Bill oreilly3/18/2023 Now, fifty years later, there has been so much talk about “The Good War,” the Justified War, the Necessary War, and the like, that the young and innocent could get the impression that it was really not such a bad thing after all. ![]() Hersey writes: “One of the things I learned was that war makes no national or racial or ideological distinctions as it degrades human beings.” My father also liked to quote a passage from Wartime, by Paul Fussell, a World War II infantry officer: But whenever my father and I talked about nostalgia for the “good war,” he would remind me of John Hersey’s Into the Valley, an account of the Matanikau offensive on Guadalcanal. My father died in 2012, so I don’t have the benefit of his thinking on O’Reilly’s new book. Traveling to nearly all the places that are mentioned in Killing the Rising Sun, from Peleliu to Manchuria, only made that more clear. ![]() But a lifetime of conversations with my father-a Marine Corps officer in the struggles for Guadalcanal, New Britain, and Peleliu, all of which O’Reilly portrays as romantic quests undertaken by fearless knights-errant-disabused me of the belief that the Pacific war was a chivalrous adventure. O’Reilly’s Pacific is chock-full of brave Marines dashing across hostile beaches, steely pilots dropping their payloads on evil Japanese, decisive generals vowing to liberate fallen countries, and honorable politicians making the decision, without fear or favor, to use the atomic bomb.Īs a child of the 1960s, like O’Reilly, I warmed to the same bedtime stories about the American colossus bestriding the earth, especially those about liberating the Pacific or breaching the Siegfried line, which kept freedom away from Nazi-controlled Europe. In case you have yet to tour the Pacific battlefields with O’Reilly and his collaborator Martin Dugard (who must do the heavy lifting on the first drafts), Killing the Rising Sun is a mash note to American infantrymen and to our air and naval squadrons. O’Reilly may be finished as a shock jock, but we are left to contemplate the shameful fact that this disgraced propagandist is the most widely read historian in America. ![]() Less attention has been paid to the news that Henry Holt, O’Reilly’s publisher, will continue to bring out his books: “Our plans have not changed,” said a spokesman. As allegations of sexual harassment piled up and advertisers fled, the Murdoch family (the owners of Fox) decided that he had to go-though not without a severance payout that could be as high as $25 million. Now O’Reilly-or at least his career at Fox-is history, too.
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