THE ghosts of peleliu island

Bruno Cabanes

Éditions du Seuil, 256 pages, 2025

Why you should take a look at it:
√ A dazzling narrative interweaving history, testimonies, and personal travelogue ;
√ A wrenching excavation of an island’s traumatic history ;
√ Renowned military historian Bruno Cabanes’ deep knowledge of the Pacific Theater.

Bruno Cabanes’ The Ghosts of Peleliu is a defining work on so many levels: as the history of an ecological and moral disaster, as an anthropology of survival, as a refutation of the “good American war” and as a prose poem that calls on all our senses. In incandescent writing, Cabanes lets us hear the shrieking birds that haunted the Marines and the Japanese soldiers in battle and take stock of what little remains: an abandoned phosphate plant, a rusty Sherman tank, and a cave where the Americans entombed the last defenders of the island. This original and devastating book will be a classic.

―Alice Kaplan, Sterling Professor of French, Yale University

Peleliu, a tiny island in Micronesia, is virtually unknown today. Yet it was the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific War during World War II. Retracing the steps of Eugene B. Sledge (1923–2001), a young Marine who fought on the island in the fall of 1944, renowned military historian Bruno Cabanes excavates the island’s traumatic past. During several research trips, he explored Peleliu’s jungle and intricate cave network where the Japanese troops hunkered down, reflecting on the vestiges and memories of a brutal ten-week battle.

The island’s prior history unfolds as a palimpsest, layered with voyages of exploration, ethnographic investigations, successive waves of Spanish, German, and Japanese colonization as well as Chinese and Korean forced laborers, looters of primitive art, and bird collectors.

Combining the author’s travel impressions with American, Japanese and Palauan personal testimonies, archival materials, and field research, The Ghosts of Peleliu Island offers a vivid and poetic rendering of Peleliu and reveals the island in all its historical and emotional complexity.

Bruno Cabanes is Professor and Donald G. and Mary A. Dunn Chair in Modern Military at The Ohio State University. From 2012 to 2017, he led fifty-seven of the world’s leading scholars in producing a comprehensive history of modern warfare. This eight-hundred-page volume, titled Une Histoire de la Guerre, was published in 2018 by Éditions du Seuil. Together with Cameron Givens, Cabanes is the co-editor of Globalizing the History of the World Wars, which is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. His works published in English include August 14. France: The Great War and a Month That Changed the World Forever (Yale University Press 2016; 2017 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title) and The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918–1924 (Cambridge University Press 2014; 2016 Paul Birdsall Prize).

Combining the author’s travel impressions with American, Japanese and Palauan personal testimonies, archival materials, and field research, The Ghosts of Peleliu Island offers a vivid and poetic rendering of Peleliu and reveals the island in all its historical and emotional complexity.

Bruno Cabanes is Professor and Donald G. and Mary A. Dunn Chair in Modern Military at The Ohio State University. From 2012 to 2017, he led fifty-seven of the world’s leading scholars in producing a comprehensive history of modern warfare. This eight-hundred-page volume, titled Une Histoire de la Guerre, was published in 2018 by Éditions du Seuil. Together with Cameron Givens, Cabanes is the co-editor of Globalizing the History of the World Wars, which is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. His works published in English include August 14. France: The Great War and a Month That Changed the World Forever (Yale University Press 2016; 2017 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title) and The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918–1924 (Cambridge University Press 2014; 2016 Paul Birdsall Prize).