Japan Made One Huge Mistake in 1942—Attacking America’s Henderson Field

Before this night is over, 3,000 of men will walk toward a single position in the dark. The man waiting for them is 25 years old, and he has not slept in 2 days. October 24th, 1942. 20 minutes past 1:00 in the morning. Rain is falling on Guadalcanal the way it always falls on Guadalcanal, not in drops, but in sheets.

Warm as bathwater and just as heavy. It has been raining for hours. It will rain for hours more. A 25-year-old sergeant named John Basilone is kneeling in the mud behind a Browning M1917 machine gun, and he is listening. Before the Marines, he drove a laundry truck in in Raritan, New Jersey. Before that, 3 years in the United States Army in the Philippines.

He is quiet in the way that men who have already served one enlistment are quiet. He knows what a tropical night sounds like. He knows the difference between wind moving through kunai grass and and something else moving through kunai grass. What he is hearing right now is something else. The sound comes from the black wall of jungle 100 yards to his front. A rustle.

A snap of vegetation. The wet clatter of equipment carried by men who are trying and failing to move too silently. Then, a voice, a single Japanese voice giving an order somewhere out in the dark. Basilone’s hand finds the traversing wheel. He does not speak. Around him, in the mud, the men of his machine gun section are doing the same thing he is doing, waiting and breathing and trying not to think about how few of them there are.

Behind them, half a mile north, lies the thing they are here to protect. It is not a city. It is not a fortress. It is not, by any reasonable measure, worth dying for. It is a strip of packed dirt and crushed coral roughly 3,600 ft long cut out of a coconut plantation on the northern coastal plain of an [clears throat] island most Americans could not have found on a map 8 months earlier.

The Marines call it Henderson Field. And before this night is over, the Imperial Japanese Army is going to throw the better part of an elite division at it and discover, at a cost that will take Tokyo years to fully understand, that they have made a catastrophic mistake. Japan would attack this airstrip four times in 6 months. Every single time they sent enough men to lose and never enough to win.

But to understand why the mistake was so enormous, you have to go back. Back before the barbed wire and the machine guns. Back to the summer when the airfield did not belong to the Americans at all. Because Henderson Field was never supposed to be American. The Japanese built it. In the spring of 1942, the Empire of Japan still had at a height no one had predicted and no one has matched since.

In roughly 6 months, Japanese forces had taken the Philippines, Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong, Burma, the Dutch East Indies, Guam, Wake Island. They had driven the British out of Asia. They had driven the Americans out of the Pacific’s western half. They had bombed Darwin. Their perimeter now ran from the Aleutians to the Solomons, an arc of conquest thousands of miles wide, and it was built on a lie of arithmetic.

Japan had gone to war to secure oil. It had secured oil. The Dutch East Indies fields were now Japanese. But those fields lay 4,000 miles from the home islands, and every gallon had to travel that distance in a tanker, and every tanker had to travel through water. Japan’s empire was a set of islands connected by shipping lanes.

Cut the lanes and the empire starves, which is why in the summer of 1942, Japanese planners looked south. If they could push their perimeter down through the Solomon Islands, they could shut down the sea route between the United United States and Australia. Australia was the last great Allied base in the theater. Isolated, and the counterattack everyone knew was coming might never come at all.

So they’d picked an island at the southern end of the Solomon chain, 90 miles long, 25 wide. Volcanic ridges, rivers that turned to mud, jungles so dense that in places a man cannot see 10 ft in front of him. Malaria in the water, dengue in the air, fungus in every seam of every uniform. Guadalcanal.

In early July 1942, Japanese construction units came ashore near Lunga Point. Most of them were not combat soldiers at all. They were naval construction troops and Korean laborers, men with shovels and picks, and a small number of bulldozers sent to do exactly one job, build a runway. They cleared the kunai grass by hand. They dropped coconut palms.

They graded and rolled and packed the coral. By the first week of August, the strip was nearly finished. Another week or two and Japanese bombers would be flying from it. They never got because 8,000 mi away, a group of American planners had looked at the same map and had reached the same conclusion in reverse. An airfield on Guadalcanal in Japanese hands would put Japanese bombers over the sea lanes to Australia.

An airfield on Guadalcanal in American hands would put American bombers over the entire southern Solomons. The runway was the prize. Whoever held it held the sky and whoever held the sky held everything under it. The operation was called Watchtower. Almost everyone involved in planning it thought it was premature. The men assigned to execute it had a private name for it, Operation Shoestring.

It was to be the first large-scale American amphibious offensive of the war. Commanding the landing force was Major General Alexander Archer Vandegrift, First Marine Division. He was 55 years old, Virginian, silver-haired, soft-spoken to the point that men who met him for the first time sometimes mistook his politeness for mildness.

He had spent decades in the Marine Corps and had never commanded a division in combat because until 1942 no American Marine had commanded a division in combat. He had been told his division would not see action until 1943. He was given weeks. At dawn on August 7th, 1942, 11,000 Marines came over the side and into the boats.

And then something happened that nobody had planned for. The landing beaches on Guadalcanal were undefended. Not lightly defended, undefended. The Japanese garrison on the island consisted almost entirely of those construction workers, laborers, engineers, cooks. When the naval bombardment opened at dawn, they abandoned their tents, their tools, their breakfast, and ran west into the jungle.

Marines came ashore expecting a slaughter and walked instead into an eerie, humid quiet. They found rice still warm in the pots. They found bicycles. They found beer and cigarettes and neatly folded uniforms. They found bulldozers, road rollers, generators, and a narrow gauge railway, a complete construction park abandoned intact.

And on August 8th, 36 hours after the first boat touched sand, they walked onto the runway itself. It was unfinished, a gap of roughly 200 ft in the middle where grading had not been completed, but it was 90% built and it had built with Japanese equipment that was now suddenly American equipment. The Japanese had spent roughly a month constructing an airfield.

The Americans took it in a day and a half. On August 12th, they gave it a name. They named [clears throat] it for Major Lofton Russell Henderson, a Marine line dive bomber pilot who had led his squadron against the Japanese carrier force at Midway on June 4th, 1942 and had not come back. An airfield named for a dead man on an island nobody wanted, taken without a fight.

For about 18 hours, it looked like the easiest victory of the war. The problem with a landing is that the landing is the beginning. 11,000 Marines were ashore. Their food, their ammunition, their sandbags, their barbed wire, their heavy equipment, their engineering supply, all of it was still floating off Lunga and offshore in the holds of the transports.

Unloading a division takes days. They had been unloading for one at a quarter to 2:00 on the morning of August 9th, a Japanese cruiser force under Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa came down the strait between the islands and found the Allied screening ships in the dark. What followed took roughly half an hour. Japanese night gunnery and Japanese torpedoes, both far better than the Allies had believed possible, tore the covering force apart.

The heavy cruiser Astoria sunk. Quincy sunk. Vincennes sunk. The Australian cruiser Canberra sunk, sunk. More than a thousand Allied sailors dead in the water that would afterward be called Iron Bottom Sound. It was one of the worst defeats in the history of the United States Navy. And then Mikawa, worried about American carrier aircraft finding him at dawn, turned north and went home.

>> He never touched the transports. Not one. The ships carrying every bullet, every ration, and every roll of wire the Marines on Guadalcanal would need sitting there unescorted, full. And the Japanese sailed past them into the dark. >> It was the first Japanese mistake at Guadalcanal, and and it was already an enormous one.

But it did not feel that way to the Marines. Because on the afternoon of August 9th, with the screening force destroyed, the transports weighed anchor and left. The Marines stood on the beach and watched them go. They had roughly 4 days of American rations. They had less than half their ammunition. They had no radar, almost no barb barbed wire, no coastal guns, and no engineering equipment except what the Japanese had abandoned.

They had no naval support, no air support, and no fixed date for resupply. They were 11,000 men on a malarial island 600 miles from the nearest Allied base holding a half-finished runway. Vandegrift did the arithmetic and gave three orders. Ration the food. Went to two meals a day supplemented by captured Japanese rice.

Which meant that for weeks American Marines fought on Guadalcanal eating the enemy’s food. Dig in. Not a perimeter around the island, a perimeter around the airfield. Everything else on Guadalcanal was negotiable. The runway was not. And finish the runway. Marine engineers took the abandoned Japanese bulldozers and closed the 200-ft gap.

On August 18th, 11 days after the landing, 9 days after the Navy left, Henderson Field was declared operational. They had no aircraft to put on it, but it was ready. 400 mi northwest at Rabaul, the reaction to all this was not alarm. It was irritation. Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake, 54 years old, commander of the Japanese 17th Army, was a career officer with a full career’s worth of confidence.

His command was responsible for a vast area, and his priority in the summer of 1942 was not Guadalcanal at all. It was It was New Guinea, where Japanese troops were pushing over the Owen Stanley Range toward Port Moresby. Guadalcanal was a distraction. The initial estimate reaching Japanese headquarters was that that the Americans had landed a raiding force of perhaps 2,000 men, and that they were there to destroy the airfield and withdraw.

There were more than 11,000 of them, and they were digging. Um the bad intelligence didn’t matter more than the bad intelligence, and it is the thing that explains everything that follows. The Japanese Army had spent 5 years in China and 6 months in the Pacific believing a specific idea about itself, that the decisive factor in battle was not firepower, but spirit.

That a Japanese soldier’s willingness to die was a weapon in itself. That Western armies, comfortable, industrial, individualistic, would break when pressed hard enough by men who would not. It was not entirely superstition. It had worked. At Singapore, a smaller Japanese force had taken the surrender of a larger British one.

In the Philippines and Malaya, Allied units had folded repeatedly under aggressive night attacks. So, when Hyakutake’s staff planned the recapture of Henderson Field, they did not plan for a battle of material. They planned for a battle of will, and they made a decision that they would go on making over and over for 6 months, each time with more men, and each time too late.

They sent what was available rather than waiting for what was needed. On the evening of August 18th, the same day the runway was declared art operational, Japanese destroyers landed roughly 917 men east of the American perimeter near Taivu Point. They were the first echelon of a unit under Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki, an infantry officer in his 50s with a reputation for for aggression and an assignment he had inherited by accident.

His regiment had originally been earmarked for the invasion of Midway, and when Midway failed, it needed somewhere to go. Ichiki had been told the Americans numbered perhaps 2,000. He had been told they were demoralized. He had a second echelon coming behind him. He did not wait for it. That is the pattern.

Hold on to it because you will see it four times. Back on the perimeter, something else had arrived. At about 4:00 in the afternoon on August 20th, Marines on the ground heard engines to the south and looked up and saw aircraft that were not Japanese. 19 F4F Wildcat fighters of Marine Fighting Squadron 223 under Major John Smith, 12 SBD Dauntless dive bombers of Marine Scout Bombing Squadron 2 under Lieutenant Colonel Richard Mangrum flown off the escort carrier Long Island and down onto that packed coral strip in the coconut grove.

Grown men stood in the mud and cheered until their voices went. Some of them cried. One officer recorded that he was so happy he wanted to weep. They had been alone for 11 days. The pilots who landed that afternoon became the nucleus of a scratch five formation of Marine, Navy, and Army aircraft that would operate off Henderson Field for the next six months under conditions no air force is supposed to to survive.

Constant bombing, artillery fire onto the runway, dysentery, malaria, no spare parts, fuel pumped by hand from drums. The Allied code name for Guadalcanal was Cactus. So, they called themselves the Cactus Air Force. They would be the reason the Japanese lost. Not [ __ ] of any single battle because of a simple grinding fact of of geography that Tokyo did not fully absorb until it was far too late.

As long as American aircraft flew from Henderson Field, no Japanese transport ship could safely approach Guadalcanal in daylight. No transports meant no heavy artillery, no bulldozers, no stockpiles, and above all, no food. Everything the Japanese army would try to do on that island for the next 6 months would be done by men who had walked in with what they could carry on their backs.

The first test came before the next dawn. At around 1:30 in the morning on August 21st, 1942, Colonel Ichiki’s men crossed the sand spit at the mouth of a stream the Marines called the Tenaru, most of the way to Henderson Field and the last natural obstacle before it. They came in a frontal charge across open sand in the dark, screaming.

Waiting on the far bank were Marines of the 1st Marines who had had spent 2 weeks doing nothing but preparing this exact ground. Barbed wire, registered artillery, interlocking machine guns sighted to fire along the sandbar so that every man who stepped onto it walked into the beaten zone of a Browning water-cooled gun.

The fighting lasted through the night and into the morning. Canister rounds from 37-mm guns swept the sand spit. Marine artillery fell on the far bank. At daylight, Marines crossed the stream and light tanks came down onto the sand, and the encircled remnant of Ichiki’s force was destroyed against the beach. Of roughly 900 men, some 15 were taken prisoner.

Nearly all the rest were killed. Colonel Ichiki died there. Accounts differ on how some some some Japanese sources say he took his own life after burning the regimental colors. Others record him killed in the fighting. What is certain is that his detachment ceased to exist as a unit in a single night. Vandegrift of walking the sand spit afterward was struck struck less by the scale of the victory than by something he found deeply unsettling.

The wounded Japanese who lay among the dead did not surrender. They waited and when Marines approached to help them, some of them detonated grenades. He wrote that he had never heard of troops fighting this way. He would spend the next 6 months facing them. In Rabaul, the destruction of the Ichiki detachment produced exactly one conclusion.

Send more men. It was the wrong conclusion. >> Mhm. >> The problem was never simply numbers. >> Mhm. >> The problem was that Henderson Field could be reinforced by ship and the Japanese positions could not. The problem was that American artillery could fire all night and Japanese artillery had to be dragged through jungle by rope.

The problem was that a Marine on the perimeter ate badly >> Mhm. >> on on captured rice, but he ate and the Japanese soldier walking through that jungle carried 7 days of food on his back and no promise of more. The problem was the runway. Every single thing that would happen on Guadalcanal for the next 6 months flowed from one fact.

The Americans had a working airfield and the Japanese had to take it. And every method they used to try was made harder by the fact that they had not taken it yet. That is what a trap looks like from the inside. Which brings us back to the mud and the dirt and the rain and the sergeant at the machine gun.

By the night of October 24th, 1942, two more Japanese attempts had failed. Thousands more Japanese soldiers had come ashore. The largest Japanese force yet assembled on Guadalcanal, the Sendai Division, one of the Imperial Army’s most respected formations, was now in the jungle south of the perimeter, exhausted, hungry, and preparing to attack.

Facing them across a 2,000-yd frontage that doctrine said uh should be held by a regiment was a a single reinforced battalion under a lieutenant colonel named Lewis Puller. And on the right of that line at a low saddle in the ridges where the ground funneled anything coming out of the jungle into a narrow front, sat John Basilone’s machine gun section.

Somewhere behind the Japanese assembly areas, Kiyotake was waiting for a radio message announcing the capture of uh Henderson Field. He had been assured it would come by morning. It would not come by morning. It would not come at all because everything the Japanese Army believed about the American soldier, that he was soft, that he was decadent, that he would not stand in the dark against men who were willing to die, was about to be tested against roughly 40 howitzers, a mile of barbed wire, and a 25-year-old

from New Jersey who had already decided he was not going to move. The rain keeps falling. Out in the kunai grass, a thousand men are getting to their feet. But to understand what is about to happen on that line, you have to go back 6 weeks to another ridge and another night. September 12th, 1942. A low ridge of coral and kunai grass, 1 mile south of Henderson Field.

There is nothing here. That is the point. No village, no road, no landmark. Just a spine of grass-covered high ground running roughly north to south, rising in three humps out of the jungle like the back of a half-buried animal. But if you stand on it and look north, you can see the runway. Which means if the Japanese stand on it, they can put mortars on the runway.

And that is the whole war. Holding that ridge tonight are roughly 830 men, Marine Raiders and Marine Paratroopers, thrown together into a single tired command under Lieutenant Colonel Merritt Edson. Edson is 45 years old, slight build, sandy hair going gray, and a voice so flat and quiet that men have to lean in to hear him.

His nickname is Red Mike. He has a habit of walking upright through areas where everyone else is crawling, not out of bravado, but because he seems genuinely uninterested in the question. His men have been in continuous action for weeks. They have malaria. Many of them have dysentery. They were sent to this ridge to rest.

Somewhere out in the black jungle to the south, about 3,000 Japanese soldiers are moving toward this ridge. 3,000 more are moving against other points on the perimeter. The man leading them is Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi, 49, a professional infantry officer who did not repeat Ichiki’s method. Kawaguchi understood that a frontal charge across open ground into prepared American machine guns was suicide.

So, he devised something smarter. He would take his brigade around round through the interior of the island, come out of the jungle south of the perimeter, and hit Henderson Field from behind, from the one direction the Marines could not reinforce quickly. On paper, it was a good plan. On paper, it was about 8 mi.

Guadalcanal does not care about paper. His men went into that jungle carrying their ammunition, their rations, and their crew-served weapons on their backs because there were no roads and no mules. The undergrowth was so thick that lead elements hacked forward with entrenching tools. Ravines that showed as thin lines on the map turned out to be near vertical drops of mud and root.

Radios died in the humidity. Units drifted apart and lost each other in a hundred yards of green. It took them four days. They came out of that jungle dehydrated, half-starved, spread across miles of broken ground with no artillery worth the name, and with their carefully drawn timetable in pieces. >> And then that night they attacked anyway.

For two nights, the 12th and the 13th of September, they came up that ridge into Edson’s line. They came in the dark, in the rain, in small groups, because that was all the jungle had left of them. They got into the wire. They got past the wire. >> At one point the fighting was close enough that Marine artillery was firing at ranges of a few hundred yards from their own positions, dropping shells as almost on top of the ridge itself.

>> Edson’s line bent back on itself until it was holding only the last hump of the ridge. Behind that last hump, roughly a thousand yards away, was the airfield. They held, barely. By morning of the 14th, Kawaguchi’s brigade had lost something on the order of 850 men killed, and it broke off and went back into the jungle it had come from.

Marines started calling the place Bloody Ridge. Later, they started calling it Edson’s Ridge. And here is the part that mattered more than the body count. Kawaguchi’s survivors then had to walk back out through that same jungle wounded, without food, carrying their casualties. Many did not make it. Men sat down and did not get up. The retreat killed more of them than the ridge had.

The Japanese army had now attacked had attacked Edson’s Field twice. First with 900 men, then with a brigade of 6,000, and had lost both times. And in Rabaul, once again, the conclusion drawn was send more, not change the method, not solve the supply problem first. Send more. If you want to understand why the Japanese kept losing on Guadalcanal, do not look at the battles. Look at the shipping.

Every day from dawn until dusk, aircraft flew off Henderson Field, Wildcats and Dauntlesses and later Army P-400s and P-39s. They were flown by exhausted men on a runway that turned to soup when it rained and to choking dust when it did not. They lived in tents. They pumped their own fuel by hand out of drums. Half of them had malaria.

Pilots flew with fevers of 103, but they flew. And that single fact meant that any Japanese transport ship approaching Guadalcanal in daylight was a target. So, the Japanese stopped sending transports. Instead, they sent destroyers, fast warships that could run down the channel between the islands after dark, dump men and supplies over the side, and be beyond air range again by sunrise.

The Marines named the operation with the black humor of men who had nothing else the Tokyo Express. It worked. It delivered thousands of soldiers. But, look at what it cannot deliver. A destroyer is not a cargo ship. There is no hold. There are no cranes. Men go over the side into small boats, or supplies go into sealed drums pushed into the water to float ashore.

You cannot land heavy artillery this way in any quantity. You cannot land bulldozers, or trucks, or stockpiles of shells. And you cannot land food, not in the tonnage that 15,000 then 20,000 then 30,000 men eat every single day. So So, the Japanese army on Guadalcanal grew in numbers and shrank in strength at the same time.

Every night, the Express brought more mouths. Every day, those mouths ate rations that were not being replaced. The Americans were fed by ships that could sail in daylight because they held the airfield. The Japanese were fed by destroyers that could only come at night because they did not. That is not a battle.

That is arithmetic, and arithmetic does not get tired, and it does not have morale, and it cannot be defeated by courage. By the second week of October, Tokyo had committed to a solution they would send an entire division, the second infantry division recruited largely from Miyagi Prefecture in northern Japan, known by the name of the city where it was raised, the Sendai division.

Veterans of China and Java, a formation with real prestige. Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake came down to the island himself to take personal command. And before the ground attack, the Japanese navy would do something to Henderson Field that had never been done to an American position this in this war.

At about half past one on the morning of October 14th, 1942, the battleships Kongo and Haruna came into range of Lunga Point, escorted by a light cruiser and destroyers. They were carrying a shell type designed for shore bombardment. Thin-walled 14-in rounds packed with incendiary sub-munitions meant to scatter fire across a wide area.

Each of those shells weighed well over half a ton. Then a star shell burst overhead and the world ended. For roughly 80 minutes, they fired. 973 main battery rounds fell into the Lunga perimeter, most most [clears throat] of them into or around the airfield. There is no comparison to make for men who have not been under naval gunfire. A bombing raid comes and goes.

Artillery has a rhythm you can learn. This was neither. Marines dove into foxholes that filled with water and stayed there while the ground itself moved. Men were lifted off the ground by concussion and set back down. Trees 100-ft tall came apart at the trunk. Coconut palms burned like torches for hours. A pharmacist’s mate named Lewis Ortega, sheltering in a pillbox, later put it as plainly as anyone has.

You can get a dozen air raids a day, but they come and they are gone. This did not go. When it finally stopped and the gray light came up, Henderson Field was a landscape of craters. Both runways cratered. 41 men dead, including several pilots. Of uh roughly 90 aircraft on the island, 48 were destroyed.

Nearly all the aviation fuel had burned. By any reasonable military standard, the Cactus Air Force had been eliminated. And here is what happened next. And this is the beating heart of the whole campaign. Marine engineers and Navy Seabees came out onto that runway with the captured Japanese equipment and started filling holes.

Ground crews went into the jungle and the wrecks and started scavenging. They drained fuel out of destroyed aircraft. They found drums that had been dispersed and buried in the tree line for exactly this reason. They cannibalized shot-up airframes for parts. A wing here, a prop there, one flyable machine assembled from three dead ones.

Aircraft flew off Henderson Field that same day. Not many, not well, but they flew. The most concentrated naval bombardment ever endured by American forces had knocked the airfield out for a matter of hours. And the Japanese planning staff, watching the fires from Savo Sound, believed it was finished. That belief is the pivot on which the entire campaign turns.

Because the ground attack that was about to be launched was built on the assumption that Henderson Field would be undefended from the air. It would not be. >> Oh. >> Hayatake’s plan was ambitious, and it was ambitious in exactly the way that it already failed twice. The main effort, Lieutenant General Masao Maruyama, 53, commanding the Sendai Division, would take roughly 7,000 men on a march through the interior.

The same maneuver Kawaguchi had attempted over the same kind of ground, but with more than twice the troops. A supporting attack in the west along the coast under Major General Tadashi Sumiyoshi. Colonel Nomura Nakaguma’s regiment with a company of tanks would strike across the mouth of the Matanikau River.

A third force under Colonel Akematsu Oka would come in from the southwest. All three would hit simultaneously. The Americans would be pulled apart in three directions. Henderson Field would fall. The attack was set for the night of October 22nd. The march route was measured at roughly 15 miles. Engineers had been sent ahead to cut a trail, but it was the same jungle that had beaten Kawaguchi and it did not make an exception for a division.

Maruyama’s men dragged their artillery forward on ropes hand over hand up mud slopes in the rain. And then one gun at a time they abandoned it because it could not be moved. They ran short of food on the trail. Men fell out with heat exhaustion and were left. Units lost contact. The head of the column and the tail of the column were at times more than a day apart.

The 22nd came. They were not in position. The attack was pushed to the 23rd. The 23rd came. They were still not in position. Maruyama postponed again to the 24th. The order to postpone had to travel back down a chain of command that was coming apart. On the coast, the western attack was under Major General Tadashi Sumiyoshi and Sumiyoshi was at that moment deep in a malarial fever.

The postponement never reached Colonel Nakaguma’s regiment. A general too sick to pass on an order. That is how it happened. So, at dusk on October 23rd, exactly on the original schedule, Nakaguma attacked. Time 9 tanks came out onto the sandbar at the mouth of the infantry behind them >> [clears throat] >> into a position the Marines had spent weeks preparing.

Marine 37-mm anti-tanks opened at close range. The tanks were killed almost as fast as they appeared, hit on the sandbar, hit in the shallows, one blown off the bar entirely and left in the surf. Crews who got out were cut down as they ran. Uh behind them the infantry was caught in the open on a riverbank with no cover and marine howitzers dug in, registered, and supplied fired thousands of rounds into them in less than an hour. By midnight, it was over.

Japanese losses on that sandbar ran to several hundred killed. Marine casualties were a small fraction of that. And the diversion had accomplished the precise opposite of a diversion. It told Vandegrift 24 hours in advance that a major coordinated offensive was underway. Vandegrift and his staff now knew the coast attack had gone in early and alone, which meant a second attack was coming from somewhere else very soon.

The Marines began shifting what reserves they had toward the southern ridges. Out in the jungle, 7,000 starving men were making their final approach, believing they were about to achieve complete surprise. They were walking toward a line that was awake, dug in, and waiting. A 2,000-yd sector held by a single reinforcing battalion under a 44-year-old Lieutenant Colonel named Lewis Puller, a man built like a barrel with a jaw like a shovel, who had spent every available hour since arriving making that ground harder to

cross. Double apron barbed wire, fields of fire cut through the kunai grass, every approach registered by artillery. Machine guns decided not to shoot at men, but to shoot along the ground where men would have to walk. At one of those guns, on the right of the line, at the low saddle, where the ground funneled everything coming out of the jungle into a front barely wider than a city street, sat Sergeant John Basilone’s section.

>> [clears throat] >> At around half past 9:00 on the night of October 24th, a Marine listening post out in front of the wire came up on the field telephone. Sergeant Ralph Briggs, whispering into the handset, reported large numbers of Japanese troops moving past his position toward the American line. Puller asked how many.

The answer came back, “Thousands.” Puller told him to lie flat, stay quiet, and not move until called for. Then he hung up the telephone and told his officers to let them come. Out in the rain, 3 mi of exhausted men were closing on 900 yd of wire. They came just after 1:00 in the morning, not in one mass.

The jungle had taken care of that. They came in groups, in bunches, in whatever a battalion looks like. After 3 days of eating almost nothing and walking uphill through mud in the rain, but there were thousands of them. And they were coming at a front barely a few hundred yards wide and they were screaming. The Marines fired every weapon they had.

Roughly 40 howitzers of the 11th Marines were laid on those approaches, registered, ranged, and supplied by ship. When the calls came in, the guns did not stop. They fired through the night at ranges that put shells down within 100 yards of American positions. Whole sections of the assault were broken apart in the grass before they ever saw the wire.

What got through the artillery hit the wire. At the saddle on the right, John Basilone’s guns were firing along the ground, not into it. The beaten zone laid down the natural funnel so that anything using the easy route walked into it. He spent that night doing unglamorous work under impossible conditions. He kept guns running.

He cleared jams in the dark with burned hands. When a gun on his flank went out of action, he got it back into action. When belt route ran low, he went back through the mud to the ammunition point and carried more forward himself more than once because there was no one else to send.

He was awake for something close to 3 days by the end of it. That is what the Medal of Honor citation describes. Not heroics, maintenance under fire without stopping. The line held. They came again on the night of the 25th, and this time they came at several points at once. Part of the weight fell on Puller’s sector again. Another force hit the ridge to the west, and here the story includes men who are usually left out of it.

The 164th Infantry Regiment, National Guardsmen from North Dakota, many of them older than the Marines beside them, most of whom had never been in combat. They had been on Guadalcanal 12 days. On the night of the 24th and again on the 25th, they were fed into the Marine line in the dark rain by squads and platoons in into positions they had never seen in daylight.

Farm boys and small-town men from the northern plains holding a jungle ridge in the Solomon Islands. They held it. Afterward, the Marines, who did not hand out compliments to soldiers, recommended them for a unit citation. Somewhere in the fighting on that second night in the southern sector, Major General Yumio Nasu, one of Maruyama’s brigade commanders, was hit.

He died the following day. The Japanese pressed for a third night. Colonel Oka’s force, delayed even longer than the rest, finally arrived and went in against the second battalion, 7th Marines, on the ridge to the west. It broke on the wire like the rest. On the morning of October 26th, Maruyama ordered what was left of the Sendai Division to break contact and pull back west.

The three nights cost the Japanese somewhere between two and three thousand men killed. The exact figure has never been established because many were never recovered from the jungle. American losses were on the order of 80 killed. Burial parties used bulldozers. The Sendai division was finished as a fighting formation.

And on that same morning out at sea, a Japanese carrier fleet was maneuvering near the Santa Cruz Islands waiting for the signal that Henderson Field had fallen so it could move in and finish the campaign. A signal did come. It reported that that Henderson Field had been taken. It was wrong and the fleet moved in on the strength of it straight into the range of aircraft flying from the airfield it had been told was captured.

In the carrier battle that followed on October 26th, 26th, the Americans lost the Hornet, a real replace. The Japanese lost something they could not dis- nearly 150 experienced naval air crew killed in a single day from a pilot pool that had no training pipeline capable of refilling it.

They had traded their veteran aviators for an airfield they did not capture. Now the arithmetic took over. The men who walked back into that jungle in late October did not get resupplied. They could not be. As long as American aircraft flew from Henderson Field, transports could not approach in daylight and and destroyers could not carry food in the tonnage that tens of thousands of men required.

So they ate what they could find. They boiled grass, they dug roots through roots. They ate the horses that had been landed to haul the artillery they had already abandoned on the trail. They ate lizards and rats and at the end in places worse. Malaria went through them. Dysentery went through them. Beri-beri. Men who weighed 140 lb when they landed weighed under 100 by January.

They gave the island a name of their own. They took the Japanese pronunciation Gadara Rukanaru and they cut it down to Gado playing on the character for hunger. Starvation Island. Of the Japanese dead on Guadalcanal, estimates range widely, roughly 9,000 to 31,000. The majority did not die in combat. They died died of hunger and disease in the green dark waiting for ships that could not come.

The runway killed them, not the men on it. The runway itself. In November, the Imperial Navy made one last attempt to knock it out and land a real convoy behind the effort. The naval battles of November 12th through 15th were the most savage surface fighting of the war. On the first night, two American admirals, Daniel Callaghan and Norman Scott, were killed within minutes of each other in a point-blank brawl in Iron Bottom Sound.

American losses were severe. Two light cruisers, seven destroyers, more than 1,700 sailors, but the battleship Hiei crippled in that fight was found and finished the next day by aircraft flying off Henderson Field. Two nights later, the Washington put 16-in shells into the Kirishima at close range and left her sinking and the convoy 11 transports carrying the reinforcements and the food that the army on the island needed to survive was hunted through daylight by planes from the airfield it was sent to capture.

Most were sunk. Four were run aground and burned on the beach. Roughly 2,000 men got ashore with almost no supplies. The Japanese navy never came for Henderson Field again. On December 31st, 1942, in an Imperial Conference in Tokyo, the decision was made to abandon Guadalcanal. Between February 1st and 7th, 1943, Japanese destroyers came down the channel three more times.

American commanders watched the ships coming, saw the concentration of warships, and drew the obvious conclusion, another offensive was building. They prepared for a major reinforcement. They were wrong. The Tokyo Express was running empty on the way down. Over three nights, the Japanese evacuated 10,652 men.

Many too weak to climb the nets, hauled aboard by sailors who did not recognize the army they were rescuing. They took off the living and left the dead, more than 20,000 of them, in the mud and the kunai grass. The Americans did not realize island the island was empty until they walked into abandoned positions on February 9th. Japan never mounted another strategic offensive in the Pacific. The runway is still there.

It is called Honiara International Airport now, [clears throat] the main airport of the Solomon Islands. Passengers land on it every week and walk out into the heat and have no idea. John Basilone received the Medal of Honor in Australia in 1943. The Marine Corps offered him a commission and a war bond tour, a safe war, a long life, a house somewhere in New Jersey.

He turned it down and asked to go back to a rifle company. On February 19th, 1945, he landed with the 27th Marines on the black sand of Iwo Jima. He was killed that same morning moving men off the beach under fire. He was 28 years old. The Japanese army came to Guadalcanal certain of one thing, that spirit beats material. That men willing to die will always break men who are not.

They tested it four times against the same airstrip. 900 men in August, a brigade of 6,000 in September, an entire division in October, a fleet in November. Every time they sent enough to lose and never enough to win. Every time they attacked before their supply could follow. And every time they failed, the airfield they were trying to take became the thing that starved them.

The men who died in that wire were not fanatics. Most of them were sons of farmers from Miyagi Prefecture sent 8,000 miles by staff officers who never solved the problem of how to feed them. That was the mistake. Not attacking Henderson Field, attacking it four times and never once solving the problem of how to feed the men they sent.

The tide of the Pacific war turned strip of strip of packed of coral in a coconut grove 3,600 feet long and it turned because a few thousand tie heard sick badly fed men decided on three consecutive nights in the rain that they were not going to move.