Guadalcanal campaign

• 1. Introduction

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  The Guadalcanal campaign began on the 7th of August 1942 with 11,000 U.S. Marines wading ashore between Koli Point and Lunga Point on a remote jungle island most Americans had never heard of. By 16:00 the following day, they had seized a half-built Japanese airfield. It seemed almost easy. It was not. What followed was six months of fighting in sweltering jungle, on moonlit seas, and in skies thick with aircraft, lasting until the 9th of February 1943. Japanese commanders would eventually call it the decisive battle of the war. American commanders at one point were not sure they could hold the island at all. The questions that hover over the whole campaign are uncomfortable ones. Why did the Japanese keep throwing men into a battle they could not win? Why did the Marines on Guadalcanal spend weeks eating two meals a day from captured enemy rations? And how did a patch of flattened coral called Henderson Field become the hinge point of the entire Pacific war?

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• 2. Operation Shoestring

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  U.S. Admiral Ernest King conceived the invasion of the southern Solomon Islands primarily to protect the sea lanes between the United States and Australia. The Japanese had occupied Tulagi in May 1942 and by early July were building a large airfield at Lunga Point on Guadalcanal. From that base, long-range bombers could have severed maritime trade routes to the Australian east coast.

  The plan nearly died in the committee stage. Guadalcanal was not even mentioned in the original Allied directive. The operation's initial targets were Tulagi and the Santa Cruz Islands, and it was only when reconnaissance aircraft spotted Japanese airfield construction on Guadalcanal that the island was added to the list. Rival command boundaries between General Douglas MacArthur's South West Pacific Area and Admiral Chester Nimitz's Pacific Ocean Area had to be redrawn by shifting their boundary 60 to 360 miles westward, effective from the 1st of August 1942, before the operation could proceed.

  The men of the 1st Marine Division, led by Major General Alexander Vandegrift, had been told to expect 90 days of supplies. Planners cut that to 60 days to get troops into action faster. The Marines were armed with bolt-action M1903 Springfield rifles and carried only a meager 10-day ammunition supply. They called the coming battle "Operation Shoestring." The 75-ship Watchtower force assembled near Fiji on the 26th of July, conducted a single rehearsal landing, and departed for Guadalcanal on the 31st of July.

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• 3. The Airfield Pivots Everything

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  Henderson Field was named on the 12th of August 1942 after Lofton R. Henderson, a Marine aviator killed at the Battle of Midway. The name was given to an unfinished airstrip seized from the Japanese, carved out using captured enemy construction equipment. By the 18th of August it was ready for aircraft.

  The airfield's rudimentary surface, ironically, made it better suited for carrier planes than conventional land-based aircraft. Carrier aircraft were built to withstand rough landings on pitching flight decks; Henderson's unpaved coral surface posed less of a problem for them than for standard ground-based designs. When the escort carrier delivered a squadron of 19 Grumman F4F Wildcats and 12 Douglas SBD Dauntlesses on the 20th of August, the pilots flew into battle from what was essentially a cleared stretch of jungle.

  The pilots and aircraft based at Henderson became known as the Cactus Air Force, after the Allied codename for Guadalcanal. The airfield's significance was understood almost immediately by both sides. Japanese forces attempted to suppress it from the air nearly every day. Japanese naval commanders recognized within weeks of the landings that no surface vessel could safely operate within 200 miles of Henderson in daylight without risking destruction from the air. The Cactus Air Force transformed the strategic situation around the island; it was the one asset neither side could afford to cede.

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• 4. Tokyo Express and the Two-Shift War

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  By late August 1942, the pattern that would define the campaign for months was already set. Allied aircraft ruled the skies during daylight hours. Japanese surface vessels controlled the seas after dark. Each side exploited its window and feared the other's.

  Japanese destroyers began making nightly supply runs down New Georgia Sound, a passage Allied forces called "The Slot." These destroyer missions moved fast enough to complete a round trip in a single night. Allied troops named them the "Tokyo Express"; Japanese planners called them "rat transportation." The logistics were brutal. Destroyers could carry troops, but they could not carry heavy artillery, vehicles, or adequate food and ammunition in useful quantities. The destroyers that ran these supply missions were also desperately needed elsewhere in the Pacific, and the command structure at Rabaul was complicated enough that Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka was simultaneously receiving contradictory orders from three different Japanese naval headquarters.

  The 8th of August saw one of the earliest and most catastrophic demonstrations of Japanese night-fighting superiority. At the Battle of Savo Island, Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa's seven-cruiser force had been sighted at least five times by Allied reconnaissance in the preceding days. Allied commanders dismissed the threat, expecting submarines and aircraft rather than surface ships. That night, Mikawa sank one Australian and three American cruisers, damaging two more Allied ships, at the cost of only moderate damage to one of his own cruisers. The path to the undefended Allied transport ships was wide open. Mikawa turned back anyway, fearing daylight air attack if he stayed. That decision preserved the Allied supply ships and, with them, the Marines' tenuous foothold on Guadalcanal.

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• 5. Edson's Ridge

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  On the 7th of September 1942, Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi issued his attack plan: "rout and annihilate the enemy in the vicinity of the Guadalcanal Island airfield." He had nearly 3,000 troops at his disposal, organized into three attack columns, and he intended to strike at night from the jungle south of Henderson Field.

  Colonel Merritt Edson got there first. Native scouts directed by Martin Clemens, a British district officer and coastwatcher working with the Marines, had located Kawaguchi's main supply depot at the village of Tasimboko. Edson's men raided it on the 8th of September, destroyed the stockpiles of food, ammunition, and medical supplies, and carried back documents revealing that at least 3,000 Japanese troops were preparing a large-scale assault. Edson and Colonel Gerald C. Thomas, Vandegrift's operations officer, concluded that the attack would come down Lunga Ridge, a narrow 1,000-yard coral ridge running just south of Henderson Field. It was almost undefended.

  On the 11th of September, Edson deployed his 840 Raiders along the ridge and began digging in. The first Japanese probe came on the night of the 12th. The main attack came the following night, the 13th of September, when Kawaguchi's 3,000 troops hit Edson's 840 men from multiple directions. Wave after wave of frontal attacks pushed the Marines back to Hill 123, the center of the ridge, then to within a quarter mile of the airfield itself. Japanese infiltrators reached the edge of Henderson Field and were killed trying to climb onto parked aircraft. Vandegrift's own command post came under direct attack at dawn. When Kawaguchi's offensive finally exhausted itself, 850 Japanese were dead and the Marines had lost 104. On the 15th of September, Japan's senior army and navy staffs met in emergency session and concluded, in their own words, that "Guadalcanal might develop into the decisive battle of the war."

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• 6. The Night

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  At 01:33 on the 14th of October 1942, two Japanese battleships under the command of Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita opened fire on Henderson Field from a distance of 16,000 meters. Over the next one hour and 23 minutes, the two ships fired 973 fourteen-inch shells into an airfield roughly 2,200 square meters in area. Many of the rounds were fragmentation shells, lethal against people and parked aircraft.

  The bombardment destroyed 48 of the Cactus Air Force's 90 aircraft, killed 41 men including six pilots, burned almost all available aviation fuel, and wrecked both runways. Only about a dozen aircraft remained flyable by dawn. Ground crews lined wrecked planes wingtip to wingtip along the runway, hoping the wreckage would distract Japanese reconnaissance from the few survivors. Troops at Henderson called it simply "The Night."

  What followed revealed how much the Allies had invested in keeping the airfield alive. Henderson personnel restored one runway to working order within hours. Seventeen SBD-3 Dauntless dive bombers and 20 F4F Wildcats were flown in from Espiritu Santo. Transport aircraft shuttled aviation gasoline across the water. Using fuel drained from wrecked planes and from a cache hidden in the jungle, the Cactus Air Force was back in the air the next day, attacking the Japanese reinforcement convoy that arrived at Tassafaronga Point at midnight on the 14th and unloaded 4,500 troops and two batteries of heavy artillery. Three Japanese cargo ships were destroyed before the convoy could complete unloading. The airfield had been nearly erased, and it still functioned.

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• 7. Aircrew and Attrition

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  Australian coastwatchers on Bougainville and New Georgia gave the Cactus Air Force one of its most valuable advantages: advance warning. When Japanese aircraft departed Rabaul on their bombing runs, coastwatchers radioed ahead, giving Allied fighters time to climb to altitude before the attackers arrived. Without that warning, the F4F Wildcats at Henderson might never have been airborne in time to intercept.

  The geography punished Japanese aviators regardless. The round trip from Rabaul to Guadalcanal was roughly 1,120 miles and took about eight hours. Rabaul-based pilots flew nearly 600 miles before their first contact with Allied aircraft. They arrived over Guadalcanal at the end of a long flight, low on fuel, and faced pilots defending their own airfield. Japanese aircrew shot down over the island were almost never recovered. American aircrews shot down over or near Guadalcanal were rescued more than half the time.

  The Japanese navy compounded this by not rotating veteran pilots out of combat. As experienced aviators were killed or wore out, they were replaced by pilots with far less time in the air. By contrast, the Allies steadily reinforced Henderson; 24 additional Wildcats reached the field on the 11th and the 12th of September alone, drawn from aircraft displaced by the torpedoing of the carrier Saratoga by submarine I-26. The cumulative toll of the air war was not visible battle-by-battle, but the direction was unmistakable. At the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands on the 26th of October, the Japanese lost close to 150 veteran carrier pilots, while Allied aircrew casualties were comparatively light. Japanese carriers never again played a significant role in the Guadalcanal campaign.

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• 8. End of the Campaign

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  By December 1942, the Japanese high command had run the arithmetic and found it insoluble. Between the 1st and the 17th of October they had landed 15,000 additional troops, giving Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake 20,000 men for his October offensive. His 2nd Division's assault on the Lunga perimeter, led by Generals Masao Maruyama and Yumio Nasu, lost more than 1,500 troops in two nights of frontal attacks against positions held by Lieutenant Colonel Chesty Puller's Marines and Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hall's Army battalion. Total Japanese losses in the October offensive came to 2,200-3,000 killed. American losses were around 80.

  Hyakutake had also been forced to order his troops in New Guinea, who were within 30 miles of their objective at Port Moresby, to halt their advance until what he called "the Guadalcanal matter" was resolved. The campaign was draining resources from every other Japanese operation in the Pacific. Tokyo Express destroyer runs tied up warships needed to escort convoys elsewhere. Tropical diseases and malnutrition were destroying the 2nd Division faster than combat. The Secretary of the U.S. Navy, Frank Knox, had told reporters in Washington that he could not guarantee the island would be held. But by December, it was the Japanese who could not hold it.

  In December 1942, Japan's leadership decided to abandon Guadalcanal. The evacuation, conducted in secret, extracted the last Japanese forces by the 9th of February 1943. The campaign that had begun with an Allied force of 16,000 men landing on an unfinished airstrip had ended with Japan surrendering the strategic initiative in the Pacific. The Solomon Islands campaign, New Guinea campaign, and the eventual reconquest of the Philippines all followed in its wake.

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