Most people don’t know that the losses of US Navy personnel during the campaign around Guadalcanal in mid-late 1942 were nearly 2.5 times greater than the losses among the ground troops, as it was a time when the US Navy was fighting the Imperial Japanese Navy at a disadvantage, or on par at best. The fighting was brutal, and during this longest campaign of WWII (which was also the first full scale air, land, and sea battle in history) the US Navy had 4,737 KIA or missing, and land/air forces had 1995 KIA.
The fighting at sea was barbaric and brutal, and the book by James Hornfischer “Neptune’s Inferno” describes it in detail better than any other. Carrier battles occurred over the horizon, and gunfire duels with modern naval artillery took place at ranges that approached those of sailing ships of old.
And over it all was the mercilessness of each fighting force for the other, underneath it all, was the fearful and deliberately unspoken, all too common predation of the man-eating sharks on the unfortunate survivors of sunken ships.
It was also the campaign that made the Sullivan Brothers a household name when they were all lost in the sinking of the USS Juno by a Japanese submarine.
The sea around Savo Island came to be known as “Iron Bottom Bay” because of the many warships sunk there. This poem below was written by Captain Walter Mahler, A Chaplain aboard one of the first ships to be sunk there:
IRON BOTTOM BAY
(By Capt. Walter Mahler, Chaplain on USS Astoria sunk August 9, 1942 in The Battle of Savo Island with 219 men killed)
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I stood on a wide and desolate shore
And the night was dismal and cold.
I watched the weary rise,
And the moon was a riband of gold.
Far off I heard the trumpet sound,
Calling the quick and the dead,
The long and rumbling roll of drums,
And the moon was a riband of red.
Dead sailors rose from out of the deep,
Nor looked not left or right,
But shoreward marched upon the sea,
And the moon was a riband of white.
A hundred ghosts stood on the shore
At the turn of the midnight flood,
They beckoned me with spectral hands,
And the moon was a riband of blood.
Slowly I walked to the waters edge,
And never once looked back
Till the waters swirled about my feet,
And the moon was a riband of black.
I woke alone on a desolate shore
From a dream not sound or sweet,
For there in the sands in the moonlight
Were the marks of phantom feet.
An incredibly powerful poem.
A terrible recounting of history. It was the USS Juneau, not 'Juno' and it was sunk by a torpedo from a Jap destroyer, not a sub.