Synopses & Reviews
On November 20, 1943, the 2d Marine Division hit the beach on tiny Betio Island, Tarawa Atoll, expecting that its defenses had been "pounded into coral dust" by naval and air bombardment. They found instead that the Japanese had survived and held largely intact defenses. Three days of intense fighting secured the island at the cost of one thousand dead Marines and more than two thousand wounded.
By early 1944 the Americans' westward drive across the Pacific required airfields in the Marshall Islands at Kwajalein and Eniwetok atolls. In late January, the 4th Marine Division and U.S. Army troops wrenched control of Kwajalein Atoll in three days of fighting. Then, beginning on February 18, the 22d Marine Regiment landed on three islands in Eniwetok Atoll. The newly rebuilt airfields would support future operations in the Mariana Islands as the Marines continued their island-hopping campaign to victory in the Pacific.
Military historian Eric Hammel has delved deeply into the government photo archives and discovered a treasure-trove of rare, many never-before-published combat photos taken during these campaigns, unearthing hundreds of images.
Synopsis
The U.S. Marines had broken the back of the Japanese on Guadalcanal in 1942 and plowed through the jungle-choked islands of the central and northern Solomon Islands and New Britain from early 1943 to early 1944—two years of bloody warfare with every soldier, sailor, Marine, ship and airplane the United States could dispatch to the South Pacific’s far-flung battlefields.
Following these victories, the war to which the Marines Corps had devoted decades of planning and doctrinal development was finally at hand: an island-hopping campaign across the Central Pacific, specially targeting the Marshall Islands as a steppingstone to the Marianas, then onward toward Japan. The idea was to outflank the Caroline Islands from the north and cut the naval and air routes between Japan and its naval bastion at Truk.
Once a command and planning structure was in place for the Central Pacific campaign, the first order of business turned out to be the Gilbert Islands, a patchwork of British-mandated atolls the Imperial Japanese Navy had swiftly conquered at the outset of the Pacific War. The Gilberts were well to the east of the Marshalls, but they were within range of modern aircraft, which made them a necessary preliminary target.
Military Historian Eric Hammel has scoured the archives for photos of Marines in Pacific War combat and unearthed thousands of rare, many never-before-published images. Hundreds of rare photographs along with Hammel’s insightful narrative and captions provide a fitting tribute to the Marines who fought their way across the South Pacific.
About the Author
Eric Hammel is a critically acclaimed military historian and author of more than thirty combat and pictorial histories, including several on U.S. Marine operations in World War II and Vietnam, such as�Pacific Warriors: The U.S. Marines in World War II,�Iwo Jima: Portrait of a Battle, and�Marines in�Hue�City: A Portrait of Urban Combat, Tet 1968. He lives in Northern California.