Publisher Description

On February 19, 1945, nearly 70,000 American marines invaded a tiny volcanic island in the Pacific. Over the next thirty-five days, approximately 28,000 combatants died, including nearly 22,000 Japanese and 6,821 Americans, making Iwo Jima one of the costliest battles of World War II. Bestselling author Larry Smith lets twenty-two veterans tell the story of this epic clash in their own words; the result is a "superb and fascinating work by one of our nation's leading oral historians" (Jay Winik, author of April 1865). Iwo Jima includes accounts from the last surviving flag raiser on Mount Suribachi, a Navajo code talker, a retired general, two Medal of Honor recipients, and B-29 flyers. With numerous photographs and maps, Iwo Jima is a stunning history of an emblematic battle and a powerful, personal history of this greatest generation of marines.

Author Biography

Larry Smith is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Few and the Proud and Beyond Glory. The latter was adapted into a major Broadway play by Stephen Lang. Smith lives in South Norwalk, Connecticut.

Review

"Iwo Jima is by turns poignant and powerful, inspiring and sobering. This is a superb and fascinating work by one of our nation's leading oral historians." -- Jay Winik, author of April 1865 and The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World
"A superb reporter revisits Iwo Jima through the men who actually fought there and how they remembered their time in Hell." -- James Brady, author of Why Marines Fight
"Nobody can get warriors to share their heroic stories better than Larry Smith." -- Jack Jacobs, MSNBC commentator and Medal of Honor recipient, Vietnam
"Page after page of compelling stories unfold in Larry Smith's brilliant oral history, Iwo Jima. The tales of valor and humanity, as told by veterans of the battle, reveal the magnitude of their remarkable accomplishment during this pivotal campaign of the Pacific war. This is neither a statistical account nor a mere catalog of the ships. Rather, it is a dramatic portrait of ordinary men confronting and surviving extraordinary events, all in their own words." -- Walter Anderson
"Smith has cast his net widely and generated interviews with a wide range of veterans, so his book affords a broader-than-usual view of the battle…Eminently readable and historiographically useful" -- Booklist

Review Quote

"Smith has cast his net widely and generated interviews with a wide range of veterans, so his book affords a broader-than-usual view of the battle...Eminently readable and historiographically useful"

Details