Tarawa and the Marshalls: A Pictorial Tribute (U.S. Marines in World War II)
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 those victories, the war to which the Marine Corps had devoted decades of planning and doctrinal development was finally at hand: an island-hopping campaign across the Central Pacific, specifically 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.Tarawa and the Marshallscontinues theU.S. Marines in World War IIseries, including previous volumesGuadalcanalandNew Georgia, Bougainville, and Cape Gloucester, a comprehensive photographic history of the Marine battles in the Pacific. 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.