On the evening of August 9th, 1942 in the words of Lieutenant Merillat “As the sun set behind the mountains no friendly ships hovered offshore and no friendly planes patrolled the skies. We were on our own.”
After dropping off Marines on Guadalcanal, Tulagi and Gavutu, the United States Navy suffered one of it’s greatest defeats of the Second World War at Savo Island, resulting in the abandonment of the Marines at the beginning of their campaign to capture Guadalcanal. The primary target for capture was an airfield (soon named Henderson Airfield) that would give the Allies a strategic advantage. As half of the Marine’s supplies sailed away with the retreating Navy, one of the most storied campaigns in Marine and WW2 history began.
In Midnight in the Pacific, Author Joseph Wheelan pulls the reader onto the battlefield as inexperienced young men come to adjust their tactics and their sense of fair play to counter the vicious and calculated fighting behavior of their enemy. Numerous instances of medics being blown to pieces by the concealed grenades of the injured Japanese while attempting to assist the wounded begin the transformation of naive young Americans into the hardened killers that war required of them – they begin to refuse to take prisoners at all.
As the fighting intensifies the reader finds themselves looking, along with the Marines, to the sky and the shoreline and thinking “surely they’ve endured enough”. Instead one bloody battle after another continues to wipe out some of the bravest men to ever wear a uniform. Wheelan reminds us of their sacrifice, citing numerous instances of valor that led to Medals of Honor and Navy Crosses. In these individual acts, as much as the collective action, the legend of Guadalcanal was created and remains today.
After the battles of Bloody Ridge, too many clashes at Matanikau to keep track of (there were 5), and the “Cactus Air Force” defending Henderson Field with little sleep from constant bombardment, the Navy finally returned under a new, aggressive and highly competent leader, William “Bull” Halsey. Along with Major General Vandegrift leading the Marines on land, Halsey’s bold moves during the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal led directly to final US victory on the island.
As Wheelan himself notes, the Army could never match the bravery and tenacity that the Marines had endured before them, though they certainly fought valiantly. The unmistakable conclusion is that it was the pure grit and ability to survive of the Marines stranded there in August 1942 that made the later victory possible at all and helped stop the unchecked Japanese advance across the Pacific.
Throughout the book, Wheelan includes looks in at the Japanese side of the campaign that help add to the rich storytelling and feel for the harshness of the terrain and uncompromising triumph-or-die “bushido” code that led many Japanese to take their own lives. He notes the inherent weakness of this as it applied to skilled pilots who refused to use their parachutes, preferring death to capture. This rapidly depleted talent on the Japanese side. Wheelan also notes that too strict an adherence to previous plans with no room for flexibility caused many unnecessary failures on the Japanese side.
It was not just Japan, however, who suffered from inadequacies born of stubbornness. The US Navy, Wheelan argues, continually underestimated the Japanese and were particularly unprepared for naval night fighting. Newer technologies were underutilized during the Guadalcanal campaign such as the latest radar (such as using the older SC vs SG technology) and not enough attention was given to lack of success of US Navy torpedoes, particularly when compared to the damage done by the Japanese “Long Lance” torpedoes.
Overall, this book is an entertaining, fast-paced, adventure wrapped in stories of valor, horror and survival while remaining a necessary contribution to the history of Guadalcanal.
