The above is a drawing by Howard Brodie, an artist James Jones much admired.  The distinctive way the Allied commanders organized the campaign for Guadalcanal, coupled with certain features intrinsic to island warfare, shaped the structure of Jones’s The Thin Red Line. Here’s how the novel begins: The two transports had sneaked up from the […]

How vividly did the Guadalcanal campaign impress itself on the American imagination? Well, this movie was released around nine months after the last Japanese soldiers were driven from the island. But all the media were moving at fast pace in those days. In propaganda, as in so many other things — internment of undesirables, terror-bombing […]

From December of 1941 through the middle of the next year, the Japanese Army and Navy enjoyed an unbroken series of victories that carried them to the doorstep of Australia. The conquest of Australia was indeed their next major endeavor. They planned to begin it by taking Port Moresby, on the southern coast of New […]