Word: vandegrift
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Most military men are given to understatement, but not many have written as modestly as this. The author of the terse sentence was Major General Alexander Archer Vandegrift, Commander of the Marines in the Solomons, and he certainly had been busy. At 55, he had been climbing up & down cargo nets like a 25-year-old. He had lowered his high rank into damp foxholes. He had eaten captured Jap rice for want of anything better. Like his men, he had slapped anopheles mosquitoes, swum naked in the Lunga River...
...Archer Vandegrift was still busy this week, and the eyes of much of the world focused on his business. To most outsiders, his Solomon Islands battle has grown from an interesting little adventure in offense into a clash which may vitally affect the whole war. For the Japanese are now committed to trying to retake what he took from them. The U.S. is equally committed to holding on, and eventually taking more...
...General Vandegrift, who can be seen in the evenings stretched out meditatively in a canvas deck chair in front of his heavily fly-sprayed cabin, has been cool, softspoken, crafty, hard and wonderfully cheerful. The Air Commander . . . wears his cigar and chooses his tactics with a jaunty air. The colonels who command Marine regiments and battalions lie in coral-crusted mud with their men, dodge the soprano-chattering Jap 25-caliber guns. . . . A private, a wire-stringer, carried a heavy steel spool of telephone wire eight miles up & down 60° slopes. . . . There are great squads of anonymous heroes. . . . Perhaps...
That Major General Alexander A. Vandegrift and his Marines had been able to hold on to their islands after such a bad start was a tribute to their tenacity and fighting skill. Whether they could continue to hold on depended on: 1) the amount of U.S. reinforcements that could be brought up; 2) the price the Jap was willing to pay. Three times within ten days, the Navy admitted, the Jap had been able to land reinforcements on his side of bloody Guadalcanal, in spite of heavy losses. An all-out battle for the Solomons looked closer & closer...
...through the ironbound Navy censorship. The Marines still held what they had taken, but they would need still more reinforcements and ample supplies if the slender thread of their strength was to endure. Nobody knew this better than their 55-year-old commander, Major General Alexander Archer Vandegrift. Despite destruction of 42 Japanese planes, without U.S. loss, and damage to enemy ships, he was in a tight spot. Aware of this fact, Admirals Ghormley and Nimitz, this week were conferring "somewhere in the Pacific" with Air Forces General Arnold...