The Island War
The Pacific war is remembered as carriers and battleships. It was decided, island by island, by infantry who had to be delivered onto a beach and then dig an enemy out of coral.
From Guadalcanal in August 1942 to Okinawa in 1945, the American advance across the Pacific was a sequence of amphibious assaults on islands that had to be taken one at a time. Each began the same way — troops carried from ships to a defended beach in small boats — and each ended in a ground battle fought at very short range against defenders who had usually decided not to surrender.
It was a war of a particular kind of machine. Landing craft mattered more than battleships; a flamethrower tank was worth more than a heavy gun; escort carriers circling offshore for a fortnight were more useful than a fast carrier task force that had to leave. The vehicles gathered here are the ones that fought it, on both sides.
