Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Pages in excellent condition. Dustcover has some wear and tear but actual book is great. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> In 1942 Baltimore native James P. Gallagher en- listed in the Army Air Force and a year later was on active duty in the Southwest Pacific Theater as a communications officer. Among the personal belongings he took was a Baldaxette camera. An amateur photographer Gallagher hoped one day to put together a scrapbook of his overseas tour. The army made no objections to its airmen taking pictures as long as they avoided radar equipment and Americans killed in action. Nearly sixty years later Gallagher’s photos have been collected in With the Fifth Army Air Force an absorbing and highly personal photographic record of America’s war in the Pacific. These pictures reveal a different side of the war than do the works of either official military photographers or photojournalists. Through Gallagher’s lens we see the everyday life of the airmen stationed on a Pacific airbase from the poor living conditions to such routine activities as watching movies on a sheet strung between two trees playing volleyball or decorating planes with paintings of pinups. Other photos capture the raw experience of the war: the terrible beauty of night- time attacks and the vast destruction wreaked upon the jungle islands.