The change of command on Guadalcanal

At 2 p.m. on 9 December 1942 Major General Alexander Vandegrift, commander of the 1st Marine Division, handed over command of all American forces on Guadalcanal and Tulagi to an Army officer, Major General Alexander Patch, commander of the Americal Division. That same day the 5th Marines left the island, and the rest of the division followed over the next few weeks. After four months in which the Marines had defended Henderson Field almost entirely on their own, the burden of the campaign was passing to the United States Army.

Four months on the island

The 1st Marine Division had landed on Guadalcanal on 7 August 1942, in the first American land offensive of the Pacific war. The plan was for the Marines to seize the airfield the Japanese were building and to be relieved quickly by a garrison. Things turned out otherwise: after the fleet’s defeat at Savo Island the transports sailed away with their equipment still unloaded, and for many weeks the division held a narrow perimeter on the Lunga River, cut off from regular supply, bombed from the air and shelled by night from the sea.

The Marines beat off three major Japanese ground offensives in turn: at Alligator Creek in August, on Edson’s Ridge in September and in the Battle for Henderson Field at the end of October. The first Army troops – the 164th Infantry Regiment of the Americal Division – reached the island only on 13 October and went straight into the defence of the airfield. In November, after the decisive night actions of the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, Japan lost the ability to move substantial forces to the island, and the Americans could at last think about replacing the exhausted garrison.

The last major Marine action of this phase was the Long Patrol of the 2nd Raider Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson, which spent almost a month tracking Japanese units in the interior of the island; on the afternoon of 4 December the last Raider companies returned to the perimeter near Lunga Point.

The state of the division

By December the 1st Marine Division was in very poor shape. According to Marine Corps figures, 650 of its men had been killed in the Guadalcanal campaign, 31 were listed as missing and 1,278 had been wounded. Disease caused far greater losses: malaria was recorded in 8,580 men, and in December the division’s doctors estimated that some three-quarters of the troops had had it. On top of this came dysentery, tropical skin infections and the effects of months on meagre, monotonous rations, often eked out with captured Japanese food. According to participants’ accounts, some of the emaciated men were unable to climb the cargo nets up the sides of the transports without help. The doctors judged that it would take three to six months to restore them to full fitness.

The division was originally to rest in New Zealand, but in the end it was sent to Australia. The first transports took the Marines to Brisbane, but the division was soon moved to the cooler, malaria-free area around Melbourne, where it spent most of 1943 recovering and bringing its units back up to strength. It was in this period that the division’s Marines adopted the Australian song “Waltzing Matilda” as their own. For Guadalcanal the division received the Presidential Unit Citation, the first such collective award in its history.

Patch and the Army

Alexander Patch, born in 1889 at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, was a regular infantry officer and a veteran of the Western Front in 1918. In the spring of 1942, after arriving in New Caledonia, he formed a new division out of a loose collection of units, which was named the Americal – from “American” and “New Caledonia”. Its regiments reached Guadalcanal in stages: the 164th Infantry in October, the 182nd on 12 November and the 132nd on 8 December, the day before the change of command. With them came artillery, engineers and supply units, and since November the 147th Infantry Regiment and the 8th Marines of the 2nd Marine Division had also been fighting on the island.

Patch was given the task of destroying all Japanese forces on the island. He judged that he had too few men for it and turned to General Millard Harmon, commander of Army forces in the South Pacific. Harmon sent the 25th Infantry Division, then being moved from Hawaii, straight to Guadalcanal; its units arrived during the last two weeks of December and the first week of January. The remaining regiments of the 2nd Marine Division were also on their way to the island. On 2 January 1943 XIV Corps was formed under Patch’s command, and by 7 January American forces on Guadalcanal numbered just over 50,000 men. Since 18 October the whole campaign had been directed by the commander of the South Pacific Area, William Halsey, who was promoted from vice admiral to admiral in November.

“Starvation Island”

On the other side of the front the situation was far worse. Since August the Japanese had moved nearly 30,000 troops to Guadalcanal, but by December only about 20,000 of them were alive, and perhaps 12,000 were fit to fight. According to American studies based on Japanese documents, around 7 December Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake’s 17th Army was losing some 50 men a day – to malnutrition, disease and American fire. The soldiers ate roots, grass and lizards; malaria, dysentery and beriberi were rife. The Japanese called the island Gatō – “Starvation Island” – a pun on the first syllables of its name.

Because slow transports could not approach the island within range of the aircraft at Henderson Field, supplies were run in by night by the destroyers of Rear Admiral Raizō Tanaka, known to the Americans as the Tokyo Express. From the end of November a new method was tried: cleaned-out fuel drums, filled with food and medicine so that they would float, were roped together in long chains and dropped from destroyers off the shore, from where the troops were to haul them onto the beach. The first such run ended on 30 November in the Battle of Tassafaronga: Tanaka sank the cruiser Northampton, but delivered no food. Further runs on 3, 7 and 11 December achieved little – many drums sank, holed by fire from aircraft and patrol boats or torn loose from their lines, and only some of them reached the shore.

On the night of 11–12 December PT boats from Tulagi attacked Tanaka’s force as it was turning back near Savo Island after dropping its drums. Two torpedoes struck the stern of his flagship, the modern destroyer Teruzuki. The fire reached the depth-charge magazine and the ship sank towards morning; Tanaka, stunned by the explosion, was transferred to another destroyer. Soon afterwards he privately informed his superiors that the troops on Guadalcanal could no longer be supplied by sea and advised evacuation. Not long afterwards he was moved to a post in Singapore.

Place in the war

The change of 9 December closed the defensive phase of the campaign. For four months Vandegrift’s Marines had held a beachhead whose loss could have wrecked the first American offensive in the Pacific; Patch’s army was no longer to defend the airfield but to clear the island. Numbers and supplies were now on the American side, and the Japanese garrison was growing weaker by the week.

The new commander’s first objective was the heights of Mount Austen, which overlooked the perimeter from the south-west and from which the Japanese observed and harassed the airfield. The attack by the 132nd Infantry Regiment, launched in mid-December, stalled, however, in front of strongly fortified positions. Meanwhile, on 12 December, the Japanese navy proposed for the first time that the island be abandoned, and on 31 December Emperor Hirohito approved the decision to evacuate. In January 1943 XIV Corps went over to a general offensive, and in late January and early February Japanese destroyers secretly took some 10,600 troops off the island. On 9 February 1943 Patch reported that there were no longer any organised Japanese forces on Guadalcanal.

For both commanders December was a turning point. Vandegrift received the Medal of Honor for the defence of Guadalcanal, and on 1 January 1944 became Commandant of the Marine Corps. Patch, worn down by malaria and dysentery, returned to the United States after the campaign, and in 1944 commanded the Seventh Army in the landings in southern France. The 1st Marine Division returned to combat at the end of 1943 on New Britain. The handover of responsibility from the Marines to the Army, once a beachhead had become a base for further operations, set a pattern that was repeated across the Pacific for the rest of the war.