Eating captured Jap food that a lot of times was less than clean. A lot of captured rice had maggots, troops reminded the Catholics when eating it that “No meat on Fridays.”
Upon reading a book on Guadalcanal it was hard to reach the conclusion that the USA took the Island not because our Navy was better than theirs, but because their Navy was more screwed up than ours.
Recommend reading “The Corps” series by W.E.B. Griffin.
I agree to a point with your statement, the arrogance of the Japanese military did them in. Their lack of integration and cooperation was appalling in comparison, especially when Admiral Halsey came aboard and made it truly a multiforce war.
Guadalcanal is fascinating to me because of the scale of the Air, Land and Sea struggles, never seen before, and I don’t think, since, where all three elements in roughly comparable capabilities on both sides were played out on such a large scale.
But I don’t believe our Navy was screwed up (though there was plenty of that) I feel it was more inexperience than stupidity. (Battle of Savo Island excepted)
The Navy lost far more men in that campaign, and the savagery of the fighting, the awful way men died through unbelivable violence, exposure to the elements and the ravages of sharks are nearly beyond imagining.
There were two somewhat evenly matched navies, using new tactics and equipment, at night, in constrained bodies of relatively shallow water, there has been nothing like it before or since.
The US Navy deserves to be pilloried for underestimating the capabilities of their enemy (even in November 1942, there were still high ranking naval officers who did not grasp the fundamental and gaping difference in torpedo performance) and for not developing a good system for handling reconnisance and intelligence.
But they fought valiantly, often with equipment inferior to their enemy, and were far more likely than the Japanese to grasp and use new technology (Such as Admiral Lee with radar guided gunnery)
Many of the battles took place at night, and were violent, free swinging affairs. So many mistakes were made on both sides because neither side had a good way to either know the disposition of enemy forces via executing intelligently on actionable intelligence, nor to execute any kind of reasonable thought out plan once the fighting in the dark began. There were far too many friendly fire casualties, but I wager that was the same on both sides.
The ferocity of the fighting in the naval battles was breathtaking. There was one incident where a Japanese battleship and an American cruiser were at point blank range, guns at lowest elevation, and the cruiser was firing dozens of rounds with a flat trajectory into the battleship, whose thick armor offered far less protection at that close range. The ships were so close, it was like a battle between sailing ships with cannons, you would hear the discharge of a big gun, and see and hear the impact nearly immediately.
Our naval forces fought hard for that island, just as hard as the men on land did. One anecdote recalls some cut-off Marines being rescued by a launch from a destroyer offshore, and the Marines declined to spend the night on the destroyer, commenting on how they thought the sailors were crazy to be on those ships in those waters.
They felt safer on land.
Given how nasty is was on land, that was quite an observation.
My favorite series of books. History with a little bit of fiction mixed in.