By Kevin Seabrooke
An ground-level view of island warfare by a U.S. Marine Corps rifleman who spent 27 months in the Pacific. William Swanson, who joined the Marines in 1942, landed on Guadalcanal as part of the Ninth Marines, Third Marine Division, in 1943 after most of the fighting was finished. Swanson gets his first taste of real combat at Bougainville in October. After two months, he got a brief respite at Guadalcanal, before being shipped to Guam to take on pillboxes and caves.
At Iwo Jima, Swanson is wounded “I have found that it is relatively easy to resign oneself to death and, on occasion, even welcome the thing. It is really the violence, the pain, the suddenness, and unpredictability of events that tear our insides. We cannot be sure of anything—not the next step or the next second—and that is the real terror.”
His convalescence finished, Swanson awaits reassignment for the upcoming invasion of Japan, but is spared of that by the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The View from My Foxhole: A Marine Private’s Firsthand World War II Combat Experience from Guadalcanal to Iwo Jima (William Swanson, Permuted Press, Brentwood, TN, 176 pp., 2022 $26 HC)
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