Battle of Guadalcanal
The Americans landed on Guadalcanal in August 1942 and spent six months taking an island most of them had never heard of. The Japanese were building an airfield there, at the end of the chain of conquests reaching towards Australia, and an airfield in the Solomons threatened the sea route between America and Australia entirely. The landing on 7 August was unopposed and everything afterwards was not. Two nights later a Japanese cruiser force sank four Allied heavy cruisers off Savo Island in a night action that cost some 1,000 sailors, and the transports withdrew with much of the marines' supplies still aboard. The marines held the airfield, named Henderson Field, with what they had landed and captured Japanese rice. The pattern for the next four months was that the Japanese controlled the sea at night and the Americans the air by day. Destroyers ran troops down the slot after dark — the Tokyo Express — and Japanese battleships shelled the airstrip, while American aircraft attacked anything afloat in daylight. The land battles at the Tenaru and Edson's Ridge were frontal attacks by troops landed piecemeal and destroyed piecemeal. Malaria, dengue and dysentery took more men out of the line than the fighting. Seven major naval actions were fought around the island, and the two sides lost twenty-four warships each. Japan evacuated some 10,000 survivors in February 1943 and never took the initiative in the Pacific again. The campaign was also where both navies learned to fight at night with radar, and where the Americans discovered that their torpedoes did not work. The waters between the island and Savo hold so many wrecks that they are called Ironbottom Sound.
- Year: 1942 CE
- Category: Military
