Watchman, What of the Night?

Two years after a handful of RAF pilots turned the tide of battle in the skies over Britain, another savage series of air and naval battles was fought in the far Pacific which was to change the complexion of that war. “Guadalcanal saved the Pacific,” Bull Halsey was to say later, “and the Coastwatchers saved Guadalcanal.”

In a lightning strike in August of 1942, American forces, on the run since Pearl Harbor and Bataan, stormed ashore on Guadalcanal and seized a nearly completed Japanese airbase there which they called Henderson Field. The Japanese navy, racing to the rescue, scattered the U.S. fleet, which retreated with the bulk of the supplies for the invasion force still in its holds. It was a stalemate of sorts. The Marines now held an operating airbase in the heart of the Japanese-occupied Solomons. The Japanese held the rest of the island, but not in sufficient force to oust the intruders, and so the Tokyo Express came into being.

PL

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Priscilla L. Buckley

Two years after a handful of RAF pilots turned the tide of battle in the skies over Britain, another savage series of air and naval battles was fought in the far Pacific which was to change the complexion of that war. “Guadalcanal saved the Pacific,” Bull Halsey was to say later, “and the Coastwatchers saved Guadalcanal.”

In a lightning strike in August of 1942, American forces, on the run since Pearl Harbor and Bataan, stormed ashore on Guadalcanal and seized a nearly completed Japanese airbase there which they called Henderson Field. The Japanese navy, racing to the rescue, scattered the U.S. fleet, which retreated with the bulk of the supplies for the invasion force still in its holds. It was a stalemate of sorts. The Marines now held an operating airbase in the heart of the Japanese-occupied Solomons. The Japanese held the rest of the island, but not in sufficient force to oust the intruders, and so the Tokyo Express came into being.