New book brings Pacific theater of WWII to life
By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Books Editor
Travel to an island in the remote South Pacific and you'll see deserted beaches, idyllic lagoons, dramatic high mountains and grassy dunes.
You'll also see half-sunken ships, rusting airplane hangars, overgrown runways and haunting memorials. Lots of memorials. These are remnants of the bloody and desperate battles that characterized the South Pacific theater in World War II.
Gerald Meehl, an atmospheric research scientist and photography buff, made note of all this as he traveled in the South Pacific in the 1970s gathering weather data.
Meehl already knew about the stories that veterans could tell: His uncles had fought in the South Pacific, and his father in Europe.
"When you start talking to these veterans, especially if you show interest and have a little knowledge at all, it's like time travel. You're just transported back in time because these memories are so vivid and they tell these stories in such a way that it's like you were there. It's the closest thing to time travel that I know," said Meehl.
What Meehl didn't know when he first got the idea of doing a book about the legacy of the war in the Pacific, in 1984, was that it would take 15 years for the project to come to fruition or that he would find himself partnered with a writer who had fought in World War II.
"I was taking a lot of photos as I traveled around, and then I started going to the National Archives and elsewhere to see what these places had looked like when the war was going on," said Meehl, who was in the Islands earlier this month. "One thing led to another and I decided to publish a then-and-now photo book."
But "Pacific Legacy: Image and Memory from World War II in the Pacific" (Abbeville, hardback, $65), which Meehl co-authored with Rex Alan Smith of South Dakota, goes far beyond his original, modest vision.
Over the years, the vision changed as an editor put him in touch with Smith, who had done a similar book, "One Last Look," about the World War II bomber bases of England. Smith, 81, who spent 36 months with the Army Engineers during World War II dredging waterways for warships, brought with him an extensive network of contacts with veterans and a commitment to allowing the veterans to tell their own story.
A third member of the team was designer Jim Wageman of Honolulu, who had worked with Abbeville in the past, when he lived on the Mainland, and who had the daunting task of organizing a series of disparate stories and clusters of photos into a coherent and eye-appealing whole.
Early on, the authors state their commitment to presenting the war not as "one thing after another" history, but in a way designed to allow readers to see, hear, taste and feel the veterans' experiences.
Meehl, 51, was keenly aware that the generation before him is going to its rest. "Once they're gone, all you'll have are the written accounts and the pictures and videos of these guys. You'll never get the first person actually talking. The experiences kind of fade into history," he said.
And, as James Michener says in a quote Meehl and Smith selected to end the book, "They, like their victories, will be remembered as long as our generation lives. After that, like the men of the Confederacy, they will become strangers. Longer and longer shadows will obscure them, until Guadalcanal sounds distant on the ear, like Shiloh and Valley Forge."
Meehl and Smith tell their story not chronologically but by island group, and by a number of intriguing topics that aren't generally covered in conventional World War II histories — such as the war experiences of the native South Pacific islanders.
The book relates the stories of a few of the islanders and all are fascinating. There is cheerful Falavi of Vaitupu in the island nation of Tuvalu, for example, pictured seated cross-legged on grass mats in his sun-dappled faré. After American radio operators were banished from the islands by the Japanese, he pieced the smashed radio equipment together and continued reports to the allies. He did this despite the fact that he was paralyzed from the waist down, and every time the Japanese would come looking for the radio, his buddies would have to pick him bodily up and carry him into the jungle to hide him along with the equipment.
"These stories have been overlooked and they are just as interesting and unique as those of the combatants," said Meehl.
Smith also brought his camera to the effort: the camera he carried during the war, that is. Among his telling photos are those of a blackened post office building in Manila, where fire was used to roust Japanese soldiers hiding out after the surrender. Meehl noted that the photos they were able to acquire from soldiers were often the most intriguing. "The soldiers actually were not allowed to take pictures, but some of them sneaked cameras in — and thank goodness," said Meehl.
During a book-signing trip here earlier this month, Meehl and Smith got a tour of backstage Pearl Harbor — war sites Meehl had previously seen but Smith had not — and met veterans who kept them talking long after they were supposed to be done. A common theme of the veterans' comments was gratitude that, finally, a book has been written about the Pacific, often overshadowed by the war in Europe.
"What we kept hearing was that it was written in a way they can relate to, about what it was like for them out there," said Meehl. "That for us, was really the reward — because if the veterans like it, you know that you've succeeded in honoring their service. And that was really what we wanted to do."
