Sixty years ago, on Aug. 7, the United States began its invasion of Guadalcanal, the first big American offensive of World War II. The campaign for the island was long and bloody, taking the lives of about 25,000 Japanese and 1,500 Americans, and it did not end until February 1943, when the remaining Japanese on the island stealthily slipped away.
Since then, countless numbers of books have poured forth on the subject. As good as many of them may be, probably none is better than James Jones' novel, "The Thin Red Line" (Delta paperback, 528 pages, $11.95). It is a grim history.
The novel, still in print, is observing an anniversary of its own. It was published 40 years ago, in 1962 — and 20 years after the author's participation in the campaign, during which he was wounded.
"The Thin Red Line" forms the middle volume in Jones' trilogy of novels about the Second World War, the first being "From Here to Eternity," published in 1951, and the third, "Whistle," published in 1978, one year after Jones died of heart disease at the age of 55.
Both "The Thin Red Line" and "From Here to Eternity" take their titles from Kipling's verse, and the one is very much a continuation of the other. Even the major characters are the same, though the names and the centrality of their roles have been altered.
Pvt. Witt, for instance, is really Prewitt, who was killed at the end of "Eternity." And 1st Sgt. Welsh is a reworking of 1st Sgt. Warden, just as Storm the cook is a new version of Stark the cook.
You might even argue that the "logic" of the characters is continued from peacetime to wartime. Sardonic, hard-as-nails Warden, coolly going along with the Army's cruel and silly peacetime games, has been hammered and flattened into Welsh, the total cynic with a "sly, mad grin" who likes being shot at, and who believes that none of their deaths will mean anything, and that war is simply for property and nothing else.
One of the great values of "The Thin Red Line" lies in what seems to be its honest and realistic depiction of combat. From the time C-for-Charlie (which is how C Company is always referred to here) lands on Guadalcanal until the end of the book, when C-for-Charlie is a totally different organization, made up of almost all new men, we are never allowed to forget how brutal war is.
For a novelist who has been through it, combat holds no glory or heroics. Loyalty is twisted into lunatic kinds of attachments. And as for sympathy, well, anyone who has ever been in the Army can tell you where you can find sympathy.
Likewise, this harsh honesty is what made the 1998 film version of "The Thin Red Line" a better war movie than "Saving Private Ryan," which, its gore notwithstanding, was essentially a flag-waver. (There was an earlier, forgettable film version of "The Thin Red Line" in 1964.)
The novel's account of the landing of C-for-Charlie on the island is completely absorbing, told in a detached, almost bemused manner. Bombers and fighter planes buzz around like insects above the landing craft. When a craft in the water is bombed, those on shore a thousand yards away hear the thin, high scream of one of the bomb's victims and realize that, with the time it takes sound to travel, the scream was still alive after the victim was dead.
From then on it is almost continuous combat. For Welsh, it is "tremendously intense excitement," generating a feeling somewhat like that in a crowd at an important college football game. Curious details are not overlooked, such as the fact that bodily functions demand attention even in the midst of murderous madness.
Indeed, the combat goes on so long (we are more than halfway through the book before the first day of combat is over) that it nearly becomes boring. This may be Jones' form-follows-function way of giving readers, safe in their chairs, at least some pale idea of the numbness felt by the soldiers, whose experience, like the reading of it, must have seemed endless.
Thus, when, after two days in combat, the company gets a week's rest, the narrative turns more varied for the reader. We learn more about individuals: Fife, who is bitterly disappointed that his head wound is not serious enough to get him evacuated; Bell, the smart ex-officer who says he doesn't know about there not being any atheists in foxholes, since nobody dug any there — but he knew of plenty in slit trenches, which were everybody's home on Guadalcanal.
In the last sentence of the book, when C-for-Charlie waits to be ferried off the island onto ships, Jones interjects himself overtly into the text of which he covertly had always been a part: "One day one of their number would write a book about all this, but none of them would believe it, because none of them would remember it that way."
Most of us could not say, not having been one of their number. But it ought to make a believer out of anyone.
Roger K. Miller, a newspaperman for many years, is a free-lance writer and reviewer for several publications. E-MAIL: rkmiller@ticon.net