One Damned Island After Another, first published in 1946, opens in "Paradise"-the island of Oahu-in the early morning of December 7, 1941, when Technician Third Class Joe Lockard and Private George Elliott, in their radar truck, tried desperately to tell the Information Center at Fort Shafter that the pips on their oscilloscope meant something big and dangerous. That was the beginning of the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor. From the old Hawaiian Air Department, and from the chaos and ruin of Hickam and Wheeler and Bellows airfields, the Seventh Air Force came into being. It faced, in the central Pacific, the largest water theater in the world - sixteen million square miles, five times the size of the United States. The Americans patched up their planes as best they could and began to fly the "Atoll Circuit," the low-lying, white sand atolls and the first stepping stones on the long road to Tokyo. In this huge area and against a fearsome opponent, the men of the Seventh were forced to fly the longest missions in any theater of war, entirely over water and, at first, without fighter escort. They fought at Midway, Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Truk, Saipan, Palau, the Philippines, Iwo Jima, and finally Tokyo. One Damned Island After Another is the story of the fighting men who contributed to the eventual winning of the war in the Pacific.
