Hello and welcome to episode 205 of the unauthorized history of the Pacific War podcast.

My name is Seth Peridon, historian and deputy director of the Mississippi Armed Forces Museum here at Camp Shelby. And with me, as always, is my esteemed co-host, retired Navy Captain Bill Toaddy. Former Skipper of the Fast Attack Submarine U.S.S. Indianapolis, common order of Submarines Squadron 3 and Pearl Harbor and many other assignments. How are you this fine morning, Bill? I'm doing great in this fine Floridaida mornings how are you doing in mississippi pretty good

yeah the weather is actually quite beautiful for february it's uh almost spring like so that's a

it's always a nice change yeah well uh guys this week we're going to take a bit of a step back, and by back, I mean, back to Guadalcanal, specifically, and review an area of the campaign that we purposely moved over when we were going through the campaign.

Moved over it mainly because of timing on the part of our guests for that season, and not because we deemed it insignificant, quite the contrary.

And as a matter of fact, great many of you viewers and listeners have asked, where is this topic?

Why haven't you discussed it? Well, we're going to talk about it right now.

This topic is arguably the most important aspect of the campaign for Guadalcanal itself.

It's the reason that the Japanese kept throwing men, ships, and aircraft into the meat grinder. It's the reason that the U.S. kept feeding men and material into that same meat grinder.

Hell is the reason we invaded Guadalcanal in the first place.

That reason, of course, was the airfield dubbed Henderson by the Marines who took it and helped

complete it, called the unsinkable aircraft carrier by the Japanese who continually tried to sink it,

called home by the hundreds of men who flew from it, many of which became legends of the highest order.

Henderson fuel is home to a motley crew of men and their aircraft, men of the Army Air Force,

Marine Corps aviators, and orphan tailhookers, flew from an equally motley crew of aircraft from Henderson.

B-17s, SBDs, TBFs, Wildcats, Eric Cobras, and many, many more. The motley crew that flew from Henderson and later Fighter won.

All compositely took the name of the island's bequeathed code name.

Cactus.

Together, all who flew from Henderson from August through the end of the campaign in February were known as the Cactus Air Force.

So, Bill, this has been a topic that a lot of people have said, when's it coming? Well, it's here.

It's, you know, we bounced around it and we talked about it.

Almost every episode we talked about the airfield or some relation to it but but there were a lot of guys that flew from cactus and cactus was born of

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