Solomons: First Seven Weeks

GUADALCANAL DIARY--Richard Tregaskis--Random House ($2.50).

This may not be the best war book of 1943--but it is thorough reporting on one of the most dramatic battles of 1942. Six-foot seven-inch, bespectacled Richard Tregaskis, 26, is an International News Service correspondent who landed with the first Marine contingents to hit the Solomons. For seven weeks, until he was relieved, he lived with the Marines, became as tough and wiry as any. Jap snipers shot at him. Jap pilots strafed and bombed him. On his way out of the islands by bomber he started to write about it all. In Honolulu he finished his book.

Thirteen dollars' worth of airmail stamps took the manuscript to New York. Within seven days it had been accepted for publication and picked as the Book-of-the-Month Club's February selection (with Norman Angell's Let the People Know). Shortly thereafter it had been sold to 20th-Century-Fox.

The book's secret is the simple secret of all good reporting--fidelity and detail. It gives a good picture of what life on Guadalcanal is like. Tregaskis' description of the Battle of the Tenaru River, which he watched while Jap tracers wove a bright red network of visible death around his head, gets its power from the countless sights he remembers and sets down rather than from any comment he makes about them. Excerpts:

"The stench of bodies strewn along Hell Point and across the Tenaru spit was strong. Many of them lay at the water's edge, and already were puffed and glossy, like shiny sausages. Some of the bodies had been partially buried by wave-washed sand; you might see a grotesque, bloated head or twisted torso sprouting from the beach.

"Everywhere one turned there were piles of bodies; here one with a backbone visible from the front, and the rest of the flesh and bone peeled up over the man's head, like the leaf of an artichoke; there a charred head, hairless but still equipped with blackened eyeballs; pink, blue, yellow entrails drooping; a man with a red bullet hole through his eye; a dead Jap private, wearing dark, tortoise-shell glasses, his buck teeth bared in a humorless grin, lying on his back with his chest a mess of ground meat. There is no horror to these things. The first one you see is the only shock. The rest are simple repetition."

Tregaskis' Marines have only to open their mouths to establish their reality. Example:

"I saw a circle of Marines clustered about one of the lads who had a reputation for being a demon with the gals. These, he said, were letters from his Number One girl. 'That's the only dame he could never make,' said one of his admirers good-naturedly. 'He wants to MARRY her!' The Sheik only chuckled. 'F-- you, Mac,' he said, indulging in the Marines' favorite word. 'The trouble with you is you never met a virgin.' "

Even after the Marines had landed "the sentries were jittery on this their first night on the island. I awoke from time to time to hear the call of 'Halt!' followed almost immediately by volleys of gunfire." But with the first real fight the cool battle fortitude began to develop. "Down the beach one of the Japs had jumped up and was running for the jungle. 'There he goes!' was the shout. 'Riddle the son of a bitch!' And riddled he was."

Tregaskis points no morals. To the end he remains just an observant reporter assigned to the tragedy of actual war.

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