Battle Stations: A Grizzly from the Coral Sea, Peleliu Landing - Hardcover

Lea, Tom

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0933841078 ISBN 13: 9780933841079

Publisher: Still Point Press, 1988

Synopsis

Battle Stations: A Grizzly from the Coral Sea, Peleliu Landing by Tom Lea.

About this title

Review:

This beautifully-printed retrospective makes available two of the most familiar battle pieces of author, illustrator, and artist Tom Lea. Both were written while he was an artist/ correspondent for Life magazine in the Pacific theater. 'Me first~ "A Grizzly from the Coral Sea," has a strong flavor of Somerset Maugham. As an aircraft carrier steams toward Guadalcanal, a correspondent and some of the crew take turns sharing part of their souls. The correspondent muses that if he were an Indian, he would like a bear as his totem. A regular Navy commander who collects coins remembers the incident, and later sends the correspondent a California commemorative half-dollar with a bear on the reverse side. Hardly a dramatic story, it conveys both the moods of men going into action and the way war broadened the horizons of Americans who, before Pearl Harbor, were largely a provincial, unhomogenized people. "Pelelieu Landing" makes a more direct impact. Lea landed on Pelelieu Island fifteen minutes after the first wave. He fourid himself in the middle of one of the hardest-fought and least-necessary battles of the Pacific War, a battle that all but destroyed the lst Marine Division. Lea's accoimt of the sounds and smells of combat, of random death and the banalities of survival, remains compelling though its themes are far more familiar now than in 1945, when the essay first appeared. Even at the end of a total war, Americans were just beginning to learn that in Lea's words, "war is fighting and fighting is killing." They were just beginning to learn as well that not only the enemy dies. The narrative of "Pelelieu Landing" is enhanced by Lea's stark sketches, made "before [his] hand steadied." No reader of Battle Stations will soon forget"The Price." A young marine has been hit by a mortar burst: His torso is shredded; his left arm blown away; half his face is gone. What remains wears an expression beyond shock or pain, a fusing of resignation and disbelief that brings home, beyond the capacity of words, the human costs of even a "good war." -- From Independent Publisher

About this edition

• Publisher: Still Point Press
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0933841078
• ISBN 13: 9780933841079
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 75