The War Memoirs of Edward Hartzell Fee, Jr.

This is the story of a young marine who joined the corps three months before Pearl Harbor. The book covers his enlistment, travels, and battles. Ed was a member of the First Marine Division. As the table of contents indicates, Ed fought on Guadalcanal, New Britain, and Peliliu. This is an eyewitness account of these battles with never-before-seen pictures of the battlefields and never-before-published stories. Table of Contents: Foreword Chapter One: Enlistment and War! Chapter Two: The Journey to the South Pacific Chapter Three: Preparations for Guadalcanal Chapter Four: The Invasion of Guadalcanal Chapter Five: The Battle of Alligator Creek Chapter Six: The Battle of Bloody Ridge Chapter Seven: The Battle of Henderson Field Chapter Eight: Leaving Guadalcanal Chapter Nine: Melbourne, Malaria, and the Great Debauch. Chapter 10: Cape Gloucester and New Britain; Back to the Battlefield. Chapter 11: Rest and Recreation (well mainly) A Sojourn to Pavuvu Chapter 12: Peleliu: Part One: The worst is yet to come. Chapter 13: Peleliu: Part Two, Murder and Slaughter Chapter 14: Homecoming Chapter 15: Afterword My friend and father-in-law, Edward H. Fee Jr., fought with the First Marine Division in the South and Central Pacific. He had a harrowing wartime experience and many of his comrades did not survive. Luckily for us, with a combination of luck, verve, and skill, Ed survived the war and came home to Austintown, Ohio. Over late-night cups of tea, hours in the car driving to Canada or fishing together, Ed told me many stories of his time in the great world war. I do not doubt that Ed Fee suffered from some degree of PTSD. The horrors he experienced were so profound that mere words cannot capture them. Some men took to the bottle or drugs to escape these horrors; other men locked them up in a dark corner of their minds, never to be revisited. For Ed, therapy took the form of talking about it and sharing his war stories with me and his other son-in-laws. To say that I liked these stories would be an understatement; I loved these stories. He did not share many of these stories with his five daughters. And hence, I promised my wife that I would write these stories for posterity. I am confident of the location of the stories of Ed's war, which you will read in the forthcoming chapters. However, I will annotate the story if I have assumed where a particular story took place. Thus, some of my guesses must be taken cum grano salis (with a grain of salt).