Reliving Okinawa

...and this was the point of his trip, "to exorcise my inner darkness with the light of understanding...

...Besides, it didn't ask you to come...

...It is William Manchester's account of his own involvement in the Battle of Okinawa...

...In his concluding author's note, Manchester writes: "This, then, was the life I knew, where death sought me, during which I transformed from a cheeky youth to a troubled man who, for over thirty years, repressed what he could not bear to remember...

...That is true both for the author and for the country for which he fought...

...Manchester extrapolates weakly from the fighting on lwo and Okinawa (where the Japanese troops were good units, deeply entrenched) to the prospective but clearly unnecessary invasion of the home islands: "You think of the lives which would have been lost in an invasion of Japan's home islands—a staggering number of American lives but millions more of Japanese—and you thank God for the atomic bomb...

...He turned away, blinded by tears...

...It is enormous...

...You are here because the Japanese brought you the first time and left wounds which cannot heal without this second trip...

...He traces his own loss of faith in the Marine Corps: "As I looked back, it was somewhere on the slopes of that hill, where I confronted the dark underside of battle, that passion died between me and the Marine Corps...

...The repressions involve nightmares in which the young Manchester ("the sergeant") confronts the contemporary Manchester ("the old man"—the book is filled with Manchester's awareness of his own physical decline), until on the final page Manchester recounts his "last war dream," in which the old man stood alone, realizing that the sergeant "would never come again...

...The autobiographical sections are so compelling and carry such conviction that they lend credibility to what is less compelling—the more broadly historical parts of the book...

...He is even capable of linking Pearl Harbor with Auschwitz and Hiroshima...

...Swept along in Manchester's personal experiences and in his thirty-five-year struggle to come to terms with them, we are all too likely to accept his historical judgments...

...Japan responded, as Hitler did not, and yet Manchester damns the Pearl Harbor attack as an "outrage...

...They are all "Hirohito's subjects," "the vanquished" who have "outmaneuvered, outsold, and outsmarted" the victors...

...Manchester gets many Japanese personal names wrong...

...But the historical context into which Manchester places his personal experience indicates that he has not lost his greater faith that the American cause was just...

...In writing of the causes of the Pacific War, Manchester wobbles back and forth between realism and romance...

...Manchester's autobiographical writing is war reporting and psychological insight of a high order...

...and it is a travelogue of Manchester's return to the Pacific battlefields in 1978...

...Thus Manchester exorcises his personal demon successfully and movingly but contributes nothing to the larger national exorcism...

...That Manchester (and Morgan) could feel this way in 1980 takes a good deal of willful blindness...

...He wrote "Victors' Justice," and his recent work has dealt with American images of Japan...

...Of the fighting in the Solomons, as much against the jungle as against the Japanese, Manchester writes that "you cannot resent nature...

...Almost ten years ago, John W. Hall, Yale's Japanese historian and current dean of American Japanists, wrote that "we need to rethink the causes of the Pacific War from what can best be described as a tragic view, one which takes no comfort in scapegoats and offers no sanctuaries for private or national claims of moral righteousness...

...It does not help in the larger task of coming to terms with the Pacific War...

...We are the good guys...

...the Japanese are the bad guys...

...Haiki...

...You can, of course, resent the Japanese...

...But if President Roosevelt precipitated the war with Japan, as Manchester states, why not resent him rather than, or along with, the Japanese...

...In revisiting Okinawa and reliving his past, Manchester has said goodbye to the sergeant...

...Here as elsewhere, what makes sense in terms of battlefield psychology and reminiscence makes much less sense as history...

...I still do...

...is littered with booby traps...

...I did...

...As Ted Morgan put it, reviewing this volume in The New York Times, "World War II was the last war in which we were indisputably the good guys...

...In a much larger matter, ManChester blames racial tension in Hawaii today on "the Japanese"—with no distinction between Americans of Japanese descent and long residence and recently-arrived Japanese businessper-sons...

...Richard H. Minear (Richard H. Minear is professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst...

...Still, Hiroshima is not unequivocally an outrage...

...Banzai...

...No brief quotations from it can do it justice...

...Manchester's resentment reveals itself in matters small as well as large...

...Manchester's account helps us to understand what it was like to be a Marine on Okinawa...

...As Manchester writes, "the past...

...it is a history of the island fighting of the Marines in the Pacific...

...Also Japanese words: Tenno heika banzai, the almost universally known shout of "long live the emperor," becomes Tenno...

...Though successful in coming to terms with the sergeant, Manchester fails to help his other Americans come to terms with the war...

...That rethinking, that exorcism, remains as unfinished business on our national agenda...

...He reports President Roosevelt's machinations: "It was Hitler Roosevelt had been trying to provoke with the Atlantic Charter, the destroyer swap with Britain, Lend-Lease, and shoot-on-sight convoys . . . but when the Fuehrer refused to rise to the bait, the President found another way to lead us into the war...