American Samurai offers an innovative approach to military history by linking battlefield dynamics of the Pacific War to cultural, social, and institutional myth among marines of the First Division. Although it has elements of each, the book is neither a detailed campaign history nor a traditional unit history. It moves in roughly chronological order, but is organised thematically to explore how myth and imagination shaped the marines' actions. It blends a humanistic approach of letting the actors speak for themselves in letters and memoirs with insights from the social sciences.
List of illustrations, maps and tables; Preface; Introduction: imagery and instrumentality in war; 1. Mythic images of the Marines before Pearl Harbour; 2. Creating Marine - and a masculine deal; 3. Images of the Japanese 'other' defined: guadalcanal and beyond; 4. 'Devil dogs' and 'dogfaces': images of the 'self' in Peleliu; 5. Okinawa: technology empowers ideology; 6. Collapse of the Pacific War images, 1945-1951; 7. Rewriting the war; Notes; Selected bibliography.
