This “engrossing” (The Wall Street Journal) national bestseller and true “heartbreaking tale of tragedy and redemption” (Hampton Sides, bestselling author of Ghost Soldiers) reveals how a discovered diary–found during a brutal World War II battle–changed our war-torn society’s perceptions of Japan. May 1943. The Battle of Attu–called “The Forgotten Battle” by World War II veterans–was raging … World War II veterans–was raging on the Aleutian island with an Arctic cold, impenetrable fog, and rocketing winds that combined to create some of the worst weather on Earth. Both American and Japanese forces tirelessly fought in a yearlong campaign, with both sides suffering thousands of casualties. Included in this number was a Japanese medic whose war diary would lead a Silver Star-winning American soldier to find solace for his own tortured soul.
The doctor’s name was Paul Nobuo Tatsuguchi, a Hiroshima native who had graduated from college and medical school in California. He loved America, but was called to enlist in the Imperial Army of his native Japan. Heartsick, wary of war, yet devoted to Japan, Tatsuguchi performed his duties and kept a diary of events as they unfolded–never knowing that it would be found by an American soldier named Dick Laird.
Laird, a hardy, resilient underground coal miner, enlisted in the US Army to escape the crushing poverty of his native Appalachia. In a devastating mountainside attack in Alaska, Laird was forced to make a fateful decision, one that saved him and his comrades, but haunted him for years.
Tatsuguchi’s diary was later translated and distributed among US soldiers. It showed the common humanity on both sides of the battle. But it also ignited fierce controversy that is still debated today. 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 has deftly rescued an important story from the margins of our history — and from our country’s most forbidding frontier. Deeply researched and feelingly told, The Storm on Our Shores is a heartbreaking tale of tragedy and redemption.
Mark Obmascik relates a beautiful tale in his book The Storm On Our Shores. The story traces the experiences of two men from two different worlds, and how their paths collided in one of the most desolate and forgotten theaters of World War II. Nobuo “Paul” Tatsuguchi, born and raised in Hiroshima, Japan, decided to pursue a medical degree in California during the 1930s. Dick Laird grew up in hard scrabble Appalachia during the Depression, working in a coal mine by the time he was sixteen years old. They both married and they both had two daughters. And eventually they both ended up in their respective armies at the outbreak of the Pacific War; one by choice, the other by fate. One day fifty years after the war ended, Dick Laird walked back into the life of the Tatsuguchi family, forming an unlikely friendship and bringing the story full circle.
When Paul Tatsuguchi returned to Japan after almost a decade in California, he was as much American in personality as he was Japanese. And as a Seventh Day Adventist Christian, he stuck out like a sore thumb among his Japanese compatriots, who were already gearing up for a war that Paul knew they could never win. Because of his medical training (and not because of his religion) Paul was drafted into the Japanese Army as a combat physician. After a brief spell in the South Pacific he was dispatched with Japanese forces invading the remote Alaskan island of Attu, situated in the Aleutians, closer to Kamchatka in the Russian Far East than to Anchorage. There he began recording a diary of his daily existence, with loving reference to his wife and daughters back in Japan.
Dick Laird found a calling in the peacetime American Army, and soon was promoted to non-commissioned officer, attaining the rank of company first sergeant after the war began in the Pacific. He was sent with the Seventh Division to retake the only U.S. soil occupied by foreign troops during the war. The unrelenting nature of the environment on Attu was brutal, with boggy ground and freezing rain, even during the late spring of 1943 when the battle raged for two weeks. Fifteen thousand Army soldiers eventually overwhelmed the three thousand Japanese occupiers. On the last day of battle, Dick Laird decimated a squad of Japanese soldiers, winning a Silver Star in the process. Among the Japanese Laird killed was Paul Tatsuguchi, whose Bible and diary he found among the dead. The diary was translated by Army intelligence, and eventually bootlegged versions made their way to Army troops throughout the Pacific. Tatsuguchi’s descriptions of his family put a human face on the enemy for the American troops, and they came to understand that Japanese soldiers were suffering just as much as they were. Dick Laird would go on to fight in the cauldrons of Kwajalein Atoll, Leyte Gulf, and Okinawa. He would emerge at war’s end twice wounded and multi-times decorated. By anyone’s standards a war hero.
Decades passed, but Dick Laird, far from feeling himself a hero, could not shake the grief and guilt of the men he had killed and the men he had seen killed. Because of the diary, Tatsuguchi stood out in his mind. Tatsuguchi’s widow Taeko and her two children eventually emigrated to Hawaii and then to California after the war. The two daughters, Joy and Laura, always wondered about their father. Before Taeko passed way, Dick Laird paid the family a visit. As shocking as the discovery was that this was the man who had killed Paul—their husband and father—both the Tatsuguchi family and Laird gained peace through a friendship that would last for the final years of his and Taeko’s life. It is a moving story, especially the last few chapters. We owe Mark Obmascik a word of thanks for bringing this small episode of the larger war to our attention.
A riveting true tale of a soldier’s lost diary, The Storm on Our Shores is a vital reminder of grace, forgiveness and the power of words to heal.
Mark Obmascik is a master storyteller. He 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. He brings to life in gritty detail the enormity of the sacrifices made on both sides of the conflict, and thus enables us to appreciate the terrible price of war anew.