Historian. Author. Solomon Islander.
John-Mark Taika Ambrose is a Solomon Islander historian of World War II, born in Honiara on Guadalcanal. Raised among communities whose families witnessed the 1942–1943 fighting firsthand, he developed an early interest in the history of the Pacific War and the battles fought across the Solomon Islands.
He has spent years researching the Guadalcanal campaign through archival study, oral histories, and on-site fieldwork across former battlefields, airstrips, and coastal landing areas. His work centers on the military history of the Pacific theater, with particular attention to the events, terrain, and lived wartime experiences associated with the Guadalcanal campaign.
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 capital of the Solomon Islands sits where it does because of a runway carved out of a coconut plantation eighty years ago, and every person who has ever lived there has grown up in the shadow of what happened on that ground.
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. It is in the rusted landing craft half-buried in the sand at Tassafaronga. It is in the unexploded ordnance that farmers still turn up in their gardens. It is in the coral heads off Savo Island, where divers descend to the wrecks that sit upright on the bottom of what the Americans named Ironbottom Sound—a name the Solomon Islanders have lived with so long it has become their own.
The older people remembered. They remembered the sound of the naval guns at night, a sound like thunder that came from the wrong direction. They remembered the American Marines arriving—young, frightened, impossibly far from home—and the Japanese soldiers who had been there before them, building their airfield in the tropical heat. They remembered being caught between two armies, neither of which had asked permission to turn their home into a battlefield.
And they remembered what they did: guiding the coastwatchers through the bush, carrying wounded men on stretchers made from coconut logs, scouting Japanese positions at the risk of their own lives, feeding strangers from gardens that the war was destroying. Solomon Islanders were not bystanders to this campaign. They were participants in it, and many of them paid for that participation with everything they had.
Most historians study the Guadalcanal campaign through the archives—after-action reports, published memoirs, secondary sources. John-Mark Taika Ambrose had something most of those historians did not: the ground itself.
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. I have followed the route of Carlson's long patrol through jungle that has not changed in any meaningful way since 1942.
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. The jungle is beautiful from the air. From the ground, at night, in the rain, it is something else entirely.
The war never entirely ended in the Solomon Islands. Honiara's roads follow routes that military engineers bulldozed through the coconut groves. The harbor at Point Cruz, where the Marines fought some of the bitterest close-quarters combat of the campaign, is now a commercial wharf. The ridgelines are dotted with memorials—American, Japanese, Australian.
For Solomon Islanders, the Battle of Guadalcanal is not a chapter in someone else's military history. It is the event that brought the modern world to their doorstep, violently and without invitation, and they have been living with its consequences ever since.
Guadalcanal is quiet now. The jungle has reclaimed the fighting positions and the foxholes. The ridgelines are green. The sound that carries across the water at night is not gunfire but the wind through the palm fronds and the surf on the reef. It is a peaceful place, and a beautiful one, and it is easy to stand on the shore and forget what happened here.
This book is written so that we do not forget.