Posted on 08/07/2002 5:52:40 AM PDT by Non-Sequitur
Of all the memorable dates of World War II, this one somehow got lost in the jungle.
Remember Aug. 7, 1942? Quiz your friends. Note the silence.
To veterans who landed 60 years ago today on the Pacific island of Guadalcanal, it is a silence almost as eerie and inexplicable as the quiet of the early hours of their raid -- the first U.S. offensive of the war.
"So many people today don't even know what Guadalcanal is," said Rudy Bock, 82, of Overland Park, who stormed in with fellow Marines and caught the Japanese with their guns down. "You hear a lot more about D-Day, Pearl Harbor Day and the war in Europe than this."
Yet this was the birthplace, some experts argue, of a brave new military that would one day grow into a superpower, which hardly seemed fathomable back then.
American ground troops that summer were unproven, toting World War I-era rifles through jungles thick with mosquitoes. But in the course of six hot, hungry months they notched their first land victories over a war machine that once seemed unstoppable.
Their gains "have changed the whole outlook" for the Allies' chances, The Kansas City Star said, at a time when many at home were grumbling about the war's pace.
"The campaign carried special meaning for this entire generation of Americans," said Richard B. Frank, a Kansas native and author of books about Guadalcanal. "It was the first testing of that generation: Would they have the toughness to prevail?"
A fair question just eight months after Pearl Harbor.
"We were not in tremendous shape," said Bill Carroll, a retired Marine organizing a reunion of Guadalcanal veterans next week in Rhode Island. "We had to learn what combat was all about."
The enemy was using Guadalcanal as a site for a new airfield, which threatened to expand the reach of Japan's empire toward New Zealand and Australia.
So confident -- or surprised -- were Japanese soldiers that they initially kept quiet as the 1st Marine Division advanced on a runway beneath Allied air and naval bombardment. The Japanese chose to hunker down in the hills, perhaps on the assumption that retaking the island would be a snap.
Grueling weeks followed: night warfare, hand-to-hand combat, heavy artillery fire from Japanese ships, foxholes getting deeper by the day, malaria ravaging the ranks.
A battered U.S. Navy pulled out of the region for a time, leaving 10,000 ground troops to fend for themselves against experienced warriors willing to battle to the last man.
Policy expert John Pike of Globalsecurity.org called the back-and-forth battles for Guadalcanal and the surrounding Solomon Islands "definitely a forgotten corner of the war."
Nonetheless, the campaign signaled a new era in fighting.
"It marked the beginning of the combined-armed operation," employing all branches of the military and upper-hand strategic intelligence, Pike said. "Most of the things characteristic of the way we fight wars today basically didn't exist before Guadalcanal."
The battle
Area veterans of the campaign remember coming of age against terrifying odds.
"To be honest we were all scared because it was all so new to us," said Robert F. Gray of Kansas City, who at 18 landed with the 2nd Marine Division. "We couldn't understand. We all wanted to stay alive and they all wanted to die for (Emperor) Hirohito."
And die they did, surging out of the jungles by the thousands, yelling banzai and being picked off by waiting U.S. troops. More than 600 Japanese lay dead one September dawn after the Battle of Bloody Ridge.
Another bloodbath spurred a Japanese colonel to burn his regimental flag and commit hara-kiri.
"We probably were more confident than we had any right to be," said Marine veteran Sam Dallas of Independence, who watched air fights over Guadalcanal from nearby Tulagi Island.
The Japanese were seasoned conquerors, after all.
The invaders had just been stopped at Midway, where U.S. bombers based on aircraft carriers took out Japan's carriers in a virtual blink of an eye. Still, America only recently had overcome its isolationist ways, and the world wondered about its staying power on a global battlefield.
"Totalitarian regimes were on the march and almost victorious without exception," Frank said.
And in Pike's view, Japan -- blazing a ferocious course to be master of the Pacific --"was the toughest army that ever fought a war" to that point.
"They were the toughest," replied veteran Carroll, "until they ran into the United States Marine Corps."
The results were in doubt for months.
Although U.S. troops held control of the airfield, named Henderson Field, fresh Imperial Japanese Army soldiers poured from transports into the jungles from the island's back door.
Gray remembers hearing the taunts of enemy soldiers gathered in the jungle, waiting to attack.
"They'd holler profanities about Eleanor Roosevelt," he says.
Rudy Bock's job was to help install phone lines -- never mind his own battles with malaria and dysentery.
"You don't ask for favors in a place like that," he said.
With the landing of U.S. Army reinforcements and decisive victories at sea by year's end, the Japanese high command ordered an evacuation. All of the Solomon Islands belonged to the Allies by February 1943.
The aftermath
The entire campaign cost some 5,000 American lives, including all five Sullivan brothers of Waterloo, Iowa. They died aboard the cruiser Juneau.
Japan lost an estimated 25,000 men.
Today, "there are fewer and fewer of us," said Bock, who received a Bronze Star for his work in the Pacific theater. "If I can make it across the street these days, I feel I'm doing good."
America's 5.5 million World War II veterans are dying at a rate of 1,000-plus a day. The Leavenworth National Cemetery averages a couple dozen interments a week, most of those veterans and their spouses.
But the spirit that won Guadalcanal has not burned out in Carroll, president of the Guadalcanal Campaign Veterans. The group boasts a national mailing list of 2,800.
"We're losing some people, but it's a strong organization," said Carroll, 81 and still golfing.
"I don't know if you would call them tough at the time. They were just regular American kids who became Marines" 60 years ago at Guadalcanal.
Thank you. My hat's off to you young man.
Not to nit pick, but Midway was the turining point of WWII in the Pacific theater...
Bad history. The author seems to have ignored the campaigns in New Georgia, Vella Lavella, Bougainville, and others in the Solomons, after Feb '43.
CD
"They'd holler profanities about Eleanor Roosevelt," he says.
Taunt? Maybe the Japanese were trying to make friends.
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