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This is part of a series of books by the same author largely focusing on the naval aspect of the war in the south-west Pacific, following on from volumes on the Java Sea campaign and the first three months of the Guadalcanal campaign. This volume continues the story of the battle for Guadalcanal to its end and then covers the period before the invasion of New Georgia, which is covered in the next book. The books do overlap slightly – each one starts with a good background section. This works expecially well in this book – instead of being thrown straight several months into the battle of Guadalcanal we get an explanation of why the Japanese and Americans were fighting on the island, and an account of the first three months of the campaign.
Once we reach November the detailed narrative begins. This was a period of stalemate on and around Guadalcanal. Generaly the US had control of the day, the Japanese control of the night. The Japanese could use the cover of night to get reinforcements and some supplies to the island, but couldn’t risk leaving ships within range of the US airfield on the island in daylight. Most of the time both sides fought with fairly limited forces, although as the author points out for rather different reasons. Despite their heavy losses at Midway the Japanese still had the most powerful fleet in the Pacific, dominating in battleships and equal in carriers – their two most modern fleet carriers hadn’t been present at Midway, while the Americans lost the Wasp and Hornet in the fighting around Guadalcanal, leaving only Enterprise and Saratoga, and both of these ships suffered damage that forced them back to Pearl Harbor for repairs. On the Japanese size the bulk of the fleet was held back to fight the ‘decisive battle’, which pre-war Japanese planning expected to come when the US fleet gathered to try and advance towards Japan, and not in the far flung Solomon Islands.
Those who have read other books in this series will be familiar with Cox’s style. This combines stretches of very well researched narrative with moments of somewhat dismissive sarcasm, normally aimed at the decisions of senior officers on both sides. I must admit I started to find that tone a little grating in the previous volume, but it seems more justified in this part of the campaign. Senior commanders on both sides made pretty inexplicable decisions. One major US defeat (early in the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal) was at least in part caused by the choice of the inexperienced Admiral Callaghan to command the US fleet instead of Admiral Scott, who had already fought and won one battle, purely because Callaghan was a few weeks more senior. On the Japanese side their most succesful Admiral, Tanaka Raizo, was moved to Singapore and then a shore post in Burma partly because he had called for a retreat from Guadalcanal just as the high command was on the verge of deciding to do exactly that. This is also the period in which it was becoming ever clearer to their users that American torpedoes were faulty, while the Navy bureau responsible continued to deny it, while the USAAF continued to insist on the pre-war doctrine of high altitude bombing attacks on enemy warships, even though it clearly didn’t work.
A key strength of this book is the use of detailed sources from both sides. This is expecially valuable in the many night battles of the period – older accounts tended to be based more on US records, so we see what the Americans saw, which was often a rather confused picture. As a result we get a gripping account of the fate of the Japanese battleship Hiei, the first to be lost during the war, and a detailed examination of the decision making process that led to the retreat from Guadalcanal (and the refusal to admit it was a defeat, instead describing the move as ‘turning around and advancing’.
This is an excellent account of the crucial period of the battle of Guadalcanal, which saw the Americans barely hanging on for much of the period, but at the same time almost cutting the Japanese supply lines, eventually forcing the Japanese to evacuate the starving remnants of the force they had placed on the island.
Chapters
1 – The Storms before the Storm
2 – Barfight in the Dark
3 – The Morning After
4 – The Reckoning Begins
5 – Just When You Think
6 – Delay, Linger, and Wait
7 – Turn Around and Advance
8 – Pappy’s Folly
Author: Jeffrey R. Cox
Edition: Paperback
Pages: 512
Publisher: Osprey
Year: 2021