75th Anniversary of Guadalcanal

Anniversary Lectures from the National WWII Museum:

youtube.com/watch?v=7l9kk3ztpyM
youtube.com/watch?v=PdQ120V1SqE
youtube.com/watch?v=7GGlanaHY-o

I am utterly fascinated by this battle. It's the closest, on paper, to an equal match of land, air and naval forces on either side; you can do so many speculative wargames with this kind of scenario. As far as I can tell it's utterly unique in having constant, intertwined combat on land, air and sea simultaneously without distinct phases as one normally sees with amphibious operations (ie Step 1: fight for sea control, Step 2: fight for air control, Step 3: land invasion), simply due to how rushed and faulty the entire operation was. On top of that, it marks not only the turning point against Japan, but, since it coincides with the Battle of Stalingrad almost exactly, it can generally be considered as part of the great turning point of WW2 as a whole.

Everything I know about Guadalcanal comes from the audio-book of Japanese Destroyer Captain. The eponymous character, also the author of the book, describes the night battle of GC as a confused mess during which he made multiple costly mistakes. He was captain of the Destroyer Amatsukaze and a mysterious ship wandered into the battle. The ship was mysterious because it did not appear to be armed, and he wasn't sure which side it was one. He began to wonder if somehow, a destroyer tender had gotten confused and wandered into the combat zone. Unwilling to take the chance of potentially sinking a friendly ship, he ordered his crew to pull up within 300 meters of the ghost ship and illuminate it with floodlights. Upon doing this, he immediately realized what it was. The American cruiser USS Juneau. Juneau had only appeared to be unarmed because her main turrets had been blown off earlier in the battle, and now she was trying to disengage. And that's when he made his first mistake. He immediately ordered that all remaining torpedoes be fired into the crippled cruiser. However, all the torpedoes failed to detonate. He immediately realized that he'd made a serious error; the torpedoes had a minimum arming distance of 400 meters, and so they all failed to go off when they hit the cruiser.

>>>TBC

>continued

Angry at himself for screwing up what should have been an easy kill, he now made his second big mistake. He ordered his gunners to open fire on the cruiser without bother to turn off the flood lights. The destroyer's 5-inch guns were weak against the cruiser's armor, but they still had the potential to sink it with sustained fire. But leaving the floodlights on made Amatsukaze a highly visible target, and the cruiser USS Helena soon spotted the isolated destroyer and started raining down 6-inch shells. The destroyer tried to run away, but the impacting shells soon disabled the ship's steering, making it a sitting duck. Why exactly the USS Helena decided to cease fire and leave destroyer alive, disabled but alive, is still a mystery. Hara and his crew were able to use manpower control to steer the crippled destroyer away.

Good thread :)

Dumping Pacific War pictures, Semper Fi/Hooah/Anchors Aweigh and all that

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Are there any movies about the Philippine Campaign? You'd figure a campaign that important and brutal would get its own movies

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