John-Mark Taika Ambrose | Historian & Author

From the Author

I was born in Honiara, on the northern coast of Guadalcanal, in a town that exists because of war. Honiara was not a town before 1942. It grew up around the airstrip that the Japanese began building and the Americans finished—the strip they called Henderson Field, the strip that men on both sides bled and died for across six months of fighting that neither army was prepared to endure.

I did not have to go looking for the war. The war was always there. As a boy, I walked paths through the jungle that followed old supply trails. I swam in rivers where Marines had filled their canteens and where Japanese soldiers had died of thirst within sight of the water. Growing up in the Solomons, you absorb the war the way you absorb the weather.

This book is written so that we do not forget.

John-Mark Taika Ambrose — Honiara, Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands

About the Book

Author John-Mark Taika Ambrose

Subject Pacific War, WWII

Period 1942–1943

Genre Military History

Guadalcanal: Six Months of Hell follows the campaign chronologically, from the strategic decisions that put American Marines on Guadalcanal in August 1942 to the Japanese evacuation in February 1943. It covers the land battles, the naval engagements, the air combat, the logistics, and the command decisions that shaped six months of fighting in conditions that tested every man who endured them.

Written by a historian born on the very ground where the battle was fought, this account draws on archival research, oral histories from Solomon Islander families, and decades of on-site fieldwork across every major battlefield of the campaign.

Comprehensive coverage of land, sea, and air operations
First-person accounts from American and Japanese combatants
Solomon Islander oral histories never before published
On-the-ground battlefield analysis from decades of fieldwork
Both sides of the conflict examined with equal rigor
The human cost of Guadalcanal—malaria, starvation, and endurance
The lasting impact of the campaign on the Solomon Islands

Walking the Battlefields

I have walked every battlefield described in this book. I have stood on the sandbar at Alligator Creek where Ichiki's men charged into the Marine guns. I have climbed the ridge where Edson and his Raiders held through two nights of attacks that came close to breaking Henderson Field's last line of defense. I have followed the route of Carlson's long patrol through jungle that has not changed in any meaningful way since 1942—the same heat, the same insects, the same canopy so thick it blocks the sky.

The terrain tells you things that the documents cannot. It tells you why the Marines on Edson's Ridge could not see what was coming until it was on top of them. It tells you why the 132nd Infantry spent weeks failing to reduce the Gifu strongpoint—because when you stand in that country and look at the interlocking fields of fire that the Japanese engineers created in the folds of the ridgeline, you understand the position in a way that no map can convey.

The jungle is beautiful from the air. From the ground, at night, in the rain, it is something else entirely.

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