The Germans shell the Saucer for a while, then attack at noon in battalion strength, backed by 88mm guns. Determined Rhodesian and Australian anti-tank guns stall the attack, but 12 guns are destroyed. At noon the British hoist Red Cross flags, and the Germans cease firing while the defenders remove their wounded.

That afternoon, Rommel drives up to the Saucer battle, and sees 30 or 40 wrecked British tanks. Von Thoma reports to Rommel that the Afrika Korps has enough fuel for the moment, but is now desperately short of ammunition. Rommel also learns that the RAF has bombed an advanced dressing station that prominently displayed Red Crosses. He orders that captured enemy officers will be used as hostages against such acts, and sends a message to that effect to the British.

All Rome has for Rommel is fatuous messages, such as one from Comando Supremo's Chief of Staff, Field Marshal Ugo Cavallero. It reads, "The Duce has asked me to express to you his appreciation for the successful counterattack personally led by yourself. In addition the Duce wishes you to know that he is fully confident that under your leadership the battle now in progress will be brought to a victorious conclusion."

The report only annoys Rommel. Worse, his radio intercept team reports that British troops are massing just south of the Saucer. A new attack is brewing.

Rommel decides, as usual, that the best defense is a good offense, and attacks the Saucer again, at 3:25 p.m. This battle turns into a melee, and the Germans score the lucky hit this time, when a shell hits 24th Brigade headquarters, killing Brigadier Godfrey and three of his staff. The brigade major takes over, but the HQ's destruction impedes the defense. The Australians are forced to withdraw.

As the afternoon wanes, British troops, including 400 tanks, mass along a four-thousand-yard front. The attack will be led by two British brigades (mentioned earlier) under 2nd New Zealand Division's command. They will clear through the main German defenses, which are the 164th German Infantry Division and Italy's Trieste Mechanized Division. The British route of advance is to be a rectangle 4,000 yards wide and 6,000 yards long that will run from Point 29 almost to the Tel el Aqqaqir.

During the evening, the 151st Brigade on the right and 152nd on the left move up to their start lines. The extreme right flank is covered by the 28th Maori Battalion of the 2nd New Zealand Division, the extreme left by the 133rd Lorried Brigade. Behind that are 72 Shermans and Grants and 49 Crusaders of John Currie's 9th Armoured Brigade, the only British armored unit that Freyberg trusts. Behind that are two armored divisions.

As the sun sinks, British and South African Wellingtons and Fleet Air Arm Albacores (ancient biplanes) hit all known targets from north to south, blasting supply dumps, ammo and fuel points, and communications lines.

British troops move up to the line of cairns that mark the startline. The 151st Brigade, made of the Durhams, shiver in khaki drill uniforms, but the Scots of 152nd Brigade are warmer in battledress. On their backpacks, each Scottish soldier wears two pieces of tape to form a St. Andrew's Cross to identify themselves. Behind the Scots, 25th NZ and 26th NZ Battalions wait as a reserve.

At midnight British troops brew tea and wait for the order to advance.

Montgomery messages London: "A real hard and very bloody fight has gone on now for eight days. It has been a terrific party and a complete slogging match, made all the more difficult in that the whole area is just one enormous minefield...I have managed to keep the initiative throughout, and so far Rommel has had to dance entirely to my tune; his counter-attack and thrusts have been handled without difficulty up to date. I think he is ripe now for a real hard blow, which may topple him off his perch. It is going in tonight and I am putting everything I can into it...If we succeed it will be the end of Rommel's army."

Ike refuses Giraud's demand. His ships are on the high seas, bound for North Africa. He will not delay the invasion and risk his ships and men. Giraud must leave France on November 4, and Torch will continue. Eisenhower dispatches HMS Seraph, the submarine that carried Clark to and from Algeria, to Southern France, to pick up the difficult Frenchman from the Gulf of Lion. As Giraud is insisting that he be taken out on an American submarine, Capt. Jerauld Wright, USN, is given "command" of the sub, even though he has never been a submariner.

Despite the prodigious supplies, the American forces heading for the beaches are inexperienced and only partially-trained. The American Regular Army is a thin slice of the manpower going over. Most of the men are draftees. All have trained with fake wooden guns and trucks marked "tank," because of pre-war supply shortages. Even the famous 1st Infantry Division, the "Big Red One," has troubles. Officers as high as captain don't know how to use newly-issued equipment like bazookas.

That message is one of confusion. American and British forces are reportedly concentrating for an attack on The Netherlands. Or France. Or Norway. Or Dakar.

The Abwehr's bag of mixed intelligence nuts is huge. Reports from the Vatican suggest an attack on Dakar, followed by a march north on the edge of the Sahara. This is confirmed by reports from Portugal and Brazil.

On the American side, the first four SBD Dauntless dive-bombers of Major Joseph Sailor's VMSB-132 land on Henderson Field. These are the lead elements of Lt. Col. William O. Brice's Marine Air Group 11.

The Japanese are also regrouping. 11th Air Fleet now has 158 aircraft: 67 Zeros, 64 Bettys, and 27 Vals. Of these, 125 are operation: 40 Zeros, 36 Bettys, and 25 Vals. The Americans have 60 operational aircraft on Guadalcanal, 34 Wildcats, 19 SBDs, and seven P39/400s. The Americans can also fly in 35 B-17s from New Caledonia for support.

11th Air Fleet is a worn Samurai blade. One-third of its men have died, creating shortages of experienced air crews and a drop in morale. 25th Air Flotilla, which has been in the South Pacific since April, is also shot.

The R Area Air Force and its collection of reconnaissance planes are also battered, down to 21 operational aircraft. If nothing else, Guadalcanal is wearing down both sides' air forces to exhaustion.

Nonetheless, the ground war continues. The pugnacious Vandegrift orders another attack tot he west, to drive the Japanese out of artillery range of Henderson Field. His only assets rested and ready to attack are Red Mike Edson's 5th Marines and two battalions of the 2nd Marines lifted in from Tulagi. Vandegrift orders an attack on the village of Kokumbuna and a drive to throw the enemy across the Poha River. 5th Marines will lead the assault, with the Whaling Group on the left flank with its Scout-Snipers and 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines. The 1st and 2nd Battalions of the 2nd Marines will be in reserve. Firepower for this attack will include the 11th Marines, Army artillery, the Cactus Air Force, and naval gunfire.

Against this, Maj. Gen. Tadashi Sumiyoshi can deploy two threadbare regiments. 4th Infantry covers the sector on the western bank of the Matanikau River from the shore to the one-log bridge. Beyond that is Col. Akisinu Oka's mixed detachment, which includes the 3rd Battalion, 4th Infantry. They lie stretched along the Matanikau and Guadalcanal's hills and jungles.

Between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m., the 1st Marine Engineer Battalion throws three footbridges across the river. At 6:30, nine artillery batteries open fire to cover the American attack. Nine B-17s join in the assault.

2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, led by Maj. Lewis Walt and 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, under Maj. William K. Enright, attack. 1st Battalion moves along the coast, while 2nd Battalion is inland. Behind them follow the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, under Maj. Robert O. Bowen. South of that, the Whaling Group shuffles across the One-Log Bridge, and on to its phase lines.

2nd/5th find little resistance, and reach its first objective line south of Pt. Cruz by 10 a.m. The battalion moves on to its second phase line.

But the 1st Battalion, moving across the Matanikau at the coast, runs smack into Japanese Nambu machine guns and light artillery. Stopped cold, Company C of the 1st Battalion loses three officers and is pushed back. Corporal Anthony Casamento of Company D leads a determined defense that obliterates most of the Japanese troops and earns him the Medal of Honor - in 1980.

The Americans send in reserves, and decide to bypass and encircle the Japanese at Point Cruz. The Americans are concerned with their high casualties. They don't realize that their Japanese opposite number, Maj. Masao Tamura, has noted that his battalion has "vanished." 7th Company is down to 10 men, 5th Company has 15. The Regimental Gun Company's last field piece has been destroyed, too.

As sunset brings an end to the fighting, the Japanese 17th Army try to restore the front with the 2nd Anti-Tank gun Battalion's dozen guns, and the 39th Field Road Construction Unit, who down picks and pick up their rifles.

After dark, the Tokyo Express rolls to Guadalcanal. Covered by the cruisers Kinugasa and Sendai, the Japanese try to supply their starving forces. Five destroyes haul 300 soldiers, two mountain guns, and supplies to support the Shoji Detachment tramping towards Koli Point on the eastern flank of the American perimeter. Eleven destroyers and the light cruiser Tenryu carry food, fuel, and ammunition and 240 soldiers to Tassafaronga, on the west.

American codebreakers intercept the signals organizing this operation and pass it to Guadalcanal just after noon, but Maj. Gen. Archibald Vandegrift, commanding the Americans, doesn't have much to face this new attack building up in the east. Most of the rested American units are attacking Point Cruz or holding the line. Vandegrift taps the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, under Col. Hanneken, to face this new menace.

While the combat on Guadalcanal is intense and bloody, the real killer is the tiny mosquito. American medics record 2,630 admissions for malaria. The disease's collateral damage includes a secondary anemia that saps endurance and resistance. In the South Pacific as a whole, malaria causes five times more casualties than the Japanese. Two-thirds of all ineffective Americans on Guadalcanal are disabled by disease - wounds only disable one-quarter.

In the age before antibiotics and penicillin, neither side is adequately prepared to face malaria. The American answer is atabrine, but many Marines don't take their pills, for two reasons. First is the obvious one: men engaged in unbelievably heavy combat have little time or interest to think about mosquitoes. Second, as with all the armies that have ever marched, the troops mistakenly believe that the new item in the diet (in this case, atabrine) will destroy their sexual potency. American officers, exhausted from continuous battle, make little effort to enforce atabrine's use. In any case, the rumors - as with all such stories - are false.

The Japanese also suffer malaria, and their plight is far worse. They call Guadalcanal "Starvation Island," a play on the abbreviation of the Japanese name for the island and the ideographs "Ga-to."

"Rice cakes and candies appear in my dreams," writes a Japanese soldier. All he eats, however, are moldy rice and soybeans. Another soldier writes, "Our bodies are so tired they are like raw cotton." Japanese units bivouac on reverse slopes amid muddy streambeds, and dense foliage, with little to no sunshine, wrecking health and morale.

Making things worse is Japanese doctrine and training, which emphasizes valor and discipline, while ignoring logistical realities. It takes two full days for carriers to haul supplies from the Kamimbo drop-off point to the Matanikau area. Delays ensue when American SBD dive-bombers or P-400 fighters attack Japanese supply columns.

Silvester's operation is, despite war, a showplace, with a neat church, outbuildings, and airy residence. The small, energetic, precise missionary is paternal towards his natives, but devoted to them.

Silvester also has help in the form of 36-year-old Merle Farland, a New Zealand nurse, who switched from piano teaching to nursing during the Great Depression. She has been in the Solomons since 1938, and, unlike other missionaries, has refused to flee.

Humorous, adventuresome, brisk, she presides over the mission hospital and its operating theater, wards, and outpatient clinic. She spends days giving injections, setting broken bones, doing dentistry, and handling maternity cases. In the evenings, she trounces Reverend Silvester at Chinese Checkers.

In addition to their duties, Silvester and Farland also work as Coaswatchers, for the network run by Donald Kennedy at Segi on New Georgia. Silvester meticulously records all ship and aircraft sightings, and, with a network of natives, sends reports to Segi by canoe. His shortwave radio can receive messages from Kennedy (addressed to MSF), but not send them.

On the 26th, Josselyn turns up, the first Westerner Silvester has seen in months. Josselyn is even more amazed to see a white woman on the island. Josselyn explains his situation, and Silvester knows what to do - send a native by canoe to Kennedy.

While Josselyn waits for an answer, he sings hymns at evening services, and tries to fit in. On the 29th, KEN radios to tell Josselyn to take the defective set to Segi for repairs - a 130-mile trip by canoe through enemy waters. Natives can do it easily, but a white man with a 300-lb. radio is another matter.

Josselyn leaves on the 30th, at 7 p.m., moving by night from village to village. At every village, Reverend Silvester has a new set of paddlers and a new canoe waiting. The first night, he paddles across Vella Gulf, down Blackett Strait, and into Wana Wana Lagoon.

He spends the 31st at Mandou village, watching Japanese camp fires on the beach at Rendova. At dusk, he's off again, dodging a stream of Japanese motorized barges moving men and supplies.

Finally, he meets a 30-man canoe sent by Kennedy from Segi in New Georgia, and this team brings him down just short of Viru Harbor, a new Japanese base. Josselyn and his natives cross New Georgia on foot, coming out on the north coast at Marovo Lagoon by daylight.

All day on the 1st, they hole up until dark, when another canoe takes Josselyn on the rest of his trip.

Leif Larsen leads the crew away from the shore, leaving the Arthur sunk in the fjord, her mast just above the surface. Later in the day, the Germans spot the mast, and raise the Arthur, and put it to their own use. She survives the war, and is returned to her owner in 1945.

Meanwhile, the Title crew plods across Norwegian rocky ground and woods, avoiding farms and crossroads. The Germans have billeted their troops at many farms (passing occupation costs on to the occupied). All are exhausted from lack of sleep, and punchy.

At dawn, they take a break on a hill 600 feet above the fjord, and eat biscuits. Larsen divides up half-hour watches so that people can sleep until noon.

On Tirpitz, it's a quiet day. Morning colors are observed at 8 a.m., followed by religious services. After that, the off-duty men ride motor launches to the island of Sattoya at the entrance to the fjord, where the German Navy has established a leave center, with log cabins, tents, a garden, and a bandstand. Nobody on the battleship is aware that 10 British and Norwegian commandos are sleeping nearby, having failed to sink their ship.

A little before noon, everyone wakes up, and Larsen and Owen Brewster use a chart to determine their location. The objective is the town of Sandvika, the 3,300-foot high frontier town on the Swedish border. It's 65 miles away.

The party moves off and walks for two hours, going higher and higher. They break through to a promontory, and see, below them, the immense bulk of the battle cruiser Scharnhorst, covered with camouflage nets and tarpaulins. Their target, Tirpitz, is on the other side of the fjord. Everyone ponders how close they have come.

Larsen notes the large collection of German patrol boats, AA guns, and troops. He splits the party into two groups of five each. Larsen takes one group, Brewster the other. Larsen believes that smaller groups will attract less attention.

Larsen's party goes along the road, which winds through fields and woods, two Norwegians and three Britons. The terrain is beautiful - ravines, birch woods, and mountain lakes, but nobody has time to enjoy the scenery. At 7 p.m., they reach the town of Ronglan, and seek a barn in which to spend the night.

The villagers, however, are all indoors, eating dinner behind blackout curtains. As they walk along, Evans hits a dead branch, which brings a farmer out. "Who's that?" he calls.

"Would you let us spend the night in your barn?" Larsen asks. "We won't do any damage, and we'll leave at dawn." The farmer invites Larsen and his party in.

The Norwegian family offers Larsen's party dinner, and the British give them their tobacco and chocolate. The farmer says he feels isolated, so Larsen and Kalve give them their revolvers. Then the evaders sack out in the barn.

Colonel Helmuth Groscurth, the chief of staff of the 297th Infantry Division, writes home, "The Fuhrer has ordered us to defend our positions to the last man, something we would do of our own accord, since the loss of a position would hardly improve our situation. We know what it would be like to be stranded without shelter in the open steppe." Groscurth, son of a pastor and an anti-Nazi, is in trouble with his superiors for filing complaints and taking action against SS murder squads who have been massacring Jews.

Winter outfits also arrive for the troops, with reversible jackets, field-gray on one side, white on the other.

Meanwhile, German troops also watch an odd sight, 150,000 horses, oxen, and camels, the 6th Army's primary transport, moving 100 miles to the rear, to ease the task of feeding them. This move leaves 6th Army's artillery and medical units immobile.

6th Army's morale is worn to a nub. Everyone suffers from lice. Russian Hiwis give the Germans a tip: bury each article of clothing just under the ground, with just one corner left above the soil. The lice move there and can be burned off.

Troops suffer from dysentery, typhus, jaundice, and para-typhus. The Germans lack many of the Allied antibiotics, including sulfa drugs and penicillin.

All the men are homesick. An NCO of 60th Motorized Infantry Division writes that when the mail arrives, his troops rush out of their dugouts. The incoming mail is the high point of the day.

All around the 6th Army, officers figure out leave plans. Paulus orders priority given to soldiers who have fought without break since June 1941. Troops shuffling back from leave know they are re-entering horror when they pass a sign on the main road into Stalingrad that reads: "Entry to the city forbidden. Onlookers put their own lives and those of comrades in danger."

The fighting in the wrecked city continues. German troops are exhausted and short of ammunition. The 79th Infantry Division hurls itself one more time against the immense steel-and-concrete Red October Factory, but the Soviets hurl heavy artillery fire back at them, stopping the attack. "The effect of massed enemy artillery has decisively weakened the division's attacking strength," 6th Army notes.

At Spartakovka, the 94th Infantry also suffers heavy casualties. German troops install wire netting over windows and shell holes in their bunkers, so that hand grenades will bounce off. The Soviets need small-caliber artillery to break the netting, but they can't ship it across the Volga. Soviet troops improvise hooks on their grenades to catch the netting.

German troops hold 90 percent of Stalingrad, while Gen. Vassili Chuikov's 20,000 defenders hold only two patches of ground - a portion of the northern suburbs and parts of the Red October factory. Chuikov himself suffers stress-induced eczema, which is so painful, he has to wrap bandages around his hands to cover open sores.

Miles to the west of Stalingrad, Luftwaffe General Wolfram von Richtofen, commander of Fliegerkorps 8, is equally stressed. His bombers have provided Paulus's men with ample air support, but the aviator is frustrated by the ground forces' slow progress. With rain coming and temperatures dropping, Richtofen is eager to finish off the Russians.

He flies out to Paulus' Tac HQ to complain about things. He tells Paulus that Luftwaffe support is pointless, because "the artillery don't fire and the infantry don't exploit our air attacks. We drop our bombs on enemy positions less than a hand grenade's throw from the infantry, but they do nothing."

Paulus, suffering diarrhea from exhaustion and poor sanitation, blames the problems on numerical weaknesses - his battalions are way under strength - the lack of training in close-quarters urban combat, and ammunition shortages.

Richtofen isn't too impressed. "They trotted out all the same old and stupid excuses," he says. However, Richtofen is eager to help. He offers additional air transport planes to bring up ammunition, and calls the Luftwaffe high command in Berlin to demand the immediate dispatch of four Luftwaffe pioneer assault battalions.

Richtofen tells Pauluus, "The real reasons for the slackening pace lie in the weariness of both command and troops and in that rigid army formalism, which tolerates only 1,000 men in the front line out of a division ration strength of 12,000." Richtofen adds: "Generals are content merely to issue orders, without going into any detail or making sure that preparations are properly made."

Paulus is not impressed, but doesn't argue the point.

While the generals palaver, Richtofen's Stukas attack Russian positions. But the raids don't gain the Nazis much. "Following the raids by all Stuka wings," Richtofen writes, "the army struck with a force of only 37 men, and they promptly stopped again after initial losses!"