Employing his day-to-day wartime notes, the press officer and historian of the 1st Marine Division on Guadalcanal interweaves his own story with the bigger history of this bitter air-ground-sea battle.

Guadalcanal was a pivotal World War II battle in the Pacific theater--a hotly contested struggle between the Japanese and American forces for possession of a small airstrip on a beautiful but blood-soaked atoll of the Solomon Islands. History has confirmed that the island campaign was both symbolically and strategically the turning point of the Pacific war....