The Guadalcanal Campaign: Then and Now

For eight months in late 1942 and early 1943, the fate of a lightly inhabited set of islands in the Southwest Pacific captivated the attention of the United States and Japan. The spectacular American victory at Midway had destroyed four Japanese aircraft carriers and effectively ended the Japanese advance of spring 1942. After much debate, senior U.S. commanders decided on Solomon Islands as the target for the first Allied offensive in the Pacific.

From August 1942 until February 1943 the Americans lost two aircraft carriers and numerous cruisers, while the Japanese lost two battleships, one aircraft carrier, many smaller vessels, and (perhaps most importantly) a huge number of aircraft and trained aircrew. On land, Japanese forces suffered some 30,000 casualties against 15,000 for the Americans.

The Guadalcanal Campaign, more so even than the Battle of Midway, tore the heart out of Japanese naval airpower.

Eighty years later, the Solomons have again attracted U.S. strategic interest. Two years after enticing the government of Solomon Islands to drop its diplomatic recognition of Taiwan, the People’s Republic of China has concluded a security agreement with the archipelago. Rightly or wrongly, this has raised concern in Washington and Canberra and inevitably evoked memories of the bitter battles of the 1940s.

The Setting

Japanese troops landed unopposed at several points in the Solomons in April 1942. At the time, the islands were occupied by indigenous inhabitants (mostly working in fishing and subsistence agriculture, or on a few large plantations owned and operated by the colonial authority) and a few European overseers.

Unlike the Dutch East Indies and the British colonies of Southeast Asia, the Solomons presented little economic value to the Japanese. Instead, they offered the opportunity to build bases that the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) and its air forces could use to attack supply lines between Australia and the United States. The critical Japanese strongholds in the eastern Solomons were Tulagi, which had a natural harbor, and Guadalcanal, which was large enough to build a substantial airfield.

In the wake of victories at the Battles of Coral Sea and Midway, the Allies were on the lookout for a chance to go on the offensive. They were aware of the threat posed by further Japanese encroachment in the South Pacific to logistical ties with Australia, and Pacific commanders believed Guadalcanal to be an ideal target. After some sparring with General Douglas MacArthur in Australia and the Europe First lobby in Washington, the operation was given a nod.

On August 7, 1942 U.S. marines landed at four beaches in the Solomon Islands chain, including Tulagi, two smaller islands, and Guadalcanal. The largest concentration (11,000 men) landed on the latter, where Japanese forces had already begun to build an airfield. At the sight of the Americans, Japanese workers and soldiers fled into the jungle, apart from a few Koreans who surrendered to the marines. The Americans named the airfield Henderson Field, after Major Lofton Henderson, the commander of a marine squadron killed at Midway. Control of the airfield would become the primary operational objective of the campaign, although the Japanese did not initially treat the loss as a critical strategic problem.

Over the next seven months, however, the Japanese and the Allies fought bitterly over control of the islands in an escalating series of seesaw land, air, and sea battles, the outcomes of which often seemed to dance precariously on the edge of a knife.

The Battles

The naval battle of Guadalcanal involved some of the most brutal, unmerciful fights of the entire war. At the Battle of Savo Island on August 8, a force of Japanese cruisers sank four Allied cruisers and damaged another. An indecisive carrier action known as the Battle of the Eastern Solomons on August 24 cost the Japanese the light carrier Ryujo.

The Japanese began to run destroyers laden with troops and food to Guadalcanal at night in order to avoid air attacks from Henderson Field. Cruisers and battleships would bombard Henderson, too. The fleet carrier USS Wasp was lost to a Japanese submarine on September 15. On October 12 at the Battle of Cape Esperance, an American force of cruisers and destroyers turned back a similarly constituted Japanese fleet with losses on both sides.

In late October, as part of an effort to support an Imperial Japanese Army attack on Henderson Field, the IJN dispatched a fleet of four carriers, four battleships, and attendant escorts to sweep the U.S. Navy from the area. Although the Japanese managed to sink the USS Hornet and damage the USS Enterprise at the Battle of Santa Cruz, they suffered dreadful aircraft losses, all while the battle on land was being won by the U.S. marines.

The land battles were every bit as brutal as those at sea. On August 21 the remaining Japanese troops on Guadalcanal (plus a few reinforcements) attacked Henderson Field but were overwhelmed by superior numbers of Americans. Reinforcements continued to trickle into the island, enabling another attack on September 12, which also failed.

The Japanese situation was complicated by horrible logistics, which typically allowed the landing of troops but not of food and ammunition to sustain and support them. Within weeks of their arrival, Japanese forces completely lost their combat effectiveness because of disease and malnutrition. Nevertheless, Japanese land and air forces mounted a major attack on October 23 in conjunction with naval operations leading to the Battle of Santa Cruz, but were repulsed from Henderson Field with heavy casualties on both sides.

In November, two confused nights of desperate fighting sank seven American destroyers and two cruisers at the loss of two Japanese battleships, a cruiser, and three destroyers. The night of November 15 witnessed the destruction of HIJMS Kirishima by USS Washington, one of the very few battleship vs. battleship actions of the Pacific War.

Henderson Field itself began to earn its keep on August 20, playing host to a small group of fighters and bombers delivered by an American escort carrier. Over the next several months control of the airfield would give the Americans a crucial advantage over the archipelago, limiting Japanese naval sorties to night operations. Japanese aircraft attacked the airfield and generally tried to exert air control from Rabaul, in what is now Papua New Guinea, but the 8-hour trip took its toll an aircraft and pilots alike.

At the Battle of Tassafaronga in December, the U.S. Navy defeated a Japanese resupply mission at the cost of one cruiser sunk and three badly damaged. The Japanese realized that the game was up, as U.S. forces were advancing in New Guinea and there seemed no prospect of delivering decisive reinforcements to Guadalcanal. An evacuation mission in February 1943 managed to rescue nearly the entire remainder of Japanese Army troops on the island, bringing the Guadalcanal portion of the Solomons campaign to an end.

The Legacy

No one battle in the islands was critical, and overall Japanese losses were not crippling. For some perspective, the Guadalcanal campaign began two weeks before the opening of the Battle of Stalingrad and ended a week after, with casualties on either side of the Pacific battle amounting to less than a 20th of those suffered in Russia.

But while the campaign did not bleed Japan of manpower in aggregate, it did bleed Japanese human and material capital. The ships, aircraft, and expertly trained aircrew lost in Guadalcanal would take years to replace, and Japan did not have years. The United States, on the other hand, could build a massive fleet of ships and aircraft while also waging a full-scale war in Europe.

Fighting would continue for most of the rest of the war across Solomon Islands, resulting in the death of Japanese Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku in April 1943 and the temporary marooning of future U.S. President John F. Kennedy in August 1943. After 1943, however, the strategic focus of the war shifted north and west, rendering the Solomons a backwater. The last Japanese troops surrendered on Bougainville in August 1945.

Guadalcanal features heavily in World War II literature. As the first major American offensive of the war, it garnered massive journalistic attention. The battles were bitter and dramatic at a moment when it still seemed that Japan could win the war. Kennedy’s experience in the broader Solomons Campaign was dramatized in a 1963 film. The novelist James Jones fictionalized his experience fighting on the island in the book “The Thin Red Line,” which received film adaptations in 1964 and 1998. More recently, Taylor Swift referenced the battle in a song (“epiphany”) on her 2020 album Folklore.

A Strategic Position?

Very few geographic points have inherent strategic value. Even the relevance of Singapore, for example, depends on prevailing strategic and technological conditions. Thus, simply because Solomon Islands was of critical importance at an early stage of World War II does not necessarily make its control a strategic national interest today.

This reality was reflected in the nearly total lack of strategic attention toward the islands during the Cold War. The United Kingdom began to give up control of the islands to an indigenous independence movement in 1960, a process that ended in full independence by 1978, with the capital the city of Honiara on Guadalcanal.

In 2003, Australia deployed troops and police to the islands in response to unrest. The deployment expanded into a 14-year assistance mission, followed by a bilateral security treaty between the two countries. In short, the Solomons have been a security issue after World War II only in that their disorder has threatened order in their neighbors, not in that they represent some kind of innate critical strategic interest.

Still, it is unsurprising that news of a security agreement between the People’s Republic of China and Solomon Islands caused alarm in the United States and Australia. The move represented an about-face by Solomon Islands, which until 2019 recognized the government of Taiwan. A promise of $730 million in aid helped shift the attitude of authorities in Honiara. The announcement of a security arrangement between Honiara and Beijing seems to imply that China will now play the stabilizing role that Australia has played in the Solomons over the last two decades, although Canberra insists that the terms of its bilateral deal remain in effect.

What does China want from the Solomons, beyond diplomatic recognition? The country is certainly not of significant economic value. Populated by some 650,000 people with a per capita GDP of $2,300, the island group does not command any resources of strategic relevance. The islands are quite far from China, which does not have a string of bases that would allow it to support large-scale operations in the islands. Still, with the growth of Chinese naval and air power Washington and Canberra regard the idea of a Chinese naval base in the Solomons (there is no serious indication that such a base is being contemplated) with a degree of alarm. Replenishment facilities in Solomon Islands would certainly extend the range of Chinese ships and aircraft, although in any kind of serious conflict such installations would be nearly indefensible.

It is also worth noting that the government remains dependent for financial assistance on Australia and other Western countries, making Honiara anything but a Chinese satellite country.

The Lessons of Guadalcanal

The lessons of the Guadalcanal Campaign for the future of the Pacific, in all likelihood, have very little to do with the new security agreement. It is exceedingly unlikely that the People’s Liberation Army Navy and the U.S. Navy would ever replay the Guadalcanal Campaign along precisely the same geographical lines, but it is not at all difficult to imagine a kind of campaign that involved episodic fighting over a wide area and extended period of time, resulting in casualties to equipment and personnel that one side or the other may find difficult to replace.

Given the extraordinary strides taken by the defense industrial base of the People’s Republic of China, the United States should be careful to avoid the Japanese strategy at Guadalcanal, which resulted in attriting the force away in a series of fruitless attempts to bring decisive force to bear on the enemy. The Japanese tried to make do with too little, then tried to bring in too much, and in the end lost their grasp over the situation. The strategic task of the U.S. today is to develop a measured and appropriate response to Chinese expansion, neither ignoring the new agreement nor panicking that it somehow portends the loss of the Pacific all by itself.