The Memory Of Guadalcanal -- It Took A Long, Bloody Battle To Recapture The First Island From Japan

At 9:09 a.m. on Aug. 7, 1942 - exactly eight months after Pearl Harbor - the first wave landed on Guadalcanal's Red Beach. The 1st Marine Division, mostly apple-green and carrying bolt-action Springfield rifles from an earlier war, waded in.

Over the next six months and two days, history would be written in blood on this 90-mile-long hunk of island jungle.

"Guadalcanal is not a name but an emotion," wrote historian Samuel Eliot Morison, "recalling desperate fights in the air, furious night naval battles, frantic work at supply or construction, savage fighting in the sodden jungle, nights broken by screaming bombs and deafening explosions of naval shells."

Guadalcanal was a turning point - the original steppingstone for later invasions of Tarawa, Saipan, Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

And it was Guadalcanal that provided the first indelible images of Marines assaulting a beach and raising the U.S. flag on Japanese-occupied ground - the blueprint for Pacific victory.

"I can't say we started the Marine Corps reputation but we burnished it a bit," said John Sweeney, a native of Columbus, Ohio, and a company commander of Marine Raiders on Guadalcanal.

"A lot of the guys - the fighters, the privates - they stuck at their posts and did everything that was asked, sometimes almost impossible tasks," Sweeney said. "And a lot of people got killed along the way. A lot of good men. You can't forget them."

To be sure, Guadalcanal wasn't just a Marine Corps show. Every branch of the U.S. military - the Navy, Coast Guard, Army and combined air forces - had a hand.

This was total war, and it took bullets, bayonets, battleships, bombers and bulldozers to pay the first horrible installment on the price of victory.

Guadalcanal was the first U.S. offensive of World War II and the first time the Japanese Imperial Army lost a piece of ground. It was an obscure place for one of history's turning points.

Located in the lower Solomon Islands, Guadalcanal was a largely uninhabitable British protectorate. The Japanese seized it and cobbled an airstrip out of the jungle from which they could menace Australia, 1,000 miles to the southeast.

To stop them, President Roosevelt dispatched the Marines. They captured the airstrip and named it after Maj. Lofton Henderson, a Marine dive-bomber pilot killed in June at the battle of Midway, the turning point at sea.

The full force of the Tokyo war machine tried to take back Henderson Field. Three times, the Japanese scheduled U.S. surrender ceremonies, only to be thwarted.

During a dozen charges in a Sept. 12-14 battle, the Japanese came within 1,000 yards of capturing the field. But Marine Raiders and paratroopers held their last line of defense - Bloody Ridge or Edson's Ridge, named for Col. Merritt Edson, the commander of the 1st Raider Battalion.

NAVY PULLS OUT

"We were told we had to stay until you die to hold the line," said Thomas Mullahey, a platoon leader on the ridge. "We never felt we'd get out of it, actually. We thought we'd either be paraded in cages in Tokyo or be pulling rickshaws somewhere. It came out our way. By the skin of our teeth."

For starters, a 76-ship Navy task force withdrew on Aug. 9, with half the Marines' equipment and too much of their food still aboard. Tokyo Rose taunted the marooned Marines, who ate palm tree roots and coconuts to augment their meager rations. On average, a combatant lost 25 pounds.

The slop and scum of Guadalcanal featured clouds of mosquitoes, jungle rot, dysentery, leeches and tropical downpours. Grunts who survived combat faced the alternating fever and chill of malaria; a Marine wasn't pulled off the line unless his temperature soared past 104 degrees.

And then there were the Japanese - screaming "Banzai!" or "Long live the emperor!" - as they charged. They were flushed with Bushido, the ancient samurai code of preferring death to the disgrace of surrender.

The Japanese had pushed the Americans off Guam, Wake, Bataan and Corregidor, and figured to do the same at Guadalcanal.

When things were at their worst, commanders quietly drew up plans to have troops melt into the jungle and fight as guerrillas.

But reinforcements arrived to beat the last and largest Japanese offensive Oct. 23-27. The Sendai Division tried a three-pronged assault supported by naval and air power.

On Guadalcanal, uncommon valor was a common occurrence.

Of the 30 men in Lt. Paul Moore's platoon, only six survived unscathed. Ten were killed and the others were wounded or sickened. Moore - awarded the Navy Cross, Silver Star and Purple Heart - took a bullet through his chest, made his confession and commended himself to God.

"If I get out of this, maybe it means I should do something special," Moore thought.

He did. The warrior was ordained an Episcopal priest, and as a man of God, he later became bishop of New York.

Air power was pivotal in the way things turned out. Henderson Field opened Aug. 20 under the name Cactus Air Force. With the help of the construction battalions, the planes kept flying, sometimes with fuel or parts taken from wrecked aircraft.

Among the 15 Medals of Honor awarded during the Guadalcanal campaign, five went to Marine aviators. One was Capt. Joe Foss, who bettered Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker's World War I record of 25 kills to become the new ace of aces.

"Marines have the best esprit de corps. The thing that a lot of people don't realize was the dedication of the people that were there. They put their lives on the line every day," said Foss, later the governor of South Dakota and president of the National Rifle Association.

SEVEN SEA BATTLES

Seven major battles were fought at sea. So much war junk went to the bottom that the turquoise waters around the island were called Ironbottom Sound.

The U.S. Navy suffered perhaps the worst defeat in its history on Aug. 9, when three American cruisers and an Australian one were sunk in less than 60 minutes off Savo Island.

But in the naval battle of Guadalcanal in mid-November the Japanese lost two battleships, a cruiser, three destroyers and 10 transports funneling men and equipment to the island.

Back on the ground, the 1st Marine Division was relieved Dec. 9 by the Army's Americal and 25th Divisions and elements of the 2nd Marine Division.

The fresh troops pushed the Japanese off the island. It was declared secure Feb. 9, 1943, after the last 13,000 Japanese fled to transport ships.

In the end, naval losses were roughly equal; each side had 24 warships sunk. In the air, Japan lost 682 aircraft, 446 of them combat planes. U.S. air losses were 615 planes, including 264 combat planes.

The human cost was greater. The U.S. death toll included 1,769 ground forces (1,207 of them Marines), 4,911 men at sea and 420 in the air.

But Japanese fatalities were four times greater. The Japanese lost 25,600 troops on the ground, 3,500 at sea and 1,200 in the air.

And that is how the Japanese came to call Guadalcanal the Island of Death. ------------------------------

CEREMONIES The national commemoration of the battle of Guadalcanal will include a 10:30 a.m. wreath-laying ceremony Friday at the U.S. Marine Corps Memorial in Washington, D.C.

On Guadalcanal, at dawn local time Friday, the new U.S. memorial will be officially dedicated.

Saturday, two obelisk memorials will be dedicated at Bloody Ridge and at Henderson Field. Six other obelisks are being built.