The bombardment of Henderson Field

On the night of 13–14 October 1942 two Japanese battleships, Kongō and Haruna, closed the north coast of Guadalcanal and for nearly an hour and a half shelled the American airfield, Henderson Field. They fired 973 rounds of 356 mm (14-inch) shells. By morning 48 of the Cactus Air Force’s roughly ninety aircraft had been destroyed or damaged, almost all the reserve aviation fuel was ablaze, and only a dozen or so machines could get into the air. Forty-one men were killed. The Marines called it simply “the Night” – it was the heaviest bombardment they endured in the entire campaign. The shelling from the sea was meant to cover a Japanese convoy that landed several thousand troops on the island the following night, ahead of a great land offensive. Yet the airfield survived: that same day aircraft were taking off from one runway, fuelled with petrol drained from wrecks and recovered from forgotten drums.

The airfield at the heart of the campaign

Since the landing of 7 August, the whole American presence on Guadalcanal had come down to the defence of one airfield. The strip near Lunga Point, named after Major Lofton R. Henderson, who had been killed at Midway, had been built by the Japanese; the Marines and the navy’s construction troops finished it with captured equipment and kept it working under daily air raids. The Marine, Navy and Army aircraft based on it – called the Cactus Air Force after the island’s code name – ruled the waters around the island by day. The Japanese could therefore bring in reinforcements only at night, in fast destroyers that the Americans nicknamed the Tokyo Express. A destroyer, however, could carry at most a few hundred soldiers without heavy equipment.

After the defeat at Bloody Ridge in mid-September, Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake’s Japanese 17th Army was preparing a third and largest attack on the airfield. Lieutenant General Masao Maruyama’s 2nd (Sendai) Infantry Division and part of the 38th Division were being moved to the island; between 1 and 17 October the Tokyo Express and convoys brought in some 15,000 troops, and on 9 October Hyakutake himself arrived on Guadalcanal. The attack, however, needed guns, tanks, ammunition and food that destroyers could not carry. The commander of the Combined Fleet, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, therefore agreed to a rare risk: sending a convoy of slow transport ships and, to cover it, putting the airfield out of action with the fire of heavy warships.

The first attempts failed. On 7–9 October the Marines smashed a Japanese regiment on the Matanikau as it prepared to attack, and on the night of 11–12 October American cruisers intercepted off Cape Esperance a Japanese force of cruisers that was to shell the airfield. Yamamoto then turned to his battleships.

13 October

For the Americans the day began well. In the morning Rear Admiral Richmond Turner’s transports McCawley and Zeilin arrived off Lunga Point with the 164th Infantry Regiment – 2,837 men, National Guard reservists from North Dakota under Colonel Bryant Moore, detached from the Americal Division stationed in New Caledonia. It was the first US Army unit on the island. Its dispatch had been urged by the commander of US Army forces in the South Pacific, Major General Millard Harmon, who was convinced that Major General Alexander Vandegrift’s exhausted 1st Marine Division could not beat off the next attack on its own. Vehicles, ammunition and supplies were unloaded along with the men.

The Japanese soon made their presence felt. At noon and in the afternoon two waves of bombers from Rabaul came over the airfield. The Cactus Air Force fighters, caught while refuelling, failed to intercept them in time; the bombs cratered the main runway and set fire to several thousand gallons of petrol. In the evening, at about 6.30 p.m., Japanese 150 mm howitzers, newly brought to the island, opened fire from positions west of the Matanikau River. The Marines gave them the collective nickname “Pistol Pete”. From then on they could shell the airfield by day and by night, and for a long time the American artillery was unable to locate them.

That same day a Japanese convoy left the Shortland Islands: six transports escorted by eight destroyers, carrying some 4,500 men of the 16th and 230th Infantry Regiments, two batteries of heavy artillery and a tank company. From Truk atoll Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita’s 3rd Battleship Division was steaming towards Guadalcanal: Kongō and Haruna with the light cruiser Isuzu and nine destroyers. Both battleships were rebuilt First World War battlecruisers, the fastest capital ships in the Japanese fleet. In a single night they could run in to the island, fire off their ammunition and be out of range of American bombers before dawn.

The Night

At about 1.30 a.m. on 14 October flares dropped by Japanese floatplanes lit up over the airfield, and on Mount Austen, which overlooked the perimeter, a Japanese artillery observer was getting ready to correct the fire. At 1.33 a.m. the battleships opened fire from a range of about 15–16 kilometres – beyond the reach of the American coastal guns, which could not reply. The bombardment lasted 83 minutes. The ships steamed along the coast, turned and fired again, laying their shells across the area of the airfield, both its runways, the aircraft parking areas and the fuel dumps. According to the detailed reconstruction by the historian Richard B. Frank, only part of the 973 rounds were special incendiary and high-explosive fragmentation shells intended for shore bombardment – once these ran out, the rest were made up with armour-piercing shells.

For the men in the foxholes and dugouts around the airfield it was an ordeal that many never forgot. Heavy shells tore up coconut palms and flung earth and aircraft wreckage about, while the burning fuel dumps lit up the whole perimeter. The soldiers of the 164th Regiment, who had come ashore only some fifteen hours earlier, had a particularly harrowing night. The only opposition the battleships met came from four American PT boats from the base on nearby Tulagi. Towards the end of the bombardment they attacked the Japanese force but failed to hit any ship. At about 3 a.m., having fired off his allotted ammunition, Kurita turned back for Truk.

The night’s toll

The morning presented a grim picture. According to American figures the shells had destroyed or damaged 48 of the Cactus Air Force’s roughly 90 aircraft; of the Dauntless dive bombers based on the airfield only a few were still airworthy, and not a single torpedo plane was. Almost all the aviation fuel had burned. The main runway was pitted with craters, although the grass fighter strip known as Fighter One had suffered less. Forty-one men were killed, among them six airmen, and in the wrecked command post of one of the bomber squadrons its commander, Major Gordon Bell, died along with several officers. Richard B. Frank described the bombardment as one of the most concentrated in history, and in the history of the Japanese navy it is regarded as the most effective action by its battleships in the whole war.

Even so, the airfield was not put out of action for long. Within a few hours engineers and Seabees had filled in the worst craters and brought part of the runways back into use. Fuel was the hardest problem. Mechanics drained petrol from the tanks of wrecked aircraft, and several hundred drums of fuel were recovered from the scrub around the airfield, where they had been dispersed earlier – according to American accounts on the orders of the island’s air commander, Brigadier General Roy Geiger, precisely against such a disaster. Reinforcements flew in from Espiritu Santo – a dozen or so Dauntlesses and about twenty Wildcat fighters – and Marine and Army C-47 transports began flying drums of petrol to Guadalcanal. Each aircraft could carry only a dozen or so, and each drum kept a fighter in the air for about an hour, but this airlift enabled the Cactus Air Force to survive the worst days.

The convoy at Tassafaronga

On 14 October aircraft from Henderson Field twice attacked the approaching Japanese convoy but inflicted no losses. After dark, at around midnight, the six transports anchored off Tassafaronga Point, some fifteen kilometres west of the American positions, and began unloading. That same night Vice Admiral Gun’ichi Mikawa’s heavy cruisers Chōkai and Kinugasa fired 752 rounds of 203 mm shells at the airfield, and the following night the cruisers Myōkō and Maya repeated the bombardment – with 912 rounds, according to Japanese figures. They destroyed more aircraft but did no damage comparable to that of “the Night”.

On 15 October, in broad daylight, the Cactus Air Force threw everything that could fly and had fuel against the transports: Dauntlesses, Wildcats, Army P-39 fighters and B-17 bombers from Espiritu Santo. Major Jack Cram, Geiger’s aide, slung two torpedoes under the general’s personal Catalina flying boat, known as the “Blue Goose”, hit one of the transports, Sasago Maru, and brought the riddled aircraft back to the airfield. Three ships, set ablaze and beached, were destroyed, and the rest sailed away after dark. The Japanese had, however, managed to land all the troops and about two-thirds of the supplies and equipment. In those days the Americans also lost ships hurrying to bring in fuel: on 15 October aircraft from the carrier Zuikaku sank the destroyer Meredith, which was escorting a tug towing a fuel barge, and the next day the seaplane tender McFarland was damaged, though she managed to unload her cargo of petrol.

Place in the war

The bombardment of 13–14 October was the high point of Japanese army–navy cooperation in the struggle for Guadalcanal. The battleships achieved what the raids from Rabaul had not: they paralysed American air power on the island for several days, allowing the convoy to land heavy artillery, tanks and thousands of troops. By mid-October Hyakutake had assembled some 20,000 men on Guadalcanal and was confident that he would retake the airfield. The Japanese estimated the enemy’s strength at about 10,000; in reality there were some 23,000 Americans on the island.

On the American side “the Night” caused deep alarm. On 15 October, at Pearl Harbor, Admiral Chester Nimitz judged that the Americans were unable to control the sea around Guadalcanal and that supplying the island would henceforth be very costly; the situation was not hopeless, but it was certainly critical. Nimitz also concluded that the South Pacific commander, Vice Admiral Robert Ghormley, was too dispirited and exhausted to conduct the fight – a few days later he replaced him with Vice Admiral William Halsey. Washington came to realise that the campaign, begun in August as a limited operation, would require far greater forces.

The airfield survived, however, and with it the whole American defence. The Cactus Air Force came through its hardest days thanks to petrol from wrecks, drums brought in by air, and the fact that the Japanese cruisers that shelled the airfield on the following nights no longer had the firepower of battleships. Whether the troops landed at Tassafaronga could retake Henderson Field would be settled by the Japanese land offensive at the end of October. When in November Yamamoto tried to repeat the night bombardment by battleships, the American fleet was ready: in two night actions off Guadalcanal on 13–15 November it intercepted the Japanese ships, and the battleships Hiei and Kirishima were sunk before they could shell the airfield.