• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1186 0

launched their main effort to get the field. The Marines were well dug in and ready for them. The Japanese came on with fanatical bravery, but with poor tactics, and ill-timed and poorly coordinated human-wave attacks that left bodies by the hundreds strung along the American wire. With more than 2,000 killed and probably three times as many wounded they finally gave it up. American losses were fewer than 300, and they now began the expansion of their perimeter. From this point on the Marines were on the offensive.

At sea the struggle went on. Ghormley was relieved by Admiral William F. Halsey, and Fletcher by Admiral Thomas C. Kincaid. The Marines had been accused of not attacking, and had replied that they needed better support from the navy than they were getting. Halsey was determined to supply it. While the battle for Henderson Field raged ashore, he sent Kincaid after the Japanese main fleet. Striking each other with carrier aircraft, the Americans damaged two Japanese carriers, while the Japanese damaged the Enterprise and sank the Hornet. Losses were more or less evened by the fact that this battle of the Santa Cruz Islands cost the Japanese more than a hundred carrier planes and pilots, and their pool of trained pilots was now getting dangerously low.

Both sides were convinced that victory was within their grasp, and as long as neither would concede the matter, the fight went on. The Japanese pushed in more troops, until they outnumbered the Americans by several thousands; they also had naval superiority, with battleships and carriers outnumbering their enemies. But Halsey was determined to give the Marines the support they needed and he stripped troops out of areas all over his command. In spite of the impending North African invasion, the Americans sent ships and planes from all over; the problem reached the President, and Roosevelt himself intervened in the allocations and the scheduling of resources. Guadalcanal was to have the highest priority; this was where the fight was.

In mid-November the Japanese mounted yet another reinforcement convoy, scheduled this time to deliver 13,000 men. As in the previous month, they planned to cover it with a battleship bombardment of the American position. They sent two battleships, a cruiser, and fourteen destroyers into the waters north of Guadalcanal, now known, ominously, as Ironbottom Sound. The Americans, also scheduling reinforcements at the same time, could not match that strength, but Turner sent his escort commander, Admiral D. J. Callaghan, into the sound with five cruisers and eight destroyers and orders to break up the bombardment. It was a cast of desperation, but fortunately for the Americans, most of the Japanese magazines were loaded with high explosive for the shore bombardment, rather than the armor-piercing shells that would have wiped out the American squadron.

After dark on November 12 the Americans waited in ambush in Ironbottom Sound. In spite of their radar they were still surprised when the huge Japanese force entered the sound just past midnight. What followed was a melee in which neither side was able to exercise any real control. For about half an hour ships blazed away at each other, sometimes hitting the enemy, sometimes hitting their own comrades, sometimes firing at shadows. Ships loomed up suddenly out of the tropic darkness, fired into each other, and surged apart again. Shell splashes and torpedo wakes churned the confined waters between Savo and Guadalcanal. Losses were extremely heavy on both sides. On the American side, Admiral Callaghan was killed, the cruiser Atlanta was sunk, Portland, another cruiser, was a wreck with no power, and the battered Juneau was sunk by a submarine—700 of her crew went down with her; and four destroyers were lost as well. The Japanese lost two destroyers, and the battleship Hiei was hit more than fifty times, so that she was dead in the water when American planes found her and finished her off next morning.

In spite of the losses, the first phase of this Naval Battle of Guadalcanal was an American victory;