Henderson Field and the Cactus Air Force

Henderson Field from the air on 22 August 1942, two days after the first Marine squadrons flew in and the same day the first Army P-400s landed. The runway the Japanese had begun and the Marines finished runs through the coconut plantations of the Lunga plain. U.S. Navy photograph 80-G-12216 (National Archives); public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Guadalcanal · Chapter 3 of 9

Henderson Field and the Cactus Air Force

How a captured dirt strip, a few dozen worn aircraft and a chain of hidden radio watchers held the air over Guadalcanal from August to November 1942, and what the Navy lost at sea while they did.

8 Aug – Nov 1942Lunga Point · Bougainville · Eastern Solomons~32 min read

Everything on Guadalcanal in the autumn of 1942 turned on a strip of rolled dirt and gravel on the Lunga plain. The Japanese had begun the airfield in July; the 1st Marine Division took it on 8 August, the day after the Watchtower landings. Two nights later the Navy’s cruiser force was wrecked off Savo Island and the transports sailed away with much of the division’s equipment still aboard (Chapter 2). From that point, the airfield was both the reason the Marines were on the island and the only way they could stay there. Ships could not linger in the waters off Lunga Point by day unless aircraft from that field protected them, and the Japanese could not bring troops and supplies down the Slot by day while aircraft from that field could reach them.

The aircraft that flew from it came to be called the Cactus Air Force, after the Allied code name for Guadalcanal. It was never a formal organization. It was a composite of whatever Marine, Navy and Army squadrons could be put on the field at a given moment: Marine Wildcat fighters and Dauntless dive bombers, Navy carrier squadrons stranded ashore when their ships were damaged or sunk, Army Air Forces P-400s that could not climb high enough to fight bombers but could strafe, and later Army B-17s, Marine and Navy Avengers, and finally Corsairs. Its fliers lived in tents and dugouts beside the runway, flew aircraft that were refueled by hand from 55-gallon drums, and were bombed by day and shelled or harassed by night.

This chapter follows the airfield from its completion with captured Japanese equipment to the arrival of the first squadrons on 20 August; the coastwatcher network on Bougainville whose radio warnings gave the defenders time to climb; the daily raids from Rabaul; the Battle of the Eastern Solomons on 24–25 August, when Cactus aircraft turned back the first Japanese reinforcement convoy; and the September losses at sea, when the submarine I-19 sank the carrier Wasp and torpedoed the battleship North Carolina and the destroyer O’Brien in a single spread. The great October crisis, when Japanese battleships shelled the field, is told in Chapter 6; the November battles that finally decided the campaign are in Chapter 7.

A note on clocks and figures. Times below are local Guadalcanal time (GMT+11) unless another clock is named; American ship reports of the period often used other zone times, and Japanese records generally used Tokyo time (GMT+9). Claims of enemy aircraft destroyed were made in good faith in the confusion of air combat and were often higher than the losses the other side recorded; where the two differ, both are given.

A Japanese airfield, finished by Marines

When Marines of the 1st Division reached the airfield on 8 August they found a runway nearly ready but not usable. The Marine Corps official history, Hough, Ludwig and Shaw’s Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal, describes a strip that the Japanese had completed to about 2,600 feet, with a gap of 180 to 200 feet at midfield still unfilled. Henry I. Shaw Jr.’s later Marine Corps monograph, First Offensive, adds that it lacked a taxiway and adequate drainage, so that heavy rain left it potholed and at times unusable. Most of the division’s heavy engineering equipment had gone back to sea with the transports when they withdrew on 9 August.

What the Marines did have was what the Japanese had left behind. The official history lists it: nine road rollers, of which six worked; two gasoline locomotives with hopper cars; six small generators, two of them beyond repair; a gasoline winch; about 50 hand carts; some 75 hand shovels; and 280 pieces of explosives. With that equipment the 1st Engineer Battalion and other Marines moved about 100,000 cubic feet of fill into the midfield gap, packing it with a captured Japanese road roller. The field was lengthened toward 4,000 feet. A Navy PBY Catalina landed on 12 August; its officer pronounced the field fit for fighters, and the aircraft took off again with wounded Marines aboard, the first of 2,879 men whom Shaw records as evacuated by air from Guadalcanal during the campaign.

The Marines named the field for Major Lofton R. Henderson, a Marine aviator killed at Midway on 4 June 1942 while leading Marine Scout-Bombing Squadron 241 against the Japanese carriers (the Midway story is told in this site’s Battle of Midway collection). The name honored one of the Marine Corps’ own just two months dead, and it gave the place a name that the men who fought for it would use for the rest of their lives.

On 15 August four destroyer transports of Transport Division 12 ran in to Lunga Point with the first aviation supplies: 400 drums of aviation gasoline, 32 drums of lubricant and 282 bombs, according to the official history. They also brought a Navy advanced-base unit, CUB-1, about 120 men strong. Robert Mersky’s Marine Corps monograph on Solomons fighter pilots, Time of the Aces, says that CUB-1 helped complete the field, installed the air-raid warning system in the building the Marines called the Pagoda, and for nearly two weeks served as the ground crew for the Marine squadrons before their own mechanics arrived. It had no fuel pumps; its men tipped 55-gallon drums into aircraft tanks by hand and belted .50-caliber ammunition by hand. The official history notes that a Marine aviation officer, Major Charles H. Hayes, came in with this first detachment. The field was declared complete on 18 August, the same day Japanese bombers scored 17 hits on the runway, killing one engineer and wounding nine.

The Pagoda itself was a crude, one-story Japanese-built structure standing on a rise a few hundred yards from the runway. A 2017 article in the Naval Institute’s Naval History describes it as both control tower and air operations center, quotes one Marine officer as saying that you could see it 40 miles away, and records the flag system that ran the daily routine. A white flag meant Condition Yellow, bombers on the way; a black flag meant Condition Red, enemy aircraft within minutes or overhead; no flag meant nothing had been reported by radar or coastwatchers. A captured Japanese siren supplemented the flags. The building was an obvious target, and it was later demolished.

Cactus: the first squadrons, 20 August

“Cactus” was the radio identification for Guadalcanal in the Allied code plan, and as Shaw notes it became increasingly synonymous with the island itself. The aircraft that flew from the island became the Cactus Air Force, a nickname the fliers themselves used for their composite outfit, and the airfield’s headquarters signed its messages with the same word. None of the services had planned a permanent air command there; the arrangement grew from necessity.

The first squadrons came on 20 August from the escort carrier Long Island (later designated CVE-1), the Navy’s first converted escort carrier, which launched them about 200 miles southeast of Guadalcanal. Marine Fighting Squadron 223 (VMF-223), under Major John L. Smith, flew 19 Grumman F4F-4 Wildcats. Marine Scout-Bombing Squadron 232 (VMSB-232), under Richard C. Mangrum, flew 12 Douglas SBD-3 Dauntless dive bombers. (Accounts differ on Mangrum’s rank that month: the official history calls him a lieutenant colonel, Shaw’s monograph a major.) Both squadrons belonged to Marine Aircraft Group 23. The forward echelon of 31 aircraft landed in the late afternoon, and they were the first American aircraft to operate in combat from the field.

The pilots had little time to settle. Early on 21 August the Japanese force under Colonel Ichiki Kiyonao attacked the Marine line at the mouth of Alligator Creek, the action Marines called the Battle of the Tenaru (Chapter 4); later that day the Wildcats strafed the survivors. In the air, Smith led a four-plane patrol against six Zeros on 21 August and scored VMF-223’s first victory, but Mersky notes that only 15 of the squadron’s 19 Wildcats were flyable at the end of that first day. The pattern of the next three months was set at once: pilots flew several times a day, aircraft were damaged faster than they could be repaired, and every machine that could fly was kept flying.

On 22 August five Bell P-400 Airacobras of the Army Air Forces’ 67th Fighter Squadron landed. Nine more arrived on 27 August. The P-400 was an export version of the P-39 originally built for Britain, and it was poorly suited to the work Guadalcanal first demanded. The official history notes its ceiling of about 12,000 feet, far below the altitude at which Japanese bombers came in; Mersky adds that the Marine Wildcats held their formations at 15,000 feet on some early missions because the P-400s had no high-altitude oxygen system. The Army pilots were soon diverted to the role their aircraft could do well, low-level strafing and bombing in support of the Marines on the ground, and in that role they became valued. The Army’s side of the air war is covered more broadly in this site’s Army Air Forces section.

Ferdinand’s warning: coastwatchers and Condition Red

Henderson Field had no radar of its own when the first squadrons arrived. For its early warning it depended on a network of observers hidden on the islands between Rabaul and Guadalcanal. The network grew out of a Royal Australian Navy scheme dating to 1919 for civilian coastwatching along Australia’s northern approaches; by 1942, Shaw writes, it covered some 500,000 square miles and was controlled by the Allied Intelligence Bureau. Its operational head in the islands was Lieutenant Commander Eric Feldt, RAN, a retired naval officer with long service in the New Guinea administration. Feldt chose the code name “Ferdinand” for the organization, after the bull in the children’s story who would rather sit and smell the flowers than fight. The Australian Department of Veterans’ Affairs’ Anzac Portal explains the choice in Feldt’s terms: the coastwatchers’ job was to watch and report unobtrusively, not to fight. Feldt’s own book, The Coast Watchers (1946), remains the starting point for the story.

Two men on Bougainville mattered most to the Cactus fliers. Paul Edward Mason, a plantation owner who had lived on Bougainville for about 20 years, watched from the hills inland from Buin in the island’s south. William John “Jack” Read watched from the north of the island, over the approaches past Buka. Both were given naval rank in the Royal Australian Naval Volunteer Reserve so that they might have some protection as prisoners of war if captured, though the protection was uncertain at best. Japanese aircraft flying from Rabaul toward Guadalcanal passed over or near both of them. Read could see formations as they came past Buka; Mason could see them again as they passed over southern Bougainville and, later, as Japanese airfields were built at Buin and Kahili under his eyes. Both lived with Solomon Islander carriers, scouts and helpers without whom no station could be supplied or moved; the Anzac Portal estimates that each station needed 12 to 16 carriers, and the radios’ petrol-driven charging engine alone weighed 70 pounds.

The value of a sighting lay entirely in the minutes it bought. On 7 August, according to the Office of Naval Intelligence Combat Narrative of the landings, the ships off Guadalcanal received a coastwatcher report at 1045 that a flight of twin-engine bombers had passed Bougainville and was probably bound for Guadalcanal; the cruiser Chicago’s radar picked up the formation at 1315, 43 miles out, and it was over Savo Island about five minutes later. The carrier fighter cover had well over two hours to prepare. Warnings to the Henderson Field squadrons later in the campaign were often shorter, because the Japanese staged through new bases closer to Guadalcanal and because messages had to pass through relay stations before reaching the Marines; the 2017 Naval History article says the coastwatchers’ warnings, sometimes as much as 45 minutes, gave Henderson’s fighters time to gain a favorable attack altitude. From 2 September an Army SCR-270-B air-search radar on the island added a second layer, able to detect high-flying bomber formations at up to about 150 miles.

The Japanese were creatures of their own geography. The 11th Air Fleet’s bomber and fighter units flew from Rabaul on New Britain, and the round trip to Guadalcanal stretched the range of even the long-legged Mitsubishi A6M Zero and G4M “Betty.” The Naval History article puts the flight from Rabaul at roughly four hours, which, with dawn takeoffs, brought the formations over Lunga between about 1130 and 1430 nearly every day. Marine airmen called the noon hour “Tojo time.” Formations of 20 to 40 Bettys in their characteristic V, escorted by Zeros, came over at 20,000 to 27,000 feet, too high for the antiaircraft guns to reach with much effect and high enough that only fighters with good warning could meet them on favorable terms. Because the Zeros were operating at the end of their range, they had little fuel to spare for long fights over the island, a limitation the Marine pilots learned to exploit.

Admiral William F. Halsey, who took over the South Pacific command in October, later paid the coastwatchers the compliment most often quoted about them: as Shaw’s monograph gives it, “the Coastwatchers saved Guadalcanal, and Guadalcanal saved the Pacific.” (The Royal Australian Navy’s Sea Power Centre gives the last word as “South Pacific.”) The coastwatchers did more than warn. Shaw records that they rescued and sheltered 118 Allied pilots during the campaign, including many Marines, almost always with the help of Islanders who hid, fed and paddled downed airmen to safety. The network, and the Solomon Islanders who made it work, are the subject of this collection’s special-units page on the coastwatchers, and of the wider account of Islanders’ war in Chapter 8.

Wildcat against Zero

The fighter pilots of VMF-223 knew the reputation of their opponent before they reached the island. The Zero was faster in a climb, more maneuverable at low and medium speeds, and longer-ranged than the F4F-4. Colonel Richard Camp’s 2017 article on the field gives the A6M3 Model 32 Zero a time to 20,000 feet of 7 minutes 19 seconds and a top speed of 338 mph, against 318 mph and a climb rate of 2,200 feet per minute for the Wildcat. A Wildcat pilot who tried to turn with a Zero at low speed was likely to lose.

What the Wildcat had was protection, firepower and a capacity to absorb damage that the Japanese fighter did not share. The Zero carried two 20-mm cannon and two 7.7-mm machine guns but had little armor and no self-sealing tanks; the F4F-4 had six .50-caliber guns, armor behind the pilot and tanks that would often survive hits that set a Zero afire. Robert Galer, who commanded VMF-224, later described his Wildcat as “very rugged and very mistreated (at Guadalcanal)” in an interview quoted by Mersky. The Smithsonian’s curator of naval aviation has made the same point, that it took a great deal of fire to bring a Wildcat down.

The tactics that followed from those facts were simple to state and hard to fly. Smith, according to a 2012 Naval History profile, ordered his pilots to attack bombers from overhead or the high side to avoid the tail guns, to fly in pairs, and, against Zeros, to fire a burst or two and break away rather than be drawn into a turning fight. Altitude was everything. A Wildcat that started above the bombers could dive through the formation at high speed, fire, and keep going down and away from the escorting Zeros, then climb back for another pass if there was time and fuel. The coastwatcher warning, the climb and the diving attack were one system; without the first, the others were impossible.

Navy fighter pilots had been developing similar ideas since the spring. Lieutenant Commander John S. Thach’s “beam defense” maneuver, in which two fighters or two sections weave across each other’s path so that a Zero attacking one is brought under the guns of the other, had been tried at Midway and spread through the Navy squadrons, including those that came ashore at Cactus. The combination of mutual support, diving attacks and refusal to dogfight did not make the Wildcat the Zero’s equal in every respect, but it allowed American pilots to fight on terms that suited their aircraft.

The cost of learning was heavy anyway. VMF-223 lost pilots in its first weeks to Zeros, to bomber gunners, to accidents on the rough field and to the sea. By 1 October, the official history counts, the squadron had lost 12 pilots, six killed and six wounded; the 2012 profile of Smith says that by October only nine of the original pilots remained. Pilots who bailed out over the water off Guadalcanal or Florida Island were often picked up by Solomon Islanders in canoes. Marion Carl of VMF-223, shot down on 9 September, was brought back by Islanders and returned to the field five days later.

The Battle of the Eastern Solomons, 24–25 August

The Japanese answer to the American landing came in two parts. On land, Ichiki’s first echelon had been destroyed at the Tenaru on 21 August. At sea, the Combined Fleet sent down the carriers Shōkaku and Zuikaku under Vice Admiral Nagumo Chūichi, the light carrier Ryūjō, an advance force of battleships and cruisers under Vice Admiral Kondō Nobutake, and a reinforcement convoy under Rear Admiral Tanaka Raizō, flying his flag in the light cruiser Jintsū, with the rest of Ichiki’s regiment and naval landing troops aboard slow transports. Opposing them east of the Solomons were the carrier task forces of Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher built around Saratoga, Enterprise and Wasp. The Naval History and Heritage Command’s H-Gram account of the battle is the basis for the timeline that follows.

On 23 August a PBY spotted Tanaka’s convoy north of Guadalcanal, and Tanaka reversed course for a time. Saratoga launched a 37-plane strike that afternoon that failed to find him in bad weather and fading light and spent the night at Henderson Field, a first demonstration of how the island’s field could extend a carrier’s reach. That same day Fletcher, believing from intelligence reports that the Japanese carriers were still far to the north, sent Wasp south to refuel. The H-Gram notes that this took a third of his striking power out of the battle; Wasp’s DANFS history records simply that she therefore did not take part.

Totals for the battle depend heavily on who is counting. The Marine Corps official history, written from American records, has the Japanese losing the Ryūjō and about 90 aircraft against 20 American planes lost. The NHHC account, drawing on Japanese records, breaks the Japanese losses down piece by piece: 18 of 27 Vals and six Zeros from Nagumo’s first strike, three Zeros and four Kates from Ryūjō’s strike on Guadalcanal, and others in scattered encounters, against eight American Wildcats lost in the defense of the carriers, three Marine Wildcats over Guadalcanal and a handful of other aircraft. The Japanese also lost Ryūjō, the destroyer Mutsuki and the transport Kinryū Maru; Jintsū was badly damaged. On the American side Enterprise was put out of action until October.

For the Cactus Air Force the battle had a meaning larger than its scale. On 24 August the Marine fighters fought their first major air battle and showed that they could break up a raid. On 25 August, a handful of Marine and Navy dive bombers flying from a mud strip had done what Fletcher’s carriers had not: found the troop convoy and turned it back. Tanaka drew the obvious lesson, and so did the Japanese command at Rabaul. Slow transports could not survive daylight within the radius of the Henderson Field dive bombers. From the end of August, Japanese reinforcements to Guadalcanal came mostly by fast destroyers that ran down the Slot after dark, unloaded off the north coast in the middle of the night and were back out of range by dawn: the Tokyo Express, as the Americans called it, and “rat transportation” in Japanese naval slang. The Tokyo Express record page in this collection follows those runs.

Daylight belongs to Cactus: the Slot by day and by night

The Slot was the Americans’ name for New Georgia Sound, the channel between the two chains of the central Solomons that runs from Bougainville and the Shortland Islands southeast to Guadalcanal. For the rest of 1942 it had two masters, one by day and one by night. In daylight, any Japanese ship within strike range of Henderson Field was exposed to dive bombers, and later to torpedo planes and B-17s. After dark the Americans had almost no ability to find and hit ships at sea from the air, and until November the Navy’s surface forces seldom contested the waters off Guadalcanal at night. Japanese destroyers and cruisers, by contrast, were trained and equipped for night action, and the Savo Island disaster (Chapter 2) had shown what they could do.

The result was a daily rhythm that the clock above plays out. Destroyers loaded with troops and supplies left the Shortlands in the afternoon, timing their run so that they would still be beyond the reach of Henderson’s aircraft when the light failed. They came down the Slot at high speed after dark, arrived off Tassafaronga, Cape Esperance or Taivu Point around midnight, put troops and drums of supplies over the side, sometimes shelled the Marine perimeter, and raced back north to be out of range again by first light. Cactus aircraft hunted them at dusk and dawn and occasionally caught stragglers. The Americans, for their part, used the daylight to bring in their own transports and supplies, and the Japanese air raids at Tojo time were aimed as much at those ships as at the airfield.

That division held only as long as the field could fly. Both sides understood it. The Japanese efforts of September and October, from the attack on Edson’s Ridge (Chapter 5) to the battleship bombardment of 13–14 October and the ground offensive that followed (Chapter 6), were aimed above all at Henderson Field. If its aircraft could be destroyed or its runway held under fire, the daylight would belong to whoever could use it, and the Japanese could bring in heavy equipment and large convoys. In mid-November that was the plan that failed, when Cactus aircraft sank most of a major convoy in daylight on 14 November (Chapter 7).

Geiger, the Wing and the Navy squadrons ashore

On 24 August, eleven dive bombers from the damaged Enterprise, scout and bombing pilots under Lieutenant Turner F. Caldwell, landed at Henderson Field rather than return to a carrier that could not take them. They became “Flight 300” and stayed until 27 September, the first of several Navy carrier units that fought ashore as part of Cactus. They took part in the attack on Tanaka’s convoy the next morning. On 30 August the rear echelon of Marine Aircraft Group 23 under Colonel William J. Wallace arrived with VMF-224, led by Major Robert E. Galer, and VMSB-231, bringing 19 more Wildcats and 12 more SBDs. The official history counts 86 pilots and 64 aircraft at Cactus after that reinforcement, 10 of the aircraft Navy and three Army. It also notes that in the first ten days of operations Cactus fliers claimed 56 Japanese planes for 11 of their own.

Geiger’s headquarters coordinated a mixed force of three services and constant turnover, which in practice meant matching whatever aircraft were flyable to whatever the day demanded: fighters against the noon raid, dive bombers against ships, P-400s against Japanese positions near the perimeter, and on occasion everything at once. The Marine accounts preserve the image of the general himself flying an SBD on a strike, which a 2006 HistoryNet summary repeats; the official histories do not dwell on it. More important was the structure he gave to what had been an improvised arrangement: a wing commander on the island with the authority to direct all the aircraft there, whoever owned them.

The Navy’s carrier misfortunes kept feeding Cactus. On 31 August the submarine I-26 torpedoed Saratoga southeast of Guadalcanal. NHHC records 12 wounded, including Admiral Fletcher, who suffered a laceration to the forehead; the carrier was out of action for several months. Her air group, flown off to Espiritu Santo, became available for the island. At 1620 on 11 September, 24 Wildcats of Fighting Squadron 5 (VF-5) under Lieutenant Commander Leroy C. Simpler landed at Henderson from Espiritu Santo. The next day, 21 of them joined the 11 remaining Cactus fighters to meet a 42-plane raid, claiming 12 bombers and three fighters. Between 11 and 13 September, the official history notes, the field gained some 60 aircraft, including 18 more Wildcats flown in by Navy pilots from Hornet and Wasp, 12 SBDs of Saratoga’s Scouting Squadron 3 (VS-3) and six TBF Avengers of Torpedo Squadron 8. The arrivals came on the eve of the Japanese attack on Edson’s Ridge.

From early September, Marine R4D transports (the Navy and Marine version of the Douglas C-47) began flying supplies into the field and casualties out, each carrying about 3,000 pounds, according to the official history. The transport squadrons of the South Pacific Combat Air Transport Command became a lifeline for the island, bringing in aviation gasoline, ammunition and spare parts, and taking out the sick and wounded. Army B-17s of the 11th Bombardment Group, based at Espiritu Santo, staged through Henderson for long-range searches and attacks; later in the campaign heavy bombers were based on the island itself.

Mud, fuel drums and Marston mat

The field was its own enemy. The official history describes it as a “bowl of black dust” in dry weather and a quagmire in wet. Dust choked engines and wore out parts; rain turned the strip and the dispersal areas to mud that bogged down aircraft and trucks. Camp’s article, drawing on the recollections of the airmen, says that poor conditions on the strip caused about as many aircraft losses as enemy action, a claim the airmen made repeatedly and which reflects the many aircraft wrecked on takeoff and landing. There were at first no hangars, no repair shops, no bomb hoists and no fuel trucks. Bombs were lifted onto the dive bombers by hand.

Fuel was the constant shortage. Early fueling, the official history records, was done from drums hung in the rafters of the partly built Japanese hangars; even after gasoline trucks arrived, fuel had to be hand-pumped from 55-gallon drums into the trucks and from the trucks into the aircraft. Camp adds that the gasoline was strained through chamois to remove condensation and that refueling a handful of aircraft often took several hours. Every drum came in by ship or by air. The Marines had captured some 800 to 900 drums of Japanese aviation gasoline, but not all of it was suitable for American engines, and it was no substitute for regular supply. Shortages were sharpest after the October bombardment, when the 13 October raids burned 5,000 gallons of aviation fuel and crews drained gasoline from wrecked aircraft and searched the groves for undamaged drums, finding enough to fly three SBDs on 15 October (Chapter 6).

On 1 September the 6th Naval Construction Battalion began to land: five officers and 387 men, with two bulldozers, according to the official history. The Seabees took over much of the work of keeping the field open. They filled bomb and shell craters, improved drainage and began clearing a second, grass strip that became known as Fighter One, which the pilots called “the cow pasture.” Fighter One gave the fighters a field of their own and a second runway when the main strip was cratered. In wet weather it flooded. Engineers and Seabees developed a drill for repairing damage: once dump trucks and pneumatic tampers had arrived, a crater from a 500-kilogram bomb could be filled in about 30 minutes. Fill was kept stockpiled near the runway so that crews could move out as soon as a raid passed.

Steel matting came slowly. The pierced-steel plank known as Marston mat (named, by the usual account, for Marston, North Carolina, near the Army field where it was first tested in 1941) could turn a dirt strip into an all-weather runway, but it was heavy and shipping was short. The official history notes that none was available in early September. Camp writes that only about 1,000 feet of the main runway was eventually covered with matting during the period he describes, and that Fighter One, for lack of matting, remained little more than cut grass suited to light fighters. By the end of the campaign the Seabees and Army engineers had built Fighter Two near Kukum, across the Lunga to the west, and the airfield complex was well on its way to becoming the large base that supported the advance up the Solomons in 1943.

Nights: Washing Machine Charlie and Louie the Louse

Night brought no rest. Almost every night single Japanese aircraft flew over the perimeter, dropping a few bombs or flares at intervals, enough to drive men out of their cots and into foxholes and to keep them awake. The Marines gave the intruders names. The official history records them as “Louis the Louse, or Washing-Machine Charley,” and explains in a footnote that, strictly, “Charlie” was a twin-engine night bomber from Rabaul, whose unsynchronized engines gave a distinctive throbbing note, while “Louie” was a cruiser floatplane whose flares signaled the arrival of Japanese warships to bombard the perimeter. Shaw notes that the Marines used the names interchangeably. The material damage the night raiders did was usually slight; the cost in lost sleep, for pilots who would fly again at dawn, was considerable.

Worse were the nights when the flares meant ships. Japanese destroyers that had unloaded on the Tokyo Express often shelled the field on their way out, and on the night of 13–14 October the battleships Kongō and Haruna fired hundreds of 14-inch shells into the Henderson Field area, the worst single night of the campaign for the Cactus Air Force (Chapter 6). The official history records that the Cactus Air Force could fly 42 of the 90 aircraft that had been operational 24 hours earlier, and that 41 men were killed in the attacks of 13–14 October. The Americans had no effective night fighters on the island in 1942 to stop the night intruders; the answer came only in 1943.

15 September: one submarine, three ships

The waters southeast of the Solomons, where American carriers operated to cover the supply route to Guadalcanal, were thick with Japanese submarines. Sailors called the area Torpedo Junction. After Saratoga’s torpedoing on 31 August, Hornet narrowly escaped a submarine attack on 6 September. On 14 September the carriers Wasp and Hornet, with the battleship North Carolina and their screens, were at sea covering a convoy carrying the 7th Marines to Guadalcanal. The convoy reached the island on 18 September, bringing, as Shaw notes, badly needed aviation gasoline and the first ammunition resupply since the landings.

On the afternoon of 15 September, about 150 miles southeast of San Cristobal, the submarine I-19 under Lieutenant Commander Kinashi Takaichi fired a spread of six torpedoes at Wasp. Wasp’s DANFS history dates the torpedo warning to 1444. Two torpedoes hit the carrier near her gasoline tanks and magazines; the H-Gram allows for a possible third. Fires broke out in the hangar and below decks, ready ammunition at a forward gun mount exploded, broken water mains left no water to fight the forward fires, and three more gasoline-vapor explosions followed within 24 minutes. Captain Forrest P. Sherman ordered the ship abandoned at 1520 and left her at 1600. The destroyer Lansdowne fired five torpedoes into the burning hulk, three of which hit, and Wasp sank bow first at 2100.

The cost was severe. Wasp’s DANFS history counts 25 officers and 150 men killed, along with an International News Service correspondent, Jack Singer; the NHHC H-Gram gives 173 crew lost and 45 aircraft. The surviving aircraft that were airborne found other decks or fields, and Shaw notes that some of Wasp’s surviving planes joined the Cactus Air Force. With Wasp gone, Saratoga under repair and Enterprise still at Pearl Harbor, Hornet was the only undamaged American fleet carrier in the South Pacific.

I-19’s spread did not end with Wasp. The torpedoes that missed the carrier ran on toward Hornet’s group, several miles away. At 1452 by the ship’s clock, one struck North Carolina on the port side abreast her No. 1 turret, at about frame 46, about two feet below the lower edge of the armor belt. The Navy’s War Damage Report No. 61 records a hole that divers measured at 32 feet fore and aft and 18 feet deep, about 970 tons of water in the damaged area, and a list of 5½ degrees that counterflooding corrected in about six minutes. Five men were lost, one washed overboard and four trapped in flooded compartments. The battleship increased speed from 19 to 25 knots immediately and kept station with the formation. A moment later, at about 1454, another torpedo struck the destroyer O’Brien near the stem on the port side.

O’Brien’s damage at first looked manageable, and no one aboard was reported killed by the hit. Her War Damage Report No. 28 follows her through temporary repairs at two advanced bases and an inspection at Suva in Fiji. She sailed for Mare Island on 16 October, but leakage grew, and on 19 October, 1,027 miles out of Suva, her hull broke up. The crew had gone over the side by 0701, apart from a small nucleus, and at 0757 the stern went under, followed by the bow. The report does not record any lives lost in the sinking.

For years after the war it was not certain that a single submarine had done all of this; another submarine, I-15, was in the area, and some early accounts credited it with the hits on North Carolina and O’Brien. Later study of Japanese records attributed all three to I-19’s six-torpedo spread, which the NHHC H-Gram calls “arguably the most effective spread of torpedoes in history.” By any measure it was one of the most destructive single submarine attacks of the war: one carrier sunk, one destroyer lost and the Navy’s newest battleship sent away for repairs at the height of the campaign. North Carolina received temporary repairs from the repair ship Vestal at Tongatapu from 19 to 21 September and then went to Pearl Harbor for permanent work; the H-Gram puts her out of action for about two months. The submarine war in the Pacific, on both sides, is the subject of this site’s submarine war collection.

The aces and the medals

The fighting over Guadalcanal produced the Marine Corps’ first aces of the war and its most decorated fighter pilots. The figures below need some care. Victory credits were assigned after the fact from pilots’ reports and witnesses, shared kills were counted in halves, and the totals given in different sources vary by a few aircraft. The citations for the Medal of Honor give the figures the Navy Department accepted at the time of the award; later tallies, compiled by historians with access to more records, sometimes differ.

Marion E. Carl of VMF-223 had already earned a Navy Cross at Midway. On 24 August he claimed three aircraft over Guadalcanal, and with two more on 26 August he became, in the words of the Marine Corps History Division, the first Marine Corps ace on 26 August 1942. The History Division credits him with 10 aircraft during the battle for Guadalcanal and 18 by the end of the war; other tallies of his Guadalcanal score run higher. He received a second Navy Cross for his service with VMF-223. Carl was shot down on 9 September and spent five days with Islanders who had picked him out of the water before he got back to the field.

Harold W. Bauer, a Naval Academy graduate from Kansas who commanded VMF-212, was based on Efate in the New Hebrides and flew in to Guadalcanal several times before bringing his squadron forward. According to the NHHC biography, he shot down one aircraft on 28 September and four on 3 October during these visits. On 16 October, arriving with his squadron, he found Japanese dive bombers attacking the seaplane tender McFarland, which was bringing gasoline into Lunga, and alone and nearly out of fuel shot down four of them. On 14 November, during the attacks on the Japanese convoy, he shot down two more, was himself shot down, and was seen in the water in a life raft; despite several days of searching he was never found. He is listed on the Tablets of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery. His posthumous Medal of Honor covers his command of VMF-212 from 10 May to 14 November 1942.

The aces were the visible part of a much larger effort. The dive-bomber and torpedo crews, whose work against ships decided the daylight war, collected fewer headlines. Mangrum’s VMSB-232 flew until it could fly no more. The official history records that by 1 October both VMSB-232 and Caldwell’s Flight 300 were “done for,” and that when Mangrum was evacuated on 12 October he was the only member of his squadron able to leave Henderson under his own power; the rest of his pilots had been killed, wounded or evacuated sick.

Attrition and rotation: the air order of battle over time

Cactus never had many aircraft. The numbers rose with each reinforcement and fell with every raid, accident and bombardment. Counting them is difficult, because the sources count different things: aircraft on the field, aircraft operational, aircraft able to fly on a given morning. The chart below gathers the figures the official histories and one later summary give for specific dates, with the definition each uses. It shows the shape of the autumn: a thin start, a build-up in September, a collapse after the October bombardment and a low point in late October, before the reinforcements of November.

The first Marine air group lasted about eight weeks. Mersky’s monograph records that from 20 August to 16 October Marine Aircraft Group 23 and the squadrons attached to it claimed 244 Japanese aircraft, 111½ of them credited to VMF-223 and 60½ to VMF-224, while the group lost 22 pilots killed or missing; 33 aviators of other units at Cactus were lost in the same period. VMF-223 and VMF-224 left in October, worn out and many of their pilots sick with malaria and dysentery as well as exhaustion. Marine Aircraft Group 14 took over, with VMF-121 already on the island from 9 October and VMF-212 from 16 October, followed by elements of VMSB-132 and VMF-211 and, from mid-November, Marine Aircraft Group 11 staging forward through Espiritu Santo. By mid-November, the official history counts 1,748 men in Guadalcanal’s aviation units, 1,557 of them Marines.

The overall cost is harder to state. A 2006 HistoryNet summary of the Cactus Air Force gives American losses through January 1943 as 148 aircraft shot down and 94 airmen killed or missing, with 43 aircraft destroyed on the ground and 86 lost operationally between August and November 1942, and puts Japanese losses over the campaign at some 900 aircraft and more than 2,400 aircrew; it does not cite a source for each figure, and other estimates differ. What all accounts agree on is the shape of the Japanese loss. The Japanese naval air arm in the South Pacific spent its experienced aircrews over Guadalcanal, flying at the limit of their range, with no means of recovering pilots who came down over the island or the sea along the Slot, while American pilots shot down near Henderson often came home the same day, by parachute, by canoe or on foot. The Marine fighter pilots made the point at the time: John L. Smith observed, as Camp records, that his squadron’s casualties were lower than they might have been because downed pilots could often make dead-stick landings or bail out over or near the field.

The November battles marked the end of the Cactus Air Force’s period of greatest danger. On 13 November aircraft from Henderson Field attacked the crippled battleship Hiei near Savo throughout the day, and her crew scuttled her; on 14 November Henderson and Enterprise aircraft, with 15 B-17s from Espiritu Santo, attacked Tanaka’s convoy, and the official history records that nine transports were hit and seven sunk (Chapter 7). After that the Japanese never again tried to run a large daylight convoy to Guadalcanal. In December and January the American air strength on the island grew steadily, the Army’s Thirteenth Air Force and Marine and Navy squadrons operated from a growing complex of fields, and in February 1943 the first Marine F4U Corsairs arrived. By then the Japanese were evacuating the island (Chapter 9), and the fields on the Lunga plain had become the starting point for the air campaign up the Solomons toward Rabaul.

Myths and the record

What the field meant

Seen from Rabaul, Henderson Field was a small target at the far end of a long flight. Seen from Washington or Pearl Harbor, it was a tenuous foothold that might be lost at any moment. Seen from the Lunga plain, it was a dirt runway, a few tents, a Japanese building with a flag on it and a line of foxholes. What made it decisive was the way it changed the arithmetic of the campaign. As long as aircraft could fly from it by day, the Japanese could not bring troops, artillery and supplies to Guadalcanal in quantity, and the Americans could. The Japanese tried to change that with air raids, with ground attacks on the field, with shellfire from battleships and cruisers, and finally with a great convoy in November. Each time, enough aircraft survived, and enough fuel and ammunition arrived, for the field to keep flying.

That survival depended on people far from the runway as much as on the pilots. It depended on two Australians and their Solomon Islander helpers hiding in the hills of Bougainville with heavy radios; on the Navy advanced-base men and Seabees who filled craters under fire; on Marine mechanics and fuel handlers pumping gasoline by hand; on the destroyer transports, cargo ships, seaplane tenders and transport aircraft that brought the drums in; and on the carriers and battleships that drew the Japanese fleet’s attention and paid for it, Enterprise, Saratoga, Wasp and North Carolina among them. It also cost Japanese aircrews dearly. Hundreds of Japanese airmen died over the Solomons in 1942, most of them over water where they had no hope of rescue, and the experienced pilots lost there could not be replaced.

The next chapter returns to the ground, to the Marines along the perimeter and their first battles at the Tenaru, the Goettge patrol and the Matanikau (Chapter 4). The special-units page on the Cactus Air Force at Henderson Field gathers the squadrons, aircraft and pilots of this chapter in one place.