The Storm on Our Shores: One Island, Two Soldiers, and the Forgotten Battle of World War II

Written by Mark Obmascik

Narrated by John Bedford Lloyd

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 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).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Release date: Apr 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9781508283164

Mark Obmascik

Mark Obmascik is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and bestselling author of The Big Year, which was made into a movie, and Halfway to Heaven. He won the 2009 National Outdoor Book Award for outdoor literature, the 2003 National Press Club Award for environmental journalism, and was the lead writer for the Denver Post team that won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Denver with his wife and their three sons.

Reviews for The Storm on Our Shores

[JefferyBrian Rieves · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Very boring story. Mostly of people's personal lives. Often contradicting itself. And sometimes inaccurate.

[timbazzett · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Probably many Americans couldn't find the Aleutians on a map, and Attu would only bring a blank look, so author Mark Obmascik is right on in calling the WWII fight for Attu a "forgotten battle, " in his latest book, THE STORM ON OUR SHORES. I first became aware of the Aleutian Islands in 1963, at the age of 19. I was in the Army, one of ten recruits selected for additional "special" training in Morse intercept . Otherwise, all we knew was that 5 of us would go to Shemya and the other 5 to Sinop. I ended up in the latter location, in remote northern Turkey. But 5 of my friends spent a year in Shemya, near the end of the chain of islands stretching from western Alaska deep into the Bering Sea towards Siberia. The Aleutians are a frigid, sparsely populated and deeply inhospitable part of our earth. My unlucky friends who spent a year there learned this quickly.

Attu is even worse. It is the farthest island and westernmost land mass of the U.S. And Obmascik paints a pretty bleak picture of this rocky mess of fog, freezing winds, mud, muskeg and mountains where one of the deadliest battles of WWII took place as U.S. forces took back that rocky atoll from dug-in Japanese troops in May 1943.

But the real heart of this historical account is the meeting of two men, Dick Laird, a soldier from the Appalachian coal country, and Paul Nabuo Tatsuguchi, a US-educated physician/medic from Tokyo. One will kill the other on the final day of the battle of Attu. But along the way, we will first get to know the life stories of these two men - their vastly different origins, childhoods and schooling, how they fell in love, married and began families. And how the war changed everything.

In addition to the personal stories, we also get a history lesson, both about Japan and the war, especially the Pacific theater, as we follow Dick Laird's subsequent battles in Kwajalein and Okinawa. We also get a small taste of the hardships in post-war Japan, as experienced by Tatsuguchi's young widow and children. And Laird's post-war life is also examined, as he changes jobs and moves west, tormented by frequent nightmares of his years in combat and the men he killed and friends he lost.

And there is the inner kernel of this whole story: a brief war diary kept by Paul Tatsuguchi on Attu, recovered by Laird, translated and duplicated numerous times and circulated among U.S. troops. The final pages, in which he says goodbye to his wife and daughters, is heartbreaking.

But perhaps the most moving part of this story is a letter written decades later to Laird by Paul's daughter, Laura, who never knew her father, but had always felt his aching absence in her life.

Ah hell, it's so hard to do justice to this book in just a short review. It's history, it's also quite a geography lesson on the Aleutians. It's a widow's story, a fatherless daughter's story. It's a story of PTSD before it had the name. It's all you need to know about Attu, a place you've never heard of, but a place where thousands died - for what? Mark Obmascik has really done his homework in putting this tiny footnote of the war into a proper and fitting context. I am impressed - and grateful. It's a pretty quick read, so - well, READ THIS BOOK. My highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the Cold War memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA

[jamespurcell · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Known by few other than historians: Japan did successfully invade America, at Attu and Kiska on the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. This well-written book captures the desolation and futility of warfare in this obscure part of the world. The links between the two protagonists are inexorably entwined in this tale of the combatants by a brief diary kept by one of them. The research is solid and thoughtful on the personal aspects of the two families.