[Includes 3 charts, 36 maps and 107 illustrations] "The successes of the South Pacific Force," wrote Admiral Halsey in 1944, "were not the achievements of separate services or individuals but the result of whole-hearted subordination of self-interest by all in order that one successful ‘fighting team’ could be created." The history of any South Pacific campaign must deal with this "fighting team," with all United States and Allied services. The victory on Guadalcanal can be understood only by an appreciation of the contribution of each service. No one service won the battle. The most decisive engagement of the campaign was the air and naval Battle of Guadalcanal in mid-November 1942, an engagement in which neither Army nor Marine Corps ground troops took any direct part. This volume attempts to show the contribution of all services to the first victory on the long road to Tokyo. It does not describe all ground, air, and naval operations in detail but it does attempt, by summary when necessary, to show the relationship between air, ground, and surface forces in modern warfare.

A detailed account of the Americans' first ground offensive against the Japanese in World War II, which occurred in August 1942 on the island of Guadalcanal.

This book argues that the preoccupation with strategic bombing doctrine was responsible for the lack of an offence on Germany's merchant shipping, resulting in the effective exclusion of all other ideas on the employment of air power.

The belief that airpower is inherently offensive is a recurrent theme throughout airpower theory and doctrine. Before World War I, dogmatic belief in the dominance of the offense in land warfare affected the military decisions which resulted in the disaster of the trenches. Termed the “cult of the offensive” by scholars, faith in offense became so unshakable in pre-1914 Europe that military organizations dismissed as irrelevant the numerous indications of the waning power of the offense as technological developments strengthened the defense. With airpower’s professed inclination for offense, could a cult of the offensive perniciously trap airpower doctrine and lead to similarly disastrous consequences? The study begins by establishing the theoretical background necessary for case study analysis. Airpower defense is defined as those operations conducted to deny another force’s air operations in a designated airspace. Airpower offenses are those operations in the airspace defended by another, or operations conducted outside of one’s actively defended airspace. The relationship between offense and defense is dissected to discover that airpower defense enjoys neither an advantage of position nor of time, so traditional Clausewitzian views relative to the power of the defense do not apply to airpower. Next, the study describes those factors which may inject, or reinforce, a preferential bias for offense into airpower strategy and doctrine. A cult of the offensive is defined as an organizational belief in the power of offense so compelling that the military organization no longer evaluates its offensive doctrine objectively. This leads to an examination of the ramifications postulated to result from offensive ideology.

In a field still dominated by a frontier perspective, this book has the potential to be a real game changer. Armed with example after example of harassment in Internet chat rooms and forums, the authors detail some of the vile and hateful speech that the current combination of law and technology has bred.