Pacific Battle Line: The First Two Desperate Years

New York: The Macmillan Company, 1944. First Edition. Hard Cover. Near Fine/Very Good. 0x0x0. First edition. Jacket edges rubbed, front jacket flap clipped with price intact. Minor spot on top page ridge. 1944 Hard Cover. ix, 405 pp. Published during war, with wartime shortage statement and 'First Printing' on copyright page. Hailey was embedded with the U.S. Navy from the Solomons to the Aleutians. Foster Hailey, New York Times war correspondent in the Pacific, here describes the first two hard years when our forces in that region were fighting odds every time they went to sea or joined the issue ashore or in the air. His account is the history of our whole Pacific naval campaign as it developed step by step. Mr. Hailey was in the front line from the Solomons to the Aleutians; yet he was not out to have adventures himself but to get the facts, and he gives a straightforward, eyewitness account of what other men did. Admirals Nimitz and Halsey, General MacArthur, John Smith and Joe Foss, Lieutenant General Vandergrift and his staff, Rear Admiral Rosedahl, and the unsung men with whom the author sailed or was billeted ashore are among the many individuals who appear in the book. Pacific Battle Line shows war's true face, as a highly technical, utterly wasteful, often boring way of life repugnant to most of our men. It pictures the head of tropic seas, the disease-ridden islands of the South Pacific, the foggy wastes of the Bering Sea, the damp, bleak Aleutians--the worst battlegrounds on which any war was every waged, and battlegrounds where the physical and mental strain exceed those of any other area. Much of this tale could heretofore only be revealed piecemeal, and the coordinated sequence of action now gives unexpected significance to individual enterprises. The result offers a clear understanding of the general strategy, the relationships of different moves to each other, and the outcome.--jacket