| By the summer of 1945, the Second World War was over in Europe. Hitler was dead, and Germany had submitted to total surrender. But the fighting in the Pacific raged on. After horrifically bloody victories on Iwo Jima and Saipan, American soldiers braced for a call to invade the Japanese mainland—not knowing that they would be saved, and that tens of thousands of Japanese citizens would be killed, by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which took place seventy-nine years ago this week. William Styron, the future author of “Sophie’s Choice” and “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” turned twenty that June. A second lieutenant in the Marines, Styron was awaiting orders when his destiny suddenly took a sharp turn. Decades later, he would write a fictionalized account of his experiences, which The New Yorker excerpted in 2009. In “Rat Beach,” Styron describes a college-age protagonist killing time on the recently captured Saipan, reading “The Pocket Book of Verse” in secret when he can. As he avoids thinking about his own fate, he observes the arrival of wounded soldiers and quietly admires the island’s lush beauty, which conjures visions of overheated honeymooners among the hibiscus trees. The story is vivid and pungent, a sense memory of youth, desire, and war. “We looked up at the planes, as they climbed over the beach, glimpsed their swollen bellies pregnant with bombs,” Styron writes. “The noise was brutal, but the planes rose with synchronous grace and when they flew past the moon, hugely silhouetted there, I was reminded of their witches’ errand and the awful multitude of deaths in those paper-and-bamboo cities. But it didn’t bother me too much. . . . Anyway, I was ready.” | 
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