I'm Staying With My Boys... is a biography written by Jim Prosser with Jerry Cutter of the life of the late Marine Sargent John Basilone who died in the battle of Iwo Jima. His story was one of three featured in the HBO miniseries The Pacific. I've already read the other two, Robert Leckie's memoir Helmet For A Pillow and Eugene Sledge's memoir With The Old Breed. I understand that some incidents had to be altered for continuity, but there seems to have been a fair amount of whitewashing in realtion to Basilone and Leckie in particular in terms of their drinking, gambling, and skirt chasing. But I think they choose three good representations of what war was like in the Pacific theater. I still feel the need to read a definitive, comprehensive account of the Pacific theater, but all of these books have given me greater insight into the brutal, protracted battle with the Japanese in the Pacific theater and what it would have been like if they had tried to invade the mainland. It also discusses how the Japanese adapted from the banzai no surrender-fight-to-the-last-man attacks of Guadalcanal to the bloody cave fighting of Pelielu and Iwo Jima which prompted the development of the flame thrower to clear out caves, which were dangerous to take in the fighting. Basilone's story was unusual in that after his heroics at Guadalcanal he was drafted into helping sell war bonds and eventually asked to be sent back to his company, something that I was unaware of. The miniseries chose to use a full episode to show what life was like in Australia after Leckie and Basilone (in separate companies of course) were stationed there after Guadalcanal. And there was significant screen time given to his war bond drive and family life interactions to give a broad scope of the life of Basilone. There's still one memoir on my shelf, R.V. Burgin's (a member of Sledge's Company K who was featured in his memoir With The Old Breed) autobiography Islands Of The Damned that a friend lent me. I have also been rewatching the ten part HBO series recently.
I have made it a habit to visit WWII Pacific battle sights on my travels and have visited sites in Hawaii, Tokyo, Saipan, Okinawa, the Philippines, and Singapore-and hope to see more thanks to Chuck Thompson's guide The 25 Best World War Sites: Pacific Theater. He makes some interesting observations about the HBO miniseries on his blog here.
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