Red Blood, Black Sand ─ Fighting Alongside John Basilone from Boot Camp to Iwo Jima

In 1944, the U.S. Marines were building the 5th Marine Division—also known as “The Spearhead”—in preparation for the invasion of the small, Japanese-held island of Iwo Jima. . .

When Chuck Tatum began Marine boot camp, he was just a smart-aleck teenager eager to serve his country. Little did he know that he would be training under a living legend of the Corps—Medal of Honor recipient John Basilone, who had almost single-handedly fought off a Japanese force of three thousand on Guadalcanal.

It was from Basilone and other sergeants that Tatum would learn how to fight like a Marine and act like a man—skills he would need when he hit the black sand of Iwo Jima with thirty thousand other Marines.

Red Blood, Black Sand is the story of Chuck’s two weeks in hell, where he would watch his hero, Basilone, fall, where the enemy stalked the night, where snipers haunted the day, and where Chuck would see his friends whittled away in an eardrum-shattering, earth-shaking, meat grinder of a battle.

This is the island, the heroes, and the tragedy of Iwo Jima, through the eyes of the battle’s greatest living storyteller, Chuck Tatum.

Chuck Tatum is a World War II Marine who trained under legendary Medal of Honor recipient Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone and fought with him on Iwo Jima. There, Chuck received the Bronze Star for firing a machine gun from the hip while single-handedly covering the retrieval of two wounded comrades. Red Blood, Black Sand is one of four credited sources upon which the HBO miniseries The Pacific is based. Now eighty-three years old, Chuck sees this book as his final act of service, so readers will never forget the heroes he watched fight, live, and die on “the island that God forgot and gave to the Devil.”