Guadalcanal, Battle of (1943)

Epic naval and land battle during World War II for control of the island of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands in the southwest Pacific Ocean. The airsea-land battle at Guadalcanal, a seven-month campaign of attrition, established the U.S. Navy as a first-rate fighting force and presaged the coming of age of the U.S. Marine Corps.

The alarming spread of Japanese detachments south and east of Rabaul, New Britain, in 1942 threatened the vital sea lanes supporting Australia and the bases from which the U.S. Southwest Pacific Command wished to launch its campaign to recover the Philippines. Pacific Fleet forces landed most of the First Marine Division in the Guadalcanal–Tulagi area on August 7, 1942, to take the nearest Japanese advance air and seaplane bases and block any further advance. The islands seized would later serve as jumping-off bases for the planned reduction of Japanese positions at Rabaul and the northern coast of New Guinea.

[Page 306]The Japanese response was fast and violent. A Japanese cruiser force defeated the Allied covering force two days later, on August 9, at the Battle of Savo Island, narrowly missing the Allied transports, which were still unloading the supplies and equipment of the division. The precipitous naval withdrawal stranded the marines with minimal supplies and no reinforcements for about two months while Japanese army forces concentrated for a final battle in September.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy fought the Japanese in pitched surface actions around Guadalcanal and carrier battles nearby, gradually gaining the upper hand. Both sides suffered serious losses in ships and aircraft, but Japan could not replace its losses before the war's end. On land, the Japanese first attacked the U.S. Marines on Guadalcanal with insufficient forces brought south from Rabaul in increasingly perilous naval convoy efforts.

The first attacks against the Marine Corps positions were easily repulsed. However, by late October, the Japanese actually had a slight margin of superiority in troops ashore, and, with Japanese naval bombardments causing damage to the vital airfield, the First Marine Division and a reinforcing army regiment made a decisive stand.

Japanese supplies sufficed only for the single effort, and they were soon reduced to starvation rations by the American assault. The Japanese Navy effected an undetected evacuation, and U.S. forces reached their empty end of the island on February 9, bringing the campaign to an end.

The doctrine, tactics, and procedures developed by the U.S. Navy during the Guadalcanal campaign left it practically unassailable thereafter in both surface and carrier warfare for the rest of the Pacific war. Although the Marine Corps had gained the measure of its enemy, the unopposed nature of the Guadalcanal landings meant that the marines still had several harsh lessons to learn in amphibious warfare.