Challenge for the Pacific Guadalcanal: The Turning Point of the War

by Leckie, Robert

• ISBN13: 9780553386912
• ISBN10: 0553386913
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-10-26
• Publisher: Bantam

Summary

From the World War II veteran and "New York Times"-bestselling author of "Helmet for My Pillow," whose experiences were featured in the HBO miniseries "The Pacific," comes this vivid narrative of the astonishing six-month campaign for Guadalcanal.

Author Biography

Robert Leckie (1920–2001) was the author of more than 30 works of military history as well as Marines!, a collection of short stories, and Lord, What a Family!, a memoir. Raised in Rutherford, New Jersey, he started writing professionally at age 16, covering sports for the Bergen Evening Record of Hackensack, New Jersey. Leckie enlisted in the United States Marine Corps on the day following the attack on Pearl Harbor, going on to serve as a machine gunner and as an intelligence scout and participating in all 1st Marine Division campaigns except Okinawa. He was awarded five battle stars, the Naval Commendation Medal with Combat V, and the Purple Heart. Helmet for My Pillow was his first book; it received the USMC Combat Correspondents Association Award upon publication.

Excerpts

PART ONE: THE CHALLENGE

CHAPTER ONE

The admiral was tall, hard, and humorless. His face wasof flint and his will was of adamant. In the United States Navy which he commanded it was sometimes said, "He's so tough he shaves with a blow torch." President Roosevelt was fond of repeating this quip in the admiral's presence, hoping to produce, if there had been no reports of fresh disaster in the past twenty-four hours, that fleeting cold spasm of mirth-like an iceberg tick-which the President, the Prime Minister of England, and the admiral's colleagues on the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff were able to identify as a smile. If levity was rare in Admiral Ernest King, self-doubts or delusions were nonexistent. He was aware that he was respected rather than beloved by the Navy, and he knew that he was hated by roughly half of the chiefs of the Anglo-American alliance. Mr. Stimson, the U.S. Secretary of War, hated him; so did Winston Churchill and Field-Marshal Sir Alan Brooke and Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham. Nevertheless, Admiral King continued to express the wish that was an athema in the ears of these men, as it was also irritating or at least unwelcome in the ears of General George Marshall, the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, and General H. H. Arnold, chief of the Army Air Force.

Admiral King wanted Japan checked. He wanted this even though he was bound to adhere to the grand strategy approved by Roosevelt and Churchill: concentrate on Hitler first while containing the Japanese. But what was containment? Containing the Japanese during the three months beginning with Pearl Harbor had been as easy as cornering a tornado. The Japanese hadcrippled the U.S. Pacific Fleet and all but driven Britain from the IndianOcean by sinking Prince of Wales and Repulse. Except for scattered American carrier strikes against the Gilberts and Marshalls the vast Pacific from Formosa to Hawaii was in danger of becoming a Japanese lake. Wake had fallen; Guam as well; the Philippines were on their way. Japan's "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" had already absorbed the Dutch East Indies withall their vast and precious deposits of oil and minerals, it had supplanted the French in Indochina and evicted the British from Singapore. Burma, Malaya, and Thailand were also Japanese. The unbreachable Malay Barrier had been broken almost as easily as the invincible Maginot Line had been turned.
Japan now looked west toward India with her hundreds of millions; and if Rommel should beat the British in North Africa, a German-Japanese juncture in the Middle Eastwould become a dreadful probability.

Meanwhile, great China was cut off andAustralia-to which General Douglas MacArthur had been ordered should he succeed in escaping from Corregidor-was threatened by a Japanese invasion of New Guinea. At that moment in early March, as Admiral King knew, the necessary invasion force was being gathered at Rabaul, the bastion which the Japanese were building on the eastern tip of New Britain. All this-all this ferocious speed and precision, all this lightning conquest, this sweeping of the seas and seizure of the skies-all this was containment? Admiral King did not think so. He thought it was rather creeping catastrophe. He thought that the Japanese, unchecked, would reach outagain. They would try to cut off Australia, drive deeper eastward toward Hawaii; and build an island barrier behind which they could drain off there sources of their huge new stolen empire. It was because King feared this eventuality that he had, as early as January 1942, when the drum roll of Japanese victories was beating loudest, moved to put a garrison of American troops on Fiji.

Already forging an island chain to Australia, he was still not satisfied: in mid-February he wrote to General Marshall urging that it wasessential to occupy additional islands "as rapidly as possible." The Chief of Staff did not reply for some time. When he did, he asked w