Firsthand accounts from Japanese WWII soldiers, sailors and pilots who fought in the battle for Iwo Jima and survived. Some were evacuated before the Marines landed and others were taken as Prisoners-of-War. The Japanese army and navy combatants are given a voice to share their experiences in the battle that coined the phrase, "Uncommon valor was a common virtue."
About the Author: Dan King is a Pacific War historian, author and public speaker. He earned his bachelor's degree in Japanese at California State University Los Angeles, then moved to Japan to work for Toyota Motor Corporation. King was awarded the Japanese Ministry of Education's top-level written/spoken language certification for non-native speakers. After moving back to the USA, King put his historical knowledge and language skills to use on several movies and dozens of historical documentaries. He was the Japanese technical/historical consultant on John Woo's WWII Saipan-based war film Windtalkers. His next major film was director Ed Zwick's The Last Samurai, where he spent six months in New Zealand working with Tom Cruise and Ken Watanabe. King conducted historical research for Clint Eastwood's film Flags of Our Fathers. He then worked with actors Pat Morita as an on-set consultant for the movie Only the Brave, the true story of Japanese-American heroism in WWII. The author traveled to Wake Island to appear in the Emmy-nominated two-hour documentary "Wake Island, Alamo of the Pacific." King was the Japanese-language consultant and a Voice-Over artist for the HBO series, "The Pacific". He appears in the documentary, Peleliu: The Forgotten Battle, War Stories by Oliver North. King worked as a Japanese technical / historical / language consultant for a series of popular WWII-based video games by EA Games, including "Pacific Assault" and "Rising Sun." King appeared on-camera with former Marine and television personality R. Lee Ermey in three episodes of the television series Mail Call. King later appeared on-camera in the series called Shootout on the History Channel. Dan King recently worked with the US National Parks Service as a historical and language consultant for the Pacific War Museum on Guam, and as a volunteer translator for the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas. In 2003, King wrote his first book, Japanese Military Sake Cups 1894-1945, (Schiffer Publishing). He later released The Last Zero Fighter (Pacific Press) in 2012. For the past twenty-five years, Dan King has studied the Pacific War using a three-pronged approach: studying, traveling, and interviewing. As of July 2014, King has interviewed ninety-eight WWII Japanese Army and Navy veterans. In addition to studying and interviewing, King has visited dozens of WWII battle sites (Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, Rabaul, Midway, Nanking, etc) and many war museums overseas.