Revisiting the Killing Islands of the Pacific : NONFICTION : TOUCHED WITH FIRE: The Land War in the South Pacific. By Eric Bergerud (Viking: $34.95, 576 pp.) : MY FATHER'S WAR: A Son's Journey. By Peter Richmond (Simon & Schuster: $23, 263 pp.)

By Max Holland

July 7, 1996 12 AM PT

Max Holland is a contributing editor of The Nation magazine and author of a forthcoming history of the Warren Commission to be published by Houghton-Mifflin

One of their number is running for president, but the generation of men formed in the crucible of World War II is fading. Even if they survived a killing ground like Peleliu in the South Pacific, underage recruits who lied their way into the Marines are in their mid- or late-60s now--and every reunion draws from a steadily diminishing pool. Yet time, they claim, has not dimmed their memories. What happens on a battlefield is indelible.

Both these books draw heavily from veterans’ private memories to paint a harrowing picture of the Pacific war. While the United States and Japan were not old enemies, the Pacific theater of operations was arguably the cruelest in the global conflict. True, on the Eastern Front the Germans starved, worked to death and sometimes executed Russian POWs--Slavs being considered sub-human, along with Gypsies and Jews. But for sheer savagery at the tip of the spear, the Pacific war was unparalleled.

It was a function of the racial overtones in this theater, along with the Japanese martial code, that viewed death as superior to surrender. Then, too, a hostile tropical climate in no small way underwrote the reversion back to the most atavistic behavior imaginable.

As one participant recounts in a passage from “Touched with Fire”:

“Jungle smells in a combat situation are almost impossible to describe. . . . The stench [of decaying bodies] is unbelievable. . . . When a man is killed the flies attack him by the millions right away. The maggots are there three or four hours later. It’s a horrible sight: the maggots are in and out of the mouth, nose, ears, eyes. On day four or five the swollen body, full of maggots and oily-like, bursts and Jesus, what a horrible stench. If you try to pick up the body by taking an arm or leg, you end up with an arm or leg in your hand.”

Apart from using such graphic recollections to communicate what Oliver Wendell Holmes called the “incommunicable experience of war,” these two books are starkly different in concept and execution. “Touched with Fire” is written by a professor at Lincoln University and accomplished military historian, and it clearly aspires to do for the ground war in the South Pacific what John Keegan achieved in his masterful “Six Armies in Normandy.”

By contrast, Peter Richmond’s book is taut, eloquent and frequently biting in its observations. While the core is the story of the son’s quest to learn about his father’s wartime service in the Marines, the book is much more than that. It is a meditation on fathers and sons and the formative experience of a previous generation: What makes men fight, and the dilemma of officers who hold the power of life over other men--sometimes ordering them to die.

In his book, Bergerud is intent on righting what he perceives as several historical wrongs. He makes a persuasive argument that the 18-month ground war between Allied and Japanese forces in the South Pacific has been unfairly forgotten, eclipsed in the public mind by the earlier dramatic encounters at Pearl Harbor, Bataan and Midway and the later, bloody clashes at Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Drawing heavily from the official histories commissioned by the U.S. and Australian armed forces, the author contends that the Marine and (mostly) Army campaigns in New Guinea, New Britain and the Solomon Islands most accurately illustrate the “turning of the tide” in the Pacific.

Unlike the period from mid-1944 onward, when American materiel strength overwhelmed Japan and allowed the Allies to more or less dictate events, the period from mid-1942 to early 1944 saw the two sides competing on roughly equal terms. Consequently, Bergerud believes, it is the best terrain for fairly judging the combatants’ respective strategies and tactics in a “ferocious slugging match between light-infantry armies at extremely close quarters.”

This perspective will rankle Navy and Marine veterans. While not discounting their bravery or accomplishments at Midway or Guadalcanal, his emphasis on restoring U.S. Army achievements to the front rank of the Pacific war comes at their expense. This is a bitter 50-year-old argument to which Professor Bergerud adds little but more fuel to the Army’s side.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s forces deftly “cut through Japanese force with ease” via maneuver and firepower, he writes, but Adm. Ernest King pursued a “blind and foolish strategy” in the Navy’s Central Pacific thrust toward the Japanese home islands. Fifty years would seem sufficient time to acknowledge that, at times, each of the armed services committed prideful errors of judgment that led to needless casualties. But if the standard is needless death and destruction, what about the civilian casualties incurred to redeem MacArthur’s pledge that he would retake the Philippines? Bergerud’s well-taken point about the significance of the ground campaign in the South Pacific is diminished, not enhanced, by such bias.

Whereas “Touched With Fire” is encyclopedic war history, even a bit repetitive and didactic at times, Peter Richmond’s book is intensely personal. By skillfully weaving an account of his father’s footsteps through Guadalcanal, New Britain and Peleliu and his own efforts to retrace literally those footsteps years later, Richmond, a special correspondent for GQ, comes to grips with a legacy he never had the privilege of knowing first-hand as an adult.

In December 1960, as he was returning home from a business trip, former Marine Lt. Col. Tom Richmond died when the passenger jet carrying him collided with another airplane over Staten Island. Richmond’s DC-8 stayed in the air for eight minutes before landing on a Brooklyn church.

War mementos and booty--including a blood-stained Japanese flag--kept the memory of Tom Richmond’s service alive in his household long after he died. But when Peter Richmond began his quest through the past, he worried that he might discover something that would tarnish his father’s image. To the son’s obvious pride, Tom Richmond turned out to be the bona fide item, a Marine officer who commanded loyalty and deep respect, brave but not fool-hardy. Tom Richmond would never have talked about himself or his deeds in this manner, so it turns out that the only way his son could have gained this understanding was by returning to his father’s battlegrounds.

The only flaw in this otherwise poignant memoir occurs when Richmond, 43, infrequently ventures an observation or two about war. Then he reveals that, although he comprehends his father’s experiences, this insight has not led him to reflect on his own times. The main virtue of studying lessons learned by an earlier generation is the perspective one gains, and subsequent ability to look anew at one’s own formative experience. But Richmond still labors under the conceits and cynicism of his own age group. This leads him to make some questionable accusations, such as his assertion that until Vietnam “the military was not yet perceived as something to be used largely for political purposes.”

Presidents never meddled in wartime strategy until Lyndon B. Johnson? Tell that to Abraham Lincoln, much less to Franklin D. Roosevelt.