Japanese Guadalcanal Memorial (Hill 35)

The well-maintained Japan Peace Memorial Park on Guadalcanal sits on a ridge line leading toward Mt. Austin, overlooking Honiara (capital of the Solomon Islands) and the sea, and remembers the land and naval forces killed in the 1942-43 campaign.

The memorial is a modernist, cubist structure, but what is most evocative from the courtyard is the clear view of Iron Bottom Sound, as contested a body of water as those of Midway and Coral Sea.

Japan lost almost 30,000 ground troops in the land battle—many died of disease and starvation—and some 38 ships in the many naval encounters that stretched from Rabaul down The Slot to Guadalcanal.

In reflecting on Japanese tactics in the fighting, Captain Nikolai Stevenson, commander of C Company 1st Marines, said: "We were lucky, with our lines stretched so thinly through the jungle, that invariably the Japanese hit us where were strongest."

The Japanese tactical preference, at least early in the war, to charge headlong into American guns also contributed to the heavy casualties.

At sea, the battle was fought to control the sea corridor off Guadalcanal that, in a larger perspective, connected Allied supply lines to Australia.

For an excellent overview of the naval battles in the campaign, see:

Samuel Eliot Morison’s The Struggle for Guadalcanal: August 1942-February 1943 (History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Volume 5)

There are many individual books about the specific naval battles that were given names such as The Battle of Savo Island, Cape Esperance, Third Battle of the Solomon Sea, etc. Savo Island is clearly visible from the Japanese Peace Memorial Park.

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Source

• Text: Matthew Stevenson
• Photos: Stefan Krasowski (1), Matthew Stevenson (2, 3, 4, 5)
• Pacific Wrecks