AMERICA’S “FEW”

For the US in the Pacific, the disaster at Pearl Harbor in December 1941 was swiftly followed by some of its darkest days of the war. However, it wasn’t supposed to have been that the first line of air defence against the seemingly unstoppable Japanese juggernaut would be a handful of US Marine Corps fighter pilots, trained to support their fellow Marines on the ground.

It wasn’t supposed to have been possible that the Japanese would conquer Malaya in six weeks, all of the Philippines outside the Bataan Peninsula in a month and Java – the crown jewel of the Dutch overseas empire – in a week. It wasn’t supposed to have been that the Japanese would hand the US Army its biggest rout since 1864, and punish the British in Singapore with what Winston Churchill called the “worst defeat” in British military history.

It wasn’t supposed to have been that the only thing stopping the Japanese from isolating Australia from the east was a gaggle of US Marines on the ground holding a small slice of a contested island called Guadalcanal, that nobody had ever heard of. It wasn’t supposed to have been, but it was.

Those Marine aviators were few, but for the Allies in the South Pacific in 1942 they were almost all there was.