American Commando
Evans Carlson, His WW II Marine Raiders, and America's First Special Forces Mission
6 of 6 copies available
November 1942: in the hellish combat zone of Guadalcanal, one man would make history.
Lt. Col. Evans Carlson was considered a maverick by many of his comrades-and an outright traitor by others. He spent years observing guerrilla tactics all over the world, and knew that those tactics could be used effectively by the Marines.
Carlson and an elite fighting force-the 2nd Raider Battalion-embarked upon a thirty-day mission behind enemy lines where they disrupted Japanese supplies, inflicted a string of defeats on the enemy in open combat, and gathered invaluable intelligence on Japanese operations on Guadalcanal. And in the process they laid the foundation for every branch of Special Forces in the modern military.
Here, for the first time, is a riveting account of one man, one battalion, and one mission that would forever change the ways of warfare.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
June 2, 2009 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781101057452
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781101057452
- File size: 727 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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June 1, 2009
The worthy chronicler of the Battle of Tarawa in One Square Mile of Hell (2006) returns to World War II in the Pacific with an excellent biography of Evans Carlson (18961947), founder of the U.S. Marine Raiders. Unorthodox during his service in China, where witnessing the Communist forces influenced his notions about commando-type units, Carlson became more unorthodox in the Pacific theater. That made his superiors suspicious but didnt prevent him from organizing the Raiders, whose submarine-launched, August 1942 raid on Makin Island made them famous. On Guadalcanal later in 1942, they made a probably more useful raid behind Japanese lines, one that offered evidence of the value of such light forces operating covertly. Carlson retired soon after the war, but many of the then-disbanded Raiders served on, influencing not only the marines but other U.S. special operations forces. Exhaustively researched though not exhausting to read, this is another winner for Wukovits.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)
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