From the Battlefield: Dispatches of a World War II Marine

By Dan Levin

As a war memoir this short book combines a high order of combat journalism with poetry composed in pauses in the midst of battle, notebook writings too personal to have become dispatches, and a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1557505152
• ISBN13: 9781557505156
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: Naval Institute Press
• Length: 133 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.8" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

A book of rare power--combat journalism and memory combined.

In 1943, Cleveland writer and journalist Dan Levin joined the Marine Corps to become a Combat Correspondent. From the Battlefield -- published by the Naval Institute Press fifty years after the Battle of Iwo Jima -- is his extraordinary personal account of World War II campaigns in the Pacific. He landed on Saipan on D+9, on Tarawa on D+2, and on Iwo Jima on D-Day.The book is the memoir of a combat journalist, from boot camp at Parris Island, to Lejeune and Pendleton, through training in Hawaii, and on to the islands of battle and death. Levin weaves his own story with those of the young Marines he accompanied into battle -- all told in a spare, direct, manly style. The writing is matched by the Naval Institute Press's inspired layout of the book, using a typewriter font to convey both journalism and the period of the war.From the Battlefield more than a memoir, however. It is also an anthology of some of Sergeant Levin's best war writing. His dispatches -- written on a portable typewriter under fire, carried by runner back to the ships offshore, sent by radio to the U.S. for distribution to newspapers and radio stations -- are as gripping today as they were in 1944 and 1945.Levin's dispatches deserve re-reading, fifty years later, for the spirit of democracy they convey. Most of the Marines he fought with were young, products of the hard times of the Depression, who had known few advantages in life. He drew out their democratic inner nobility. He salutes in particular two men -- Frank Krywicki, who led the assault platoon (demolition satchels and flame-throwers) that Levin accompanied onto the beach, and Joe Berger, whose "different kind of heroism," work with captured and wounded Japanese, enlarged Levin's sense of humanity. He stopped using "Japs" in his dispatches as a result. He honors too the uplifting eulogy delivered after the Iwo Jima battle by Navy Chaplain Roland Gittelsohn, a rabbi.He shares his journalistic techniques -- keeping a journal, writing "Joe Blow" stori! es, using literary references in his articles, and painting a mental picture of the battlefield for the distant American reader. At Gettysburg there were the "Devil's Den" and the "Peach Orchard." In Levin's corner of Iwo Jima there were "the Amphitheatre," "the Wilderness," and the "Brimstone Pit."In addition to the articles and dispatches, From the Battlefield includes some of Levin's letters home and entries from his notebook, unpublished during the war because they could not pass the censors or were too grave. His battle muse also drove him to write poetry. "We Clasp Our Fallen" -- an agonized tribute to the Marines that fell in the thirty-one day battle of Iwo Jima -- combines GI experiences and emotions with a feeling for America and for the dignity of sacrifice matched in few other American memorial poems.In one of the book's most poignant moments, Levin relates how his dispatch from the beach at Iwo Jima was heard on America's radios the next day. H