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book ... Read more

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book ... Read more

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It was a desperate time and it brought desperate remedies. Black and white photographs throughout. ... Read more

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Out in BOONDOCKS MARINES IN ACTION IN THE PACIFIC 21 U. S. MARINES TELL THEIR STORIES BY JAMES D. HORAN AND GEROLD FRANK G P PUTNAMS SONS NEW YORK FOREWORD When the full story of World War II is written, perhaps then we shall be able to assay the importance of the U. S. Marines and their Homeric exploits in the Solomon Islands. Let the military experts gauge the strategic significance of these battles, which began with landings on Guadalcanal, Tulagi, Gavutu and Tanambogo on August 7, and marked the first exclusively American land offensive in the Pacific. It is sufficient to agree now that they stopped the Japanese in their tracks, smashed the myth of Japanese invindbility, and threw the Japanese warlords off a racing stride. Our concern is with the men who took part in these battles, with whom we spoke and to whom we listened hours on end, and whose stories you will find in these pages. Each of them had death as neighbor. Each of them had undergone a mental and physical ordeal more punishing, in the opinion of medical authorities today, than any combat troops have known in history. They were men who had what it takes. Men Some were only boys, like eighteen-year-old Billy Harding. Not even the most omniscient dramatist would cast Billy for the role he played. Certainly, by all the rules he seems more suited to be pictured sitting at a drug-store counter sipping a malted milk than strangling a Japanese soldier on the edge of a Guadal canal fox hole. But they were all Marines, and what they did is the stuff of which the songs and sagas of a people are made. Billy Harding, and twenty-year-old Jimmy Hall, who played cHig tjfe d afi Wili e a Japanese mop-up squad nudged ti oy and stripped him and, miraculously, ISi nJbt b c cti to niake sure, and all the rest of the boys who went, out in the boondocks, would dismiss such character ization a f o business, and be pretty uncomfortable about it. But we who sit behind typewriters and dare only a smudged finger or a twitchy eye have the right to use words about them. We spoke to them in naval hospitals, in the quiet of hotel rooms, in their homes and we know what they are. Hero fits them. Some of these Marines were part of the Marine Raider Bat talion, commanded by Col. Merritt A. Edson. For months be for August 7 they trained, both in the United States and on small islands in the South Pacific, for the job they had to do. Your Marine Raider is tough. He makes up the advance guard, the shock-troops, the battering rams, as it were, who hit an objec tive and soften it up for the troops that follow. Hes a Marine flus, handpicked for the most dangerous and difficult tasks. He has perfected himself in every possible technique of defense and offensive warfare. He knows amphibious fighting. Hes at home in a rubber boat, in a fox hole or as part of a raiding party as signed to hit, destroy and disappear. Hes a specialist in hand to-hand fighting, and he knows the skills of gouging, bayonet ting, strangling and knifing. Hes trained to sweep out of nowhere to strike at an objective, smash air and naval bases, com munication centers, ammunition dumps, military stores, defen sive installations. On August 7 it was the Raiders who invaded and captured the island of Tulagi, following that up by sweep ing over Florida Island and relentlessly pursuing the Japs who had escaped from Tulagi. Meanwhile, the main body of the Marines had landed on Guadalcanal. On September i the Raiders joined forces wtih them on Guadalcanal and helped push the Japanese back into the jungles. On September n, under Colonel Edson, the Raiders attacked the Japanese village of Tasimbogo. Painted like Sioux Indians, they crept through the jungles and attacked the village at dawn, burned it to the vi ground and destroyed vital enemy ammunition dumps. The U. S. Marines were thrown into the battle of Lunga Ridge, variously known as Raiders Ridge, Bloody Knoll and Edsons Ridge... ... Read more