Battle of Guadalcanal order of battle

The campaign lasted from the initial American landings on 7 August 1942 until the final Japanese evacuation on 9 February 1943, a period of six months, far longer than was expected by Allied planners.

The 7 August landings on Guadalcanal itself and Tulagi across Savo Sound (the site of a Japanese seaplane base) were carried out by US Marines under the command of Major General Alexander A. Vandegrift.

The 1st Marine Division's struggle to take Guadalcanal achieved legendary status: the heat and mud, the malaria and dysentery, the giant tropical insects and the fanatical, often suicidal, resistance of the Japanese combined to create an immense amount of sheer suffering.

Why does so genteel an author as Herman Wouk, whipped into a white-lipped rage at the mere thought of Guadalcanal, write that it "was and remains 'that fucking island'"?

[1] Adm. Ghormley's pessimism, inadequate staff work and unwillingness to visit the front led Adm. Nimitz to replace him with the much more aggressive and hands-on Vice Admiral William F. Halsey on 18 October 1942.

At issue was how long Fletcher's aircraft carriers would stay in the vicinity of Guadalcanal to provide air cover for Turner's support vessels in Savo Sound.

These attacks convinced Fletcher that his crucial aircraft carriers could not be risked in the waters of the Solomons any longer and his task force departed the area that evening.

Unsettled by the removal of air cover and rattled on the morning of D+2 by the discovery that his cruiser screen had been decimated at the Battle of Savo Island, Turner ordered his vulnerable, and still half-full, cargo ships back to Nouméa around sundown 9 August.