The Road to Victory

ON TO WESTWARD—Robert Sherrod—Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($3).

A very different kind of book on the same general subject is Robert Sherrod’s On to Westward. As a TIME correspondent, Sherrod followed the war in the Central Pacific from Tarawa to Okinawa. The tragic Tarawa victory he described in a superb piece of war reporting, Tarawa (TIME, March 13, 1944). In On to Westward he reports the road to victory from Saipan to Okinawa. This book is a memorable day-to-day account of the high points—Saipan, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, the Ryukyus—in the bitter 3,500-mile battle that led from Tarawa to Tokyo. It is reported with a tacit grasp of the overall strategy, an identification, remarkable in a correspondent, between Sherrod and the officers and men (chiefly of the U.S. Marine Corps) with whom he shared many of the hazards of war, an exhilarating sense of the grandeur (as well as the misery) of battle. There are striking impressions and biographical sketches of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, Admiral Raymond Ames Spruance, and quick, revealing glimpses of dozens of other officers and men. And there are unforgettable, somewhat baffled, but graphic reports of the nature of the Japanese enemy, especially his proneness to suicide.

One of the qualities that makes Sherrod a great war reporter was revealed when he had a chance to go ashore on the lethal beach at Iwo Jima. The first night of the invasion a colleague urged him: “I wouldn’t go there, if I were you. It’s plain foolishness. The Nips are going to open up with everything they’ve got to impart.” Writes Sherrod: “I looked down into the faces of the men in the boat, and I saw written on them the same fear that gripped at my guts. I knew these men could not stay on the PC, where it would be warm, and there would be coffee, and there would not be much danger. They had to go in. When I looked at these faces and realized these things, I knew I could not stay aboard the PC. I had cast my lot with these men when we set out for the shore, and this was no time to desert. I put on my jacket, buckled on my belt, and shouldered my pack.”

For those who could not go with him, reading this book is about the best substitute.