The Air Combat Over Guadalcanal

Making a brief appearance in this book is an airplane irreverently named “The Resurrection”, brought back from the dead at Henderson Field on Guadalcanal through combining parts from multiple wrecks at a time when Japanese aircraft and naval gunfire made the US beachhead seem precarious. This was a Bell P-400 – not a familiar type in the history books – a fighter rejected by the Royal Air Force, yet acquired by the US Army Air Force when it was desperate for deployable fighters after Pearl Harbor. Though proven inadequate in air combat against the Japanese, the defenders of Henderson Field made a desperate effort to pull together one more fighter, even though what they got was another P-400. This story is one of the more relevant ones appearing in this book. Effective military history requires more than re-assembling the past from existing material, like “The Resurrection” at Henderson Field.

Like “The Resurrection”, this book is put together from pre-existing material. Eric Hammel’s books on Second World War air combat, especially fighter combat, made extensive use of interviews with US personnel, back when they could be interviewed, including those for a planned book about Guadalcanal. Thomas McKelvey Cleaver has, along with this book, written Beneath the Southern Cross, also published by Osprey, a history of air operations against Rabaul that included the Guadalcanal campaign, two books that overlap in content. The Cactus Air Force’s maps and naval battle track charts are also recycled and have appeared in that earlier book. Like the long-ago P-400 at Henderson Field, putting the material covered in that earlier book with Hammel’s interviews put together this volume.

This book has no bibliography or source notes (apparently the publisher's choice), but appears to be based on the US-published literature that reflects the importance of Guadalcanal as the hinge campaign of the Pacific war. Other sources include the diary of Navy ace F.R. Register – “Cash” to his squadron, “Pinky” to his friends – which is available online. Interviews, oral histories, letters and diaries give a sense of what it must have been like to have experienced the air and naval combat of the Guadalcanal campaign. A historian – especially one aiming at a broader audience – can use sources such as Register’s diary to show what it was like and share some of the tension that the defenders of Guadalcanal experienced. There are dramatic turning points in the story, even though readers know who wins in the end. Historians such as the late Stephen Ambrose ended up on the best seller list and on the television screen, providing a broad audience with historical insights and stoking popular interest.

But interviews by themselves can be misleading, especially if not compared to contemporaneous sources such as combat reports and logbooks. It may be the same person giving the interview that made history, decades before. But how the intervening years may have changed perception is often opaque to historian and source alike. Relying on interviews without the larger context – as Ambrose did in his Band of Brothers – can be effective. But it can also be misleading. “The obvious advantage of living testimony is offset by serious disadvantages. … The result may be disconcerting to the historian”, wrote Sir Henry Newbolt, the Royal Navy's official historian of the First World War, who came close to becoming collateral damage in the savage interwar Jellicoe-Beatty feud. That is why, when contemporaneous accounts (in the form of combat reports or war diaries) or histories are available, they provide context to interviews (such as Southerland’s) or diaries (such as Register’s).

While apparently limited in scope and number – the bulk of the text comes from published sources – the interview material that is included does provide some fresh insights, most notably in telling the story of “Pug” Southerland, a Navy pilot shot down by the Japanese ace Saburo Sakai on the day of the US landings. Outside such material, this book does not set out to offer new viewpoints, unappreciated facts nor fresh insights, but rather presents what the existing US-published literature, or in this case, what the same author has previously written.

Historical narratives do not have to present new evidence or new interpretations. The importance of a good story has been repeatedly demonstrated. Guadalcanal, like Waterloo, Gettysburg, or D-Day, is a story that gets retold, not only because of its turning-point significance but because the narrative provides drama and suspense. At Guadalcanal, unlike other Pacific campaigns, the ultimate result was in doubt for months. Between air battles and undergoing intense Japanese bombing, Ensign Register recorded in his diary he feared Henderson Field would become another Bataan.

Now, it is a good thing when an author takes familiar facts and uses their skills and insights to reassemble or explain them differently from how they have been presented in existing historical writing. This is basically what the late Sir John Keegan did with The Face of Battle and helped get him his knighthood. But with this book – unlike “The Resurrection” – this approach does not get off the ground.

Today, islands in the Pacific that had previously been no one’s strategic priority are now seen as potential multidomain battlefields. Both sides were surprised by the speed and scope of their opponents’ moves during the campaign, something today’s increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to make orders of magnitude more lethal and immediate. Guadalcanal, more so than the better-resourced and organized offensives in the later years of the war, was fought with both sides at the end of improvised trans-Pacific supply lines, and logistics were crucial in the ultimate outcome. In a future conflict, air-ground forces may find that their situation resembles that of the beleaguered defenders of Guadalcanal. This increasing relevance means that looking beyond what is already on the shelf is potentially valuable for the future.

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Note: The Cactus Air Force is also available in e-editions.

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