News Release

WWII Historian Dr. John McManus to speak at Gettysburg National Military Park Museum and Visitor Center

Fire and Fortitude: The US Army in the Pacific War, 1941-1943, by John C. McManus

John C. McManus and Penguin Random House Publishers

News Release Date: June 7, 2022

Contact: Daniel Vermilya, 717-253-5971

Eisenhower National Historic Site (NHS) and Gettysburg National Military Park (NMP) are proud to co-sponsor a presentation and book signing by award winning military historian John C. McManus. This free lecture will take place in the Ford Education room at the Gettysburg NMP Museum and Visitor Center on Saturday, June 11, at 2 pm. A book signing will follow.

While General Dwight D. Eisenhower and the European Theater are prominent in America’s popular memory of World War II, American forces in the Pacific waged an equally harrowing war against the Japanese. Sometimes forgotten in that fight is the role of the U.S. Army, which fought alongside Naval and Marine forces in faraway islands across the Pacific.

In his recent works Fire and Fortitude and Island Infernos, McManus provides new accounts of the U.S. Army’s struggle in the Pacific. His works explore the personalities of American commanders in the Pacific, the iconic battles and stories of individual heroism and courage, and the many difficulties faced by army soldiers beset by tropical weather, malaria, and logistical nightmares. McManus’s talk will explore these themes, as well as the many ways the Pacific Theater distinguished itself as a precursor of future conflicts in the latter 20th and 21st centuries.

John C. McManus is the Curators’ Distinguished Professor of U.S. military history at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. He is the recipient of the prestigious Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History, and the author of over a dozen books on the American military and the Second World War. He is a frequent contributor to local and national radio and television programs, and in 2018-2019 McManus was in residence at the U.S. Naval Academy as the Leo A. Shiffrin Chair of Naval and Military History.

This presentation is part of the Eisenhower National Historic Site’s programming commemorating and remembering the events of the Second World War. In September 2022, Eisenhower NHS will once again host its annual World War II Weekend living history camp. For more information and updates, visit www.nps.gov/eise.

www.nps.gov