US COUNTER-ATTACK

DRAMA IN THE PACIFIC - GUADALCANAL

The Battle of Midway had brought harsh realization to Japan that they had not wrought at Pearl Harbor the devastation of the US Pacific Fleet that they had intended, even believed, and that they now had little hope of bringing about the destruction of the fleet at sea. The easternmost line of the Japanese Empire seemed stationary at the point where Midway had stopped it - from the Aleutians in the North, past Wake Island to the Gilbert Islands.

In the West, Japan had wisely decided not to emulate Hitler's Napoleonic dreams of conquering Russia, and had advanced no further than her prewar positions along the coastal strip of eastern China and in Manchuria. In Burma, Japan had stopped short of pushing South into India. There was only one place left into which Japan might profitably and with some prospect of success attempt to expand - the southern part of New Guinea and the southern Solomon Islands. From airfields there, the Japanese would be able to bomb and disrupt the vital Allied shipping routes between the USA and Australia, where General MacArthur was building the Allied forces for a counter-attack. Despite the Allied policy of defeating Germany first, a large proportion of the Allied reinforcements that were available for all theatres were being diverted to Australia - for every American soldier sent to Europe in the first half of 1942, four were sent to the Pacific theatre, and Australian units in the Middle East were withdrawn to defend the homeland.

In July 1942, US Intelligence became aware that the Japanese were building an air base on the island of Guadalcanal, at almost the extreme southern tip of the Solomon Islands. The threat was clear and immediate. A plan that had already been agreed and briefed to senior commanders for an amphibious invasion in the Solomon Islands was put into effect. At dawn on August 7th, eight months to the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, a massive bombardment from the sea heralded the arrival of the first major seaborne invasion fleet of the Second World War off Guadalcanal and its nearby smaller islands, all of them heavily defended by the Japanese.

Three hours after the Navy's bombardment began, the gunfire ceased and the US Marines under Major-General Vandegrift landed with an initial deceptive lack of opposition. They captured the airfield that was still under construction, fought out a few short sharp engagements on the surrounding islands, and then paused, wondering when the trouble would start. They were not left wondering for long. Two days after the initial landings, a Japanese Naval force struck suddenly at the US Navy off Guadalcanal and sank four ships, one of them Australian, before disappearing as suddenly as it had come, without attacking the many vulnerable transport vessels that were sitting duck targets.

Over the next two months, with periodic harassment from the Japanese, the US Marines built up their presence on the island until more than 17,000 troops were on the exposed area around the airfield. Japanese naval vessels bombarded the US troops and their supply ships at increasingly short intervals, and detachments of Japanese troops were sent by sea from Rabaul. Two and a half months after the original August landings, in late October, the Japanese chanced their arm on a major carrier sea battle, sending a task force that included four of their aircraft carriers to the area of the Pacific North of the island. Two US Navy aircraft carrier forces went out to meet them, one led by the Hornet , the other by the Enterprise , the whole operation being under the command of Admiral Thomas Kinkaid.

The fierce naval gunnery and air battle that followed, known as the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, resulted in the Japanese losing two destroyers, and having two carriers and two battleships badly damaged. Japanese dive bombers inflicted severe damage on the USS Hornet , which was subsequently sunk by Japanese naval gunfire with considerable loss of life. But the battle did nothing to conclude the matter of Guadalcanal. Just over two weeks later, the Japanese Navy once again attempted to re-establish its dominance on Guadalcanal and repel the American invasion. A large Imperial Navy task force carrying troops to reinforce the Japanese forces still on Guadalcanal arrived during the night of November 13th, and the two battleships and many smaller warships of the Japanese fleet began furiously to shell the American fleet. In the darkness a considerable melee developed, and the Japanese, in what can only be described as the naval equivalent of close hand-to-hand fighting, lost a battleship. The US Navy lost two cruisers, one of them, the Juneau<, with 700 men aboard, including a family of five brothers named Sullivan. Two other US ships were damaged, but the US emerged from the first night of the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal bloody but unbowed.

The next night aircraft from the USS Enterprise did severe damage to another smaller Japanese squadron, but the major turning point came when US aircraft from the captured airfield on Guadalcanal, now known as Henderson Field, scored a major victory by sinking seven and damaging the remaining four of a force of eleven transport vessels bringing Japanese troops to the island. Now the Japanese gathered up their remaining naval resources in the area for a last try at getting a significant force of reinforcements ashore. A battleship and four cruisers approached Guadalcanal at high speed along the infamous channel between the islands known as "The Slot". As they came from one direction, Admiral Willis A. Lee and a US Navy flotilla approached from the other. Lee hurled his force precipitately but effectively into the battle, and claimed another battleship sunk and two more cruisers damaged. By the next day, the Japanese knew they had lost another round, and with it the naval battle of Guadalcanal, for they simply did not have sufficient naval forces remaining in the area to pursue the attack.

Now the Japanese land forces in the densely overgrown jungle of Guadalcanal were on their own without potential for reinforcement, and the young and, until now, almost entirely inexperienced US Marines began the task of flushing out skilled Japanese jungle-trained troops from what was virtually their natural environment. Tackling this task amid heat, discomfort, decomposing vegetation and the risks of poisonous reptiles and insects, often racked with dysentery,malaria and a host of minor ills, the Marines, whose average age was only nineteen years, also had to face the even greater risk of encountering suicidally motivated Japanese snipers. Despite these privations, they methodically fought their way across the island, winkling out pockets of Japanese soldiers from caves and dugouts as they went.

During the first week of February 1943, the Japanese decided that they had little chance of success on Guadalcanal, and sent in the Imperial Navy at night to evacuate the remaining Japanese troops, some 12,000 of them, from Cape Esperance on the North-Western corner of the island. Their evacuation was almost totally successful. At last, Guadalcanal was in American hands, the Japanese had been defeated on land for the first time, and American morale shot sky-high. Now the Marine Corps, having earned a brief respite, built and equipped a rest and retraining centre among the palm trees of Guadalcanal. In the months that followed it was to be sorely needed, for Tokyo, the ultimate goal of the US island hopping campaign across the Pacific, was still 3,000 miles away.

The US forces had lost 1,600 dead during the campaign for Guadalcanal, with just over 4,700 wounded. The Japanese losses were astronomical. No less than 24,000 Japanese soldiers died. The Japanese Navy lost 1 aircraft carrier, 2 battleships, 4 cruisers, 11 destroyers, 6 submarines (including their semi-experimental giant I-1 sub) and 16 transport vessels. The US Navy lost 2 carriers, 8 cruisers, 17 destroyers, 6 MTBs and 4 transports. It had been an expensive but, from the Allies' standpoint, necessary campaign.