Combat Engineer, Pacific Theater

Looks at the daily lives of ordinary young men who found themselves with a unique job to do at an extraordinary time and place in history. It tells the mostly untold story of the army's combat engineering battalions in the Pacific in World War II. As their name implies, the role of these soldiers was unique. They were trained both in construction and in combat, and were called upon to do both. With every step of the way contested, their job was to build an infrastructure for crossing the world's biggest ocean, to take the fight to an implacable enemy where he lived.

The focus is the experiences of the men in the ranks of the Thirty-Fourth Engineer Combat Battalion. Part of the Army's Twenty-Seventh Infantry Division, the battalion participated in two of the three largest and bloodiest amphibious assaults in military history, those of Saipan and Okinawa.