Customer Reviews

Guadalcanal Diary

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Richard Tregaskis, a 24-year-old reporter, went ashore with the 1st Marine Division on Guadalcanal. He lived with the men, sleeping on the ground and eating the same chow. He remained on that nightmarish piece of coral for 50 days, usually under combat conditions. His retelling of the engagement along the Tenaru is as good or better than other first hand reports. His description of the several days of combat on Edson's Ridge was excellent, as he had moved his tent to that elevated location the morning of the first day. With an eye toward the readers' morale, losses of flights at Henderson Field were not reported as accurately as they could have been. As many as seven aircraft had crashed on take off while he was still on the island. Tregaskis left the island before the major battles on the Matanikau or the desperate fight for Henderson Field, but he had his story. He had seen the boys of democracy turn back the seemingly invincible Japanese Army; he had seen some of our flyers defeat the unstoppable Zeros; he had seen our navy hold their own against the designers of the attack on Pearl Harbor and he hurried home to tell the American public. This book was started aboard a B-24 before he returned home and was an instant best seller. This was a first hand reporting of our first offensive engagement of WW II. A nation hungry for news of the front greeted it eagerly. Not even the casual reader of WW II can bypass this major work, if for no other reason than the place it holds in the history of the war in it's own right.

Guadalcanal Diary now sold by Modern Library as Hardcover is an all print softcover with a hardbound cover. Shame on Randomhouse for their cheap Subsidiary version from Modern Library's reprint of this Classic. Had I known this book came without the photo's and maps I would not have purchased it. We waited 7 months for backorder and is needed for college report so we can't return it this late in the game. Find an edition with photographs and maps included!!
John P Patterson NYC, NY

when i was a young man my father gave me a copy of Guadalcanal Diary and i literally wore it out, and in fifty years it has gone

i purchased a new copy in the hardbound edition

no photos
no index
no bibliography

only the minimum of print to enable it to be published
really disappointed that this great manuscript was treated so badly

a very very close friend of my Dad, Ken Bailey was included in the book as he won the MOH

one more thing i am not critical of the authors words only in how the publisher cheaped out the book

"Guadalcanal Diary" is a classic of war reportage. In the first American offensive of World War II, Tregaskis went ashore with the Marines at Guadalcanal on August 7, 1942 and stayed with them for the next six weeks while they fought for survival against the Japanese. Appropriately, he focuses the book on the fighting men rather than himself, giving the name and hometown of Marines he met or were worthy of special mention.

"Diary" is a bit understated, perhaps due to wartime censors. Tregaskis mentions disease, the shortages of food and equipment, and the sense of the marines that they were abandoned by the Navy and forgotten by the "Brass." I suspect, however, that the fear and desperation of the Marines at Guadalacanal were considerably stronger than he expressed.

I recommend you read "Diary" with a modern account of the battle for Guadalcanal and maps at your side. You can then compare Tregaskis' account of events with those of later scholars. I found "Diary" to be believable in most details and atmosphere -- which is not always the case with on the spot reportage.

Guadalcanal Diary is one of the rare books that captures the characters and machinery of war in the midst of an unfolding island campaign. Richard Tregaskis lands with the Marines on Gaudalcanal and is not an outsider amongst them, he is in the foxhole, taking cover and fearing for his life. Despite many close calls he never avoids danger in order to get the facts about the Marines or their mission; his accounts are literally taken from looking over the shoulders of the commanders and the riflemen. This unique viewpoint gives the reader an appreciation for the planning and execution of the war fought on Guadalcanal. This book is a good read in 2000 because it lacks the sanitized objective analysis that often comes with contemporary accounts of military action. Tregaskis is an American on foreign soil and you can sense the solidarity of purpose that he feels with the Marines. He is not afraid to acclaim the strength of the Marine leaders and never questions their decisions or judgment. His courage and unpretentiousness are a refreshing change from today's celebrity journalist that search for the negative aspects of modern military action.

It's a good book. The eyewitness account of a war correspondent during the Battle of Guadalcanal, Guadalcanal Diary's a book that should be read by anyone with an interest World War II. I read it in either junior high school or high school, I can't remember which, and I loved it.
Soldiers and Marines were forbidden from using cameras and keeping diaries because if they were killed or captured,
they'd provide good intelligence for the enemy. War correspondents, like Richard Tergaskis, weren't under any such prohibitions. World War II was the first war with embedded reporters. And you thought it was Operation Iraqi
Freedom. Didn't you? Well, 'tain't so! I highly recommend it.

Richard Tregaskis was a war correspondent assigned to the First Marine Division and this book is his classic war diary describing his experiences on Guadalcanal. Assigned to only cover the landings, he stayed on to cover much of the fighting. The book gives one the sense of the day-to-day struggle for Guadalcanal and has provided the foundation for many books that followed. He tells of what he witnessed and the fragmentary information gathered from the first or second hand accounts told to him at the time.

As war diaries go, this one is excellent and is one of the best to come out of WWII. However, it suffers from the same limitation that all such diaries suffer from, namely, that one only gets a tunnel vision view of what is going on. Tregaskis tells what he saw and what he could gleam from others, but this picture is far from complete. The picture is one of individual engagements and of periods of excitement separated by the mundane. Being a problem with all war diaries, and this clearly being a war diary, the lack of a big picture was to be expected. I was, however, disappointed by the rather unexciting manner in which many of the most heroic events in Marine Corps history were described. The ambush at Mantanikau is told in two short, matter-of-fact, paragraphs. Much more space was allotted to the Battle of the Tenaru River (actually on the Ilu River, called Alligator Creek by the local inhabitants), which Tregaskis observed personally, but even here the descriptions are quite flat. The last part of the book deals with the fighting at what was to be called Edson's Ridge, which I feel is also described in rather dispassionate terms. Some of these failings can be explained by the fact that the book was written in 1943, shortly after the fighting, and his reports and subsequent book were subject to the limitations of censorship, and a desire not to horrify the home front concerning the brutality of the fighting. Also, being an American diary, the reader is not given any perspective concerning the Japanese side of the fighting. The book contains only one inadequate map and no index, both of which limit the historical usefulness.

I recommend Robert Leckie's "Strong Men Armed" for a more exciting and comprehensive picture of the fighting on Guadalcanal, and of the Marine Corps in WWII. Leckie, also a Marine veteran of this campaign and others in the Pacific, devotes almost as much space to Guadalcanal as Tregaskis. He also describes the Naval and Air engagements that Tregaskis hardly mentions at all. Leckie, writing well after the war, had available Japanese diaries and archives from which to tell their side of the story, thereby providing a much more well rounded picture of the Guadalcanal campaign.

I recommend this book for those who like to read war diaries and for those who want to read, first hand, one of the foundation stones of the history of WWII in the Pacific. It may be of less interest for someone who wants to know more about why things evolved as they did, or wants to know more about strategy and the ramifications of the fighting of Guadalcanal.

An outstanding piece of combat reporting written in an easy to read format. This gives the reader an insight into what the initial period of the campaign was like, from the front line!
This book is very difficult to put down and by drawing reference to the names of combatants and their home City and State brings the amazing exploits of our citizen soldiers to life.
Anyone with an interest on combat reporting, life in the front line of the South Pacific combat theatre or the battle of Guadalcanal should read this. Many of these veterans will soon be gone forever and this book is a worthy testament to their sacrifices.

This is a gripping first-person account of the battle of Guadalcanal. War correspondent Richard Tregaskis describes landing with the marines on August 7, 1942, in what was the first U.S. offensive of World War II. Readers see how the intial island landings caught the Japanese napping, and the marines quickly grabbed the air field. But within days Japan launched furious counter attacks by land, sea, and air, leaving the battle's outcome and the survival of the marines in doubt. The author paints a stark picture of what the marines experienced - malaria, disease, and deadly combat in a steamy, jungle island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. And this battle occurred while the Allies were losing; Japan held half of China and much of the Pacific, while Nazi Germany had most of Europe, North Africa, and was battering the Russians near Stalingrad. Tregaskis left Guadalcanal in late September with the fight raging and unsettled, but by February of 1943 Japan withdrew and the marines had a key victory.

Richard Tregaskis (1916-1973) was a war correspondent who wrote easy reading copy. This was probably the most famous of his many war books, and it was soon adapted into a 1943 movie starring Anthony Quinn, William Bendix and Lloyd Nolan.

This was one of the earliest & realistic books about America's first offensive operation against the Japanese Empire during WWII.
While the book lacks in details in some places due to Wartime censureship. It still is a great book about our fight in one of the most hellish places in the world against one very tough foe & where we could not lose.