In the pre-dawn hours, U.S. Marines waded ashore on Guadalcanal and nearby Tulagi, catching the Japanese garrison by surprise and seizing an unfinished airstrip within a day. The six-month campaign that followed, fought through malaria-ridden jungle and brutal naval battles in 'Ironbottom Sound,' marked the turning point when the Allies shifted from defense to offense in the Pacific.
The landing itself was almost anticlimactic — Japanese construction troops fled into the jungle rather than fight, and Marines walked onto the airstrip, later named Henderson Field, with barely a shot fired. The real war came after, when the Imperial Navy turned Guadalcanal's surrounding waters into a graveyard of ships, sinking so many vessels on both sides that sailors nicknamed the channel 'Ironbottom Sound.'
Marines ashore survived on captured Japanese rice and suffered so badly from malaria that some units lost more men to disease than to combat. Yet the stubborn defense of Henderson Field, flown by pilots who called themselves the 'Cactus Air Force,' denied Japan the airfield it needed to threaten Australia's supply lines.
By February 1943, Japan quietly evacuated its starving remaining troops. Guadalcanal cost roughly 7,100 American and 31,000 Japanese lives, but it proved the Imperial Army was not invincible in jungle warfare — a psychological turning point as important as the strategic one.
Key people: Alexander Vandegrift