Historians of Guadalcanal agree on one point: The place stank, literally.
One coined a pungent word to describe the odor: "faecaloid." Another called Guadalcanal "a miasma . . . a queasy mixture of superabundant vegetation, swift to rot, on a bed of primeval slime humming with malarial mosquitoes."From the rail of a troopship off Guadalcanal, novelist James Jones thought, "God help me, it was beautiful. None of it looked like the pestilential hellhole it was."
Even so, 50 years ago this week, the United States and Japan started a six-month struggle for that pestilential hellhole.
The carnage appalled both sides. The prize - 2,500 square miles of sweat and stink - hardly seemed worth the cost.
But without really meaning to, the United States and Japan piled on reinforcements until Guadalcanal became a matter of honor - of slugging and slogging until somebody called it quits. After six months and two days, the Japanese called it quits.The Allies had tailored their grand strategy to British wishes: Hold the line against Japan and pour everything into a ground war against Germany.
The U.S. Navy chafed at the thought, because the Navy itched to carry out a sea war against Japan. Anyway, the Navy's top officer, Adm. Ernest King, loathed the British.
After the Navy scored a desperate upset against the Japanese at the Battle of Midway in June 1942, King saw an opening. He persuaded the Joint Chiefs of Staff to reinforce success by carrying the war to the Japanese.
The long-range objective: the Japanese air and naval base at Rabaul, on New Britain in the Bismarcks. The Army's Gen. Douglas MacArthur talked grandly of leaping onto New Britain to pluck this plum, if only the Navy would lend him two carriers and the 1st Marine Division.
Fat chance. The Navy wasn't about to hand over its striking force to an Army general, especially one so well-versed in publicity as MacArthur. Besides, the Navy had reports from its force of colonial coastwatchers that the Japanese were laying down a seaplane base almost 700 miles southeast of Rabaul, on tiny Tulagi in the Solomons.
Before anybody could think about plucking Rabaul, Tulagi had to be taken. The Joint Chiefs gave the job to the Navy and Marines.
The Marines had yet to load their ships for the descent on Tulagi when the coastwatchers radioed that the Japanese were also carving out an airstrip on a larger, neighboring island. This place, too, would have to be taken.
Its name was Guadalcanal.
On Aug. 7, 1942, the Marines waded ashore against negligible resistance. By the next day, they had the unfinished airstrip in hand. They promptly named it Henderson Field after one of their own, Maj. Lofton Henderson, killed at Midway.
With that, the easy part ended.
Japanese planes from Rabaul made a lot of noise the first two days - enough to spook Adm. Frank Jack Fletcher, the commander of the carrier force. He yanked his three carriers out early, leaving the beachhead bereft of air cover.
Just after midnight on Aug. 9, a Japanese naval force crept into "The Slot," the narrow passage between the two chains of the Solomons. There, the Japanese humiliated the Navy by sinking four cruisers, one of them Australian.
(The historians named this disaster the Battle of Savo Island; the sailors named the place "Ironbottom Sound." In the end, the sea war around Guadalcanal would cost the staggering sum of 48 warships, 24 on each side.)
On Aug. 9, with the noon sun shining off the oil slicks on Ironbottom Sound, Adm. Richmond Kelly Turner told his cargo ships to weigh anchor and scoot. Their holds still held most of the stuff that the Marines needed, but Turner had little choice. With the U.S. cruisers sunk and the U.S. carriers skedaddled, Turner's merchantmen were so many sitting ducks.
Those two days were not the U.S. Navy's finest hour. The Navy was bugging out, leaving the Marines all alone.
Well, alone for a little while.
The Japanese quickly shipped in 1,000 soldiers to reoccupy the airstrip. On Aug. 20, Marine pilots beat them there, occupying Henderson with a handful of planes. The next night, the Japanese attacked and were slaughtered in large numbers.
And so a pattern fell into place:
The Japanese navy would own the night, making reinforcement runs down The Slot and shelling Henderson Field in what came to be known as The Tokyo Express.
The Japanese army would hurl itself against the Marines in a series of piecemeal but bloody nighttime attacks, the savagery of which would shock the Marines.
The Americans would hold on to Henderson Field, a jerry-built base that could house only a few squadrons of fighters and dive bombers. Even so, it would come to be the point around which the whole campaign revolved.
The naval and ground battles got the most attention. At sea, the Japanese and Americans clashed almost nightly, with six encounters big enough to earn the formal designation of "battle."
On shore, the Japanese grappled night after night with the Marines (and, later, one doughty regiment of North Dakota National Guardsmen) in God-awful close combat, with three major battles along the edge of Henderson Field alone.
The air skirmishes were more episodic and less easy to chart. But in the end, air power decided the issue. By the extension of air power, whoever owned Henderson Field would sooner or later own the sea around the Solomons. Whoever owned the sea would sooner or later own the ground it washed.
But in the case of Guadalcanal, nothing came sooner.The Navy finally cleaned house. In October, it sacked its top man on the scene, the gloomy Vice Adm. Robert Ghormley. The South Pacific came under new management: Vice Adm. William "Bull" Halsey, whose give-'em-hell spirit made everybody feel better.
In Washington, King had insisted that the Navy and Marines could take Guadalcanal on their own. But events were proving otherwise, and headlines hinted at another Bataan. Just before the fall elections, the White House nudged the Joint chiefs, and the Marines got help.
The 2nd Marine Division arrived, as did two Army units - the Americal Division and the 25th Infantry Division. The Army Air Force began stripping squadrons from reserves set aside for the invasion of North Africa. The Navy's Turner rolled the dice by running his cargo ships back to the beaches.
All this activity raised eyebrows in Tokyo, where the Japanese couldn't understand why the Americans were so hell-bent on capturing this hellhole. But if the Americans wanted Guadalcanal, the reasoning went, so do the Japanese.
The Marines and North Dakotans held their own at Henderson Field late in October. On two nights in November, in the naval Battle of Guadalcanal, things turned around at sea. American losses were heavy - the Japanese navy was simply better-trained in night fighting - but a convoy of Japanese reinforcements turned back to Rabaul.
After that, the Japanese soldiers left on Guadalcanal slowly ran out of food, ammunition and hope. The campaign had hardened into a battle of attrition, and nobody ever beat the United States in a battle of attrition.
On the last day of 1942, the Japanese high command decided that Guadalcanal simply wasn't worth it. Quietly, the Tokyo Express began running in reverse, slipping into The Slot by night to pull Japanese soldiers off the island.
On Feb. 9, 1943, American soldiers pushed through to the western tip of Guadalcanal. They found nothing but the debris a retreating army leaves behind. The Japanese had bugged out.
The United States had put 60,000 men on Guadalcanal. Of that total, 1,600 never went home. The Japanese committed 36,000 soldiers and airmen. They lost 26,000, killed by American firepower or by disease and starvation. Neither side ever totaled up its human losses at sea.
Defensively, the capture of Guadalcanal tied down the Allied lifeline to Australia. Offensively, all it gave the Americans was the bottom rung of a long, long ladder called the Solomon Islands.
Guadalcanal drove home the point that the Pacific war would be long and ugly. The Japanese refused to surrender, and the Marines obliged the Japanese by killing them. In the Pacific, brutality became the norm for both sides.
Rabaul stayed in Japanese hands until war's end. Not that it did the Japanese any good; Rabaul had been bypassed, isolated and left behind.
That was the Navy's new tack. Its Marines and fast carriers would strike through the Central Pacific, hopping from coral outpost to coral outpost. This checkerboard war would bypass many Japanese garrisons, leaving them to rot as the war moved past.
The Army would leapfrog its way along the north coast of New Guinea (every bit as pestilential as Guadalcanal but much less publicized as a hellhole). Then MacArthur and the Army would retake the Philippines. Not until the spring of 1945 would the Army and the Marines come together again, at Okinawa.
In effect, the United States would fight two Pacific wars, one run by the Army, the other by the Navy. Interservice grudges ran so deep that no other approach would work. It was wasteful and expensive, and only the United States could afford it.
Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.