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Island Victory: The Battle of Kwajalein Atoll. By S. L. A. Marshall. Lincoln, Nebr.: Bison Books, 2002. ISBN 0-8032-8272-9. Maps. Photographs. Diagrams. Index. Pp. xvii, 117. $22.00.
The search for truth on the battlefield may ever elude the military historian. Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall, a newspaper journalist who became a widely read historical writer, is best known for his pioneering efforts to record "truth-in-battle" oral histories shortly after the shooting stopped. Island Victory, originally published in 1944 and recently republished by Bison Books with an insightful introduction by Joseph G. Dawson III, was the first of many Marshall books to utilize this methodology to present a collective narration of a specific battle.
Marshall died in 1977, and his reputation suffered from subsequent reexaminations of his 1947 book, Men Against Fire, a seminal...