"New Cactus Air Force Book!" Topic

Osprey has published the late Eric Hammel's final work: The Cactus Air Force: Air War over Guadalcanal.

From the blurb:
For 40 years from 1961, the late Eric Hammel interviewed more than 150 American participants in the air campaign at Guadalcanal, none of whom are still alive. These interviews are the most comprehensive first-person accounts of the battle assembled by any historian. More importantly, they involved the junior officers and enlisted men whose stories and memories were not part of the official history, thus providing a unique insight.

I knew Eric slightly. This is a subject he knew pretty well. When everyone was all crazy for the ETO he was looking into the Pacific. Back int he day when you could pick up the phone and find veterans often living in the same town as they did in WW2. I didn't know he passed.

I didn't know he was gone either. I guess I'd better complete my Hammel library.

We're losing not only the veterans, but their chroniclers at an alarming rate.

It's actually a thing. The guys that fought the war are pretty much gone now. And now the guys who studied the actual vets are going. This may not seem like much, but I have found a change in knowledge and comprehension of the period in younger historians that didn't grow up with the vets and have as much of a chance to talk to them. You wouldn't think it would make much difference, but we're rapidly running out of people who used to sit around and just talk to WW1 vets, and soon that'll happen with those that really knew the WW2 vets.