Photo: Fighting leathernecks start out on their sunset patrol - courtesy US MARINES

The assault on Guadalcanal and Tulagi caught the Japanese completely by surprise. As dawn on August 7 revealed the American Armada offshore, an excited Japanese radio operator on Tulagi tapped out a message to Rabaul: “Large force of ships, unknown number or type, entering the sound. What can they be?”

And a little later, just before American navel guns silence the transmitter: “Enemy forces overwhelming. We will defend our posts to the death, praying for eternal victory”. That vow was kept. The Japanese on Tulagi held out for 31 hours of brave, bitter fighting. Some died in suicide charges across what had once been a cricket ground for the British administrators of the Solomons. Others holed up in deep caves in the hills back of the shore, pouring machinegun fire on approaching Marines until they were killed by high-explosives charges tipped into the caves.

The Japanese use of such natural redoubts technique they were to employ again and again in the fighting in the Pacific was a tactic new to the Americans and one they also learned at considerable cost in the honeycombed hills of nearby Gavutu and Tanambogo. On these islets, lined by a causeway, the Japanese fought as fiercely as their comrades on Tulagi. Just getting ashore on Gavutu posed enormous difficulties for the Marines.

The islet was rimmed by coral reefs and the only practicable place to land, a Japanese built seaplane ramp, had been wrecked by the American’ sea and air bombardment. Forced to go ashore on the exposed areas adjoining the ramp, the Marines proved to be an easy target for the defenders in the hills.

The Tanambogo landing, which the Marines had delayed until after sunset on D-day, produced its own special disaster. Just as the men came ashore, one of the last shells from their support ship hit a fuel dump on the beach. Instead of the cover of darkness the attackers had hoped for, they were brightly silhouetted in the flaming oil and raked by fire from the hills.

The taking of the three islands cost the Marines 144 dead or missing and 194 wounded. But they had exacted a heavier toll from the Japanese: of an estimated 800 troops, all but about 100 were killed. About 70 escaped across to Florida Island, mopping up on Florida was to go on for several weeks.

Of the few Japanese taken alive on Tulagi, Gavutu and Tanambogo, only three of the 23 surrendered, they proved as instructive to the Americans as the Japanese tactic of holding up in caves. They now knew that to all but a few Japanese soldiers, death was preferable to what was viewed, in the Japanese code, as eternal dishonour.

By contrast the landing on Guadalcanal itself went easily. The marines swarmed ashore, unopposed, on the level sands east of the airstrip the Japanese were building at Lunga Point; the Japanese construction workers and the sailors who had brought them across from Tulagi the month before fled into the jungle to the west.

At least for a while, Guadalcanal, 90 miles long and about 35 wide, seemed big enough for both the invaded and the invaders. The first American casualty was a Marine who cut his hand with a machete while trying to open a coconut from a plantation. Along the beaches the only moving targets the Americans found were some wild pigs galloping through the underbrush back of the shore. But in the waters of Guadalcanal the action came soon enough.

The first waves of Marines had been on the island barely two hours when the emergency “Bells” radio frequency that was monitored by every combat ship in the fleet beeped with a message in code: “From STO:24 torpedo bombers headed yours”.

STO was the call sign of Paul Mason, a coastwatcher hidden on the Japanese-held island of Bougainville, 350 miles away on the air route between Guadalcanal and the Japanese base at Rabaul. Mason was wrong about the number of planes he saw; actually there were 27. But this warning, the first of many that the daring and resourceful Australian coastwatchers would flash to Guadalcanal in the weeks ahead, gave the American invasion fleet one vital hour to prepare for the enemy raid.

Unloading operations ceased; the ships raised anchor and got under way; anti-aircraft gunners donned helmets and scanned the skies. From the carries Enterprise and Saratoga, cruising with the carrier Wasp south of Guadalcanal, squadrons of stubby Wildcat fighters rose to take stations over the fleet.

Fortunately for the Americans, the two-engined Mitsubishi “Bettys” spotted by Mason had been fitted with bombs for a raid on an Allied airfield at Milne Bay, on New Guinea’s southeast coast, when they received urgent orders to head for Guadalcanal and “drive back the American invasion force at any cost”. They had zoomed off without exchanging the bombs for the torpedoes that would have been more effective against the ships; high level bombing could do little damage to alerted vessels manoeuvring at high speed.

The circling Wildcats and the ships anti-aircraft guns downed a number of the attacking bombers and their fighter escorts. More of the Japanese planes ran out of fuel on the way back to Rabaul and had to be ditched; the 650 mile distance to Guadalcanal was just too far for effective strikes from Rabaul. Nevertheless, other raids followed for the next two days.

All told, these cost the Japanese naval arm at Rabaul 42 planes and, worse, 42 expert pilots. Americans lost a transport and a destroyer and had to delay the unloading of supplies, already behind schedule.

Meanwhile, the Marines on Guadalcanal were trying to adjust to an environment they found strange and unnerving. At night jungle birds screeched from the tress and land crabs crunched away under the sand, making a noise that sounded to one Marine like “tunnelling operations with a hacksaw blade, or the chewing of pecan shells”.

Every unfamiliar sound, jittery men on guard, aware from their know your enemy lectures that the Japanese often attacked at night opening fire and every time one Marine pulled his trigger another down the line would also shoot into the dark. But the Japanese were far away, lying low and they wondered what the Americans were firing at.

The Marines’ password had been chosen in the knowledge that the Japanese had trouble pronouncing the letter “L” and would surely stumble over words like “lollipop” or “lollybag”. The first night a jeep without its lights on approached a Marine position from the beach. “Halt!” a sentry shouted. The jeep moved on “Halt! Damn you, give the password!” Still the jeep failed to stop. The sentry fire and the bullet “thwangged” off the vehicle’s side. The driver then jammed on the brake and, in a Tennessee drawl that conveyed all the fervour of a revival meeting, called out: “Hallelujah, brother, Hallelujah”.

Next morning the Marines moved west through the coconut plantations and after a few brief skirmishes captured the airfield and installations the Japanese had been laboriously constructing at Lunga Point.

The 2,600-foot runway was nearly completed; revetments, repair sheds and blast pens were already finished. In just a few days the Japanese would have brought in their first planes. Wharves and machine shops, only slightly damaged by the prelanding bombardment, could quickly be utilised. More than 100 trucks and nine road rollers stood where the Japanese had left them.

The Japanese has also abandoned quantities of gas, oil, kerosene, cement, many kinds of machinery and, to the delight of the divisions’ doctor, surgical instruments that he pronounced better than his own. Other items seemed certain to ease the rigors of Operations Shoestring: hundreds of cases of canned meat, fish and fruit, tons of rice and especially welcome in the humid climate a machine for making ice.

The shed housing the machine soon bore a gaudily pointed sin crediting the Premier of Japan for the gift. “Tojo Ice Factory”, it read: “Under New Management”. All in all, the Marines had captured a rich prize.

But there was one flaw: seizing the airfield was not the same as holding on to it. Shortly before 11pm on August 8, Major General Vandergrift left the island and sped by small boat to the flagship McCawley to confer with Rear Admiral Richard Kelly Turner, commander of the amphibious force. Turner had summoned Vandegrift on short notice; also present was Rear Admiral A. C. Crutchley, the Englishman in charge of the escort forces of Americans and Australian cruisers and destroyers whose function was to protect the invasion armada from attack by sea.

Turner had three pieces of bad news to report. The first was that a Japanese naval force had been sighted en route from Rabaul. The second was that Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, commander of the entire Task Force 61, was removing the three carriers from the scene. Fletcher was concerned about the flattop’s safety; a number of enemy planes had already appeared in the area. Permission to withdraw the carriers had been sought and obtained by Fletcher from the top American commander in the South Pacific, Vice Admiral Robert L. Ghormley. The third piece of news was related to the second. Turner himself, now deprived of the carrier’s air cover felt compelled to take away the vulnerable transports the next day, even though some 1,400 Marines had not been debarked and more than half of Vandegrift’s supplies were still in the ship’s holds.

Vandegrift was stunned at Fletcher’s decision to depart. Privately he felt that the admiral was “running away”. But the decision had been made. All he could do was hurry and keep his troops unloading through the night and hope that the Marines could get by for the few days it was expected to take the carriers to refuel and return.

But even as Vadegrift and Crutchley were leaving the McCawley about midnight, the stage was being set for a battle that would deprive the Marines of their lifeline for much longer than a few days.

Daily Japanese bombing raids stall landing The only things moving on Guadalcanal were the landing craft - photo courtesy Noel Taylor Japanese vehicles - a present from Tojo, the mud courtesy of Guadalcanal. Photo: Robert C. Muehrcke