I WROTE recently in TCW how victory for Britain in the Second Battle of El Alamein in November 1942 was a turning point in the war against Germany.
Commenting on the article, one of our American readers, D A Christianson, noted that the pivotal moment of the war in the Pacific for the US also came in 1942, with the battle for the key island of Guadalcanal.
He was right to remind us. The hard-won victory there after a bitter six-month struggle from August 1942 to February 1943 is probably little remembered now in Britain, but it halted Tokyo’s military juggernaut, which until then had seemed unstoppable.
