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It was a reflection of the fantastic Japanese capacity for self-delusion that, after their first stunning wave of conquests, their army commanders proposed establishing small garrisons to hold their island bases, while redeploying most troops to China – which they regarded as their nation’s main theatre of war. Short of trained manpower, they had scraped the barrel for forces to conduct the South-East Asia and Pacific island offensives; the long China campaign had weakened and demoralised the army even before Pearl Harbor took place. Thereafter, Japan’s generals were obliged to find soldiers from a shrinking pool, then dispatch them into battle with barely three months’ training. Japanese strategy had been rooted in a conviction that the United States would treat for peace after a brisk battlefield drubbing. When this hope was disappointed, the army spent the rest of the war struggling to defend Nippon’s overblown empire with inadequate means and inferior technology. The important reality of the Pacific war was that the Americans and Australians eventually prevailed on every island they assaulted. Only in Burma and China did the Japanese army maintain dominance until the last phase of the war.

Throughout the campaign on Guadalcanal, an equally relentless and bloody struggle was conducted at sea. The Savo battle was only the first of a series of dramatic naval encounters, almost all precipitated by Japanese attempts to reinforce and supply their troops ashore, and to impede the matching American build-up. Destroyers of the ‘Tokyo Express’ sought to run men and stores by night through ‘the Slot’, the narrow approach to Guadalcanal. Australian coastwatchers manning radios in jungle hideouts on Japanese-held islands played a critical role in alerting the air force to enemy shipping movements. Meanwhile in deeper waters offshore, opposing squadrons of carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers manoeuvred for advantage like boxers circling each other in darkness in a giant ring. The challenge was almost always to locate the enemy, then to fire first. Attrition was awesome: the 24 August Battle of the East Solomons cost the Japanese a carrier and heavy aircraft losses in exchange for damage to the Enterprise; a week later, the carrier Saratoga suffered such severe torpedo damage that it was obliged to quit the theatre for an American dockyard. The Americans inflicted heavy losses on the enemy off Cape Esperance on the night of 11–12 September, but on the 15th Japanese submarines sank the carrier Wasp and damaged the new battleship North Carolina.

Vice-Admiral William ‘Bull’ Halsey, who assumed command of regional naval operations on 18 October, found himself committed to some of the heaviest fleet actions of the war. At Santa Cruz on 26 October, the Japanese lost over a hundred aircraft and the Americans seventy-four, more than the rival forces on any day of the Battle of Britain. Destruction of the carrier Hornet left the Americans for some weeks solely dependent on the damaged Enterprise for naval air operations. On the night of 12 November Vice-Admiral Hiroake Abe, leading a squadron dominated by two battleships to bombard the Americans on Guadalcanal, met an American cruiser force. Though he inflicted heavy damage, sinking six ships for the loss of three, with familiar caution he chose to retreat after a twenty-four-minute action, only to lose one of his battleships to American aircraft next morning.

Two days later, Marine pilots of the ‘Cactus Air Force’, as the Henderson Field squadrons were known, caught a Japanese troop convoy en route to Guadalcanal and almost annihilated it, sinking seven transports and a cruiser, and damaging three more cruisers. That night, there was a dramatic clash between American and Japanese capital ships in which Admiral ‘Ching’ Lee’s Washington landed nine 16? salvoes on the battleship Kirishima, which foundered soon after, an acceptable exchange for damage to the US