The end of the fighting on Guadalcanal

On 9 February 1943, after six months of fighting on land, at sea and in the air, the commander of the American forces on Guadalcanal reported that there were no longer any organised Japanese forces on the island. It was the first great success of the American offensive in the Pacific – and the first time since the start of the war that Japan had given up ground it had fought for. Yet the end of the campaign left a bitter aftertaste: in three night runs in early February Japanese destroyers had taken more than ten thousand soldiers off the island, and the Americans realised it only after the last of them had gone. Twelve days later, on 21 February, American troops occupied the nearby Russell Islands without a fight – the first step up the chain of the Solomon Islands.

Half a year of fighting

The fighting for Guadalcanal began on 7 August 1942, when General Alexander Vandegrift’s 1st Marine Division landed on the island and seized the airfield the Japanese were building, soon named Henderson Field. On the very night of 8–9 August the Japanese navy inflicted a heavy defeat on the Allies in the Battle of Savo Island, and over the following months both sides drew ever larger forces into the struggle. The Japanese tried several times to retake the airfield – in August, September and October – and each time suffered bloody defeats. At sea there was a series of battles, of which the decisive one proved to be the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal in November: after it Japan could no longer get a large convoy with heavy equipment through to the island.

In December 1942 Vandegrift’s exhausted division was relieved by army units, and command on the island passed to Major General Alexander Patch. At the beginning of January his forces – reorganised as XIV Corps, with more than 50,000 soldiers and marines – opened the final offensive. Facing them, according to American studies based on Japanese documents, were some 14,000 Japanese, most of them suffering from malaria and dysentery, starving and without artillery.

Operation Ke

The decision to abandon the island was taken in Tokyo at the end of December. After long disputes between the army and the navy – each blamed the other for the failure of supply – Imperial General Headquarters proposed an evacuation, and on 31 December 1942 Emperor Hirohito approved it, at the same time demanding a new line of defence in the central Solomons and on New Guinea. By 9 January the plan had been drawn up by the staffs of Lieutenant General Hitoshi Imamura’s Eighth Area Army at Rabaul and Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s Combined Fleet. It was called Operation Ke – after one of the syllables of the Japanese syllabary, with no hidden meaning.

The plan provided for one more infantry battalion to be landed on the island as a rearguard, while Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake’s Seventeenth Army withdrew to the western tip of Guadalcanal, around Cape Esperance and Kamimbo Bay. From the end of January aircraft from Rabaul were to fight for air superiority over the southern Solomons, and in early February destroyers of Vice Admiral Gun’ichi Mikawa’s Eighth Fleet were to take off the survivors in three night runs. Distant cover was provided by Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondō’s force of two aircraft carriers and two battleships, cruising north of the archipelago. To mislead the enemy the Japanese staged feints and increased radio traffic in the Marshall Islands and around New Guinea. Some 20 destroyers were assigned to the operation, and Yamamoto himself expected half of them to be sunk.

The Allied forces were many times larger. Admiral William Halsey, commander in the South Pacific, had at his disposal two fleet carriers, six escort carriers, several battleships, more than a dozen cruisers and several dozen destroyers, and in the air – according to American tallies – some 540 aircraft. Their superiority went unused for one reason: American intelligence, which since 1 January had been having difficulty reading the changed Japanese codes, interpreted the concentration of ships and aircraft at Rabaul and in the Shortland Islands as preparations for a new offensive. As late as 26 January it warned that the Japanese were preparing an attack code-named “Ke”. Both Halsey and Patch therefore acted cautiously, expecting a landing that never came.

Withdrawal to the west

On 14 January destroyers landed Major Keiji Yano’s battalion on the island – some 750 infantrymen and a battery of mountain guns – and with it an officer of Imamura’s staff carrying the evacuation order. The Seventeenth Army staff accepted it reluctantly and on 18 January passed it on to the units. As the 38th Division began to leave its positions in the hills, XIV Corps was just launching its final offensive, which on 23 January gave it Kokumbona, until then the Seventeenth Army’s headquarters. Most of the Japanese 2nd Division, however, managed to slip out of the threatened encirclement. Japanese orders stipulated that soldiers unable to march should take their own lives so as “not to stain the honour of the Imperial Army”; many wounded and sick men were left behind along the line of retreat.

West of Kokumbona the Americans advanced along a narrow strip a few hundred metres wide between the sea and the jungle, cut every few hundred metres by streams and steep coral ridges. Yano’s battalion and the remnants of the 2nd Division defended one river after another: from 26 January the Marmura, from 29 January the Bonegi, where they held up the advance for almost three days. Patch, fearing a Japanese landing near the airfield, committed to the pursuit at any one time forces roughly equivalent to a single regiment. The rest he kept in reserve around Lunga Point.

On 1 February the Americans, supported by the fire of two destroyers, forced the Bonegi. The same day Patch – suspecting that the Japanese might be withdrawing to the island’s south coast – landed a reinforced battalion under Colonel Alexander George, some 1,500 soldiers and marines, at Verahue on the south-western shore of Guadalcanal. This force was to march north along the coast and block the Japanese route from the west. Japanese aircraft, however, took the landing ships for a threat to the evacuation planned for that night and attacked them with dive bombers. The destroyer USS De Haven was hit by three bombs and sank within minutes off Savo Island; 167 of her crew were killed, including her captain.

Three night runs

The evacuation was commanded by Rear Admiral Shintarō Hashimoto, who had taken over the destroyer force at the last moment after his predecessor was wounded. The runs followed the same timetable as the earlier supply runs that the Americans called the Tokyo Express: the destroyers left the Shortland Islands in the afternoon, ran down “the Slot”, the channel between the islands of the archipelago, by night, and had to be well out of range of the aircraft from Henderson Field before dawn.

The first run set out on 1 February with 20 destroyers. On the way it was attacked by some 90 American aircraft, which badly damaged the flagship Makinami, so Hashimoto transferred his flag to another destroyer. At night, between Guadalcanal and Savo, eleven American PT boats lay in wait for the Japanese; in clashes lasting several hours the Japanese destroyers, supported by floatplanes, sank three of them. Meanwhile the transport destroyers closed the shore at Cape Esperance and in Kamimbo Bay, and sailors ferried the waiting soldiers aboard in boats. By 2 a.m. 4,935 men had been taken off, mainly from the 38th Division. On the way back an explosion – from a mine or from a PT boat’s torpedo – crippled the destroyer Makigumo, which her crew had to abandon and scuttle.

Japanese officers who saw the evacuees described them as men in tattered uniforms, utterly emaciated, their faces expressionless. Their digestive systems were so ravaged that on board they were given only thin gruel; many suffered from constant diarrhoea. According to Japanese figures some 600 of the evacuees died before they could be treated, and another three thousand needed long stays in hospital.

The second run, on 4 February, went more quietly. Aircraft from Guadalcanal damaged the destroyer Maikaze on the way, but the PT boats did not come out that night. 3,921 soldiers went aboard, mainly from the 2nd Division, and with them General Hyakutake and the Seventeenth Army staff. On land the Americans were still advancing slowly, a few hundred metres a day, convinced that the Japanese destroyers were bringing in reinforcements rather than taking men out. The force from Verahue halted at Titi on 6 February, and on the north coast the 161st Infantry Regiment only went over to the attack that day, reaching the Umasani River, while the Japanese were gathering their last two thousand men at Kamimbo Bay.

The third run was the riskiest, because the Japanese knew of the American carriers and battleships south of the island. Hashimoto left the Shortlands on 7 February with 18 destroyers and this time took a route south of the main chain of islands rather than down the Slot. American aircraft damaged the Isokaze, but the rest of the force reached Kamimbo Bay and embarked 1,972 soldiers, including Yano’s battalion. For another hour and a half sailors rowed along the shore calling out so that no one would be left behind. At 1.32 a.m. on the night of 7–8 February – almost exactly half a year after the American landing – the last destroyers sailed away from Guadalcanal.

In all, according to aggregate Japanese figures, 10,652 army soldiers were taken off in the three runs (the figures given for the individual runs come from different tallies and add up to just over 10,800) – almost all those still alive of the some 36,000 sent to the island since August. Japan lost only one destroyer in the operation; the Americans lost the destroyer De Haven, three PT boats and several dozen aircraft. Earlier, in the Battle of Rennell Island on 29–30 January, Japanese torpedo bombers had sunk the cruiser Chicago from the force covering an American convoy – which further persuaded Halsey to keep his ships away from the waters around Guadalcanal.

“Tokyo Express no longer has terminus”

At dawn on 8 February the Americans resumed their advance on both coasts and now came across only isolated sick and dying Japanese and abandoned equipment. Only now did Patch understand that the destroyers’ night runs of the past week had served an evacuation rather than the delivery of reinforcements. On the afternoon of 9 February units of the 161st Infantry Regiment, advancing from the east along the north coast, and the force from Verahue, coming up from the south, met in the village of Tenaro at the western end of the island. Patch then sent Halsey a message that went down in history: “Total and complete defeat of Japanese forces on Guadalcanal effected 1625 today. […] Tokyo Express no longer has terminus on Guadalcanal.”

The same day Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo issued a communiqué announcing the end of the fighting. It claimed that the troops on Guadalcanal, “having driven the superior enemy forces into a corner of the island” and “crushed their fighting strength”, had achieved their aim, and had then been withdrawn from the island in the first ten days of February and “moved elsewhere”. To describe the retreat it used the word tenshin – “transfer” or “change of direction” – which long remained in Japan a byword for the euphemisms of wartime propaganda. At the same time it announced the “transfer” of the troops from Buna on New Guinea, even though most of Buna’s defenders had been killed at the turn of December and January. The Japanese press had earlier written about the harsh conditions on Guadalcanal and heavy losses, so many readers understood that this was a defeat – but officially the word was never used.

A few Japanese stragglers remained on the island, and in the following weeks American patrols killed or captured them. According to American accounts, the last known Japanese soldier on Guadalcanal surrendered only in October 1947. The evacuated 2nd and 38th Divisions went to Rabaul, where they were brought up to strength with new recruits; the 2nd Division was soon moved to the Philippines, and the Seventeenth Army was re-formed on Bougainville.

The Russell Islands

Even before the fighting ended, the South Pacific command was looking for a way to move further up the Solomons. There were not yet enough forces for a landing on New Georgia, with its Japanese airfield at Munda, so a closer objective was chosen: the Russell Islands, a small group lying some 50 kilometres north-west of Cape Esperance. In January the Japanese had used them as a staging point for traffic to and from Guadalcanal. Airfields built on the islands would shorten the distance from Henderson Field to Munda by about a hundred kilometres, and their bays were suitable as bases for PT boats and landing craft.

On 29 January Admiral Chester Nimitz approved the operation, and on 7 February Halsey issued the order. Since Patch had reported some four hundred Japanese on the islands as recently as 30 January, and no one knew how the enemy would react to the loss of Guadalcanal, the landing force was to be a strong one. The operation was code-named Cleanslate and was commanded by Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, the same man who had carried the marines to Guadalcanal in August. The core of the ground forces was Major General John Hester’s US 43rd Infantry Division, less one regiment, reinforced by the 3rd Marine Raider Battalion and anti-aircraft artillery. Turner had no large transports: the troops were carried by destroyers, fast minesweepers, fast transports converted from destroyers, and landing craft towed behind the ships. It was in essence a shore-to-shore crossing, from a base near Koli Point on Guadalcanal.

Earlier, on the night of 17–18 February, scouting officers had landed on Banika Island from the New Zealand corvette HMNZS Moa. The inhabitants assured them that the Japanese had already left; according to the report of one of the Allied coastwatchers, the Japanese garrison had abandoned the islands around 11 February. Even so, the landing was prepared as if for combat. Early on 21 February the force split into three groups, and at 6 a.m. the first waves went ashore on Banika and Pavuvu – without a single shot. The planned naval bombardment proved unnecessary, and drinking water was a bigger problem than the enemy. By 10 a.m. supplies for a dozen or so days had been unloaded; the second echelon arrived the next day, and by the end of February some nine thousand troops were on the islands. The Japanese noticed their loss only in early March and from then on bombed the islands from the air, but never attempted to retake them.

The balance of the campaign

The losses of both sides in the six-month campaign are counted in different ways, depending on whether one includes the sailors and airmen killed in the naval and air battles around the island. According to American tallies some 7,100 men were killed on the Allied side – most of them sailors from sunken ships – and the number of wounded exceeded 7,800. The Allies lost 29 ships, including two fleet carriers and six heavy cruisers, and about 615 aircraft. Japanese losses were much higher. The American historian of military medicine Albert Cowdrey states that of some 19,200 Japanese army soldiers who died, only about 8,500 were killed in combat; the rest died of starvation, malaria, dysentery and beriberi. Counting the sailors and airmen killed, various studies put Japanese deaths at 20,000–25,000 or more. About a thousand Japanese were taken prisoner – many of them labourers from construction units. Japan lost 38 ships, including two battleships and a light carrier, and by various estimates from about 680 to more than 800 aircraft, and with them many experienced naval pilots whom it was never able to replace.

For both sides Guadalcanal was also a lesson. The Americans learned jungle warfare, cooperation between the army, navy and marines, and night fighting at sea, in which they had long been inferior to the Japanese. In Japan the island, which in July 1942 hardly anyone had heard of, became a symbol of defeat – soldiers called it Gatō, “Starvation Island”, a pun on the first syllable of its name.

Place in the war

The end of the Guadalcanal campaign, coinciding with the surrender of the German forces at Stalingrad and the capture of Buna on New Guinea, meant that Japan had finally gone over to the defensive in the South Pacific. Its plans for further expansion towards New Caledonia, Fiji and Samoa, in order to cut Australia off from the United States, were no longer realistic. The effort swallowed up by Guadalcanal had also weakened the Japanese on New Guinea. The new defence line ran through New Georgia, Kolombangara and Bougainville, and Rabaul remained its pivot.

For the Allies the island became a great base. More airfields were built alongside Henderson Field, and the waters around Tulagi became the main naval anchorage in the South Pacific. The Russell Islands, where the first airfield was already in operation in April 1943, served as a springboard for the attack on New Georgia in the summer of 1943. The Allies soon adopted the plan for Operation Cartwheel, in which Halsey’s forces were to advance up the Solomons and those of General Douglas MacArthur along the coast of New Guinea. The aim of both was to encircle Rabaul. So began the Solomon Islands campaign, which over the following year moved the front several hundred kilometres to the north-west.

Guadalcanal did not decide the outcome of the war in the Pacific – that was determined above all by the industrial superiority of the United States, which in 1943 began to deliver new carriers, aircraft and ships. It was, however, the moment at which the initiative passed into Allied hands, never to be lost again.