Looking Back

Volume IV in Time-Life Books' ongoing history of World War II, Zich's book records in a chronological series of essays, both printed and photographic, the course of Japan's war in the Pacific from its beginnings, through Pearl Harbor, Corregidor, 'Bataan, and Guadalcanal and ending with the Battle of Midway, where the rising sun began to set. The story of the almost uninterrupted string of Japanese victories is familiar. But many, if not most, of the photographs are not. Cumulatively, they allow us to sense how it all looked and felt from the Japanese point of view during those eventful years.

Scherman's photographs are familiar. All of those long-ago images of "the War" indelibly printed on our memories by Life magazine's exhaustive coverage of "the longest story Life ever told": the West Virginia, decks awash, burning at Pearl Harbor; the long black lines of men awaiting evacuation on the beach at Dunkirk; Hitler's little victory jig at the Fall of France (a faked picture, it turns out); Omaha Beach on D- Day; the flag-raising on Iwo Jima; the corpses, living and dead, of Buchenwald; the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima. Here it all is again, the catalogue of horrors.

It's all just as we remembered it: the shocking, the sentimental, the tawdry, the gruesome, the unthinkable. And yet, and yet....Maybe old soliders, even old citizen soldiers, are something like old grads. Down the long corridors of memory much is forgotten, mercifully forgotten. But much remains. For good or ill, this book brings it all back.

As a combat photographer for Life, Scherman himself shot some of the pictures in his book. Frank K. Kappler '36, for many years a staff writer for Life, wrote much of the special material for it.

THE RISING SUNBy Arthur Zich '56Time-Life, 1977. 208 pp. $9.95

LIFE GOES TO WAR:A Picture History of World War IIEdited by David Scherman '36Pocket Books, 1977. 303 pp. $8.95