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By Root 1945 0

be counted. They were lost in the larger story, for November 1942 had brought the Allies a worldwide turning of the tide. The victories at Guadalcanal and in North Africa, broadly seen, were part of the same worldwide effort. The two major Axis nations could pursue their separate military ambitions, but “their hopes for a combined victory over their enemies still looked to a meeting in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean, which had been blocked for the Japanese at Midway and in the Solomons as it was blocked for the Germans in North Africa and the southern part of the Eastern Front,” the historian Gerhard Weinberg observed. A Collier’s editorialist saw this on the day after Christmas 1942: “We don’t claim to be prophets, but we feel constrained to agree with the numerous prophets, analysts and commentators who are saying that the first two weeks of November, 1942, in all probability, were the turning point of the war.”

Five months later, a contributor to the magazine wondered what had been gained. “We have not begun to penetrate more than Japan’s outpost lines. In sixteen months of war we have taken one airfield and three jungle towns. Japan has captured an empire.… The Japanese could lose all of the Solomons and all of New Guinea and New Britain without endangering any vital point in their empire.”

But the significance of the Guadalcanal campaign was never about just war matériel or real estate. Though the idea had haunted Yamamoto from the beginning that American victory was inevitable, the outcome was not foreordained by advantages in industry and war production. As the French Army’s performance against Germany in 1940 had suggested, arms and matériel were not sufficient for victory. It had to be seized by men with an active will to fight. On that score Japan had misestimated the United States as, in Weinberg’s words, “unwilling to pay the price in blood and treasure to retake islands of which they had never heard, only to be returned to allies for whose colonial empires they had only disdain.”

An American defeat was strongly possible well into November. Had such a setback occurred, Ernest King, who two weeks after Pearl Harbor was appointed COMINCH in a major shakeup, would likely have fallen in another one. The campaign would have been written off as his signature folly, a haphazardly conceived fantasy. King’s powerful rivals such as General Hap Arnold would have testified morosely, no doubt, to the folly of the Navy’s ambitions in the war’s secondary theater. That it ended differently is a testament to the fighting character of the fleet at the squadron level. The Navy wasn’t ready for its light forces—its cruisers and destroyers—to be the primary weapons of a naval campaign. By the end of November 1942, it wouldn’t need to use much else to finish the job in the southern Solomons.

At Guadalcanal from August through November, the Japanese saw for the first time the terrifying aspect of the American nation resolved to total war and bent to slaughter. The Imperial Japanese Navy, well blooded, seemed to lose some of its will to fight. In the decades before the outbreak of the war, Japan came to the negotiating table in Washington and again in London out of a conviction of its matériel inferiority to the Western navies. Despite its fleet’s achievement in the early stages of the war, a powerful current within the IJN cast it as an underdog against the United States. It compensated for the perceived inferiority through a dedication to training and esprit de corps. After Guadalcanal, pessimism was preeminent again. Not until October 1944—and not in any of the significant amphibious invasions that took place from Tarawa to Peleliu—did Japan again commit heavy surface forces to battle. The reason appears to be the shattering effect of the Guadalcanal defeat on morale.

Though Japanese losses in planes, pilots, and aircrewmen were terrible at Guadalcanal, far worse than at Midway, the 8th Fleet chief of staff, Toshikazu Ohmae, would cite the U.S. Fleet’s use of radar-controlled gunfire as “the outstanding feature in the