[1] The base was located on the island of Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides, now Vanuatu, in the South Pacific.

[2] To keep ships tactically available there was a demand for bases that could repair and resupply the fleet at advance locations, rather than return them to the United States.

[3] Prior to December 7th, Pearl Harbor was the U.S. fleet's largest advance base in the Pacific.

Had it not existed, ships would have had to return to Pearl Harbor, Brisbane, or Sydney for major repairs and resupply.

[4][5][6][7] At the start of the war Espiritu Santo was one of a string of roughly 80 islands under the rule of a joint British and French New Hebrides colony.

U.S. troops first set up a base in May 1942 on the nearby island of Efate, as a defence against the expanding Imperial Japan.

The build up of Espiritu Santo was both a defense strategy and then a staging point for the offense against the Japanese.

By the end of the war 9 million tonnes of equipment had been shipped there and over 500,000 servicemen and women had spent some time at New Hebrides and Espiritu Santo.

Two died from the mine explosions: a fireman in the engine room and a captain of the 103rd Field Artillery Regiment who had returned to the ship when he heard men were still trapped in the infirmary.

[32][33] At the end of the war a vast amount of vehicles, supplies and equipment at the bases was deemed not needed and too costly to ship to the U.S.[34] Also it would have hurt home front industries in bringing all the gear home as there was already a vast amount of military surplus.

[35] In 1948 author, James Michener wrote a sequence of fictional short stories called Tales of the South Pacific.

There is a plan to build a South Pacific World War II Museum on Espiritu Santo in the town of Luganville.