THE AMERICAN STALINGRAD

The Guadalcanal campaign, planning for which began 81 years ago this month - while a very different kind of battle than that fought on the Russian Steppes at the same time - can be analogized as the American Stalingrad. Like that battle, it was a very near thing, right to the end, against an enemy that was at times stronger than the American force, held off from victory in desperate battles for which there were no reserves. It was very much a battle of attrition with resources, men, and supply lines strained to their breaking points. Instead of a brutal winter, the environmental factors of hellish heat and malaria were in play.

Guadalcanal was fought before the arrival of the “new navy” in 1943. The fleet that faced the enemy was that of the pre-war U.S. Navy. The only other battle the Navy fought in the Pacific - in terms of ships and men lost - that came close to Guadalcanal was Okinawa, the final campaign of the war. The naval fighting saw modern ships close on each other to ranges not seen since the Battle of Trafalgar. The fighting was at night, giving the advantage to the Imperial Navy, which had spent the previous 20 years mastering the night while the U.S. Navy was forced to learn how to fight this kind of battle “on the fly” as it were. The most important of the sea battles was remembered by one ship’s captain as “a barroom brawl after the lights were shot out.”

The Marines on Guadalcanal often felt abandoned, and rightly so since the Navy was unable to send regular resupply in the face of enemy naval superiority. For most of the campaign, they held only a small perimeter around crucial Henderson Field, which had to be defended at all costs. To this day, Guadalcanal is seen as the Corps’ greatest victory, because it came so close to being their greatest defeat. The most important battle on the island during the campaign took place over two nights in a driving tropical downpour that limited visibility to the point much of the fighting was hand to hand. The night two Imperial Navy battleships shelled the Henderson Field perimeter was remembered ever after by all who survived as “the bombardment;” it needed no further explanation. One survivor remembered it sounded like “express trains going overhead” for the three hours it lasted.

As with Stalingrad, after Guadalcanal, the enemy - though not defeated - was never able to mount another major offensive operation successfully

This weekend, I will be starting a series of posts that will be published on the important dates of the campaign; the series will go behind the paywall in August. I want to start it now - before the battle began - to get you free subscribers interested enough that you will want to subscribe to continue reading it. The series will run from now to mid-December.

The series is adapted from my books “Under The Southern Cross,” “Pacific Thunder” and “The Cactus Air Force.”

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