South Pacific Diary, 1942-1943 - Hardcover

by Mack Morriss (Author)

A unique chronicle of the war from the perspective of a sensitive twenty-four-year-old sergeant who wrote for the Army's in-house paper, Yank, the Army Weekly and a tale of the South Pacific that will not soon be forgotten. Correspondent Mack Morriss reluctantly left his diary in the Honolulu Yank office in July 1943. "Here is contained an account of the past eight and one-half months," he wrote in his last entry, "a period which I shall never forget." The next morning he was on a plane headed b

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What was preserved and appears in print here for the first time is a unique chronicle of the war in the South Pacific from the perspective of a sensitive twenty-four-year-old sergeant who wrote for the Army's in-house paper, Yank, The Army Weekly. This is a intensely personal account, reporting the war from the ridge known as the Sea Horse on Guadalcanal, from the bars and dance halls of Auckland to a B-17 flying through the moonlit night to bomb Japanese installations on Bougainville. Morriss thought deeply and wrote movingly about everything connected with the war: the sordidness and heroism, the competence and the ineptitude of leaders, the strange mixture of constant complaint and steady courage of ordinary GIs, friendships formed under combat stress, and, above all, what he perceived to be his own indecisiveness and weaknesses. Woven through the diary is the story of the development of what proved to be a life-long friendship with fellow Yank staffer, combat artist Howard Brodie. Ronnie Day introduces Morriss's diary and illuminates the work with extensive notes based on private papers, government documents, travel in the Solomon Islands, and the recollections of men mentioned in the diary.

Author Biography

Mack Morriss, author of The Proving Ground, a novel based on his wartime experiences, died in 1975.

Ronnie Day is professor and chair of the Department of History at East Tennessee State University.