Voss passes up a chance to discuss in more depth the two flag raisings on Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima. Monuments, Memories, and the American Hero, the Marines public relations machine wanted a bigger flag. Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal himself was personally witnessing the assault and ready to be impressed. Most disappointing is the final chapter on The New York Times's William Laurence and The New Yorker's John Hersey, and their two accounts of what America did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Perhaps more than any journalist alive, Laurence should have known, particularly after August 6, what this weapon could do to human beings.
Philosophers agree that compassion is the most fundamental evidence of humanity.
I read Hersey's Hiroshima thirty years ago, but can still remember the man whose eyeballs melted when he saw the blast. Reporting the War's distinctive gift is republishing the work of five combat artists. Here is a medium apparently pushed aside by the immediacy of satellite TV reports and the demise of the large format magazines like Life, Look, and Colliers, which could spread their color and drama out and allow the eye to linger and the mind to absorb. Bernard Perlin recalls his aborted commando raid into Greece and escape with a wounded comrade in haunting, surreal panels.