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Patrick O'Donnell has made a career of uncovering the hidden history of World War II by tracking down and interviewing its most elite troops: the Rangers, Airborne, Marines, and First Special Service Force, forerunners to America's Special Forces. These men saw the worst of the war's action, and most of them have been reluctant to talk about it. With O'Donnell's respectful coaxing, however, they first began telling their stories through www.thedropzone.org, his award-winning Web site. In 2001, veterans of the European Theater told their stories in O'Donnell's first book, Beyond Valor. Now, in Into the Rising Sun, O'Donnell presents scores of veterans' personal accounts, based on over a thousand interviews spanning the past ten years, to tell the story of the brutal Pacific war.

These veterans were often the first in and the last out of every conflict, from Guadalcanal and Burma to the Philippines and the black sands of Iwo Jima. They faced a cruel enemy willing to try anything, including kamikaze flights and human-guided torpedoes. As O'Donnell explains in the Introduction, most of the men in this book were at first reticent to talk. Over the course of the war, they had spearheaded D-Day-sized beach assaults, encountered cannibalism, suffered friendly-fire incidents, and endured torture as prisoners of war. Heroes among heroes, they include many recipients of the Navy Cross, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star, and other medals of battlefield valor, but none bragged about it. As one soldier put it, "When somebody gets decorated, it's because a lot of other men died."

"These narratives are highly charged, emotional, dramatic, intense. The horrific underside of war has seldom been exposed so graphically. What is shown here, often very powerfully, is the "Bad War," which we prefer not to know too much about."

Stanley Weintraub
author of MacArthur's War: Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero, Professor Emeritus, Pennsylvania State University

The Surrender Dilemma

Sometimes one of the hardest parts of any oral history interview is trying to get soldiers to talk about their feelings and emotions, since they are trained to suppress them to get the mission accomplished.  Even after 55 years, many soldiers are still grappling with the war. Staff Sergeant Jack Williamson, of the 327th Glider Infantry Regiment openly and vividly discusses his platoons attack outside Bastogne around January 13, 1945. This is one of the best accounts on the site and captures a side of WWII that is often hidden from easy view.