The Storm on Our Shores: One Island, Two Soldiers, and the Forgotten Battle of World War II

Mark Obmascik

pri 2019 · Simon and Schuster

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This “heartbreaking tale of tragedy and redemption” reveals how a diary found during a bitter campaign changed our perceptions of WWII Japan (Hampton Sides, bestselling author of Ghost Soldiers).

May, 1943. The Battle of Attu—called “The Forgotten Battle” —was raging on the Aleutian island amid some of the worst Arctic fighting conditions in history. American and Japanese forces endured the yearlong campaign as both sides suffered thousands of casualties. Included in this number was Paul Nobuo Tatsuguchi, a Japanese medic whose war diary would lead a Silver Star–winning American soldier to find solace for his own tortured soul.

A Hiroshima native, Tatsuguchi had attended medical school in California. Wary of war yet devoted to Japan, he enlisted in the Imperial Army and kept a diary of his experience—never knowing that it would be found by Appalachian coal miner and American soldier Dick Laird. Translated and distributed among US soldiers, Tatsuguchi’s diary showed the common humanity on both sides of the battle. After forty years, Laird was determined to return it to the family and find peace with Tatsuguchi’s daughter, Laura Tatsuguchi Davis.

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Mark Obmascik “writes with tremendous grace about a forgotten part of our history, telling the same story from two opposing points of view—perhaps the only way warfare can truly be understood” (Helen Thorpe, author of Soldier Girls).

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Mark Obmascik is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and bestselling author of The Big Year, which was made into a movie, and Halfway to Heaven. He won the 2009 National Outdoor Book Award for outdoor literature, the 2003 National Press Club Award for environmental journalism, and was the lead writer for the Denver Post team that won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Denver with his wife and their three sons.