Posted on 08/07/2012 3:18:37 AM PDT by PJ-Comix
Today marks the 70th anniversary of the first offensive land operation taken by the United States in World War II. On August 7, 1942, the U.S. Marines landed at Guadalcanal. The general outlines of that battle which lasted which lasted 6 months until February 9, 1943 are known by many but here are 19 things about Guadalcanal that you might not know.
This is the first of my regular "20 Things You Don't Know" posts that I hope will encourage the History Channel to bring back that series. You can read my full mission statement about this in my introductory blog post here. And now on to 10 Things You Don't Know About Guadalcanal:
1. Most of the enemy force on Guadalcanal when the Marines landed on August 7, 1942 were actually ordinary laborers, not combat troops. Of the 2800 enemy personnel on the island, 2200 were laborers, of whom many were Korean, not Japanese.
2. The most hated uniform of WWII met its demise at Guadalcanal. It was the one-piece coverall jungle uniform issued to army troops. The main defect was that when the dysentery suffering troops, of which there were many, had to relieve themselves (or what they called the “Tulagi Trots”), the entire uniform had to be removed. One improvised solution was to use a razor blade to cut the thread in the crotch area and make sure not to wear skivvies. Ultimately the one-piece coverall was replaced by a more practical two-piece jungle uniform.
3. Malaria caused many more American casualties than Japanese bullets on Guadalcanal. One estimate is that every American who served on Guadalcanal between the landing on August 7, 1942 until the official end of the campaign in February 1943 had been infected to one degree or another by malaria.
4. As a result of the many Japanese ships sunk trying to resupply their troops, the waters off Guadalcanal are among the most popular scuba diving sites in the world. Many of these scuba tourists are Japanese.
5. On the morning of August 7, 1942, a Japanese radio operator on Tulagi off of Guadalcanal answered his own question when he keyed off this message to the Japanese base at Rabaul:
LARGE FORCE OF SHIPS, UNKNOWN NUMBER OR TYPES, ENTERING THE SOUND. WHAT CAN THEY BE?
The answer he sent shortly afterwards followed by silence, due to intense shelling:
ENEMY FORCES OVERWHELMING. WE WILL DEFEND OUR POSTS TO THE DEATH, PRAYING FOR ETERNAL VICTORY.
6. The best equipment and supplies that the Marines had in the early days following their landings on Guadalcanal were provided by the Japanese themselves. The landings so surprised the Japanese they did not have time to destroy their equipment at the airstrip which was soon named Henderson Field. Among the supplies left behind were construction equipment, lots of food, and even an ice making machine. The latter must have been very welcome in that tropical environment.
7. The U.S. Navy suffered its worst naval defeat of WWII outside of the Pearl Harbor attack (which can be considered peacetime) at Guadalcanal. On the night of August 8-9 a Japanese force of seven cruisers and one destroyers sank one Australian and three American cruisers near Savo Island off of Guadalcanal. Ironically the Japanese commander, Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa was later strongly criticized for not destroying the unprotected American invasion transports following his naval victory. Had he done so, it would have removed the tenuous American foothold on Guadalcanal.
8. A New Zealand longshoreman’s union almost caused the cancellation of the Guadalcanal campaign. Even though New Zealand was facing a dire threat from the expanding Japanese Empire, the unionized dockworkers of Wellington went on strike rather than load American naval vessels with supplies during poor weather for the Guadalcanal invasion. The union refused to budge despite the pleas from the navy so finally the dock workers were ordered off the docks and their places taken by Marines. Unfortunately the loading situation was a mess. The food supplies were packed in thin cardboard and the rains made a soggy mess of much of it. The dock was covered with soggy cornflakes and mushed up chocolate bars. Meanwhile the Marines covered much of Wellington’s walls with profane graffiti describing what they thought of the Wellington dock workers.
9. The marines on Guadalcanal became quite skilled in counterfeiting red “meatball” Japanese flags which they traded to sailors unloading supplies on the beach for candy bars and other products.
10. The number of warships lost by each side during the Guadalcanal campaign was precisely equal: 26 with almost exactly the same amount of tonnage. The big difference was that the Japanese could not replace such losses due to their decreasing industrial output while the Americans were able to vastly increase their supplies and equipment over the course of the rest of the war.
Thanks for posting. Great thread!
“war is hell” - Yeah. We’ve been watching Ken Burn’s PBS series on the war, with much footage we’d never seen before. I don’t see how ANYONE in that mess that Adolph Hitler and the arrogant Japanese leadership started survived WWII on any front. - My dad, a combat veteran in N. Africa, Sicily, Italy and Germany, said “It’s old men’s WAR, but it’s the young men’s FIGHT.” - He stood and delivered, with thousands of others, and rammed Hitler’s and Hirohito’s big plans down their own throats. - These current liberal history revisionists make me puke.
My mother worked almost every day of WWII at Hughes Tool milling out oil drilling bits. She worked seven days per week and most holidays; she worked double shifts.
The union called a strike which she ignored. She was pelted by rocks crossing the picket line. She yelled back at them, “Don’t you fools realize there’s a war on?”
God bless Mom. She never learned to drive a car, but she could run a milling machine for 16 hours straight!
Good for your Mom. My Mother also crossed a picket line, but it was a very small clerical union, nothing to do with war.
My dad was at Guadalcanal with Marine Aviation out of Henderson Field. He joined the corps fresh out high school in 1938
He never talked about it to me or my three brothers growing up but when I became his caregiver the last 5 years of his life, I found out a lot about his tour of duty there.
Actually I am lucky to have been born because when the Jap navy was shelling Henderson field a giant 14 inch shell landed next his foxhole and it was a dud!
He returned stateside in 1944 as a MSGT to train new recruits and married my mom who he met on a train years earlier when he was traveling to the west coast to ship out.
Here is a good link about the conditions at Henderson Field:
“Henderson Field was also very close to the thinly-held lines of the U.S. First Marine Division, so security was always a concern. There were no fuel trucks, aircraft hangars, or repair buildings. Damaged aircraft were cannibalized for spare parts, and with no bomb hoists, all aircraft munitions had to be hand-loaded onto the warplanes. Fuel, always critically low, had to be hand pumped out of 55 gallon drums.[11] Even after the arrival of fuel trucks, aviation gasoline still had to be hand-pumped into the trucks.[12”
Living conditions on Guadalcanal were some of the most difficult ever faced by Marine aviation. Pilots and mechanics lived in mud-floored tents in a flooded coconut plantation called “Mosquito Grove.” These living conditions led to most Marines contracting tropical diseases such as malaria, dysentery, dengue fever, or fungal infections.[15] At night, Japanese warships would periodically bombard the airfield, and by day, Japanese artillery shelling frequently struck. The worst night of bombardment was on October 13–14, 1942, when two Japanese battleships fired more than 700 rounds of heavy shells into Henderson Field—providing cover for the Japanese Navy’s landing of Marine and army reinforcements further west on Guadalcanal.
Also, nearly every day around noon, flights of 20 to 40 Mitsubishi G4M “Betty” bombers would fly in at 20,000 feet (6,100 m) in a perfect “V formation” to bomb the Henderson Field. These were always escorted by a flight of Japanese fighter planes, and this bombing helped make life on Guadalcanal even more miserable.[16]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cactus_Air_Force
Wonderful post. Made my day.
I heard a story about Walt Disney, a WWI ambulance driver.
He'd collect German helmets, and shoot them, the bullet holes "adding value" and cachet to his souvenirs over his competitors'.
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.
[they] rammed Hitler’s and Hirohito’s big plans down their own throatsYup. That's why the are the Greatest Generation.
Please add me to your ping list
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.
Thanks for the ping. Very interesting.
In the 1970’s I worked in the Pentagon with a man named Del Burchfield who fired a 37 mm anti-tank gun all one night on Guadalcanal to hold off a counterattack. He and a .50 cal machine gunner were put in for the Congressional Medal of Honor, but didn’t receive it.
Thanks PJ. Guadalcanal was my father’s first campaign as a navy coprsman with the Marines. I never really talked to him about it. Add me to the list please.
My favorite series of books. History with a little bit of fiction mixed in.
I was privileged to meet Mr. Alton Frost of Wortham Texas at the WWII museum in New Orleans last May. USMC fighter pilot with 95 combat missions starting at Guadalcanal.
Thank you for the ping and for the information. Somehow I rather suspected that about malaria. And if the malaria wasn’t debilitating, the meds to prevent malaria were (and still are, btw). To switch to today, sometimes I think that the prevention and cure are worse than the disease.
American ingenuity.
I am currently living in Sentani, Papua, Indonesia. I teach at a school situated on a ridge sloping off Gunung Cyclops into Lake Sentani. At the bottom of the ridge there is a cave dug into it and it runs for some distance the length of the ridge (IOW, it doesn't continue straight back but after an entrance area it adjoins another long cave). That cave system is just one of several dug and used by the Japanese here to store ammo. Occasionally, one can find ordnance even today.
Our airport uses the same strip originally built by the Japs, then bombed by us, and eventually rebuilt longer and better by us.
Another ridge here is where Gen. MacArthur (and the area is known as MacArthur's Park ~~ no cakes but plenty of rain) had his "palace". That palace consisted of about 4 rooms and really was quite small. However, from that site, MacArthur could see the whole of the area to the south. It is a spectacular view.
I understand MacArthur came ashore at what is now called "Pantai Merah", Red Beach. It is in a bay on the north shore of the island of New Guinea, but is part of the province of Papua (formerly Irian Jaya) of Indonesia. At the outside of the bay, on top of yet another bridge, there is today an overgrown grassy airstrip. I've been told there is a remnant of a WWII plane there as well as other paraphernalia. The story goes that planes low on fuel could land there if they thought they didn't have enough to make it to the larger, slightly more inland strip at Sentani.
Another story relates to the first time MacArthur came ashore here. He was sitting in a small boat, in a chair, reading a newspaper and smoking a corncob pipe. There was a sailor piloting the craft and one gunner. That is all. All of a sudden a Japanese plane came over and circled around the bay. It came low and gave that boat a second look. Apparently deciding that no one of importance would be so nonchalant, it flew off. Can you imagine what that gunner and boat pilot were thinking?
One more story. The bay at Tanah Merah is rather deep even close in to shore. In one place, a dock had been built. Again, I've been told that the US forces built it to service our ships. I can well believe it. Depth finders used for fish stop around 300' deep. We haven't measured how deep it is. There is plenty of water needed by even our largest ships to get to that dock (now I don't know about width of the bay, but it seems to me that at least two or three could be there at a time). The diving around that dock's pylons is great.
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