This was so well done!!! The written account was complimented so well by the great pictures that I felt like I could get an better idea of being there. This really needed to be recorded before it was a forgotten era in history. Thank you for doing that.

enjoyed the book and found an artist rendering taken at a train staion, i beleive. the approximate page location is 70 & 71, give or take. what i need to know is where i can obtain a source that has this picture showing this german train station during WWII. it is for a friend who works for union pacific and loves enginges. please contact me about the picture. as for the book i grew up near wright-patterson AFB, Dayton OH and love planes - loved the book - hope to purchace it someday. any direction to a source will be greatly appreciated. thank you. Dave Falknor.

As the son of a surviving B-17 pilot, I have spent considerable time poring over books specific to the subject. This book, along with Half a Wing, Three Engines and a Prayer are true treasures. History books alone cannot convey information to our successors like a story retold by someone who had the events firmly planted in their memory by the first-hand impact of the situation.

Smith writes an engrossing tale about how Doane Robinson decided it would be a good idea to have sculptures created in the Needles of the Black Hills to bring in tourists, and how eccentric carver Gutzon Borglum took his idea over. It is amazing that Mount Rushmore ever was carved, with everyone being most concerned about getting it done their way, and no one paying enough attention to whether or not there was enough money to get it done.

An unbiased, original, creative, compelling mastperpiece, Moon of Popping Trees is a brilliant and "professionally detached" work regarding Native American/European American relations prior to and including the Wounded Knee "incident." Of course, by "professionally detached" I mean amazingly separated from this often times over-emotionally approached subject in American History.

Yet, what is most compelling about this absolute masterpiece, is that despite Smith's own emotional detachment, he by no means fails to draw in the emotion of the reader--a danger which "scholarly reflections" often succomb to. Smith's work is perennial, cautious, and yet fascinatingly marvelous in its ability to "suck in" the reader. A subject I often pay little attention to and have little care for...Moon of Popping trees gave me a desire to study this area of history in greater detail.

A great book of a time when our cause was so noble and the sacrifices so great. With gratitude we think of all those who
did their best and left a noble legacy of the United States Of America for the rest of the world. Without that effort the world would not be as great as it is. Make no mistake the seeds of our goodwill were sown forever by those who fought that battle.

I've read a lot of books about the Pacific war, but this one is definitely my favorite.

Rex Alan Smith served 36 months as an Army Engineer in the Pacific. Since then, he has traveled extensively, visiting and talking with other veterans of the Pacific war. Gerald Meehl has spent years combing the Pacific and photographing the places which played important roles in WWII in the Pacific: places such as Pearl Harbor, Wake Island, Bataan, Corregidor, Guadalcanal, Tulagi, Munda, Tarawa, Guam, Saipan, Tinian, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa; along with lesser-known, but exotic outposts, such as Bora Bora and Pago Pago.

What emerges from their work is a series of more than 20 essays on individual battles, in the order in which they occurred, from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the final surrender at Tokyo Bay. The essays begin with explanations of why the battles were fought, and what strategies were employed. Aerial photographs give you an overall view of the operation. First-hand accounts by the men who fought there give you a chilling sense of what it was like to charge up the beach in the face of withering enemy fire. There are hundreds of photographs - about half in black and white, which were taken during the actual fighting; and half in color, taken by Mr. Meehl some years later, often of the same scenes. The color photographs are beautiful and haunting. You'll see the rusting hulk of an abandoned tank, or the crumbling rubble of a bombed-out pillbox, surrounded by sparkling white beaches with swaying palms, crystal clear ocean waters, and blue skies with fluffy white clouds.

In his introduction to the book, Joe Foss, Medal of Honor winner at Guadalcanal, says, "We could not cover every campaign in detail, nor was it our purpose to present a comprehensive history of the Pacific war. Rather, we tried to create for the reader, while the veterans themselves can recall it, what that war was like--how it looked and felt and smelled--and to examine the legacy today of a war so fiercely fought on faraway Pacific Islands."