Good Night Officially: The Pacific War Letters Of A Destroyer Sailor (History and Warfare)

"27 March 1945 ... Hello baby darling: We're at sea again. The jumping, rolling, tossing sea again. My belly isn't the only thing with the jitters this time. They affect my whole body. Okinawa. Just looking at it on the map breaks us out in a cold sweat. Okinawa spells Kamikaze Corps to us. Somebody's gotta get it and we may be lucky or unlucky. You see, the Navy loses a lot of men but you don't particularly hear about it. ..." These are the words of Orvill Raines, a newspaperman in civilian life, who now found himself in the uniform of a Yeoman Second Class on the destroyer Howorth and smack in the middle of the Pacific war. From his assignment to the ship in April 1944 until his death one year later in a kamikaze attack off Okinawa, Orvill Raines wrote a remarkable series of letters to his young bride, Ray Ellen. His perceptive, uncensored correspondence shows us, with a directness that no conventional history could hope to match, the horrific experiences shared by thousands of Ameri