US Marine Corps Pacific Theater of Operations 1941-43

By Gordon Rottman

The outbreak of World War II set in motion a massive expansion of the United States Marine Corps, leading to a 24-fold increase in size by August 1945. This book is the first of several volumes to examine the Corps's meteoric wartime expansion and the evolution of its units. It covers the immediate pre-war period, the rush to deploy defense forces in the war's early months, and the Marines' first combat operations on Guadalcanal, New Georgia, and Bougainville. It focuses on the 1st, 2d, and 3d Marine Divisions (MarDivs) and the provisional 1st, 2d, and 3d Marine Brigades (MarBdes).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Mar 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781472801562

Gordon Rottman

Gordon Rottman lives outside of Houston, Texas, served in the Army for twenty-six years in a number of “exciting” units and wrote wargames for Green Berets for eleven years. He’s written over 130 military history books, but his interests have turned to adventurous young adult novels—influenced by a bunch of audacious kids, Westerns owing to his experiences on his wife’s family’s ranch in Mexico, and historical fiction focusing on how people lived and thought—history does not have to be boring. His first Western novel, The Hardest Ride, garnered three writing awards and was a USA Today and Amazon best seller.