MORE LIVES THAN ONE

If you shared our enthusiasm for the author's fictional Valley of the Sky you will also like this, which voices -- not in fiction form -- for boys and men of the air forces administration and service their testament of belief in the part they played. How these men kept the ships flying in the atoll and island war of the Pacific; how through their unspectacular but vital work, they discovered the many things for which they were fighting. From their departure from this country to the landings -- learning the ways of tropic life and warfare, the preparations for assault on Japan, this spans the change of pattern as the war developed gigantic proportions and became impersonal so that in retrospect their early experiences and achievements seemed inconsequential. Of the Gis, of air men, infantry, bull dozers, of chaplains and medics, of the enemy in all his vileness, of the commonness of valor, of living in the field, of the making of air fields. Then there's a furlough with its disappointments -- and work in the Big islands, preparing to carry the war to the Japs homeland. A vista of the immensity of the war, and of non-combatants who found some answers to what it was about... Too important a book in its fundamental implications -- and the way they are handled -- to be pushed aside as simply another war book.