Some of the fiercest fighting took place on the Tenaru river, where both sides suffered heavily as the Japanese attacked again and again with suicidal courage and tactical clumsiness. As a green Japanese flare burst overhead, Robert Leckie described the scene: ‘Here was cacophony; here was dissonance; here was wildness…booming, sounding, shrieking, wailing, hissing, crashing, shaking, gibbering noise. Here was hell…The plop of the outgoing mortar with the crunch of its fall, the clatter of the machine guns and the lighter, faster rasp of the Browning automatic rifles, the hammering of fifty-caliber machine-guns, the crash of 75-millimetre anti-tank guns firing point-blank canister at the enemy – each of these conveys a definite message to the understanding ear.’ After hours of this, dawn revealed heaped enemy bodies and a few survivors in flight. But as night succeeded night of such clashes and counterattacks, the strain told on the Americans.
‘Morale was very bad,’ said Marine Lt. Paul Moore, who won a Navy Cross. ‘But there was something about Marines – once we were ordered to attack we decided we damn well were going to do it.’ Swimming the Matanikau river with his platoon, the young officer glanced up and saw mortar bombs and grenades arching through the air above him, ‘as if it were raining, with bullets striking all around us’. Moore, a few months out of Yale, was shot as he threw a grenade to knock out a Japanese machinegun. The bullet hit him in the chest: ‘The air was going in and out of a hole in my lungs. I thought I was dead, going to die right then. I wasn’t breathing through my mouth, but through this hole. I felt like a balloon going in and out, going pshhhh. I was thinking to myself: now I’m going to die. And first of all it’s rather absurd for me, considering where I came from, my early expectations of a comfortable life and all the rest, for me to be dying on a jungle island in combat as a Marine. That’s not me…Shortly, a wonderful corpsman crawled up and gave me a shot of morphine, and then a couple of other people got a stretcher and started evacuating me.’
Guadalcanal set the pattern for the Pacific campaign, a three-year contest for a succession of harbours and airfields, refuges for ships and platforms for planes amid an otherwise featureless watery vastness. The Japanese were never able to reverse their early mistakes, rooted in an underestimate of American strength and will. Each island action was tiny in scale by the standards of the European theatre: at the peak of the Guadalcanal battle, no more than 65,000 Americans and Japanese were engaged with each other ashore, while 40,000 more men served on warships and transports at sea. But the intensity of the struggle, and the conditions in which the combatants were obliged to subsist amid swamps, rain, heat, disease, insects, crocodiles, snakes and short rations, caused the Pacific battlefield experience to become one of the worst of the war. Island fighting evolved into a bizarre and terrible routine: ‘Everything was so organized, and handled with such matter-of-fact dispatch,’ Corporal James Jones, one of the army men who eventually landed on Guadalcanal to reinforce the Marines, observed with fascinated revulsion.
Like a business. Like a regular business. And yet at the bottom of it was blood: blood, mutilation and death…The beach was literally alive with men, all moving somewhere, and seeming to undulate with a life of its own under their mass as beaches sometimes appear to do when invaded by armies of fiddler crabs. Lines, strings and streams of men crossed and recrossed it with hot-footed and apparently unregulated alacrity. They were in all stages of dress and undress…They wore all sorts of fantastic headgear, issue, civilian, and homemade, so that one might see a man working in the water totally naked with nothing adorning his person except his identity tags.
Between August and October, the Japanese on Guadalcanal outnumbered their enemies, but thereafter American reinforcements and Japanese casualties progressively shifted the balance against the latter. Repeated headlong assaults failed against a stubborn defence: they were unable to wrest control of Henderson Field from the Americans, who had superior artillery and air support. This was small consolation to the defenders, however, when the Japanese navy intervened. Seldom in the course of the war did Allied troops have to endure naval bombardments of the kind the Royal Navy and US Navy routinely administered to the Axis, but the Americans on Guadalcanal suffered severely from the guns of Japanese warships. Hour after hour during four nights in October, enemy heavy ships delivered some nine hundred rounds of 14″ fire, followed by 2,000 rounds from heavy cruisers. ‘[It] was the most tremendous thing I’ve been through in all my life,’ said a Marine afterwards. ‘There was one big bunker near our galley…a shell dropped right in the middle of it and practically everybody in the hole was killed. We tried to dig the men out but we saw it wasn’t any use.’ A correspondent wrote: ‘It is almost beyond belief that we are still here, still alive, still waiting and still ready.’ Many aircraft on Henderson Field were wrecked; the strip was rendered unserviceable for a week.
The Japanese were belatedly growing to understand the importance of the battle as a test of wills: ‘We must be aware,’ wrote an officer at Imperial General Headquarters, ‘of the possibility that the struggle for Guadalcanal…may develop into the decisive struggle between America and Japan.’ To the defenders, however, it sometimes seemed that they were a forgotten little army. ‘It was so lonely,’ wrote Robert Leckie. ‘… In an almost mawkish sense, we had gotten hold of the notion that we were orphans. No one cared, we thought. All of America’s millions doing the same things each day: going to movies, getting married, attending college commencements, sales meetings, café fires, newspaper drives against vivisection, political oratory, Broadway hits and Broadway flops, horrible revelations in high places and murders in tenements making tabloid headlines, vandalism in cemeteries and celebrities getting religion; all of the same, all, all, all, the changeless, daily America – all of this was going on without a single thought for us.’
Yet the myth of the invincibility of the Japanese army was shattered on this island, just sixty miles by thirty, where the US Marine Corps, which expanded from its pre-war strength of 28,000 to an eventual 485,000 men, first staked a claim to be considered the outstanding American ground force of the war. The Japanese, by contrast, laid bare their limitations, especially a shortage of competent commanders. Even during Japan’s victory season, while Yamashita conducted operations in Malaya with verve and skill, the campaigns in Burma and the Philippines suggested that his peers lacked initiative. When defending a position, their ethic of absolute conformity to orders had its uses; but in attack, commanders often acted unimaginatively. Man for man, the Japanese soldier was more aggressive and conditioned to hardship than his Allied counterpart: British Gen. Bill Slim characterised the enemy condescendingly as ‘the greatest fighting insect in the world’. Until 1945, Hirohito’s men displayed exceptional night-fighting skills. Collectively, however, the Japanese army had nothing like the combat power of the Wehrmacht, the Red Army – or the US Marine Corps.
It was a reflection of the fantastic Japanese capacity for self-delusion that, after their first stunning wave of conquests, their army commanders proposed establishing small garrisons to hold their island bases, while redeploying most troops to China – which they regarded as their nation’s main theatre of war. Short of trained manpower, they had scraped the barrel for forces to conduct the South-East Asia and Pacific island offensives; the long China campaign had weakened and demoralised the army even before Pearl Harbor took place. Thereafter, Japan’s generals were obliged to find soldiers from a shrinking pool, then dispatch them into battle with barely three months’ training. Japanese strategy had been rooted in a conviction that the United States would treat for peace after a brisk battlefield drubbing. When this hope was disappointed, the army spent the rest of the war struggling to defend Nippon’s overblown empire with inadequate means and inferior technology. The important reality of the Pacific war was that the Americans and Australians eventually prevailed on every island they assaulted. Only in Burma and China did the Japanese army maintain dominance until the last phase of the war.
Throughout the campaign on Guadalcanal, an equally relentless and bloody struggle was conducted at sea. The Savo battle was only the first of a series of dramatic naval encounters, almost all precipitated by Japanese attempts to reinforce and supply their troops ashore, and to impede the matching American build-up. Destroyers of the ‘Tokyo Express’ sought to run men and stores by night through ‘the