Customer Reviews

Challenge For The Pacific: the Bloody Six-month Battle Of Guadalcanal

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Robert Leckie, like Xenophon before him, undertakes to write about a campaign in which he participated. Leckie hit the beaches with the First Marine Division and lived through the privation, hardship, and carnage to tell a gripping story of this pivotal Pacific campaign.

Leckie gives good character sketches of the principle participants on both sides and details great acts of courage by many of the rank-and-file warriors who participated in the campaign. For example, Leckie recounts the tale of Sergeant Major Vouza of the Guadalcanal constabulary. Vouza acted as a scout for the Marines and was captured by the Japanese. He was tortured, stabbed in the throat, and left for dead. When he came to his senses, he crawled back to the American lines in time to warn of a planned Japanese attack. During that arduous journey, Vouza prayed that he live just long enough to get back and bring the warning. Vouza survived and later act as a scout for Carlson's Raiders.

When he describes the "big picture," Leckie doesn't do quite as well, and the reader will occasionally succumb to spells of confusion in trying to follow major troop and ship movements and understand their strategic significance. Despite this minor flaw, the reader will come away from this book with a clear understanding of just how close the United States came to the brink of unmitigated disaster on Guadalcanal.

Arrogance, incompetence, and blind staggering luck contributed to the cliffhanger nature of the conflict, as did courage, tenacity, and toughness. Both sides had more than their share of all six. The argument could be made that if the Americans had not had more good luck than the Japanese, the War in the Pacific would have taken a much different course. But then, that brings to mind the old saying "The harder you work, the luckier you get."

There have been more accurate, fully-researched books written about the pivotal battle for Guadalcanal, and if what you want is a carefully-written factual history with names, dates, battle charts and footnotes, you can't do better than Richard Frank's massive epic. But if what you want is an exciting read that gives the point of view of a Marine who helped hold off the Japanese assault on Bloody Ridge, Leckie is definitely worth a try (and this account of Guadalcanal is considerably better than the one he gave in "Helmet For My Pillow.") As a green recruit in the First Marines, Leckie (who brings himself into the text as "Lucky," his Marine nickname) came ashore with the first wave of Marines, fought through the long, horrendous campaign that followed, in which the environment was an enemy at least as tough as the Japanese, and eventually was evacuated with the haggard survivors in November. Recovering his strength, Leckie went on to fight in the other battles of the First Marines until badly wounded and invalided out at Peleliu. As some more critical reviewers have sniffed, Leckie makes no pretense of being even-handed, and I fail to see why he should. I have talked to a number of WWII veterans who felt the same way about the Japanese trying to kill them, although they sometimes become good friends with some of those same Japanese veterans once the war was over (as, in fact, did Leckie, according to his 2001 obituary). Yes, the men fighting on Guadalcanal were dirty, disease-ridden, foul-mouthed and sometimes cruel - war does that to people. What Leckie does perhaps better than the more scholarly studies of Guadalcanal is show the reader WHY that happened. His book inspired me to explore further, including reading Frank and the modest but fascinating memoirs of coast-watcher Martin Clemens, and one of the more complimentary things one can say about any historian is that he inspired you to dig deeper.

Since Leckie was one of the soldiers fighting for Guadalcanal, he quite quickly loses the objectivity that might have made this a better book. Unlike his other works where his style is plain and forthright, here one suspects him almost of tilting a bottle while he recalls the best and worst of Guadalcanal. Too often the book reads as if Leckie had written it overnight for his surviving comrades also stationed on the island; the endnotes are plagued with citations reading "author's recollection." Some of these personal reflections are obviously important to the historical fabric of Guadalcanal, but Leckie's style in this particular work seems to speak to a very finite specific audience rather than the general public. On the one hand I felt as if we were there during the conflict, and on the other I felt like a wastrel and misfit hoping the whole thing was over.

This is as good a book as has been written about the World War II battle for the island of Gaudalcanal. That's faint praise because the definitive history of this turning point in American military fortunes has not yet been written.

Guadalcanal was the first American ground offensive of World War II against a Japanese army that had swept aside all opposition and a Japanese navy that had been beaten at Midway but still had parity in numbers and advantage in experience over the Americans. Several thousand young, untested marines were dumped on this big jungle island, abandoned by the Navy and left to fight nearly by themselves. Fortunately for them, Japanese strategy and tactics were self-deluding and, frankly, stupid.

Leckie gives a competent account of the 6-month long battle, bringing a lot of color into his story, and introducing himself into the text unobtrusively on several occasions. (He was a machinegunner on Guadalcanal.) But the maps in the book could be better; his explanations are sometimes hard to follow; and his descriptions of the hardships and horrors of battle on Guadalcanal could be improved upon.

I've read other books with more facts about Guadalcanal, although Leckie is good at eye-witness detail. But Guadalcanal was a epic struggle and deserves an epic of its own. Some might find it in the novel and movie, "The Thin Red Line."