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ON AUGUST 7, 1942, elements of the U.S. 1st Marine Division storm ashore on Guadalcanal, an island 90 miles long and 25 miles wide in the Solomons Archipelago of the South Pacific Ocean. Their objective is an airfield that the Japanese are constructing, from which long-range enemy air craft could menace the critical supply route between the United States and Australia. Although the Marines handily outnumber the Japanese garrison and swiftly capture the airfield—now named Henderson Field, in honor of a pilot killed in the recent Battle of Midway—their early victory is deceptive.

The invasion, called Operation Watchtower, has been mounted in haste and on a shoestring. It lacks unity of oversight: separate commanders are responsible for the landing force, the naval screening force, and the three aircraft carriers (Enterprise, Saratoga, and Wasp) covering the invasion. The 19,000 Marine invaders have received only rudimentary training in amphibious warfare and jungle combat. The available maps of Guadalcanal are so crude and inaccurate as to be worthless. Most critically, the invasion has been mounted without first completing one of the cardinal tasks of amphibious war fare: the isolation of the beachhead from a naval counterstroke by the enemy.

That counterstroke occurs the very next day. It begins with a massive Japanese air strike consisting of 53 Zero fighters and two-engine Betty bombers. Although the Japanese suffer heavier losses than the Americans—36 aircraft in two days of aerial battles, compared with 19 for the Americans—U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher con siders his carriers so vulnerable that he withdraws them.

On the night of August 8-9, a Japanese force under Admiral Gunichi Mikawa charges southeast down New Georgia Sound (known to the Allies as the Slot) toward Guadalcanal. Near tiny Savo Island, just off Guadalcanal’s western tip, the Japanese flotilla—a destroyer, 5 heavy cruisers, and 2 light cruisers— collides with the Allied screening force composed of 15 destroyers, 6 heavy cruisers, and 2 light cruisers. Mikawa opens fire with both his main batteries and salvoes of the fearsome “Long Lance” torpedo. In the ensuing melee the Japanese sink three American heavy cruisers, fatally damage a fourth, and pummel two destroyers, killing more than 1,500 seamen. It is a stunning display of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s skill at night engagements.

The British admiral in charge of the Allied screening force, Victor Crutchley, withdraws his ships, sending them to join Fletcher’s carriers in the open sea. Mikawa then goes after the helpless Allied transports, most of them still partially loaded with supplies and reinforcements, and systematically picks off his prey. The Marines on Guadalcanal are isolated and forced to capitulate. This humiliating defeat, three months after the fall of the Philippines, utterly reverses the jubilation that attended the American triumph at the Battle of Midway in early June.

The above scenario is historically correct in all respects save one. Having achieved the upper hand in the night action known as the Battle of Savo Island, Mikawa failed to press his advantage: the vital American transports survived unscathed. Even so, the threat of a renewed Japanese naval strike remained—the danger so potent that a month later, the American officer in overall command of the South Pacific Theater, Vice Admiral Robert L. Ghormley, advised Marine division commander Major General Alexander A. Vandegrift to consider surrendering his force or having it take to the mountains to conduct guerrilla resistance. (Luckily the defeatist Ghormley was soon sacked in favor of pugnacious Vice Admiral William “Bull” Halsey.) The waters around Guadalcanal would be the scene of many more naval encounters, but American forces finally prevailed in January 1943, when the last Japanese troops were evacuated from the island. Some military historians consider the naval battles off Guadalcanal, rather than the Battle of Midway, to be the true turning point of the Pacific War.

But what would have happened if the Japanese had been victorious at the Battle of Savo Island? Given Ghormley’s defeatism, it is difficult imagine him even considering how to sustain the Guadalcanal invasion—and virtually impossible to imagine how Ghormley could have done so had he tried.

The Marines on Guadalcanal almost certainly would have become prisoners, leaving the Japanese free to complete their airfield on Guadalcanal. That would have put Japanese air power six hours’ flight time closer to the Allied supply line than it was from the Japanese base at Rabaul, on the island of New Britain. The airfield on Guadalcanal would have provided land-based air cover for Japanese naval strikes against the supply line, and perhaps seriously interfered with American efforts to sustain General Douglas MacArthur’s operations in New Guinea. The heightened difficulty of fighting successfully in the Pacific might even have influenced American strategists to shift focus from “Germany first” to “Japan first”—if only because the ignominy of this latest defeat would create enormous pressure for redemption. And in any event, Japan would have been able to maintain its military effort longer.

This sounds dire, and yet American factories could simply pour forth more warships and aircraft than Japan could match, which is exactly what occurred historically. Sometimes structural factors—the unmatched industrial power of the United States, in this instance— can balance out even repeated defeat. Indeed, America’s military might was strong enough that its forces could have sustained several debacles as serious as a fiasco at Guadalcanal and still been able to press onward. Given the epic nature of the Battle of Guadalcanal, which holds a hallowed place in American military annals—particularly those of the U.S. Marine Corps—it seems almost blasphemy to assert that failure would have had no long-term consequences. But even so harsh a reversal of fortune would not have saved Japan from eventual defeat.

 

Originally published in the April 2013 issue of World War II. To subscribe, click here.