Helmet For My Pillow Illustrated Edition

Details Book:
Author by Robert Leckie
Genre : History
Editor : Pickle Partners Publishing
ISBN : 9781786252036
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages : 480
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Includes over 220 photos, maps and plans following Robert “Lucky” Leckie’s Pacific War with the 1st Marine Division “Here is one of the most riveting first-person accounts ever to come out of World War II. Robert Leckie enlisted in the United States Marine Corps in January 1942, shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In Helmet for My Pillow we follow his odyssey, from basic training on Parris Island, South Carolina, all the way to the raging battles in the Pacific, where some of the war’s fiercest fighting took place. Recounting his service with the 1st Marine Division and the brutal action on Guadalcanal, New Britain, and Peleliu, Leckie spares no detail of the horrors and sacrifices of war, painting an unvarnished portrait of how real warriors are made, fight, and often die in the defense of their country. From the live-for-today rowdiness of marines on leave to the terrors of jungle warfare against an enemy determined to fight to the last man, Leckie describes what war is really like when victory can only be measured inch by bloody inch. Woven throughout are Leckie’s hard-won, eloquent, and thoroughly unsentimental meditations on the meaning of war and why we fight. Unparalleled in its immediacy and accuracy, Helmet for My Pillow will leave no reader untouched. This is a book that brings you as close to the mud, the blood, and the experience of war as it is safe to come.”-Print Ed.


Helmet For My Pillow

Details Book:
Author by Robert Leckie
Genre : History
Editor : Bantam
ISBN : 9780307806208
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages : 194
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Here is one of the most riveting first-person accounts ever to come out of World War II. Robert Leckie enlisted in the United States Marine Corps in January 1942, shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In Helmet for My Pillow we follow his odyssey, from basic training on Parris Island, South Carolina, all the way to the raging battles in the Pacific, where some of the war’s fiercest fighting took place. Recounting his service with the 1st Marine Division and the brutal action on Guadalcanal, New Britain, and Peleliu, Leckie spares no detail of the horrors and sacrifices of war, painting an unvarnished portrait of how real warriors are made, fight, and often die in the defense of their country. From the live-for-today rowdiness of marines on leave to the terrors of jungle warfare against an enemy determined to fight to the last man, Leckie describes what war is really like when victory can only be measured inch by bloody inch. Woven throughout are Leckie’s hard-won, eloquent, and thoroughly unsentimental meditations on the meaning of war and why we fight. Unparalleled in its immediacy and accuracy, Helmet for My Pillow will leave no reader untouched. This is a book that brings you as close to the mud, the blood, and the experience of war as it is safe to come. Now producers Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, and Gary Goetzman, the men behind Band of Brothers, have adapted material from Helmet for My Pillow for HBO’s epic miniseries The Pacific, which will thrill and edify a whole new generation. From the Trade Paperback edition.


Helmet For My Pillow

Details Book:
Author by Robert Leckie
Genre : History
Editor : Ravenio Books
ISBN :
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages :
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To be a Marine is to subscribe to the idea that nothing in war is impossible—including the writing of books. Now, after years have passed and the jungle has reclaimed the scenes, comes this engaging story of a young man's personal adventures with the vast and ultimately overwhelming forces that defeated him. This is an old story, but it is told in a fresh and lovely voice. Robert Leckie writes with charm, with personal humility, with humor, with a rare gift for capturing all that is human in the most inhuman of man's activities. He makes no bones about it—the war is what happened to him. The point of view is not the grand strategy of victory, but the immediate tactic of personal survival. By turns a boot, a machine gunner on Guadalcanal, a liberty hound in Australia, an intelligence scout on Peleliu—briefly a self-styled "brig rat" subsisting on bread and water and finally a casualty—Private Leckie fought the enlisted man's battle. "Helmet for My Pillow" is the sort of book a man might write for his children, saying, in effect: "This is the way I remember it. The time I killed three Japs while on patrol. The day I went AWOL. The way it is for a man to die. And these are the men I knew—Captain Dreadnought, Lieutenant Commando, Pvt. Chuckler, Major Major-Share, Filthy Fred—some of them heroes, some cowards, some living, some dead but all inexorably part of my life." For Mr. Leckie writes of his companions as though they might be characters in a morality play—as, indeed, they were. Like most Marines, he both loved and hated the Corps—loved it for the arrogance with which it relegated to itself the tough assignments; hated it for the sacrificial demands that were made on the individual soldier. There is no sentimentalism here, no gratuitous brutality; in the end, of course, it is a success story, for the irony of war is that injustice is not incompatible with victory. And how do you know when you've won? Mr. Leckie's answer deserves quoting: "An officer's mess is one of the surest barometers of military success. So long as the officers continue to pig it with the men, there is danger of defeat. But once the officer's mess appears—raised almost on the bodies of the foe, contrived of sticks or pieces of canvas or perhaps only an imaginary line like a taboo—once this appears, and caste is restored, we know that victory is ours." —THE NEW YORK TIMES


Helmet For My Pillow

Details Book:
Author by Robert Leckie
Genre : World War, 1939-1945
Editor : Random House
ISBN : 9780091937515
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages : 322
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Robert Leckie was 21 when he enlisted in the US Marine Corps in January 1942. In Helmet for My Pillow we follow his journey, from boot camp on Parris Island, South Carolina, all the way to the raging battles in the Pacific, where some of the war's fiercest fighting took place. Recounting his service with the 1st Marine Division and the brutal action on Guadalcanal, New Britain and Peleliu, Leckie spares no detail of the horrors and sacrifice of war, painting an unsentimental portrait of how real warriors are made, fight, and all too often die in the defence of their country.


Helmet For My Pillow

Details Book:
Author by Robert Leckie
Genre : World War, 1939-1945
Editor :
ISBN : 1977052304
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages : 250
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"One hell of a book! The real stuff that proves the U.S. Marines are the greatest fighting men on earth!" Leon Uris Robert Leckie signed up for service with the United States Marines on January 5, 1942. Wake Island had fallen and America was still reeling from the tragedy of Pearl Harbor. This vivid and personal account of one marine's journey through the course of the war in the Pacific in World War Two. Leckie provides vivid, and at times humorous, details of his training in South Carolina, through to being assigned to first terrifying duties as a fighting marine. He was thrust into the heat of battle at Guadalcanal before seeing action across many islands of the Pacific until he was eventually wounded and evacuated from the island of Peleliu. Yet this fascinating autobiography is not simply about Leckie's fighting life over the duration of the war as it also records the camaraderie of his fellow soldiers, the adventures that he enjoyed during his time off service in Melbourne, Australia, along with the day to day life of a normal marine. "Helmet for My Pillow is a grand and epic prose poem. Robert Leckie's theme is the purely human experience of war in the Pacific, written in the graceful imagery of a human being who -- somehow -- survived." Tom Hanks This work is essential reading for anyone interested in uncovering the voice of a true marine who saw some of the bloodiest battles of World War Two. Along with E. B. Sledge's With the Old Breed: At Peleiu and Okinawa this book formed the basis for the HBO miniseries The Pacific. Robert Leckie was an American author and historian. His service with the 1st Marine Division in World War Two as a machine gunner and a scout greatly influenced his later work. Helmet for my Pillow was first published in 1957 and Leckie passed away in 2001.


Okinawa

Details Book:
Author by Robert Leckie
Genre : History
Editor : Penguin
ISBN : 9781101196298
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages : 225
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Penguin delivers you to the front lines of The Pacific Theater with the real-life stories behind the HBO miniseries. Former Marine and Pacific War veteran Robert Leckie tells the story of the invasion of Okinawa, the closing battle of World War II. Leckie is a skilled military historian, mixing battle strategy and analysis with portraits of the men who fought on both sides to give the reader a complete account of the invasion. Lasting 83 days and surpassing D-Day in both troops and material used, the Battle of Okinawa was a decisive victory for the Allies, and a huge blow to Japan. In this stirring and readable account, Leckie provides a complete picture of the battle and its context in the larger war.


Islands Of The Damned

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Author by R.V. Burgin
Genre : History
Editor : Penguin
ISBN : 9781101196687
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages : 304
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A remarkable eyewitness account of the most brutal combat of the Pacific War, from Peleliu to Okinawa, this is the true story of R.V. Burgin, the real-life World War II Marine Corps hero featured in HBO®'s The Pacific. “Read his story and marvel at the man...and those like him.”—Tom Hanks When a young Texan named R.V. Burgin joined the Marines 1942, he never imagined what was waiting for him a world away in the Pacific. There, amid steamy jungles, he encountered a ferocious and desperate enemy in the Japanese, engaging them in some of the most grueling and deadly fights of the war. In this remarkable memoir, Burgin reveals his life as a special breed of Marine. Schooled by veterans who had endured the cauldron of Guadalcanal, Burgin’s company soon confronted snipers, repulsed jungle ambushes, encountered abandoned corpses of hara-kiri victims, and warded off howling banzai attacks as they island-hopped from one bloody battle to the next. In his two years at war, Burgin rose from a green private to a seasoned sergeant, fighting from New Britain through Peleliu and on to Okinawa, where he earned a Bronze Star for valor. With unforgettable drama and an understated elegance, Burgin’s gripping narrative stands alongside those of classic Pacific chroniclers like Robert Leckie and Eugene Sledge—indeed, Burgin was even Sledge’s platoon sergeant. Here is a deeply moving account of World War II, bringing to life the hell that was the Pacific War.


Strong Men Armed

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Author by Robert Leckie
Genre : History
Editor : Hachette UK
ISBN : 9780306818929
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages : 409
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Strong Men Armed relates the U.S. Marines' unprecedented, relentless drive across the Pacific during World War II, from Guadalcanal to Okinawa, detailing their struggle to dislodge from heavily fortified islands an entrenched enemy who had vowed to fight to extinction -- and did. (All but three of the Marines' victories required the complete annihilation of the Japanese defending force.) As scout and machine-gunner for the First Marine Division, the author fought in all its engagements till his wounding at Peleliu. Here he uses firsthand experience and impeccable research to re-create the nightmarish battles. The result is both an exciting chronicle and a moving tribute to the thousands of men who died in reeking jungles and on palm-studded beaches, thousands of miles from home and fifty years before their time, of whom Admiral Chester W. Nimitz once said, "Uncommon valor was a common virtue."Strong Men Armed includes over a dozen maps, a chronology of the war in the Pacific, the Marine Medal of Honor Winners in World War II, and Marine Corps aces in World War II.


China Marine

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Author by E. B. Sledge
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Editor : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN : 9780195167764
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages : 195
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Originally published: Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, c2002.


I M Staying With My Boys

Details Book:
Author by Jim Proser
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Editor : St. Martin's Griffin
ISBN : 9781429996594
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages : 352
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I'm Staying with My Boys is a firsthand look inside the life of one of the greatest heroes of the Greatest Generation. Sgt. John Basilone held off 3,000 Japanese troops at Guadalcanal after his 15-member unit was reduced to three men. At Iwo Jima he single-handedly destroyed an enemy blockhouse, allowing his unit to capture an airfield. Minutes later he was killed by an enemy artillery round. He was the only Marine in World War II to have received the Medal of Honor, the Navy Cross, and a Purple Heart and is arguably the most famous Marine of all time. I'm Staying with My Boys is the only family-authorized biography of Basilone, and it features photographs never before published. Distinctive among military biographies, the story is told in first person, allowing readers to experience his transformation, forged in the horrors of battle, from aimless youth to war hero known as "Manila John".