Basilone and the 7th Marines arrive on Guadalcanal to reinforce Leckie and the rest of the 1st Marine Division as they continue to defend the crucial airstrip. Basilone plays a key role in repelling a nighttime Japanese attack but suffers a frightful personal loss. After four months of continuous action, the exhausted and disease-ridden men of the 1st Marine Division are evacuated off the island.
Edward J. Drea explains the problems that afflicted the Japanese military in the Pacific Theater during World War II. Japanese military leadership was unprepared and ill-informed in regard to waging war in the Pacific, as their focus for years had been on Russia and China. Their strategy and tactics left them overextended and underpowered, leaving them vulnerable to the attacks of the United States.
At the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, the destroyer USS Smith kept fighting after receiving a blow her mid-1930s designers never imagined.
Leading the U.S. offensive of World War II, the U.S. Marines came face to face with the brutal realities of Pacific theater ground fighting.
The naval battles off Guadalcanal ruthlessly delivered a searing audit of U.S. Navy leadership and prewar doctrine.
Navy and Marine Corps artists captured the drama that unfolded before them on the sea and in the jungle during the Guadalcanal campaign.
Lieutenant Richard Zimmerman, USN (Ret.) laughs and cries as he describes a shipmate being struck by the wing of a Kamikaze plane he'd shot down from the deck of his ship. The man was taken away by the doctors and Zimmerman states, "I was sure he was dead."
The Guadalcanal Collection is from the U.S. Naval Institute's Oral History program. The program captures and preserves the reminiscences of key Navy and Coast Guard personnel and contains over 230 bound volumes.
Watch a preview of HBO's new miniseries, The Pacific.