Guadalcanal. A name that means very little nowadays except to historians, military buffs and those honored few who remain of the greatest generation. It was a name that resonated through the '40's, '50's and early '60's, but now "sounds distant on the ear," as James Michener observed, "like Shiloh and Valley Forge." The battle for Guadalcanal began seventy years ago August 7th, when the leathernecks of the 1st Marine Division waded ashore on that dark, sodden, pestilential island in the middle of the south Pacific to deny the Japanese an airbase that could threaten Australia. Doing so commenced a six month campaign of unrelenting misery and savageness that became a war within a war, fought by every branch of the US military - Marines, Navy, Army, Army Air Force, and Coast Guard, which had its only Medal of Honor winner in Douglas Munro, Signalman First Class, who sacrificed his life to rescue a battalion of marines pinned down on the beach by Japanese fire. Guadalcanal was the beginning of the end of the empire of Japan, although it would take another two-and-a-half years and two atomic bombs before that fact was clear to the Japanese.
It was a close run thing, to borrow a phrase from the Duke of Wellington. It was a campaign of attrition and supply - especially supply. American convoys tried to resupply our troops by day, Japanese convoys tried to resupply theirs by night. There were seven naval engagements in the seas around Guadalcanal, the first, the last and the one in the middle clear Japanese victories, while the others - save one - were American victories mostly in the sense that they kept the Japanese from resupplying their troops. Between the two sides, three aircraft carriers, two battleships, 12 cruisers, 26 destroyers and six submarines were sunk. It was not for nothing that American sailors nicknamed those waters Iron Bottom Sound.
The air battle lasted almost the entire six months. Relays of Japanese planes - Bettys and the dreaded Zeros - from the Japanese airstrip at Rabael, flew 650 miles down 'The Slot' daily to plaster the ex-Japanese airbase, now named Henderson Field. The make-shift Cactus Air Force of Marine, Navy and Army Air Force fighters rose to challenge them, losing scores of planes and pilots in combat, and even more planes and pilots trying to take off and land on that rutted, shell holed dirt field.
And then there was war on the island itself. Most of Guadalcanal was - and remains - uninhabited, an ancient, festering tropical jungle growing on top of sharp rocky ridges and plunging ravines, except for a narrow grassy plain on the northeast coast that seemed perfect to imperial planners as the site of an airfield. Japanese construction crews landed on June 8th. The Americans wouldn't have it. Two months later the Marines waded ashore. The 1300 Japanese escaped into the jungle, and despite the convoys and transports that boosted their numbers to almost 30,000, despite three major nighttime battles and scores of minor actions, they never took the air field back. The Marines, and later the Army, held - and they held in spite of being placed on a ten mile long defensive front around Henderson Field. It was, in a way, like the western front of World War One, except that instead of 100,000 or so men crammed into ten miles of damp, cold trenches, there were 20,000 Americans strung out in a weakly defended line, sweating in fox holes and little depressions in the ground, on half rations from Day One (the Marines landed with only four days of ammunition and 17 days of food), staring out into the jungle, never quite knowing where the enemy was or when he would attack.
But whereas the Americans were hungry, the Japanese were starving. This I didn't know when I was growing up. The John Wayne movies never mentioned that. I wouldn't have known it either, except for the book 'Guadalcanal', the definitive work on this battle, authored by Richard B. Frank, a young, ex-army officer and lawyer who published this book in 1990. My friend, Ken, gave me the book years ago. It sat in my basement bookshelf for several more years when, for reasons unknown, I started reading it - at night, in bed, all 800 pages of it held at arm's length over my head. It was fascinating - horrific and fascinating. Frank not only told the familiar story of America's experience on the island, but he also researched the other side, and as a consequence, half of the book explains what the Japanese did. And what they did mostly was get sick and starve.
The Japanese soldiers were forced to live in those pestilential jungles, often on the dark, damp reverse slopes of ridges to avoid American artillery fire and attacks by the aircraft of the Cactus Air Force ('Cactus' was the allied code name for Guadalcanal). The Japanese navy never quite managed to supply their army with enough ammunition or food - due to our habit of sinking their supply ships. Their soldiers nicknamed Guadalcanal 'starvation island'. Of the 30,000 soldiers eventually posted to the island, only 13,000 were capable of duty. Capable of duty was generously defined - if they were too weak to walk, but could man a gun, they were capable of duty. The Japanese navy eventually managed to extract about 10,000 of them, leaving 20,000 dead behind. Those rescued were a spent force. Franks quotes a report to Admiral Yamamoto that the evacuees were "so undernourished that their beards, nails and hair had all stopped growing, that their joints looked pitifully large. Their buttocks were so emaciated that their anuses were completely exposed, and on the destroyers that picked them up, they suffered from constant and uncontrollable diarrhea."
Another thing I didn't know was the grudging respect many of our military had for the Japanese. I knew all about Admiral Bull Halsey and his strategy of: "Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs!" What I didn't know were the other thoughts. From Admiral Willis Lee, who sailed the last battle-worthy American ships into night action against a Japanese fleet determined to bombard Henderson field into oblivion, and won a smashing victory, "... we have no edge on the Japs in experience, skill, training or performance of personnel," to John George, an army officer who served on Guadalcanal "... most of us who have fought in the Pacific are ready to admit here and now... that for sheer, bloody, hardened steel guts, the stocky and hard-muscled little Jap doughboy has it all over any of us."
A grinding, bloody, savage fight in and around a bloody, savage island in the middle of nowhere. Fought by boys, now wheel chair-bound old men with mottled skin and fuzzy memories. Honor them while you still have the chance.
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