Close Combat: The Corps, Book 6

This installment in Griffin’s “The Corps” series compensates for the lack of battle in earlier books. We get a strong feeling of the desperation of Guadalcanal, particularly among the Marine flyers who keep their Japanese counterparts at bay despite overwhelming odds, the troops cut off and undersupplied as they are.Pilots Pick Pickering and Billy Dunn are flying planes kept in the air with cannibalized parts in a unit of dwindling size as planes are shot down and their fellow flyers killed.No one thinks they’ll survive Guadalcanal. They have a fatalistic view of it. That includes young Bob Easterbrook, a 19-year-old combat photographer who has shot some of the war’s most stunning images while watching fellow photogs get killed off. The carnage affects even the legendary Jack Stecker, a Medal of Honor winner from World War I and now a major commanding one of the Marine battalions. He is sent home and replaced – because his commanding general thinks Stecker is close to exhaustion.So it’s a relief when most of our characters are pulled off the island. Pickering and Dunn are assigned to a war bond tour in the states, one also including Ken McCoy’s savage brother Tom “Machine Gun” McCoy, a hero of the Battle of Bloody Ridge, and such a walking time bomb that he must be kept company by two gunnery sergeants who are in effect his jailers, or maybe his zookeepers.There’s much dallying in which young war heroes, practically still boys, make up for lost time and inexperience with women. Dunn finds that playing the boy makes slightly older women want to, uh, mother him. Charley Galloway is reunited with flame Carolyn Ward, Ed Banning with his paramour Carolyn Howell. Steve Koffler, rescued from Buka behind Japanese lines, finds an Australian girl pregnant from his one-night stand with her before the mission, and marries her. Steve Oblensky finds the legal obstacles to his secret marriage to a Navy nurse removed.Pickering, who carries a torch for war widow Martha Payne, is sent to Pensacola where she just happens to live. Jake Dillon’s romance with Hollywood star Veronica Wood heats up, and the enterprising publicity man trades a wannabe starlet a screen test in return for her showing some love to the young Easterbrook.Flem Pickering must deal, though, with onetime girlfriend Ellen Feller, whose access to top-secret material and numerous liaisions has made her a security risk.The stage starts to be set for the the Marine spies’ next focus: assisting a U.S.-led guerrilla force in the Philippines led by an Army engineer who refuses to surrender to the Japanese, and navigating the serious bureaucratic battles his very existence causes between the Army, Navy, Marines, the newly created OSS and even the White House.

In this sixth installment of Griffin's The Corps series, the Marines are barely holding on to Guadalcanal as the Japanese have woken up to the fact that American control of this strategic island represents a deadly threat to their ambitions for empire. This is an engrossing story that continues a great saga of the US Marine Corps, which is a great service (for all that I am a proud former US Army officer!).In this review I will list my few (and mostly insignificant) nits and gripes about Griffin's writing:1. Everyone drinks pretty much all the time that they are not engaged in actual combat. I swear to God, the reader can almost get a hangover just reading about all the drinking. It would be a fun project to see how many pages Griffin can go without a character breaking out the Famous Grouse Scotch (a/k/a "The Bird). Several of the characters, particularly General F. Pickering, should long ago have passed away via cirrhosis of the liver.2. The women are all simultaneously willing, randy, and virtuous. Well, maybe that's what induces young men to join the USMC. It is remarkable how the guy always gets the girl (or vice-versa) in this series.These are minor nits. Griffin's portrayal of actual historical figures, such as Gen. MacArthur and his "Bataan Gang" staff are true to life and in my opinion, about dead-on.This is a superb series that I recommend to everyone. RJB.

WEB Griffin has the talent of developing characters to the point where the reader becomes personally invested in what happens to them. I started reading his books while underway on active duty on a U.S. submarine over 30 years ago, and own them all. When Amazon Kindle came out, I bought them all again in Kindle format. I periodically re-read them all. It's like visiting an old, beloved friend. He brings history to life, and makes the reader feel he was there when it happened.

The Pickering crew keeps rising to new heights in the war in the pacific. More love stories than you can shake a stick at. And everyone comes out smelling like roses, or as well as you can in any war..

The book opens up back on "the canal", where Dunn as acting executive officer for the second time, anxiously awaits the return of Capt. Galloway. It is here that we meet the next actor in the WWII drama in the Pacific- "Easterbunny", one of Major Dillon's photographers who landed with the first wave . He is one of the 3 survivors who remains on the canal and has attached himself to the fighter squadron. As the story opens, the ski-R4D arrives as Henderson with Galloway, Pickering, Dillion, Banning and Killer. We learn that Machine Gun McCoy has been sent back to the states as a hero, and that Banning has instructions from Gen Pickering to get Gen .Vandergifts assessment of his troops to repel a sizeable force of Japanese reinforced troops. Macklin, the guy we all love to hate, ends up as host of second bond crew, Gen Pickering is dispatched back to Australia to calm waters between MacArthur and OSS chief Donovan as well as to get the "real poop" regarding Guadalcanal - leaving Banning to navigating Washington D.C politics. Mr. Griffin weaves through the various operations like a smooth sailor weaving around bouys- in the mist of the various assignment relocations, Gen. Pickering, as with the Australian Coastwatchers, determines that a closer look should be given to the possiblity of Philippine guerrilla and uses the Nicaragua experience of his comrade Jack NMI Stecker to begin setting up an operation led by Lt McCoy...a prelude to the next book..or prelude to the Mongolian weather station? Stay tuned....

I picked up my first web Griffin book in my Doctors Surgery about two months ago and could not put it down. I stayed up all night reading it.Since then I have read about fifteen of his titles and, again, cannot put them down am eagerly awaiting my next two despatched from the States as they were unobtainable from a UK bookseller. I have one at home but it comes after the other two so I eagerly await their arrival PLH

All his books an excellent listen well thought out very interesting leaves you wanting more

Good

prompt delivery and very good copy

W.E.B. Griffin is one of my favourite authors. Each of the series of books captures your imagination with the action and imagery of the story. Strongly recommend these books