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I wish more people would pick up a book, study the Pacific theatre more. What’s rather troubling is the lack of awareness of what truly went on. Seems too many people think the war in the Pacific consisted of Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa and a couple of naval battles. Way, way off the mark – not even close. There were dozens of invasions, dozens of pitched battles over land and water. We had to spool up momentum to move in, dominate every nautical mile of the sea and air out there to disrupt enemy lines of communication in support of the overall strategy – and keep that momentum up, not let it fall off. We had to land on and take all sorts of widespot-in-the-ocean places most people have never even heard of to ‘base’ our way into Empire held territory. It was a long, nasty slog that many remain unaware of to this day. The distances involved were daunting, and the efforts to overcome them in order to take the war to the Japanese even more so, making the struggle in Europe look simple in comparison.

100% true.

There was an interesting book out many years ago that you can't even find anymore it seems, by Vincent Bugliosi called "And The Sea Will Tell". A fascinating true murder story that played out back in the Seventies in a deserted WWII era American dot in the ocean airfield in the Pacific called Palmyra. The story is really unusual about two boats with two couples that just happened to be there at that same time, and something happened between them resulting in one couple disappearing and the other couple taking their boat and returning to the USA.

Thing was, it made me think of how full the Pacific Ocean must be of little dots of land where American boys and men did terribly boring jobs, seemingly forgotten by the war, occasionally having a plane land and refuel, drop supplies off, etc. Their contribution largely forgotten by history.

One battle in particular that I believe is under appreciated by history is The Battle of Leyte Gulf.

The scale of the battle was huge. The stakes were high. The sub-plots were astounding.

Halsey, itching for a fight, taking the bait, and through a common clerical error which threw gasoline on the fire, ends up to his dying days fighting what he viewed as slander by people who questioned his actions, all under the shadow of the words "The world wonders".

On the other side, almost simultaneously, the Davids of the US Navy in Taffy3 against the Goliaths of the Imperial Japanese Navy and their battleships, darting in, really, the unbelievable parallel to "The Charge of the Light Brigade".

The destroyers of Taffy 3 with bones in their teeth sailed directly at the Japanese battlewagons, their five inch guns like the sabres of the Light Brigade being flashed in the air, they "Volley'd and thunder'd" like hooves, as the superstructures of the battleships flashed with impacts. They sailed under full steam to what many of them, like the calvary in Tennyson's poem, assumed was going to be their certain death..."Someone had blunder'd".

Halsey, in full pursuit to the north, gets the communication from his boss who is trying to discreetly ask what Halsey was up to without ruffling his feathers, ending with Halsey losing it on the bridge of the New Jersey and throwing his hat to the floor in white hot anger and shame as "All the world wonder'd" in Hawaii what was going on.

You could not make this up.

And then, Typhoon Cobra just a month or two later.

With the way they could use computer graphics to recreate that, with the real, unadulterated story line from history, that would be quite the production.

"The Battle of Leyte Gulf".