The USS North Carolina (BB-55) My all-time favorite warship. As an elementary school student in North Carolina, I donated nickels and dimes to save this ship back in the early sixties.

Thursday, August 17, 2017

Guadalcanal 'A Darkness Without Time'-- Part 6: Brutal Fighting

One reporter, Jack Singer, who worked for the old International News Service, was killed when the aircraft carrier he was on, the USS Wasp, was torpedoed in September and sank.  Singer's final dispatch was written for him by surviving officers from the Wasp.

The fighting on the land was brutal.  In some cases it was hand-to-hand.  Men were clubbed to death, stabbed, strangled.  Hersey wrote that the jungle itself felt malevolent.

Marine Pfc. Robert Leckie remembered:  "It was a darkness without time.  It was an impenetrable darkness.  To the right and left of me rose up these terrible formless things of my imagination.  ... I could not see, but I dared not close my eyes lest the darkness crawl beneath my eyelids and suffocate me."

Mighty Scary Images Here.  --GreGen

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