War has played a key role in the history of the United States, from the nation's founding

right down to the present. War made the U.S. independent, kept it together, increased its

size, and established it as a global superpower. Understanding America's wars is essential for understanding American history.

Welcome to Key Battles of American History,

a podcast in which we discuss American history through the lens of the most important battles of America's wars.

Here is your host, James Early.

Thank you. host, James Early. Hello and welcome back to our series Guadocanau, Air, Land, and Sea, our 2,000-foot survey of the

epic Guadalcanal campaign of the Pacific Theater World War II. This is your host,

James Early, as always. And once again, I am joined by my friend Dave Holland. Dave, say hello

the people. Hello, people, and welcome back, and I'm glad you're still with us, so to speak,

but I'm very excited to speak about the Battle of Easter Solomon's and Choco Express, number five.

That's right.

Thank you for sticking with us, folks.

So this is, as you know, this is new for me to go this deep into a campaign.

Usually I do 10,000-foot views, but thanks to my buddy Dave here, we're able to

zoom in a lot closer and give you a much closer and more in-depth discussion of the campaign.

So let me recap our last episode just to refresh your memory, and then we'll move into our

current topic. So in our last episode, we talked about some of the efforts that Japan made

to strike back against the American landing on Guadalcanal and to try to get rid of these pesky

Marines. How dare they come and land on our island and take our airfield. So we talked about

the Getcha Patrol, which was one of the early patrols that the Americans sent out, the Marines, and now that resulted in disaster.

Some fighting on the Matanacal River, which was to the west of the marine perimeter in a very key area, and we're going to see in the future there's going to be a lot of fighting along that river.

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