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From the Prologue...
On Friday, August 7, 1942, Eighty-Two U.S. Navy ships manned by forty thousand sailors, shepherding a force of sixteen thousand U.S. Marines, reached their destination in a remote southern ocean and spent the next hundred days immersed in a curriculum of cruel and timeless lessons. No fighting navy had ever been so speedily and explosively educated. In the conflict that rolled through the end of that trembling year, they and the thousands more who followed them learned that technology was important, but that guts and guile mattered more. That swiftness was more deadly than strength, and that well-packaged surprise usually beat them both. That if it looked like the enemy was coming, the enemy probably was coming and you ought to tell somebody, maybe even everybody. That the experience of battle forever divides those who talk of nothing else but its prospect from those who talk of everything else but its memory.
...
The founders of the U.S. Navy, having faced their own moments of decision, from John Paul Jones off Flamborough Head to Stephen Decatur against the Barbary Pirates, would have felt kinship with the men of the South Pacific Forces. There as everywhere, men in uniform fought like impulsive humans almost always have: stubbornly, viciously, brilliantly, wastefully, earnestly, stupidly, gallantly. At Guadalcanal, so distant on the ear, a naval legacy continued, and by their example in that bitter campaign the long shadows of their American quality reach right on up to the present.
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Subjects
United States. Navy, Interviews, United States, Guadalcanal, Battle of, Solomon Islands, 1942-1943, American Personal narratives, American Naval operations, World War, 1939-1945, Veterans, Biography, History, Guadalcanal, battle of, solomon islands, 1942-1943, World war, 1939-1945, naval operations, american, United states, navy, history, World war, 1939-1945, personal narratives, american, United states, navy, biography, nyt:combined-print-and-e-book-nonfiction=2011-02-13, New York Times bestsellerPlaces
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Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal
2011, Bantam Books
ebook
in English
0553908073 9780553908077
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While the Battle of Midway is perhaps more well known, the Battle of Guadalcanal was a far larger, longer, and more brutal struggle which marked the turning point in the Pacific War. It was an all out fight on land, sea, and air which lasted for over 4 months, into which both sides poured all the resources they could summon. This book is about the many major naval battles which to a large extent determined the outcome. At the beginning, the US Navy was still emerging from its peacetime slumber, and it was ravaged by the much more experienced Japanese in some of the worst defeats in US naval history. However, as crews and commanders learned from very painful experience, the tide was turned, and eventually the Japanese were forced to withdraw as they couldn't sustain their enormous losses in ships and sailors. The book vividly describes the hell that both sides went through as human beings lived and died in hailstorms of hot steel.
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November 13, 2020 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
March 29, 2016 | Edited by Alex Herrera | Added ebook edition, TOC and cover |
March 29, 2016 | Edited by Alex Herrera | Added new cover |
March 29, 2016 | Created by Alex Herrera | Added new book. |