A Picture is worth a thousand words

In his Always Faithful, noted military historian Eric Hammel has assembled one hundred Marine Corpsa combat photos from the Pacific Theater of operations during World War II. Together these tell the story of the Marines’ costly victory over the Japanese.

Over the years, innumerable historians, novelists, film-makers, and artists have attempted in various ways to capture what it was like to fight in the Pacific. In Always Faithful, readers are invited to take in the combat slowly, as it unfolds, image by image.

Arranged by theme—from dramatic images of beach assaults to heartbreaking photographs of the injured and killed-in-aetion—Always Faithful seeks to capture the essence of the War in the Pacific and the core of what it means to be a Marine.

Hammel has carefully selected each image in these pages, shown with only the barest of explanation: a short caption to describe the time and place. But even with so few words, each photograph is a complete message unto itself, a picture of truth showing a moment of humanity. Together, these images reveal what it means to be alwavs faithful.