With Guadalcanal lost, the Japanese chose to fortify and build an airfield at Munda on New Georgia, the next major island up the island chain on the Solomon Sea. Coupled with the forces of their bastion at Rabaul, Japanese air forces at Munda could threaten American control of the Central Solomons and the adjacent Solomon Sea. To Third Fleet commander, William "Bull" Halsey, this was intolerable; New Georgia could not be skipped.With evocative, almost surrealistic prose, author Altobello places the reader on the trails to Munda with the American soldiers from this now almost forgotten campaign: The jungle hissed as the men readied themselves for their first encounter with fear. Everything around them shimmered with movement from the jungle's huge population of small creatures. The earth itself seemed to crawl.