From August 1942 until February 1943, two armies faced each other 
amid the malarial jungles and blistering heat of Guadalcanal Island. 
The Imperial Japanese forces needed to protect and maintain the air 
base that gave them the ability to interdict enemy supply routes. The 
Allies were desperate to halt the advance of a foe that so far had 
inflicted crippling losses on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, then seized 
the Philippines, Wake Island, the Dutch East Indies, Guam, and other 
Allied territory. After months of relentless battle, the U.S. troops 
forced back the determined Japanese, providing what many historians 
believe was the decisive turning point in the Pacific theater of 
operations.

    Stanley Coleman Jersey, a medical air evacuation specialist in the 
South Pacific during World War II, has spent countless hours 
combing Australian, Japanese, and U.S. documents and interviewing 
more than 200 veterans of the Guadalcanal campaign, both Allied and 
Japanese.

    Beginning with the events that preceded the battle for Guadalcanal 
during the Australian defense of the southern Solomon Islands in late 
1941, Jersey details the military preparations made in response to 
intelligence describing the creation of an enemy air base within 
striking distance of American supply lines and recounts the civilian 
evacuation that followed the Japanese arrival in New Guinea.

    With the stage set, he turns to the campaign itself, with particular 
emphasis on the combat during the critical period of August to 
December 1942. While Guadalcanal is his primary focus, Jersey also 
covers the roles played by forces occupying the other Solomon 
Islands, including the plight of construction laborers, air crews, and 
ground units.

    This book, chock-full of gripping battlefield accounts and harrowing 
first-person narratives, draws together for the first time Allied and 
Japanese perspectives on the bloody contest. It is certain to become 
an indispensable asset to historians of World War II.

_________________________________________________________

STANLEY COLEMAN JERSEY has spent the last forty years 
researching the Guadalcanal campaign. He was active in raising funds 
for a monument to honor the U.S. forces that fought on Guadalcanal.


Number 111: Texas A&M University Military History Series



What people are saying about this book

"While not an oral history, [this work] in effect gives us the color and 
depth of one, while piling on the fruits of research into the Japanese 
and English language literature."—Kenneth W. Estes, Ph.D., Lt. Col. 
USMC (Ret)

"The author has produced a history of the Guadalcanal campaign 
that provides the reader with information that appears nowhere else 
in the literature. . . . His detailed coverage of Japanese land 
operations, inadequately treated in other books on the campaign, is 
particularly to be commended."—William H. Bartsch