Post image for William Manchester GOODBYE DARKNESS 1944

William Manchester GOODBYE DARKNESS 1944

by Ethan Russell

“In the spring of 1942, when Corregidor fell, and I joined the Marines, a glance at a global map would have convinced an impartial observer, were there any left, that our side was losing the war. Indeed, one could have argued persuasively that the Allies had already lost it,” writes William Manchester in his extraordinary book, Goodbye Darkness. “Hitler was master of Europe. He ruled an empire larger than the United States, with conquests stretching from the Arctic waters in the north to the Libyan Desert in the south, from the English Channel in the west to within a day’s march of the Caspian Sea in the east. It seemed that nothing could stop Erwin Rommel from seizing Cairo and the Suez Canal. Certainly the Americans couldn’t. Thus far they had been an ineffectual ally… U.S. merchantmen were being torpedoed nightly in the Atlantic — 1,160 that year — often within view of their Atlantic seaboard. Too few were reaching Murmansk or English ports with tanks or munitions to tip the scales. An imminent linkup between German and Japanese armies, probably in India, appeared to be inevitable.”

FROM GOODBYE DARKNESS BY WILLIAM MANCHESTER

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