ACROSS THE DARK ISLANDS (Pbk)

A seeringly honest account of the war in the Pacific * Based on the author’s experience in the 161st Infantry Regiment. ‘I remember sitting in a foxhole on Guadalcanal in the rain. The sergeant I shared the hole with shook his head and asked me: “What in the hell are we doing on this godforsaken island? Why don’t we let the Japs keep this stinking rock?” I didn’t have an answer’ – Floyd W Radike The war in the Pacific has never been portrayed more honestly – or in prose more powerful – than in this unflinching account. Brigadier General Floyd W Radike remembers how he started his military career in the mud and mayhem of Guadalcanal, fighting a campaign as crucial to the war’s outcome as it was chaotic and cruel. This is the sobering story of a junior officer in a National Guard unit who was shipped off to the front lines where he was treated with disdain by ‘regular Army’ elitists who served beside him, and given second-class status so that others could earn headlines and promotions. While struggling to survive amid dirt and disease, routine and monotony, Radike endured harrowing missions that had been incompetently, arrogantly or just impatiently planned. As no book ever has, Across the Dark Islands reveals shocking details of the war in the Pacific, removed from myth and sentimentality: how American commanders were intimidated by the Japanese stereotype of fearlessness, night attacks, and cries of ‘banzai’; how imitations of John Wayne heroics caused immediate death; how threats of court-martial quieted accusations of Army injustice; and how panic and flight destroyed a fight for the enemy’s Munda Field airstrip, an event that disappeared from the record and appears in no official history.