THE UNITED STATES TOOK THE OFFENSIVE FOR THE first time when on 7, August 1942 the Marines stepped ashore on Guadalcanal and Tulagi in the remote Solomon Islands. The violent campaign in the South Pacific which followed lasted more than a year and cost the lives of thousands of Allied seamen; dozens of warships were sunk in the black, shark-infested waters, where six major naval engagements were fought. Even today, with a perspective of thirty-odd years, the names "Watchtower" and "Ironbottom Sound" retain a grim, trenchant clarity synonymous with death. Guadalcanal, discovered by the Spanish explorer Don Alverado Medana in 1568, lies at the lower end of a double-stranded island chain extending five hundred and sixty miles on a northwest-southeast track, through which flows the narrow, deep-water New Georgia Sound, aptly nicknamed The Slot by American sailors.
Almost nothing was known of the Solomons when Admiral King and Vice Admiral Robert L. Ghormley initially discussed the offensive, which was designed. among other things, to protect our lines of communication with Australia. Informed that he was to be Commander South Pacific Force and Area—"an important and difficult task"—Ghormley was ordered to establish headquarters in Auckland, New Zealand, and an advance base in the Fijis; and he was to prepare to mount an amphibious invasion in early autumn, using the 1st Marine Division. Subsequently Glormley called on the Bureau of Personnel for fifty officers to form a staff, headed by Rear Admiral Daniel J. Callaghan and Marine Brigadier Dewitt Peck, and on 1, May he departed for the Pacific.
From the start colossal problems plagued "Operation Watchtower," and one of the worst perhaps was securing current maps of the target area—the only maps available were German, dating back to the turn of the century. This ludicrous situation was eased in due course by a great number of interviews with Anzacs who had lived in the islands. Persistent intelligence officers and cartographers began to arrive at a picture of the Solomons, and the picture was far from sanguine. Guadalcanal, ninety miles long and twenty-five wide, was muddy and malaria-infested, and it rained more often than not; forbidding mountain ranges rose eight thousand feet above the sweltering floor of the jungle; vast fields of shoulder high kunai stretched out for miles on the plains. A few prospectors lived in the ridges and scratched the alluvial sands for grains of gold, while below there was an occasional copra planter.
By contrast, Tulagi was almost pleasant. A community formerly under British rule, with an Australian Air Force base, copra plantations, a Lever Brothers trading post and even tennis courts, this island was the seat of civilization in the Solomons. Its shopkeepers were predominantly Chinese, descendants of the four-hundred who had swum across Savo Sound when the schooner St. Paul fought it out with King Solomon's shoals in 1865, and lost. Because of its good harbor, the Royal Navy established a coaling station here twenty years later, and soon a few missionaries came out.
Up to this stage of the conflict, the principal opponents of Japanese rule had been Australian coastwatchers—those extraordinary and intrepid souls who risked instant death spying out enemy movements. They reported by tele-radio to their headquarters in Sydney via an inter-island network which the Imperial forces were unable to silence at any time during the war. They were aided by woolly-headed Melanesians, the local defense force and one of the better reasons for our success in that otherwise soporific emerald inferno.
The many-faceted story of Guadalcanal is presented by a number of distinguished authors. We have first Nimitz and Potter, who tell us something of the problems of strategic decision which preceded the invasion, and of the mounting of "Operation Watchtower" on a crash basis.
--S. E. Smith
From: The United States Navy in World War II
Preface to Part IV
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