First Offensive


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Shooting the Pacific War


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Thayer Soule couldn't believe his orders. As a junior officer with no military training or indoctrination and less than ten weeks of active duty behind him, he had been assigned to be photographic officer for the First Marine Division. The Corps had never had a photographic division before, much less a field photographic unit. But Soule accepted the challenge, created the unit from scratch, established policies for photography, and led his men into combat. Soule and his unit produced films and photos of training, combat action pictures, and later, terrain studies and photographs for intelligence purposes. Though he had never heard of a photo-litho set, he was in charge of using it for map production, which would prove vital to the division. Shooting the Pacific War is based on Soule's detailed wartime journals. Soule was in the unique position to interact with men at all levels of the military, and he provides intriguing closeups of generals, admirals, sergeants, and privates -everyone he met and worked with along the way. Though he witnessed the horror of war firsthand, he also writes of the vitality and intense comradeship that he and his fellow Marines experienced. Soule recounts the heat of battle as well as the intense training before and rebuilding after each campaign. He saw New Zealand in the desperate days of 1942. His division was rebuilt in Australia following Guadalcanal. After a stint back in Quantico training more combat photographers, he went to Guam and then to the crucible of Iwo Jima. At war's end he was serving as Photographic Officer, Fleet Marine Force Pacific, at Pearl Harbor.




Isolation of Rabaul


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Victory and Occupation


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Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal


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This book, “Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal: History of U. S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II, Volume I,” covers Marine Corps participation through the first precarious year of World War II, when disaster piled on disaster and there seemed no way to check Japanese aggression. Advanced bases and garrisons were isolated and destroyed; Guam, Wake, and the Philippines. The sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, “day that will live in infamy,” seriously crippled the U. S. Pacific Fleet; yet that cripple rose to turn the tide of the entire war at Midway. Shortly thereafter, the U. S. Marines launched on Guadalcanal an offensive which was destined to end only on the home islands of the Empire. The country in general, and the Marine Corps in particular, entered World War II in a better state of preparedness than had been the case in any other previous conflict. But that is a comparative term and does not merit mention in the same sentence with the degree of Japanese preparedness. What the Marine Corps did bring into the way, however, was the priceless ingredient developed during the years of pence: the amphibious doctrines and techniques that made possible the trans-Pacific advance – and, for that matter, the invasion of North Africa and the European continent. By publishing this operations history in a durable form, it is hoped to make the Marine Corps record permanently available for the study of military personnel, the edification of the general public, and the contemplation of serious scholars of military history.







The Guadalcanal Campaign


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Opening Moves


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Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal: History of U. S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II


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This book is the first of a projected five-volume series covering completely, and we hope definitively the history of Marine operations in World War II. This book covers Marine Corps participation through the first precarious year of World War II, when disaster piled on disaster and there seemed no way to check Japanese aggression. By publishing this operational history in a durable form, it is hoped to make the Marine Corps record permanently available for the study of military personnel, the edification of the general public, and the contemplation of serious scholars of military history.