Iron and Fire

In 1941, the fire of war met the iron of duty-and a generation of heroes was born. In December of 1941, elements of the Imperial Japanese Navy bombed Pearl Harbor and plunged the United States into the greatest military conflict in human history. A young naval officer named Bruce McCandless was at Pearl on the morning of the attack. He witnessed the destruction and, with his shipmates, fought back as best he could. From that dark day forward he helped to prosecute an angry nation's response to Japanese aggression. From Oahu to Okinawa, from Auckland, New Zealand to the Aleutian Islands, this i...

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In 1941, the fire of war met the iron of duty-and a generation of heroes was born. In December of 1941, elements of the Imperial Japanese Navy bombed Pearl Harbor and plunged the United States into the greatest military conflict in human history. A young naval officer named Bruce McCandless was at Pearl on the morning of the attack. He witnessed the destruction and, with his shipmates, fought back as best he could. From that dark day forward he helped to prosecute an angry nation's response to Japanese aggression. From Oahu to Okinawa, from Auckland, New Zealand to the Aleutian Islands, this is the story of one man's war on the trackless blue battlefields of the Pacific Theater-and of the costs that conflict inflicted even on those who survived combat. McCandless wrote about the action he saw, cataloguing it in action reports and daily ship's diaries. Years later, suffering from the ill effects of the injuries he suffered in battle, he dictated his story to his daughter Sue. The manuscript disappeared until 2021, when it was found in a Colorado barn. In its current form, it starts with the Japanese attack and the decimation of America's Battleship Row. We then learn of Bruce's upbringing as the son of a naval officer and his experiences as a boy sailing in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea on his father's ship, the U.S.S. Parrott. Bruce later attended the United States Naval Academy. He became a commissioned officer in 1932, and in 1939 reported for duty on the heavy cruiser U.S.S. San Francisco, soon to be celebrated as the "fightingest ship in Uncle Sam's Navy." Following Pearl Harbor, Bruce and his shipmates on the Frisco performed convoy escort duty in the South Pacific; fought in the Battle of Cape Esperance; turned back a large Japanese task force off the coast of Guadalcanal in a furious night engagement; helped to drive the enemy off the Alaskan islands of Attu and Kiska; and battled kamikazes during the American assaults on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. In short, Bruce participated in many of the major actions of the Pacific theater and documented his experiences-including a final fiery encounter with a suicide plane-in grounded but dramatic prose. For his actions during the war, Bruce received both the Medal of Honor and the Silver Star.

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