Kinryu-GO: Operation Golden Dragon

If you like raw-bone, no-holds-barred storytelling about tough men of action fighting each other and nature, you deserve to treat yourself to Kinryu-GO.

It is late in the fall of 1942. The Japanese are losing the crucial Battle of Guadalcanal in a series of futile attacks to recapture Henderson Field – a critical airbase complex seized by U.S. Marines the previous August. In desperation they devise Kinryu-Go or ‘Operation Golden Dragon’ to interdict and destroy Allied supply convoys to the Solomons and gamble everything on a secret airstrip built on a tiny, unstable, volcanic island in the Coral Sea, deep in Allied-controlled territory.

Their plans go awry when a destroyer transport carrying a company of U.S. Marine Raiders is blown off course in a tropical cyclone and goes aground on the island. While the crew escapes to the open sea in the ship’s landing craft, the ‘leathernecks’ go ashore in rubber boats to await rescue. Once the two enemies become aware of each other’s presence, it’s only a matter of time before they face off in a vicious, sanguinary firefight – and time is running out!

But they’re not alone. There’s another enemy on the island – one that doesn’t distinguish between Americans and Japanese. As it closes in on both combatants, the island’s dormant volcano rumbles to life. Frantically fleeing for their lives in a bid to outrun the deadly hunters, the men dodge chasms which suddenly open up beneath them, spewing steam laced with toxic sulfuric gas. Rivers of molten lava pour forth, setting the island afire and threatening to roll them all into the sea.

Kinryu-Go propels the reader into the thick of the Guadalcanal campaign. The story unfolds amidst a historical background of sea and air battles as the bitter contest for control of the island reaches its apex. You stand watch on the bridges of fighting ships and hunker down in the cockpits of warplanes locked in mortal combat. On the ground you tramp through the gloomy tangles of fetid rainforest alongside U.S. Marine Raiders and Imperial Japanese Marines as they struggle to gain the upper hand over each other, and grudgingly join together to repel a malevolent, nightmarish throwback to the dawn of time.