themselves ordered to restow their ships for an immediate assault landing; when the local dock labour force refused to work in prevailing heavy rain, Marines did the job themselves. Then, in the first days of August 1942, they sailed for Guadalcanal. In their innocence, many supposed that they were destined to wage war in a tropical paradise.
On the 7th, 19,000 Americans landed first on the outlying islands, then on Guadalcanal proper, in the face of slight opposition following a heavy naval bombardment. ‘In the dirty dawn…there were only a few fires flickering, like the city dumps, to light our path to history,’ wrote Marine Robert Leckie. Australian coastwatcher Captain Martin Clements watched exultantly from his jungle hideout as the Americans came ashore, writing in his diary, ‘Wizard!!! – Caloo, Callay, Oh! What a day!’ On the beach, men vastly relieved to find themselves alive split coconuts and gorged on the milk, heedless of implausible warnings that the Japanese might have poisoned them. Then they began to march inland, soon parched and sweating prodigiously. The Japanese, following another huge intelligence failure, had not anticipated the Americans’ arrival. In what would prove a critical action of the Pacific war, the landing force quickly seized the airstrip, christened Henderson Field in honour of a Marine pilot hero of Midway. Some men liberated caches of enemy supplies, including sake which allowed them to become gloriously drunk during the nights that followed. Thus ended the last easy part; what followed became one of the most desperate campaigns of the Far Eastern war, characterised by small but bloody battles ashore, repeated clashes of warships afloat.
Two days after the initial assault, at sea off Guadalcanal the US Navy endured a humiliation. Admiral Fletcher had signalled Nimitz that he believed local Japanese air power presented an unacceptable threat to his three aircraft carriers, and recommended their withdrawal. Without waiting for approval, he set course north-eastwards. Rear-Admiral Kelly Turner, commanding the transports inshore, made plain his belief that the carrier commander had deserted his post of duty, and Fletcher’s reputation suffered lasting harm. But modern historians, Richard Frank notable among them, believe that Fletcher made an entirely correct decision to regard the safety of his carriers as the foremost strategic priority.
In the early hours of the following morning, 9 August, Allied naval forces suffered a surprise which revealed both command incompetence and a fatal paucity of night-fighting skills. Japanese Vice-Admiral Gunichi Mikawa led a heavy cruiser squadron into an attack on the offshore anchorage, which was protected by one Australian and four American heavy cruisers, together with five destroyers. The enemy ships had been spotted the previous afternoon by an RAAF Hudson, but its sighting report was not picked up at Fall River on New Guinea because the radio station was shut down during an air raid. Even when the Hudson landed, there was an inexcusable delay of several hours before word was passed to the warships at sea.
The Americans were deployed off Savo island in anticipation of a Japanese strike, but in the darkness Mikawa’s cruiser column steamed undetected through the western destroyer radar picket line. Within three minutes of the Americans belatedly spotting Chokai, the leading Japanese ship, at 0143 the Australian cruiser Canberra was struck by at least twenty-four shells which detonated, in the words of a survivor, with ‘a terrific orange-greenish flash’. Every man in the boiler rooms was killed and all power lost; Canberra was unable to fire a shot during the subsequent hours before being abandoned. There is some contested evidence that the cruiser was also hit by a torpedo from the American destroyer Bagley, aiming at the Japanese.
The destroyer Paterson found itself in a perfect firing position, but amid the deafening concussion of its guns, the ship’s torpedo officer failed to hear his captain’s order to trigger the tubes. At 0147 two Japanese torpedoes hit Chicago. Only one of these exploded, in the bow, but it crippled the ship’s fire-control system. Astoria fired thirteen salvoes without effect because she too failed to see Mikawa’s ships, and her gunnery radar was defective. The cruiser was wrecked by Japanese gunfire at a range of three miles, and abandoned next day with heavy loss of life.
Vincennes was likewise devastated, and already on fire when her own armament began to shoot. Her commanding officer, Captain Frederick Riefkohl, had no notion the enemy was attacking, and supposed himself a victim of friendly fire. As Mikawa’s huge searchlights illuminated the American cruiser, Riefkohl broadcast angrily over his voice radio, demanding that they should be switched off. Thereafter, he concentrated on trying to save his ship, hit by three torpedoes and seventy-four shells which reduced it to a flaming hulk. Only belatedly did the American captain acknowledge that the Japanese were responsible, and order destroyers to attack them – without success. Quincy fired starshells which proved ineffective because they burst above low cloud, while a Japanese seaplane dropped illuminant flares beyond the American squadron, silhouetting its ships for Mikawa’s gunnery directors. The hapless Quincy’s captain was killed a few moments after ordering an attempt to beach the ship, which sank with the loss of 370 officers and men. Chokai suffered only one hit, in its staff chartroom.
At 0216, the Japanese ceased fire, having achieved a crushing victory inside half an hour. There was a heated debate on the bridge of the flagship about whether to press on and attack the now defenceless American transports beyond, off Guadalcanal. Mikawa decided that it was too late to regroup his squadron, make such an assault, then withdraw before daylight out of range of American carrier aircraft, which he wrongly supposed were at hand. Amid a sky dancing with lightning in a tropical rainstorm, the Japanese turned for home. Chaos among the stricken Allied shipping persisted to the end: at dawn, an American destroyer fired 106 5″ shells at a cruiser before discovering that its target was the crippled Canberra. When it was decided that the Australian warship must be sunk, US destroyers fired a further 370 rounds into the hulk before being obliged to use torpedoes to end its agony. The only consolation for the Allies was that an American submarine torpedoed and sank Kako, one of Mikawa’s heavy cruisers, during its withdrawal after the action.
In the Guadalcanal anchorage, Admiral Turner continued offloading supplies for the Marines until noon on the 9th, when to the deep dismay of the men ashore he removed his transports until more air cover became available. Reviewing the disaster off Savo, he wrote: ‘The navy was still obsessed with a strong feeling of technical and mental superiority over the enemy. In spite of ample evidence as to enemy capabilities, most of our officers and men despised the enemy and felt themselves sure victors in all encounters under any circumstances…The net result of all of this was a fatal lethargy of mind…We were not mentally ready for hard battle. I believe that this psychological factor as a cause of our defeat was even more important than the element of surprise.’ The US Navy learned its lessons: never again in the war did it suffer such a severe humiliation. And the critical reality, which soon dawned on the Japanese, was that yet again one of their admirals had allowed caution to deprive him of a chance to convert success into a decisive strategic achievement. The lost Allied cruisers could be replaced; the landing force was able to hold on at Henderson Field because its supporting amphibious shipping remained unscathed, and soon returned to Lunga Bay. Savo would be redeemed.
The Japanese were slow to grasp the importance of the American commitment to Guadalcanal. They drip-fed a trickle of reinforcements to the island, who were thrown into repeated frontal attacks, each one insufficiently powerful to overwhelm the precarious Marine perimeter. The Americans holding Henderson Field and the surrounding tropical rainforests found themselves locked in an epic ordeal. Visibility amidst an almost impenetrable tangle of vines and ferns, giant hardwoods and creepers, was seldom more than a few yards. Even when gunfire was temporarily stilled, leeches, wasps, giant ants and malarial mosquitoes inflicted their own miseries. The intense humidity made fungal and skin infections endemic. Marines encountering the jungle for the first time were alarmed by its constant noises, especially those of the night. ‘Whether these were birds squawking…or some strange reptiles or frogs, I don’t know,’ said one man, ‘but we were terrified by any noise because we’d been told that the Japanese signaled each other in the jungle by imitating bird calls.’
Amid incessant rainstorms, they bivouacked in mud, which became a curse of the campaign, endured short rations and dysentery. Nervous men not infrequently shot each other. There was a
