Guadalcanal

• 1. Introduction

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  Guadalcanal sits in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, a dense, mountainous island that locals call Isatabu. Its highest peak, Mount Popomanaseu, rises to 7,661 feet above sea level. Twelve rivers drain its interior, the longest of them, the Mbokokimbo, running nearly 99 kilometers to the sea. People have lived here since at least 4500-2500 BC, and yet the name attached to the island today comes not from those ancient inhabitants, but from a small town in southern Spain. How a Spanish sailor's hometown ended up on a Pacific island is only one of the questions this documentary will answer. The other, far heavier question is why the waters around Guadalcanal are still called Ironbottom Sound.

• 2. A Spanish Name, A Pacific Shore

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  In 1568, a Spanish expedition out of Peru, led by Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira, became the first Europeans to sight the island. Mendaña's subordinate, Pedro de Ortega Valencia, gave the island his own name: Guadalcanal, the Andalusian town where he was born. The name did not settle cleanly. For years after the discovery, maps and logs rendered it variously as Guadarcana, Guarcana, Guadalcana, and Guadalcanar, each spelling reflecting a different ear's interpretation of Andalusian pronunciation. It was not until 1932 that British authorities formally confirmed the spelling in line with the original Spanish town.

  Centuries before Ortega Valencia arrived, the Austronesian Lapita peoples had already made the island home, migrating there between 1200 and 800 BC. Their settlement built on even older habitation, evidenced by archaeological finds at two sites: Poha Cave and Vatuluma Posovi, which together push the record of human presence back to at least 4500-2500 BC.

  European contact from the 18th and 19th centuries brought whalers, missionaries, and settlers, but also forced labour. Beginning in the 1860s, about 60,000 natives from across the Solomon Islands were indentured by British authorities and shipped to plantations in Australia or Fiji. The system ran into the 1890s. By the 1880s, Germany and Britain were competing directly for the Solomons. Germany established a protectorate over the northern part of the island chain in 1884. Britain proclaimed its own protectorate over the remainder, including Guadalcanal, in 1893. Germany eventually handed most of its holdings to Britain in 1899. By the early 20th century, Australian-run copra plantations dominated the island's agricultural economy, and Guadalcanal entered the Second World War little changed from that colonial arrangement.

• 3. The Battle That Changed the Pacific

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  On the 7th of August 1942, the 1st Marine Division landed on Guadalcanal. They seized a Japanese airfield at Lunga Point on the north coast with relatively little resistance. The airfield had been spotted by American reconnaissance, and its completion would have given Japan a base threatening the supply lines between the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. The Americans were not fully prepared for what came next.

  U.S. Navy Seabees finished the airfield immediately after the landing. It was named Henderson Field, after Major Lofton Henderson, a Marine aviator killed at the Battle of Midway. The aircraft based there, a mix of U.S. Marine, Army, Navy, and other Allied planes, were collectively nicknamed the Cactus Air Force. They held the daylight hours. At night, Japanese destroyers ran reinforcements and supplies down the island chain in a shuttle route that American troops called the Tokyo Express. Japanese naval forces also shelled Henderson Field repeatedly under cover of darkness.

  The naval Battle of Cape Esperance on the 11th of October 1942 saw the U.S. Navy intercept a Japanese formation moving down the route known as the Slot. The Americans won the engagement, though not without losses. The multi-day Naval Battle of Guadalcanal in early November was the hinge of the entire campaign. Allied surface ships fought a large Japanese force at night and forced a withdrawal. In the process, the IJN battleship Kirishima was sunk. This was one of only two moments in the entire Pacific war when battleships fired on each other; the only other occasion came in 1944 at the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

  Some Japanese analysts have placed these naval battles alongside the Battle of Midway as the decisive turn against Japan, noting that they exposed the improving ability of Allied warships to contest Japan's long-held advantage in night fighting.

  On the 27th of September 1942, Signalman 1st Class Douglas Albert Munro of the U.S. Coast Guard provided covering fire while helping evacuate 500 besieged Marines from a beach at Point Cruz. Munro was killed during the evacuation. He remains, to date, the only U.S. Coast Guardsman to receive the Medal of Honor, awarded posthumously. Sergeant John Basilone also received the Medal of Honor during the Battle for Henderson Field; he was later killed at the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945.

  By February 1943, the remaining Japanese troops on Guadalcanal were critically short of supplies and no longer capable of sustained combat. They were evacuated from Cape Esperance on the northwest coast. American authorities declared the island secure on the 9th of February 1943. The campaign had lasted six months and stopped Japan's southward advance for good.

• 4. Ironbottom Sound

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  The waters around the Solomon Islands chain absorbed so many ships from both sides that sailors gave them a single name: Ironbottom Sound. The naval engagements clustered in this stretch of sea were among the most intense in the Pacific theater. Allied warships and Japanese destroyers running the Tokyo Express met repeatedly in these waters, sometimes in daylight, far more often after dark.

  Two U.S. Navy ships were later named in recognition of the campaign. USS Guadalcanal, designated CVE-60, was a World War II escort carrier. A second vessel, USS Guadalcanal, designated LPH-7, was an amphibious assault ship commissioned in later decades.

  After the war ended, American and Japanese groups returned to the island repeatedly, searching for the remains of missing soldiers. The bodies of roughly 7,000 Japanese troops have never been recovered. Bones of Japanese soldiers were still being unearthed on Guadalcanal as recently as the 2010s.

• 5. Honiara and the Postwar Island

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  Honiara, sitting on Guadalcanal's north coast, became the new capital of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate immediately after World War II, replacing the previous capital at Tulagi in the Florida Islands. In 1952, the high commissioner for the Western Pacific relocated from Fiji to Honiara, and that role was merged with the governorship of the Solomon Islands.

  Henderson Field, the airstrip that both sides fought over for six months, is now the international airport for the Solomon Islands, located about five miles east of Honiara. The secondary wartime airfield, once called Fighter Two, found a quieter postwar career: it became the local golf course.

  In early 1999, ethnic tension between the indigenous Guale people and Malaitan migrants erupted into violence. The Guadalcanal Revolutionary Army, later renamed the Isatabu Freedom Movement, forced Malaitans out of rural areas. About 20,000 Malaitans fled to Honiara. Guale residents of the capital fled in the opposite direction, and the Malaita Eagle Force eventually took control of the city. The Royal Australian Navy and Royal New Zealand Navy deployed vessels to protect the expatriate community. In 2003, the Pacific Forum brokered the RAMSI intervention, formally known as Operation Helpem Fren, drawing in Australia, New Zealand, and other Pacific island nations to restore order.

  About 25 kilometers west of Honiara, the Vilu War Museum preserves an outdoor collection of military equipment and aircraft wreckage from the campaign. Memorials to American, Australian, Fijian, New Zealand, and Japanese soldiers who died on the island stand alongside the exhibits.

• 6. A Living Wilderness

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  Dense tropical rainforest covers most of Guadalcanal's interior, and the mountains running through that interior remain, in large part, uninhabited. The Guadalcanal Watersheds, identified by BirdLife International as an important bird area, cover 376,146 hectares, roughly 70 percent of the island. The site stretches along the southern coast inland to the central highlands and holds riverine and lowland tropical rainforest, as well as what BirdLife describes as the greatest contiguous area of cloud forest in the Solomon Islands.

  The birds for which the site was designated include chestnut-bellied imperial pigeons, Woodford's rails, Guadalcanal moustached kingfishers, Meek's lorikeets, Guadalcanal honeyeaters, Guadalcanal thicketbirds, and Guadalcanal thrushes. Logging and invasive species are the primary threats identified for the area.

  The island's only native marsupial is the phalanger, also called the grey cuscus, known scientifically as Phalanger orientalis. Other land mammals are limited to bats and rodents. Estuarine crocodiles once ranged along the north coast near the wartime airstrip. A place called Alligator Creek records that presence in its name. Today, crocodiles are found only on the southern Weather Coast. Venomous snakes exist on the island but are not considered a serious hazard; a species of centipede, however, has a bite that is.