From Makin to Bougainville: Marine Raiders in the Pacific War

In February 1942, with Pearl Harbor still smoldering, Lieutenant General Thomas Holcomb made a decision that would reshape American warfare. He created the 1st Marine Raider Battalion, an elite force designed for swift, devastating strikes against enemy-held islands. What followed was one of the most consequential experiments in military history. This is not simply a combat narrative. Jon T. Hoffman traces the entire arc of the Marine Raiders: their birth in urgent necessity, their refinement into the most effective amphibious fighters in the Pacific, and their abrupt dissolution in 1944 when their mission was deemed complete. The book reveals how the Corps grew from 19,000 men to nearly half a million, and how the Raiders became the proving ground for doctrines that still shape amphibious warfare today. But Hoffman also gives us the personalities: the commanders who led from the front, the men who fought in conditions no one back home could imagine. A vital chapter in how America learned to fight a war across open ocean, and a tribute to the unit that proved small, fast, and deadly could defeat an empire.