Episode Details

This week we would like to welcome back Dave Holland.  Dave is a former United States Marine, owns and runs the facebook and youtube channel called Guadalcanal: Walking a battlefield, a Solomon islands battlefield guide, and most importantly, a Guadalcanal expert.  Welcome back, Dave.

We’ve been building up to this specific event for some time now, and so have the Japanese.  As you will recall, the last several months on Guadalcanal have seen steadily larger Japanese assaults hit that Marines with intents on grabbing Henderson Field.  The Japanese have tried and failed at Tenaru in August, tried and came very close at Edson’s Ridge in September, tried a few smaller attacks here and there the next several weeks, all failures.  

Now we sit in late October and the Japanese have finally built enough forces on Guadalcanal for their almighty “decisive battle”.  All the Japanese thrusts, both ashore and at sea, have led to this operation.  This is the all or nothing, the decisive battle that the Japanese have clamored for and the Americans have been preparing for. This is the tipping point for better or worse. 

Talking Points:

Preparations:

• The Japanese had been steadily sending troops and supplies, more troops than supplies, to Guadalcanal for several weeks in anticipation of this specific offensive.

• The IJN fully supported the operation in just about any way that they could.

• On October 14, two battleships, Kongo and Haruna, along with screening vessels shelled Henderson Field in what was easily, the worst bombardment of the entire campaign.
• For nearly an hour and a half the two battleships fired over 900 rounds of 14 inch ammunition into the Lunga perimeter to knock out both airfields and destroy the Cactus Air Force’s aircraft.
• The shelling, known as “the Bombardment” by the Marines and soldiers ashore destroyed about half of the Cactus Air Force, and heavily damaged the two airfields, although one was back in operation in a few hours.
• This bombardment, as well as others in between, were all in conjunction with the large-scale offensive, all with plans to soften the defenses of the Americans.

• The Japanese had begun steadily moving troops into the attack area for many days, through the jungle (again), with the date of the main assault set for October 22, but would actually take place two days later.  

• To distract the Americans attention from the main location of the attack, the Japanese set up a series of diversionary infantry assaults.

• The Japanese were under the assumption that only 10,000 Americans were ashore, when in actuality the number was over 23,000.

• The Americans, aware that a large scale assault was eventually coming, had been preparing their defensive perimeter for weeks.
• The addition of the Army’s 164th Infantry Regiment gave Vandegrift a total of 13 infantry battalions to defend the perimeter in an almost continuous line.

Prelude to the main event:

• The Japanese had been moving their main assault force through the jungle, along a trail blazed by their engineers, for days…completely undetected by American forces.

• At dusk on October 23, one of the diversion attacks under COL Nakaguma, alomng with 9 tanks, attacked Marine defenses at the mouth of the Matinikau river.

• The Japanese tanks advanced near the river under the cover of an artillery barrage, however, the Japanese tanks were either disabled or destroyed by Marine anti-tank weapons on the opposite side of the river.  

• In response to the Japanese assault, and the Japanese artillery, 4 battalions of Marine artillery fired over 6,000 rounds at the Japa