The Skeeter Beaters Foundation
The book, Skeeter Beaters-Memories of the South Pacific, 1941-1945 by Dennis Cline, provides a unique look at a never before documented microcosm of US history and America’s ability to impact world health. The book chronicles the wartime activities of a forgotten group of US Navy volunteers and their link to modern malaria control. It was a job that “was hot, dirty work” and one that the official military historians had passed over and incorrectly documented.
This story would have been lost forever if one ordinary person hadn’t stumbled across certain facts and discrepancies while reading a number of books on the war in the Pacific. This led him to look for the answers and after extensive research using the Internet, the discovery of two long lost friends who lost touch after the war. What began with e-mails and lengthy phone conversations turned to involve more veterans, more questions, and interviews with hundreds of pages of notes became a mission with purpose.
So a 51 year old father of two working as a manufacturer’s representative in Colorado realized that if he didn’t write and tell their story it would die with them. He spent thousands of hours researching and writing until he felt he had a book ready for publication and hundreds more seeking a publisher. He was turned down every time until one small publisher in Minnesota said yes and validated his years of effort and sacrifice.
The book is based on Dennis’ conversations with two survivors of the original Skeeter Beaters unit and a handful of other veterans of South Pacific campaigns conducted nearly 60 years after the events themselves. The result assures their place in American history and is a vivid set of highly personal experiences and makes a great story for both students and adults.
The reader has a ringside seat into their world of life and death. The fear and horror of war, exotic tropical islands, fearsome island natives, the hated Japanese enemy, and a world of disease, a dangerous scarcity of food, nightly bombings and daily shelling survived through the tedium of the job.
