Add Joseph Wheelan's Midnight in the Pacific: Guadalcanal - The World War II Battle That Turned the Tide of War to the canon of outstanding World War II narrative non-fiction.
Wheelan offers readers an in-depth exploration of all phases of the battle, from the initial confusion by the Japanese army of U.S. interest in the island (the Japanese navy had failed to tell their land-based counterparts that they had nearly completed a massive airfield on Guadalcanal) to the final escape of roughly 10,000 emaciated, diseased soldiers from the island. There is good reason for the doggerel "And when he gets to Heaven | To St. Peter he will tell: | One more Marine reporting, sir — | I've served my time in hell.
In between he recounts the individual battles that comprised the campaign, the hellish conditions faced by men on both sides (it wasn't uncommon for a soldier to know the agonies of dysentery and malaria, often simultaneously - to say nothing of the tropical conditions that caused clothing to literally disintegrate), and the cultural divide that so drove strategy on both sides of the war. Probably my favorite example is the Japanese Vice Admiral's report on a particularly brutal battle (for the Japanese) in which he wrote: "The situation isn't developing to our advantage." Indeed. Likewise, Wheelan enumerates the differences between American and Japanese soldiers in which he notes that the Japanese pilots rarely used their parachutes, in stark contrast the Americans who did everything possible to live to fight another day...and to live, period.
As I said, this is one of the great World War II works out there, along with the likes of Lost in Shangri-La, On the Eve of a Hundred Midnights, Flyboys, and Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors. Perhaps even more than the others, Wheelan captures the hellish environment in which such hellish battles were fought. Coupled with the fact that the Marines' average age was 20, it's easy to see why this was the greatest generation.
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