By Robert Leckie
Here's essentially the most riveting first-person bills ever to come back out of worldwide warfare II. Robert Leckie enlisted within the usa Marine Corps in January 1942, presently after the japanese assault on Pearl Harbor. In Helmet for My Pillow we stick to his odyssey, from uncomplicated education on Parris Island, South Carolina, all of the method to the raging battles within the Pacific, the place many of the war’s fiercest scuffling with came about. Recounting his carrier with the first Marine department and the brutal motion on Guadalcanal, New Britain, and Peleliu, Leckie spares no element of the horrors and sacrifices of battle, portray an unvarnished portrait of the way actual warriors are made, struggle, and infrequently die within the safeguard in their country.
From the live-for-today rowdiness of marines on depart to the terrors of jungle struggle opposed to an enemy decided to struggle to the final guy, Leckie describes what battle is de facto like while victory can simply be measured inch by way of bloody inch. Woven all through are Leckie’s hard-won, eloquent, and punctiliously unsentimental meditations at the that means of battle and why we struggle. unheard of in its immediacy and accuracy, Helmet for My Pillow will depart no reader untouched. it is a e-book that brings you as with reference to the dust, the blood, and the event of warfare because it is secure to come.
Now manufacturers Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, and Gary Goetzman, the lads behind Band of Brothers, have tailored fabric from Helmet for My Pillow for HBO’s epic miniseries The Pacific, that allows you to thrill and edify an entire new iteration.
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Additional info for Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific
Sample text
The passive shelters – barracks, observation posts and combat shelters – were also dispersed to make them more difficult to strike, and to fulfil their functions as troop shelters and combat support for the armoured batteries and infantry works. Command and control was assured by a system of observation and redundant communications. Observatories were placed on the high points of the fort in armoured cupolas equipped with the latest optical equipment – binoculars, periscopes and telemetry scopes.
Existing fortifications could no longer give the batteries sufficient overhead protection to permit them to survive against artillery combat with mobile field artillery. Major Schumann, in his treatise Die Bedeutung drehbarer Geschützpanzer “Panzerlaffeten”, written at the Krupp proving grounds at Magdeburg in 1884, proposed the use of armoured batteries with steel turrets to protect the guns and crew. A radical reform of permanent fortifications was needed. Schumann argued that the way to obtain the desired results was the employment of guns in rotating armoured turrets in place of fixed guns behind ramparts.
Troops manned the picket shelters, blockhouses and counterscarp casemates at all times. While they didn’t stand all day in front of an embrasure with rifle at the ready, since there would be ample time to move to that position in case of alarm, they stayed in the vicinity of their post, ready to respond to any warning. The daily routine was tedious, mostly consisting of sitting and waiting. If the troops were lucky, the commander would give them practice drills and alerts, and based on the written record, this was done quite often in the Imperial Army.
