Helmet for My Pillow: The True, Incredible Story of the US Marines in World War II (Military History (Ibooks))

by RobertLeckie (Author), David Ballantine (Introduction)

• Used

  Paperback
  2001

  $32.70

  Robert Leckie, one of America's greatest military historians, was both an eyewitness and participant to some of the greatest battles in the Pacific. This is Leckie's vivid account of combat and survival in World War II. In January 1942, in the aftermath of the infamous Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the United States Marines Corps. From boot camp in Parris Island to the bloody war in the Pacific, Robert Leckie experienced it all. The booze, the brawling, the loving on sixty-two-hour leave; the courageous fighting and dying in combat as the US Marines slugged it out, inch by inch, island by island across the Pacific to the shores of Japan.

• Used

  Paperback
  2010

  $6.90

  Now the inspiration behind the HBO series The Pacific . Here is one of the most riveting first-person accounts to ever come out of the Second World War. Robert Leckie was 21 when he enlisted in the US Marine Corps in January 1942. In Helmet for My Pillow we follow his journey, from boot camp on Parris Island, South Carolina, all the way to the raging battles in the Pacific, where some of the war's fiercest fighting took place. Recounting his service with the 1st Marine Division and the brutal action on Guadalcanal, New Britain and Peleliu, Leckie spares no detail of the horrors and sacrifice of war, painting an unsentimental portrait of how real warriors are made, fight, and all too often die in the defence of their country. From the live-for-today rowdiness of Marines on leave to the terrors of jungle warfare against an enemy determined to fight to the last man, Leckie describes what it's really like when victory can only be measured inch by bloody inch. Unparalleled in its immediacy and accuracy, Helmet for My Pillow is a gripping account from an ordinary soldier fighting in extraordinary conditions. This is a book that brings you as close to the mud, the blood, and the experience of war as it is safe to come. Helmet for My Pillow is a grand and epic prose poem. Robert Leckie's theme is the purely human experience of war in the Pacific, written in the graceful imagery of a human being who - somehow - survived - Tom Hanks.