gaudalcanal is pretty much jungle. but on top of that, we had no idea of the terrain of the ground. so a lot of photography was spent on detailing for the troops what lay ahead of them. they flew in what we called old wives in those days. small aircraft and took picture whafts was going to be taken the next day, hopefully and so forth and so on. so that was done. and very little actually was done of a battle, so to speak. and they just couldn't seem to get at it because of all of the other work they were doing. tarawa was different. here we had an island that was part of a chain of islands and the enemy was building an air strip taun would which would easily edict -- interdict the naval activity in that general area. and so they decided that they didn't want that flight spot going down there while their ships were out here. so we were to take it. well it was garrisoned by about -- pretty close to 4,000 rigicenti, which were japanese marines. so here we're going to have probably the first time in the world a marine battle. marines against marines. and they are a fairly large group of