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Guadalcanal's Red Beach Landing: America's First Offensive in WW2 (ad-free)
🕑 Added 2022-12-24 12:00:02 +0000 UTCAfter joining (formally) World War Two in the wake of Pearl Harbor, the United States endured a series of defeats at the hands of the Japanese. The Philippines garrison fell, Wake Island fell, Guam fell. British possessions in Southeast Asia teetered and fell as well - the campaign was not going well for the Allies.
The first American offensive of the war would come on August 7th, 1942 with the landing of the 1st and 5th Marines at Red Beach on Guadalcanal. Part of a multi-prong assault (the nearby Japanese bases on Tulagi and Gavutu/Tanambogo were also captured at the same time), the attack on Guadalcanal was made to secure the airstrip under Japanese construction there. If the island became an operational Japanese air base, Allied supply shipping to Australia would come under threat, and this could imperil the whole area of operations.
Fortunately for the Marines, US intelligence massively overestimated the Japanese force on Guadalcanal. It was in fact only a few hundred infantry, leading a work force of about 3,000 laborers (mostly Koreans). They thought the US landings were just a small raid, and dispersed into the jungle to wait for the US departure. Instead, the Marines were there to take the airfield and hold it. They were not, however, very well prepared. The Navy suffered a massive defeat in the waters off Guadalcanal the very next night, and would pull out of the area August 9th, leaving the Marines with dangerously low supplies of food, ammunition, and other essentials.
My trip to Guadalcanal was made possible by War Historian Battlefield Expeditions. If you are interested in seeing sights like these in person yourself, check out their upcoming schedule:
https://battlefield-expeditions.war-historian.com
Comments
Guido Schriewer
uh! must have been a real interesting trip.
EyeBall
The Guadalcanal trip had to be beyond amazing. Thank you for video of your discoveries.
Lance Thundercock
Say, this may not be the right place to ask, but a bunch years ago you wrote an article about when someone was shooting an old Lee Navy rifle and it blew up, as well as about an earlier incident where someone else suffered the same thing (unfortunately not surviving). You speculated from the common factor that both had made 6mm Navy cases out of .30-40 Krag cases, and that these were not strong enough, or at least not if reused a number of times. Did you ever do a followup on this? I recall you got offers on examining the ammunition from the later case, as well as someone offering you to make an attempt to test the theory out on a sporter. Thought it'd be important to figure out, as the Lee Navy is such a wonderfully oddball rifle which I think deserves to be enjoyed if there's a definite and safe way to do so.
