Munda Trail: Eric HammelThe Solomon Island archipelago stretches in a roughly east west direction from New Guinea to San Cristobal. For the Imperial Japanese forces in 1942, it was a natural highway into the South Pacific. When checked at Guadalcanal, these forces realized they had moved east too quickly, and that their defeat was caused in part by inadequate air bases between the front and their head quarters at Rabaul, more than six hundred miles away. As the last Japanese