GUADALCANAL DIARY 145
Guadalcanal Island (in the Solomon Island chain) on 7 August 1942. Tregaskis
stayed on to cover the first three months of their increasingly bloody strug gle to
wrest control of the island from Japa nese forces. On 18 November Tregaskis
signed a deal with Random House to publish a book culled from his newspaper
dispatches entitled Guadalcanal Diary. In early December, 20th Century Fox pur-
chased the film rights, winning a bidding war with the other major studios. By
March 1943 Lewis Seiler had signed on as director. By early April it was announced
that William Bendix would appear in the picture and that Victor McLaglen
would play “ Father Donnelly” and Preston Foster would take the role of “Capt.
Cross.” Ultimately Foster played the Donnelly character and McLaglen was given
the “Col. Grayson” role but was later replaced by Minor Watson. Anthony Quinn,
of Mexican Irish extraction, was cast in the heroic role of “Soose Alvarez” in order
to help improve the public image of the United States in Latin American coun-
tries. An added selling point for Quinn is that he closely resembled Sgt. Frank
Few from Buckeye, Arizona, who was one of the heroes of Guadalcanal. Eddie
Acuff’s character, “Tex Mcllvoy,” was based on Gunnery Sgt. Charles E. Angus, a
Marine rifleman famous for his marksmanship on Guadalcanal. The studio won
the crucial cooperation of the War Department on the condition that the script,
based on “Marines in the Pacific,” a treatment by George Bricker and Herman
Ruby, be completely revised for historical accuracy. The studio complied, assign-
ing Lamar Trotti and Jerome Cady, with uncredited contributions by Kenneth
Gamet and Waldo Salt, to rewrite the film so that it faithfully followed Tregaskis’s
book. The only major departure was to focus the narrative on a single unit of
Marines instead of depicting the entire campaign. For its part, the U.S. military sup-
plied 5,000 Marines, 1,000 soldiers, 300 sailors, a transport ship, landing craft,
tanks, planes, guns, etc. (Stanley, 1943).
Production
The beach landing scenes in Guadalcanal Diary were shot at Catalina Island off
the California coast, but most of the movie was filmed at Camp Pendleton, near
Ocean side, California (about 90 miles south of Los Angeles), between mid- May and
late July 1943— less than a year after the events it depicts. Many of the Marines
stationed there were filmed while on maneuvers, and many of them appeared in
the picture in small speaking parts or as extras. The shoot was overseen by two
(uncredited) technical advisors: Lt. James W. Hurlbut, a Marine Corps war corre-
spondent who was at Guadalcanal with Tregaskis, and Capt. Clarence Martin, who
fought at Guadalcanal with the first detachment of Marines.
Plot Summary
Throughout the film, voice- over narration is supplied by Reed Hadley (the war cor-
respondent based on Richard Tregaskis), who describes the action and gives
impor tant dates. On 26 July 1942, a transport ship carry ing a large contingent of
Marines sails through the South Pacific. Sailing under sealed orders, the men make
the most of the 11 days they have left at sea by singing, writing letters, and con-
versing with the war correspondent traveling with them. The men include Father
Donnelly (Preston Foster), Col. Wallace E. Grayson (Minor Watson), Capt. Jim Cross