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A marine fighter squadron at Guadalcanal

(Max Brand)

Naval Institute Press, 1996. 232 pp., b&w photos, $25.95

Frederick Faust wrote westerns and romances under the name of Max Brand until he gave up fiction to become a war correspondent. Before leaving for combat, he interviewed the veterans of VMF 212, a Marine squadron recently returned from Guadalcanal. The result was this astonishing book, lost for half a century after its writer was killed in Italy. Its publication today is like turning on the radio to hear the voice of Edward R. Murrow, broadcasting live from Blitz-torn London.

The writing is easy and eloquent--the real malt whiskey, undiluted by second thoughts. The other guys are Japs, when they aren't sons of bitches, and our guys are outnumbered, exhausted, filthy, and unfailingly gallant. Their Grumman F4F Wildcats are no match for the Zeros, but they usually come back with satisfying results. Heck, on one occasion they even sank two destroyers with machine-gun fire.

Such myths were necessary in 1943, to keep GI Joe and Rosie the Riveter at their hard and sometimes terrible work, but why publish them without comment at this late date? I wish the editors had provided more reality checks, and put them on the page instead of banishing them to the back of the book.

The photos, by contrast, add hugely to the text. A pilot recalls his commander, drunk on adrenaline after landing at Henderson Field: "He hardly knew what he was doing, and he'd left his parachute on instead of leaving it in the plane." And here's the colonel himself--parachute pack dangling, knees bent, right hand strafing the left--photographed as he relives the battle for two grinning mechanics.

Writing With General Chennault under similar circumstances, the journalist Robert Hotz made enduring heroes of the Flying Tigers of Burma and China. If this book been published in 1943, the Marines of Fighting 212 might be as famous today as the Tigers. But that would have denied us the treat now available, of reading it for the first time.

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