Excerpt from The Natural History of Enewetak Atoll, Vol. 1: The Ecosystem, Environments, Biotas, and ProcessesThe Pacific theater of operations in World War II brought millions of military personnel to the tropical Pacific, and their activities on the Pacific Islands afforded close contact and awareness of the physiography and natural history of these small dots of land scattered in the vast expanse of ocean. This enhanced awareness, coupled with a recognized need by the military establishment for increased knowledge of Pacific Island areas, led to government-sponsored investigations, complemented by efforts of many individual scientists whose interest had been stimulated by wartime visits to these islands. In the postwar period, two activities of the U. S. Government focused further interest on the coral atoll of the tropical Pacific and influenced the future of research at Enewetak Atoll (figs. 1 and The origin of the spelling Eniwetok is lost but would appear to be a phonetic rendering of what the people called their atoll. In 1973 it gave way to the current spelling, consistent with written Marshallese, and meaning island which points to the east.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.