PECULIARLY PETE

The last photograph of USS Quincy (CA-39) – caught in Japanese searchlights and burning. (Note: Image NH50436 from the US Naval History & Heritage Command, public domain)

June, 1942, Wellington, New Zealand. So far this corner of the world had been relatively untouched by the war; it was true that New Zealand’s armed forces (such as they were) had been mobilised and were taking part in the fighting in various theatres, but in terms of direct contact there had been none.

This must have been a comforting thought to Major General Alexander Vandegrift; he had only been promoted to command of the U.S. First Marine Division in April, and the following month had been tasked with taking the division on its first ever foreign deployment. To simplify the logistics, various regiments and other units had been scattered around New Zealand, Samoa, and New Caledonia, with a more gradual buildup meaning that the last regiment would not arrive until the 11th July. None of that was a problem of course because Admiral Nimitz (Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet) had assured Vandegrift that the services of his Marine Division would not be required until at least the beginning of 1943.

Vandegrift may have surveyed the situation in June with some misgiving, at least on the other fronts; in the Libyan desert, May 27th had seen the start of one of the greatest defeats in British Army history; having advanced well into Libya, the British, with their Indian, Australian and commonwealth allies had paused at the so-called Gazala line, awaiting further resources, many of which had already been diverted for the fighting in the far east. 

What the British did not realise on the morning of the 27th was that Rommel was engaging in his most outlandish gamble yet; an incompetent Italian attack in the north was intended to pin down British forces, while he drove the vast majority of the Afrika Korps around the British line to the south, completely outflanking the line and trapping the forces on the Gazala line. This was not a plan that should have worked; and as the 27th turned into the 28th, it looked like it was Rommel, rather than the Gazala line, that should have been surrounded. Unfortunately, over the next few weeks, in a battle which displayed the worst of British hubris, bickering, and incompetence, and the best of German opportunism, the British 8th Army would be forced into an embarrassing retreat. Even Tobruk, which had famously held the year before, with its defences now un-maintained, fell quickly; it was only a mixture of heroic fighting and the woefully overstretched German logistics which saw them halted at the first (less famous) battle of el Alamein, but whether this would be a permanent halt, or merely a halt 90 miles west of Cairo, remained to be seen.

Much further to the east, as June drew to a close, on the steppe of southern Russia, the men of 4th Panzer Army were limbering up, preparing their tanks to move out. They had every reason for confidence; at the second battle of Kharkov further south, German forces had annihilated a Soviet counterattack in one of the most one-sided slaughters of the war so far. True, the winter of 41/42 had been an uneasy time, but with the weather warm, the ground firm, and the skies full of Luftwaffe aircraft, the drive of the previous summer could be resumed.

And so it was. 4th Panzer smashed into the relatively thin Soviet line and immediately began to drive towards Voronezh and the river Don. Soviet resistance was severely hampered by marauding German aircraft, while their own were shot down in their hundreds, or destroyed on the ground. Once again the Soviet Union was in peril; if the German advance continued, and they were able to cut off the oil fields of the Caucasus, the already shaky Soviet economy might be pushed over the edge. 

In more immediate terms, the Japanese position remained a strong one in the Pacific. They may have lost much of their offensive striking power at Midway, but they were still in possession of huge swathes of Asia, vast amounts of natural resources, and a navy still capable of island hopping its way towards smaller objectives, complete with at least 2 modern aircraft carriers. The Allies were very well aware of the Japanese intention to continue fighting in the south west pacific, and not at all badly.

Back in New Zealand, Vandegrift’s Marines were a mixture of a very small number of very experienced men who had been in the corps for decades (in such forgotten conflicts as the Banana Wars), and a very large number of raw recruits who were enthusiastic but had no combat experience at all. With very few exceptions, the Marines who had seen combat this war were either in Japanese captivity (and experiencing all the horrors thereof), or dead. None of that should have mattered however, because as far as the Marines were concerned, they would not be fighting until 1943.

All of this was about to change, for reasons which were, at first, obscure. Far to the north west, several hundred miles to the north east of Australia, just east of New Guinea, lie the Solomon Islands. These volcanic islands jutting out into the Pacific had been occupied by various peoples since before the Bronze Age, but by the 19th Century had become colonial possessions, split between Britain and Germany. Britain had turned the whole of the area into BSIP, the British Solomon Island Protectorate, following the First World War, but despite their best efforts they had not managed to boost the population past a few thousand, with few white settlers. As the Japanese grew closer, even this small smattering of residents was evacuated, leaving a small number who elected to become coastwatchers, reporting to Australian intelligence by radio.

Initially in 1942, there was not much to report. The Japanese did indeed eventually splash ashore in April, but even for them the islands were more of a pub quiz question than a military necessity, and so it was only a small number of naval engineers. Nevertheless, as the months progressed, things did start to happen which the coastwatchers found interesting; on one of the smaller islands, Tulagi, the piers and anchorage of a seaplane base were gradually taking shape. Australian intelligence passed this on to the United States. 

Following Midway, U.S. Naval Command was quick to start thinking big. Admiral Nimitz, and his superior Admiral King, were already considering the possibilities for taking the initiative, and taking back territory. Knowing as they did that a seaplane base was taking shape off Tulagi, and that the Solomons were not fortified, it seemed a logical place to start. King ordered Nimitz to begin preparations to retake Tulagi and associated islands, with the operation (codenamed WATCHTOWER) to begin not later than 1st August. OVERLORD, the liberation of Normandy, would take nearly 2 years of planning; they had a handful of weeks.

Almost immediately, things began to go wrong. King was acting without the joint chiefs of staff, and when General Douglas MacArthur (U.S. Army) heard that the Navy were planning an operation in a part of the south-west Pacific that had already been agreed as his prerogative, he went ballistic, threatening to withdraw any support from the operation. He did have a point; the Solomons were an awfully long way from any assets the Allies, and he had only a handful of B-17s that could even reach the Solomon Islands, no other aircraft that could be used, and no troops in any position to help. With a huge amount of inter-service argument (Admiral King threatened to go ahead regardless of the Army’s opinion), assuaged only by George Marshall (the very under-appreciated head of the U.S. Army), eventually WATCHTOWER was given the green light.

Back in the Solomons, the attention of the coastwatchers had shifted from Tulagi to a larger island just to the south called Guadalcanal. In the relatively flat north of the island, the Japanese engineers were busy clearing away the jungle. Why they were doing this was a mystery; what could they be constructing in this backwater? It took some days, as the bulldozers crunched through more and more foliage, to work out, and only by taking several days of observation, as large, empty buildings started to go up, did it become obvious; what they were building was an airfield. This sent alarm bells ringing throughout the intelligence community. If the Japanese could finish this airfield, their aircraft could range deep into the pacific, and threaten the supply routes to Australia; the focus of the operation had to shift to Guadalcanal, and its importance had been dramatically underlined.

With no land-based air power, it would fall to the Navy to use their aircraft carriers to support a landing. At the time these were under the command of Admiral Frank Fletcher, who had just fought at Coral Sea and indeed at Midway; even to Vandegrift, who was himself in his late 50s, Fletcher seemed to have aged immensely. Admiral Ghormley, who had been put in charge of the overall operation by Nimitz, for understandable reasons wanted to keep the air cover of the carriers for as long as possible. General Vandegrift had done his homework, and established that they would need at least 5 days to unload their supplies once landed; Fletcher, under the strain of months of operations, and knowing that the Japanese could do to him what he had done to them at Midway, offered just 2 days. 

This only added to Vandegrift’s unease; his practice runs in Fiji had gone poorly; his young troops simply had no idea how to co-ordinate a complicated amphibious landing. Worse still, the one definite advantage that U.S. troops should have had, the superb, semi-automatic M1 Garand rifle, was not available, as a result of squabbling about its durability, and admin delays, none of the Marines were actually armed with them. Instead they would go into battle armed with a mix of bolt-action M1903 rifles, interspersed with M1918 Browning Automatic Rifles (BARs). In case you were wondering, both 1903 and 1918 refer to the introduction dates of those weapons; that’s right, they would be assaulting the Japanese with weapons entirely familiar to their fathers in WW1. Nor would they be going in with particularly state of the art landing craft. We modern people will doubtless picture the landing craft with a big ramp at the front, no doubt tinged a little by the opening scene from Saving Private Ryan, but while these were starting to appear (along with amphibious tracked vehicles which would later become the iconic AmTrack), most of the Marines would have to clamber over the side of Higgins Boats, and wade ashore from there. 

Even that most basic of aids to an amphibious landing, an accurate map, was absent; the only maps available had been drawn up in the late 19th century, their soundings of the sea depth were long out of date, and they had no maps at all of the interior of the islands. In the end they could only rely on the testimony of the few Solomon Islanders, which only gave a very rough idea of what they could expect.

At this critical juncture, industrial relations (of all things) became an issue, as the civilian longshoremen in New Zealand who were supposed to load the transport ships decided to go on strike. With no clear alternative, Vandegrift instructed the Marines (who had had no training in this sort of thing) to load the ships themselves. Far from the high-sounding WATCHTOWER, the troops began to call the forthcoming operation SHOESTRING, and Admiral Fletcher’s eventual offer of 3 days of air cover (still short of the 5 days really needed) did little to ease his concerns.

Still, the fleet which eventually assembled (about a week behind the original timeline) was formidable; it consisted of the fleet carriers Saratoga, Enterprise, and Wasp, heavily protected by a screen of cruisers, destroyers, and even the new fast battleship North Carolina which was barely a year old. The transport fleet (led by Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner), was escorted by the Australian heavy cruisers Australia and Canberra, paired with the USS Chicago, the Australian light cruiser Hobart and no fewer than 9 destroyers (interestingly, this escort group was commanded by Read Admiral Victor Crutchley, RN. Yes, RN as in Royal Navy, he was British). They could also call on a further 3 heavy cruisers, an anti-aircraft light cruiser and a further 6 destroyers for fire support to the landings.

Warming up in the half-light of the morning of the 7th August, on the sun-bleached wooden flight decks of the U.S. carriers (among all the other aircraft we talked about last time) were Grumman F4F Wildcat fighters. This was the very same type that had fought at Coral Sea and Midway, the backbone of American air strength thus far in the war, and on paper a very modern aeroplane; the Wildcat was of all-metal, stressed skin construction; it had a retractable undercarriage, and its 9 cylinder Pratt & Whitney radial engine featured a 2 stage supercharger, bringing power up to a respectable 1200 hp, and drove a metal, 3 blade, constant speed propeller.

These facts belied the truth about the Wildcat. As its pilots had known all along, the Wildcat had some significant shortcomings compared with its main opponent, the Mistubishi A6M Zero; the Zero was not only faster in a straight line, it was also more manoeuvrable in all axes, could climb faster, and could outrange its U.S. contemporaries. Even the “upgrades” that had been made from the -3 to -4 model had been of dubious benefit; the folding wings may have allowed more Wildcats to be stored on a carrier, but they had made the wings even heavier, compounded by the update from 4x to 6x .50 calibre machine guns (4 was generally held to be perfectly adequate, and 6 guns not only made the aircraft heavier, but reduced the rounds per gun that could be carried, so they had less firing time). Despite their efforts, nothing had made this aeroplane, which started life as the F3F biplane, any more formidable.

Nevertheless, the Wildcat did have some real strengths which are not at first obvious, and it was generally well-liked by its pilots. The engine was extremely reliable and durable, and being air cooled there was no cooling system to fail or get damaged. While she was a heavy aircraft for her size, that weight had been spent on the whole wisely; the fuel tanks were self-sealing, and the pilot was well-protected by armour plating. The airframe too was legendarily strong, and it was this strength which bought the Wildcat its primary advantage over the competition; it could dive at well over 500 mph, which the more fragile Zero could not follow, a comforting thought for the pilots scanning their instruments on that morning.

With the dawn, aeroplanes began to launch from the U.S. carriers, and set a course for Guadalcanal, Tulagi, and the amusingly named Florida Island. The fire support ships drew closer to the shore, and along with the dive bombers from the carrier began to turn Tulagi and the northern shoreline of Guadalcanal into swiss cheese. 8 inch and 5 inch naval guns roared, as the first of the troops, the Marine Raiders (a sort of proto-special forces, but until they get a series called Marine Raiders: Rogue Heroes, will not get much attention this side of the pond), stormed Tulagi. Comfortingly, the only Japanese aircraft turned out to be the seaplanes at their base, which were quickly put out of action.

However, General Vandegrift cannot have been put at ease by their performance on Tulagi. Japanese resistance was greater than expected, with the raiders taking far more casualties and time to achieve their objectives. If this was the reception on the relatively small and un-airfielded Tulagi, the much larger Guadalcanal seemed a daunting prospect. With no prospect of turning back, the transports pushed on as the sun rose high, and nerves rose higher, Marines climbing down into their boats and motoring towards the northern shore. A combination of nerves and the swell made sea sickness rife. With the smell of cordite filling the air, the boom of naval gunfire and the scream of aircraft overhead, expecting the Japanese to be waiting for them, the boats hit the beach, soldiers leaping over the side.

And then… nothing. No-one. It seemed eerie at first, but the landing was entirely un-opposed. Without knowing why, there was a scramble to unload transports, to get the men ashore what they would ultimately need to carry out the operation, as advanced parties began to snake their way through the jungle to surround the airfield. Unfortunately, the Marines had managed to load many of their transports backwards; what you are supposed to do is load the things that you need immediately (usually weapons, ammunition etc.) last; this means that when you unload the transport, those things are available first. In the confusion of the longshoreman’s strike and a lack of experience, the Marines found in many cases their weapons and ammunition were in fact underneath tents, canteens, and other longer term items. In a desperate scramble, they threw them into the sea, or scattered them across the beach, in a repeat of the chaos of their practice runs. 

They were relying on luck, not knowing when the Japanese might strike, and time was already running out, a fact dramatically underlined by the appearance of Japanese aircraft, fighting running battles with the U.S. Wildcats, and not doing at all badly. Fletcher began to worry about losses. The Marines began to wonder how long it would be before their transports were hit.

At least initially though, their luck appeared to be holding. The first of the light tanks began to run ashore, their 37 mm guns doubtless a comforting presence, and the advance parties of Marine Raiders were not encountering much resistance. Even the night of the 7th passed relatively peacefully, as they continued to encircle Lunga point, the area where the Japanese airfield-to-be was located. The 8th saw sporadic fighting, and more frantic unloading on the beaches, but no significant setbacks for the allies; or so it seemed. By nightfall, the airfield was in U.S. hands, and had even acquired a new name; Henderson field, after a Marine Corps aviator killed at Midway. 

Meanwhile, to the northwest, Admiral Crutchley (RN) and his cruisers and destroyers had been guarding the approaches, to prevent any Japanese naval units breaking through to the transport ships still unloading. They felt pretty confident they could do this; after all, at least some of Crutchley’s cruisers were equipped with radar, something the Japanese were known to have not equipped. In theory, they would get further advance warning even than their radar. Not only did the Australians have a network of coastwatchers who could radio in sightings, they also had reconnaissance aircraft operating out of Milne Bay in New Guinea, perfectly placed to spot any ships coming down from the Japanese fleet base at Rabaul. 

Unfortunately, theory and practice somewhat differ. The aircraft did indeed spot the Japanese force of cruisers and destroyers, and made several attempts to radio this sighting in. When this did not appear to work, they returned to base and personally reported the sighting to their superiors, but this was never passed to the U.S. or Royal navies, so Crutchley was unaware. While it was not immediately obvious, the radar of the time could not differentiate friend from foe, and so as the Japanese crept into Crutchley’s formation, they failed to raise alarm bells on the allied ships.

A star shell exploded over the allied ships, turning day to night, as Japanese 8 inch shells rained on the startled Americans and Australians off Savo island. They might have fought back bravely, but they had no idea precisely where the Japanese force was, and the result was a tragedy for the Allies. By daybreak on the 9th August, 1,077 Allied sailors would be dead, 4 heavy cruisers would be sunk, with another damaged, and the remnants of the force would limp back east to lick their wounds. The Japanese cruisers (under Admiral Gunichi Mikawa) had all the time in the world to break off, see to their relatively minor damage, and were well outside the range of allied air cover the following morning. 

This Battle of Savo Island precipitated a dramatic turn of events on the Allied side. Admiral Fletcher, already nervous about the prospect of a run-in with the Imperial Japanese Navy, running short of fuel and having taken much higher aircraft losses than he was comfortable with, announced that he was going to withdraw the Enterprise, Saratoga, and Wasp, along with their escorts, and steam south to refuel. Ghormley, taken by surprise at the soon-to-be-absent air cover, was left with the choice of leaving the transports there, to be picked off by Japanese air and naval attacks, or withdrawing them to safety. He chose the latter. With barely half of their supplies ashore, Vandegrift’s 1st Marine Division, all 11,000 of them, were abandoned in the Solomons, hundreds of miles from the nearest Allied base, with no air cover and at best weeks until relief. 

The U.S. Marines are not famed for sitting around waiting to be destroyed. Thus it was that Vandegrift set them to work; their great hope was that if they could get the airfield operational, they could base their own aircraft there, giving them a measure of protection against aerial attack, and some real striking power of their own. Work began on extending the runway, and sorting through what supplies they had captured from the enemy. Other marines were put to work building a defensive perimeter around the airfield and beachhead, digging in emplacements for artillery, machine gun nests, scraping out foxholes, anything to impede the inevitable Japanese counter attack. With much of their equipment either dumped in the sea or heading off in the wrong direction, they improvised, taking what the Japanese had left behind, stringing up their own barbed wire against them. Still others began to patrol the jungle, scouting for enemy presence that was eerily elusive, but they knew must come one of these days.

Some problems became apparent almost immediately. A warm island in the Pacific sounds almost like a pleasant holiday destination, however, a warm Pacific island with extremely high humidity, low lying stagnant water, hordes of mosquitoes and other insects, is not so much a restful vacation and more a breeding ground for disease. Malaria and other fevers sprang up within days. 

Malarial treatment in 1942 was going through something of a revolution. For centuries, Malaria had been treated with Quinine, which is derived from the bark of a particular species of Peruvian tree. It was relatively obscure until it was used to cure Charles II, and from that point on, became the go-to treatment. The only real drawback of Quinine was its bitter taste, but mixed with a little sugar and water it could be turned into an easily consumed tonic (incidentally the origin of the tonic water we now use with gin). Unfortunately for Vandegrift’s marines, a nice G&T was not on the cards; thanks partly to the shortage of fresh water, but mostly because, owing to supply chain difficulties, the drug they actually had to hand was not Quinine but the relatively new Atabrine, a synthetic alternative that had been synthesised barely a decade previously. It did work in treating Malaria, but the side effects could be easily worse; dizziness, abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, and (strangely) yellow skin discolouration were all reported, and often with wrong dosages did occur. A rumour did the rounds that Atabrine caused erectile dysfunction and sterilisation (although neither are reported in the medical literature, there is a note on the Wikipedia page that there were attempts to use it in female sterilisation, although when, and with what dose is not clear), which was completely false, but it did stop some marines from taking the tablets which led, surprise surprise, to more malaria.

There was bad news for the marines even if they had not succumbed to tropical disease. With over half their supplies either in the sea itself or sailing away towards New Zealand, the stock cupboard was bare. They might have been digging in, but they estimated they had just 3 days worth of ammunition, not enough for a prolonged battle. Worse (and more immediate) news came from their stocks of food, or lack thereof. Very few of their rations had made it ashore; to ward off complete starvation they would have to turn to the large stocks of rice Japan’s naval engineers had kindly left behind. Unfortunately the Japanese hadn’t been kind enough to store the rice properly, and so by the time the marines were actually eating it, it had become infested with weevils, worms, and maggots, something boiling it only partially removed. Worse still, there was not enough of it to support 11,000 marines for months; at times they would be down to just two tablespoons of rice a day.

Suffice to say, all the above, coupled with sleeping in the open (their tents having been thrown largely into the sea), made life extremely uncomfortable. Weight loss was severe on men already somewhat malnourished from the Great Depression, and the psychological impact of being abandoned, not knowing when the enemy were going to strike, took its little toll on the souls of men, not helped by the Japanese flying aircraft overhead at night, dropping the odd small bomb, just to keep the Americans awake.  The tension would carry on for 13 days.

It was at this point that two important things happened. On the 20th, the first U.S. aircraft arrived, a mixture of Marine Corps Wildcats and SBD Dauntless Dive Bombers. The reality was they had been put together somewhat hastily, the pilots had barely had a month of training after leaving flight school, and had been launched from the aircraft carrier USS Long Island, which sounds impressive, but was actually a converted merchant ship, with such a small flight deck the Marine Corps aviators had had to endure a very risky catapult launch. Nevertheless, as the first Dauntless arrived, General Vandegrift ran out to shake the pilots hands, almost pathetically stating “thank God you’re here”.

This was actually just the latest in a series of small attempts to keep the Marines supplied; the odd ship had made it through to land some supplies in the intervening two weeks. Speaking of supplies, Fletcher and his carriers had also not been idle; they had retreated to Noumea, a port in the then-French possession of New Caledonia, replenished their air group losses with new Wildcats, Dauntles and Avengers, restocked ammunition, and were already back to sea, armed this time with some extra intelligence. The Japanese were at sea.

Frank “Jack” Fletcher may have been reluctant to risk his carriers to save a tiny ex-British island he doubted the Marines could hold, but he was quite prepared to send them out to hunt down the Imperial Japanese Navy. He had sent the carriers racing down to the Coral Sea, had pushed for Saratoga to get out in time for Midway, and now he was going to do it again. Intelligence suggested that a large Japanese force had assembled at the Japanese base at Truk, probably including the Zuikaku and Shokaku, the last surviving large carriers the Japanese possessed, and perhaps including the converted liner Ryujo into the bargain, and Fletcher was determined to find them and put them on the bottom.

The second important thing that happened was that the Japanese Army finally attacked. This too was not entirely unexpected; on the 19th, hearing rumours of Japanese presence, a patrol made up of Marines, some British and Australian coastwatchers, and a mixture of other Solomon islanders, had gone out beyond the perimeter, and picked their way carefully through the jungle to a place called Koli point. The man up front motioned for the others to keep their heads down, and pointed out figures, dressed in the unmistakable khaki of the Japanese army. Clearly, somewhere on the island they had landed, and they too appeared to be patrolling, looking for trouble with the Americans. In a stroke of luck, they did not seem to have noticed the allied patrol, and so, ever so carefully, ever so quietly, the 60 men crept into an ambush position, the tension excruciating in the heat and stifling humidity of an August day in the south Pacific. With a sharp intake of breath, rifles cracked, and Japanese fell; to their credit they reacted quickly, returning fire, killing 3 of the Marines, but in a brutally short action, the bodies of the Japanese soldiers lay shot through, limp in their uniforms. Something even more important, however, was evident in the pockets of those uniforms; plans and insignia. It appeared that this patrol was part of a much larger unit (though exactly how large was not clear), and that they were intending to attack the Marine positions.

The focal point of this attack was an area known the Marines as Alligator Creek (in reality these were crocodiles, but not having left the USA before, most Marines would not know the difference). This is an area where the river Tenaru flows down towards the sea near a place called Lunga Point, and the river with its associated banks was a natural place to anchor the eastern defences of Henderson Field.  19th August turned to the 20th, and the 20th eased into the 21st. 

And it was at precisely this point, in the moonlit darkness just past midnight, that the usual sounds of the jungle were subtly interrupted. Marines in foxholes on the east side of the creek could hear the small but subtle noise of men whispering to one another, and not in English, accompanied by the rustle of equipment. Sensibly, the Marines fell back quietly over the river, and deployed in their prepared positions, behind a single strand of barbed wire. Gun crews manned their 37 mm weapons, 1903 Springfield rifles were pulled up into the shoulder… and just then the sky to the east flashed, the rustling replaced with the boom of mortars landing among the Marines. A great mass of Japanese men pushed their way down the bank and into the river, wading across, chanting, but they never stood a chance, as the Marines struck back with their own mortars and 37 mm guns, firing canister shot filled with ball bearings. The immense din was joined by the crack of rifles as the Japanese reached the western bank, but just as soon as it started, the attack petered out, bodies floating in the river, ghostly in the dim light, others laying as misshapen, crumpled heaps on the west bank. 

The peace was not to last. At 02:30, the Japanese tried again, using very similar tactics, and again, in a cacophony of rifle fire, canister shot, and mortars, they were cut down. As the sun began to rise, at around 05:00, Japanese troops attempted to flank the creek completely, moving around the beach at Lunga Point, but this open ground proved ideal for machine gun fire and allowed the Marine artillery, such as it was, to range in on them with ease. Not all were killed, but the Japanese did something quite rare here; they abandoned the attack, falling back east towards the east bank of the Tenaru.

As the sun rose further, the Marines were able to play their trump card. Over on Henderson field, the brief whir of electric motors was cut by the spluttering of gasoline in cylinders, as the Pratt & Whitney engines of the SBD dive bombers thundered to life. Within minutes they were in the air, and tossing 500 lb bombs among the remaining Japanese troops, followed shortly thereafter by the guttural screams of Marines, as, bayonets fixed, they charged across the river and slaughtered what remained of the Japanese force.

It was here they discovered a lesson which had never been fed back to the states; the Japanese did not surrender easily, even in the most hopeless of circumstances. Several wounded men would scream for help, before then trying to pull the pins on grenades and take a Marine with them. Only quick marksmanship had saved many a Marine from a grizzly fate. Other Japanese attempted to escape back onto the beach, and only the quick intervention of the few tanks on the island prevented them from causing more casualties. Nevertheless, Marine morale was good, and deservedly so; what they had just done was something almost unheard of in 1942; they had defeated a Japanese land force, and decisively so. The “Ichiki” detachment, nearly 900 strong and including their Colonel Ichiki, had been wiped out for less than 100 marine casualties.

The next day, as the US Navy and IJN swept through the south west Pacific, there was some more good news for the weary Marines on Henderson Field, because the U.S. Army Air Force was coming to the party. As the 22nd wore on, the air once again filled with the noise of aircraft engines, and coming in low over the jungle turned out to be the P-39 and P-400 Airacobras of the 67th Fighter squadron. Exactly how the Marines reacted is unfortunately lost to history (one imagines a lot of them barely noticed) but those more familiar with aircraft might have been a little dismayed.

They would have been dismayed because even at this early stage, the Airacobra was developing a bad reputation. It was a very unusual looking aeroplane for its day, with a “tricycle” undercarriage (virtually all modern aeroplanes have this layout but at the time, anything other than a “taildragger” was very rare), the engine mounted in the middle, and with a “car door” to get in, rather than the usual opening canopy. It also had a very unusual armament, at least for an American aircraft, in that it had a cannon firing through the propeller hub, and a mixture of .30 and .50 calibre machine guns, two firing through the prop, and the other two in the wings. None of this should necessarily have crippled the reputation of the aircraft, but it was all very odd.

One big factor in the Airacobra’s unpopularity was its engine. In common with many U.S. fighters at this time, both the P-39 and P-400 were fitted with Allison V-1710 engines. On paper, this should have been a fine engine, in many ways comparable to the legendary Rolls-Royce Merlin, with both engines being 60^o V-12s, both having four valves per cylinder, and both having overhead camshafts. Even the displacements were similar; the Merlin was a 27 litre, with the V-1710 being around 28 litres. They were so similar in fact that in many aircraft, either engine could be equipped.

The big difference between the two is in how they are supercharged. The Merlin featured a large, two-speed centrifugal supercharger that was continuously tweaked and upgraded, whereas the Allison (at least from the factory) only came with a small, single speed centrifugal blower. While this was still technically a supercharger (many sources claim that they had no supercharger at all, which is not true, there is no way that the Allison would have been making 1200 hp without one), it really restricted what the engine could do.

Allow me to explain; internal combustion engines, in very basic terms, burn a fuel with oxygen from the air. As you go higher of course, the air gets thinner. This is why people climbing Everest often need their own oxygen supply, and it plays havoc with engines, as without much oxygen around, they struggle to burn fuel, vastly reducing their power. What is needed is some way to force more air into the engine, and the supercharger, which draws more air in and compresses it before it enters the engine, did just that. The trouble is (to massively oversimplify), having just one speed or stage limits how much pressure can be generated, and this gets worse as the air gets thinner and thinner. This resulted in a dramatic drop-off in the power of the Allison above 14,000 ft as the engine simply was not getting enough air to burn the fuel to make more power. As a lot of the air combat was happening above this height, the Airacobra was really struggling; even at lower heights where the Airacobra was fast, Japanese fighters diving down from above could and did outpace the unlucky Americans.  Before long, the Marine Corps Wildcats (with their two stage superchargers) would be grabbing most of the glory, with the USAAF planes desperately trying to run away, until a new role could be found for them.

None of this, it should be noted, was Allison’s fault, nor can blame really be laid at Bell Aircraft (the Airacobra’s manufacturer). See in the 1930s, the USAAF was investing heavily in turbochargers, which is in essence the same thing as a supercharger except driven from the exhaust of the engine, rather than being mechanically driven from the crankshaft. Both the P-38 Lightning and the P-47 Thunderbolt would go on to be very successful with these turbochargers, so it definitely worked out in the end, but as a result of this obsession, Allison were instructed to design an engine with only a second stage blower, as it was assumed that the first stage would come from a turbocharger. In fact the early concept for the Airacobra (and the first prototype) were designed for this turbocharger, which never materialised, being far too bulky to fit into a small fighter. As a result all the production aeroplanes had only that single blower.

The pilots and crews of the P-400s probably felt even less confident. Otherwise identical to the P-39, the P-400 has a different designation because it was designed for the British. Back in the dark days of 1940, with a German invasion seemingly imminent, the Air Ministry were none too picky about what they would order; Bell had sold them on some performance figures that looked impressive on paper (largely based on having that turbocharger), and they were not going to fact check this too closely. They made a few small changes to the specification (largely around changing out the weapons for 0.303 calibre rather than 0.3, swapping out the default 37 mm cannon for a 20 mm Hispano cannon), and the French also ordered some to a similar spec. When these aircraft finally arrived in Britain in the spring of 1941 (including those originally intended for the French), the Royal Air Force was not pleased. It was immediately apparent that the aircraft did not perform as advertised, particularly at altitude, and to add insult to injury, the layout of the guns made it difficult to service the engine, refuel, and rearm at the same time, something the RAF was anticipating needing to do. Only one RAF squadron ever operated the P-400 as a result, and the rest of the order was cancelled, those planes already produced being crated up and placed in storage. 

These crated up aeroplanes had been shipped to the Pacific when a rather bizarre idea to try invading mainland Europe had been cancelled in June, and the 67th fighter squadron had made heroic efforts to get these aircraft assembled, flying, and getting the pilots familiar with them in a very short space of time. Rumours abound about what these aircraft may or may not have had; most sources seem to agree that the manuals were missing, or at the very least that documentation was limited; other sources claim that the P-400s were fitted for British oxygen systems, and were incompatible with the U.S. system, so the pilots were going into combat with no oxygen masks, but I have no way to confirm any of these claims. The basic point is that these were not ideal circumstances. 

Usefulness of the land-based aircraft aside, with Fletcher’s carriers at sea, and the IJN bearing down on Guadalcanal, the stage was set for another carrier battle. Unfortunately this time the U.S. Navy did not have the benefit of knowing where the enemy was, and spent most of the 23rd steaming around southeast of Guadalcanal, sending out search aircraft who found little except a handful of Japanese submarines, indicating that there was something afoot in the area, but not precisely what was afoot. Enterprise, Saratoga,  and their escorts continued to steam northwards, pursing reports of the Ryujo somewhere north of the Solomon Islands, and although Saratoga launched a strike of several dive bombers, they failed to find the target and ended up having to land on Guadalcanal.

On the morning of the 24th, after several fruitless searches, their luck finally turned; another patrol plane based on Guadalcanal made another sighting of Ryujo and her accompanying ships. In the afternoon aircraft from Enterprise finally made contact with Ryujo, as well as another force consisting of 2 carriers (we now know these to have been the Zuikaku  and Shokaku). Unfortunately these reports were somewhat scrambled as there was very poor radio discipline, and with everyone trying to transmit at once, it took several attempts to actually get the message across. As soon as it was, Enterprise and Saratoga began to prepare dive and torpedo bombers to hit both these targets, but those of the Enterprise simply waited on deck while Fletcher decided what to do with the garbled information he was receiving.

Saratoga’s aircraft were more lucky and were free to go about their business. Sure enough, the dive and torpedo bombers found Ryujo and screamed down from the sky, putting at least 3 bombs on target and leaving the light carrier a burning wreck, to be picked at by land-based aircraft before she would finally slip beneath the waves.

Back on Enterprise, time was to force Fletcher’s hand. At 16:32, Enterprise’s radar detected a large flight of aircraft to the northwest, at about 90 miles distance. These raiders then disappeared from the radar screen while the other ships in the task force quietly prayed they weren’t immediately going to be attacked. At 16:49, the raiders reappeared on the radar screen, and six minutes later the fighters covering the American carriers finally spotted the raid, at least 36 attack aircraft with numerous Zero fighters escorting. 

Chaos now reigned as both carriers scrambled to clear their decks, launching fighters, followed by the strike aircraft previously prepared, all chatting on the radio, along with the fighters already in the air beginning combat with the Japanese force. By 1703, the last aircraft had cleared the deck of Enterprise, and to avoid attack she had wound herself up to 27 knots, manoeuvring wildly to avoid the imminent attack. 

During the attack that followed, Enterprise was struck by 3 bombs, one near the no.3 elevator which penetrated several decks, before exploding in the chief petty officer’s mess. Several sailors were killed instantly, large holes were opened up, the hangar deck buckled, and a large fire was started on 2 deck. Another hit a large collection of anti-aircraft guns, causing a huge number of casualties and starting a vicious fire, and a third hit the flight deck on the starboard side, causing largely shock damage, all the way down to the waterline. Damage control efforts started immediately as fire crews hosed down the burning anti-aircraft gallery with foam, while still others battled to patch holes in the flight deck.

Meanwhile, some of the Japanese aircraft had abandoned the attack on Enterprise and went after the battleship North Carolina. She was not only armoured to withstand 16 inch shell hits reasonably well, but also bristled with 5 inch and smaller anti-aircraft guns, and so ferocious was their fire that many incorrectly reported that the ship herself was ablaze. No hits were scored on North Carolina.

The parties shoring up Enterprise’s flight deck at last succeeded in patching it up sufficiently, and at 1800 the wounded ship was even able to steam at 24 knots into the wind and collect some of her aircraft. This was brought to an abrupt halt a few minutes later; the crews desperately fighting the fires in the anti-aircraft battery had quite naturally attempted to dowse the flames with huge quantities of foam, but this had dripped down the decks and ended up in the steering room with the motors controlling the ship’s rudder, shorting them out and leaving Enterprise with no steering. Fortunately Saratoga was able to at least land the remaining aircraft while her sister fought for her life.

Smug British historians may point out at this juncture that British aircraft carriers all had armoured flight decks rather than the wooden decks of American ones, and were (it is argued) much better ships by dint of this, perhaps better able to survive the sort of punishment meted out at the so-called Battle of the Eastern Solomons. This is an argument that still rages across the internet and indeed probably will still be being argued long into the future, so we are definitely not going to put it to bed now, but it is worth explaining why I think the Americans were actually correct, if for no other reason than it is an interesting tangent.

From our privileged vantage point in the present day, it would seem that the British policy was correct. Indeed, all modern aircraft carriers from every country (currently including the British, French, Chinese, Russians, Indians, technically a few smaller nations, and the Americans themselves) have metal flight decks and many of these are to one degree or another armoured. We could also look at what happened later on and the very different experiences of British and American carriers coming under kamikaze attack, but neither 2025 era aircraft carriers nor kamikazes existed in 1942. 

By 1942, the world was only just emerging from the inter-war era of the naval treaty. There are many interesting aspects of these treaties, but for now just know that the total tonnage of various types of ship (including aircraft carriers) was restricted. So to make up, say, an allowance of 100,000 tonnes of aircraft carriers, would it be better to have 5x 20,000 tonne ships, or just 3x 33,000 tonne ones? Almost everyone preferred having 5; such considerations are not valid today with no such limit to how big you can make the carrier, but at the time they did force some trade-offs.

The heavy armoured flight decks of British carriers may have helped survivability, but the structure needed to support that made the hangars more cramped, and as a result they could not host anything like as many aircraft. For comparison, let us take HMS Ark Royal. In every dimension she was very similar to the USS Enterprise (often within a few feet), so you would imagine that the air groups would be similar, but no. Ark Royal could manage 60 aircraft (often putting to sea with fewer), whereas Enterprise could comfortably manage 90, and often carried more. 

Even survivability is a somewhat questionable aspect; certainly the flight deck armour did absolutely nothing to stop submarine attacks, as the crews of Eagle, Ark Royal, and Courageous found out to their cost. Several British carriers took severe damage in the Mediterranean from German air activity, which only made them more vulnerable to submarines. The little 11,000 tonne Hermes also failed completely to withstand Japanese air attack, and we cannot forget that multiple battleships with even thicker deck armour were crippled and/or sunk by air attack.

Aircraft, as we have seen, were rapidly becoming the defining weapon of naval combat, and being able to carry more of them was a definite advantage, their good offence probably just as great a defence as some additional armour. Indeed, having large numbers of effective aircraft may have saved Glorious from her fate in Norway (a topic for another day). This is normally where the discussion ends; the U.S. ships had better striking power, the British were a little tougher but lacked the punch. But why?

One of the many reasons is to do with doctrine, that is, the way an armed service intends to fight. Between the wars, the U.S. Navy had been experimenting extensively with combat uses for aircraft carriers, and several exercises (known as “Fleet Problems”) had revealed how useful they could be, not to mention the (somewhat questionable but influential) work of figures like Billy Mitchell. Meanwhile, the Royal Navy had lost control of the aircraft on the flight decks; the RAF had actually absorbed the nascent Royal Naval Air Service in 1918, and the Royal Navy had only regained control of the renamed Fleet Air Arm in 1939. It is not surprising that little work had been done on using aircraft, and with the strong influence of the battleship lobby, coupled with the short time and money available, it is even less surprising that the doctrine they ended up with was unimaginative; Find, Fix, Strike. This meant that the role of the Fleet Air Arm was to find the enemy fleet, “fix” it in place by causing damage, and strike to make it weaker, while the battleships arrived and did the real fighting. In such a scenario, not many aircraft were needed, and it made sense to use the unneeded space to add some protection.

Now, in the interests of time, we are going to leave this tangent into aircraft carrier design and return to the south west Pacific. Stubborn fires continued to burn aboard Enterprise as she fought to regain steering, as night at last fell, and a smaller group of Japanese ships (a mix of cruisers, destroyers and transports) snuck towards Guadalcanal, trying to put troops ashore, bombard the Marines, and put this whole business to bed. By the time the sun rose on the 25th, Enterprise had finally put out the fires of the previous day, and the Japanese carriers were nowhere to be seen; this new group of ships was bombed intensively by the Dauntless dive bombers of Guadalcanal, and somehow managed to get unlucky enough to get hit by a B-17 of all things. This group too was forced into a retreat back towards Rabaul.

Back aboard Enterprise and Saratoga, while the dead were buried at sea, records were being compiled, and the after-action report was being compiled (one of the best sources on this particular battle). This was quite the task since the pilots and anti-aircraft gunners had claimed a total of 70 aircraft destroyed; even at the time they knew this could not possibly be true (remember they only detected 36 aircraft in the first place), so how had so many been claimed?

Let us do a quick thought experiment. Put yourself in the cockpit of one of those Wildcat fighters; it is a noisy environment, your engine churning away ahead, the confusion of aeroplanes all around, both your own, and the enemy’s, visible above, below, to the side. Fully aware that a wrong move could spell your death, adrenaline surges through your veins, as G-forces tug at your circulation, almost making you black out one moment, and red out the next. A Zero dives down in front of you, briefly flashing into your sights, you pull the trigger, and your tracer zips towards the enemy plane. A few seconds later, it explodes. Surely this is your kill? Well, it may be true that you damaged it, but the killing blow could just as easily have come from one of your comrades, or from a burst of anti-aircraft fire, or perhaps even friendly fire from another Japanese aircraft, or more likely some combination of the above. So even without meaning to, it was somewhat inevitable that the same aircraft would be claimed multiple times; the Japanese archives reveal that the number shot down was not in fact 70, or even all 36, but 25. 

Even this was narrowly a victory, despite the heavy damage to Enterprise. You see, while the Americans were able to recover the vast majority of their downed aircrew, the Japanese, fighting above the U.S. task force and the U.S. held waters around Guadalcanal, were unable to recover any. Aircrew take much time and effort to train (at least if you want them to be effective), far more so than the average sailor or soldier, so this in and of itself was a big loss. And of course, the light carrier Ryujo was also on the bottom, whereas Enterprise was still underway.

Whatever the case, by the 25th August the few remaining Japanese troops on Guadalcanal were not reinforced. The 1st Marine Division remained ashore, a long way from Allied help but nevertheless still there having survived for 3 weeks with few supplies, no facilities, disease, heat, humidity, and a ferocious Japanese counterattack. The seas around the Solomons had already been the stage for two naval battles, and the skies reverberated daily with the sound of American and Japanese aircraft locked in mortal combat. Both sides were to take a breath, as the campaign to hold onto Guadalcanal continued, but it was clear that the Americans were going nowhere in a hurry, and that if the Japanese wanted to retake the island, they were going to have to spend a lot more lives. 

A lesson one might take here (apart of course from all the various tangents) is that while in life we are not always fully prepared, or fully confident in taking a risk, we are often far more resilient than we first realise. We can take crushing losses and still achieve what we set out to achieve. 

Another take home point is that, as Winston Churchill famously said “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts”. The Allies may have been successful on that day, but there was no guarantee this would continue; the 1st Marines were going to have to steel themselves for what may be out there in the Pacific waters, and, at the risk of spoiling the rest of the story, for putting up with the horrendous conditions for a far, far longer time than they could have expected. Thus we are leaving this, as things are always in your own life, in medias res, perhaps for the best.

Finally, I think it is worth taking some time to reflect on the losses sustained. Casualties were relatively light on the ground, and in the air were by no means excessive (many of the crews bailed out and were recovered, as we have stated), but in the action on August 9th, I would like to pay tribute to the following:

United States Ships:

Quincy (CA-39)

Commissioned 1936, 
Built 1935 by the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation, Quincy, Massachusetts.
Lost with 370 dead.

Vincennes (CA-44)

Commissioned 1937,
Built 1935 by the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation, Quincy, Massachusetts.
Lost with 322 dead.

Astoria (CA-34)

Commissioned 1934,
Built 1933 by the Puget Sound Navy Yard, Bremerton, Washington.
Lost with 219 dead.

His Majesty’s Australian Ships:

Canberra (D33)

“Pro Rege, Lege et Grege” 
Commissioned 1928,
Built 1927 by John Brown & Company, Clydebank.
Lost with 84 dead.

We will add to this list as the story continues.

Bibliography

While this is by no means an academic piece and does not pretend to live up to those standards, there are some publications you may wish to explore if you want to know more.

The Metal Fighting Ship in the Royal Navy by E.H.H Archibald – 1st Edition, 1971. This one was a brilliant charity shop find, if you want some of the technical details and development history of, well, metal ships in the RN, look no further.

Carrier Operations in WWII – Volume II The Pacific Navies (Dec 1941 – Feb 1943) – 1st Edition, 1974. Another charity shop find, giving brief accounts of all the various battles. A bit limited if you want to study the Japanese side, but quite good for the Allies.

U.S.S. Enterprise – Action of August 24, 1942, Including Air Attack on U.S.S. Enterprise; Report of (dated September 5, 1942). Alas, I have no physical copy, but you can read the whole thing online.

The website of the U.S. Navy History & Heritage Command is of course superb, and well worth exploring for anything the U.S. Navy has been involved with in the past 250 years.

There are of course a lot of less formal sources:

Firstly, the excellent Greg’s Airplanes & Automobiles, who has done some extremely detailed work on World War 2 aircraft.

No list of naval history YouTube channels would be complete without the incomparable Drachinifel – who has detailed accounts not only of Guadalcanal but of particular ships, technologies, personalities, pretty much you name it.

Another brilliant channel is the Unauthorized History of the Pacific War – if you want to watch 2 historians and a former submarine commander discuss in fascinating detail the events in the pacific, this is definitely for you.

There were a lot of different online sources (apart from Greg) around the P-400 Airacobra, see here, here, and here. I was not able to confirm these sources very well, so fingers crossed it came across as somewhat doubting in the above.

Another podcast worth looking at is Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, in particular the series “Supernova in the East” – a far more expansive look at the Pacific War, including the Japanese perspective, and a lot of the reasons why they were doing these things.