Fahey was a 24-year-old garbage-truck driver when he enlisted in the Navy on Oct. 3, 1942, and became a seaman first class on the USS Montpelier. During almost three years of battle in the Pacific Ocean, he defied Navy rules against keeping a diary by writing copious notes on loose sheets of paper that appeared to anyone watching to be ordinary let

PERSONAL NARRATIVES OF U.S. MILITARY PERSONNEL.

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 back to the South Pacific and the New Georgia battleground. Morriss was working out of the press camp at Spa, Belgium, in January 1945, when he learned that the diary he had kept in the South Pacific had arrived in a plain brown wrapper at the New York office. He was so happy "to know that this impossible thing had happened," he wrote to his wife, that he helped two friends "murder a quart of scotch." 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. This is an 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 sordiness and heroism, the competence and 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. 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.

This new, illustrated edition of Pacific War Diary preserves, in abbreviated form, Fahey's vivid narrative. A selection of photographs, drawn from both Navy and Army sources, follows the course of events described by Fahey.

Long out of print, these wartime diaries of a key admiral of the Imperial Japanese Navy, provide a revealing inside look into the Japanese view of the Pacific War. Matome Ugaki was chief of staff of the Combined Fleet under Admiral Isoroki Yamamoto until both were shot down over Bougainville in April 1943, resulting in Yamamoto's death. He later served as commander of battleship and air fleets, finally directing the kamikaze attacks off Okinawa. Invaluable for its details of the Japanese Navy at war, the diaries offer a running appraisal of the fighting and are augmented by editorial commentary that proves especially useful to American readers eager to see the war from the other side. When first published in 1991, this dairy was hailed as a major contribution to World War II literature as the only firsthand account of strategic planning for the entire war by a Japanese commander. -- Publisher's Description.