Challenge for the Pacific

Robert Leckie CHALLENGE FOR THE PACIFIC Guadalcanal: The turning Point of the War

To Bud Conley, Lew Juergens, and Bill Smith,

my buddies on Guadalcanal

Praise for CHALLENGE FOR THE PACIFIC

“[Leckie] has succeeded in compressing numerous tales into a readable story, but his greatest contribution is a unique feeling for combat.… His marines are living, brawling, obscene, blasphemous—and utterly believable. He has caught their gallows humor, their cockiness and their savagery in the business of battle.”

—JOHN TOLAND, The New York Times Book Review

“A stirring story of America’s survival in its grimmest hour… as readable and gripping as a novel.”

—The Patriot Ledger (Massachusetts)

“Here is a book to wrench the heart. It is a driving, relentless narrative that summons up all of the hideous color and clamor of battle. But, more than that, it is a timely evocation of what a nation must do in wars to preserve its freedom.… [This] book is a splendid weld of the strategies, views and experiences of soldiers, sailors and airmen.”

—Newark News

“Leckie is a brilliant war writer.”

—New Orleans Times-Picayune

“[A] true winner… Excitement, action, fast narrative pace, and a deep respect for the rudiments of genuine patriotism mark the story.… [Leckie] presents the Allies and the Japanese as separate people, giving them the stature of human beings involved in desperate battle.”

—Nashville Banner

“Despite its scope, the story is told in individual terms—Japanese and American. Characters are very much alive on the printed page. Challenge for the Pacific is fast-paced and informative.”

—Navy Times

“An exceedingly good account of a feat of arms which remains unsurpassed… enthralling.”

—The Times Literary Supplement

“[An] epic tale ably told… To those who were there this book will bring back vivid memories… To those who were not there this book should bring some small realization of what it was like.”

—El Paso Times

“Detailed and dramatic… In these pages one can feel the frustration, despair and confusion experienced by both sides in the savage see-saw struggle.”

—Tulsa World

“Leckie puts flesh on the bones of history.… The book has the ring of authenticity.… It is intensely dramatic, vivid, broad, and yet intimate in detail, deeply moving in its portrayal of the human side of war. In the best sense, it is history made alive.”

—Pasadena Star-News

“A vivid portrayal… worthy of attention.”

—Buffalo Courier-Express

“Challenge for the Pacific is more than the battle of Guadalcanal. It is the living and dying of Americans and Japanese.… [Leckie] knows how a ground-pounding Marine thinks, talks and reacts.”

—Leatherneck magazine

“Leckie describes this outstanding American combined operation from an intensely personal yet well- documented angle.”

—The Daily Telegraph

PREFACE

ON AUGUST 7, 1962—the twentieth anniversary of the landings at Guadalcanal—men of the First Marine Division Association received a message from Sergeant Major Vouza of the British Solomon Islands Police. Vouza said: “Tell them I love them all. Me old man now, and me no look good no more. But me never forget.”

Neither would anyone else who had been on Guadalcanal, not the Japanese who tortured Vouza, and from whom this proud and fierce Solomon Islander exacted a fearsome vengeance, not the Americans who ultimately conquered. For Guadalcanal, as the historian Samuel Eliot Morison has said, is not a name but an emotion. It is a word evocative, even, of sense perception; of the putrescent reek of the jungle, the sharp ache of hunger or the pulpy feel of waterlogged flesh, as well as of all those clanging, bellowing, stuttering battles—land, sea, and air— which were fought, night and day, to determine whether America or Japan would possess a ramshackle airfield set in the middle of 2500 square miles of malarial wilderness.

More important, historically, Guadalcanal was the place at which the tide in the Pacific War turned against