Bougainville: The Marines, the Navy, and the Battle for the Tomb Island, 1943–1945

On November 1, 1943, three Marine regiments hit the beach at Cape Torokina, on an island the Japanese garrison had already started calling Tomb Island. What followed was one of the Pacific War's most consequential campaigns, and one of its least remembered: eighteen months of jungle combat, night surface battles, and a starvation siege that pinned down a Japanese army of more than 40,000 men and helped seal the fate of the fortress at Rabaul, without a single Marine or soldier ever setting foot inside it.

Bougainville tells the full story of that campaign: Halsey's decision to bypass Rabaul rather than storm it, the landing at Empress Augusta Bay and the desperate night battle that followed, Arleigh Burke's destroyers running down a Japanese task force off Cape St. George, and Operation TA, the last major Japanese counterattack of the Pacific War's middle years. It follows the campaign down to the level of individual men: Sergeant Robert Owens, charging a Japanese gun position alone at Cape Torokina Corporal Henry Gurke and Sergeant Herbert Thomas, each smothering a grenade with his own body to save the men beside him Navajo Code Talker John Kinsel Sr., eighteen years old on the day of his first battle The soldiers of the Japanese 6th Division, drafted out of Kumamoto and Okinawa, who held a dying position for two years and could still describe, decades later, exactly what it cost them Drawing on official unit histories, oral testimony from American, Australian, and Japanese veterans, and Japanese-language sources rarely used in English accounts of the Pacific War, this book reconstructs a campaign most World War II histories cover in a paragraph. It is a story of naval combat and jungle warfare, and of a strategy that let the Allies break an empire's strongest Pacific fortress by choosing, deliberately, never to attack it directly.

Readers of Ian W. Toll's Pacific War trilogy, James D. Hornfischer's naval histories, and Eric Bergerud's Touched with Fire will find the same combination here: ground-level combat narrative built on primary sources, without losing sight of the strategy driving it.