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Crusade in the Pacific is a video series that documents the fighting between the United States and Japan's Empire of the Rising Sun during and immediately after World War II. Each episode examines a crucial stage in a war that was contested bitterly and marked by unheard-of savagery. This episode, Crusade in the Pacific: Guadalcanal - America's First Offensive, covers the struggle for the island of Guadalcanal, the first true confrontation between untried U.S. troops and experienced Japanese divisions, veterans of fighting in China who, to this point, had never lost a battle. The word Guadalcanal still graces the unit patch of the 1st Marines, marines who came to call the island "Starvation Island," an island their opponents would label the "Island of Death."