Tuesday, October 13, 1942. The Army lands on Guadalcanal

Today in World War II History—October 13, 1942: First US Army troops land on Guadalcanal, joining the US Marines. On Guadalcanal, Japanese naval shelling makes Henderson Field inoperable.

So reports Sarah Sundin.  The soldiers were from the 164th Infantry and they took up the 6,600 yard sector at the east end of the American perimeter.   The 164th was part of the Americal Division.

It's often forgotten that the Army played a significant role in the fighting in the Pacific, but it did.  While the island hopping campaigns that later developed were principally, but not exclusively, Marine Corps affairs, larger engagements nearly always featured the Army.  Of this battle, one of the Army's official histories states:

The Guadalcanal Campaign also made clear that whether subsequent fighting in the Pacific took place in an Army or a Navy theater, success would depend on a high degree of interservice cooperation. The early stages of the campaign were dominated by Navy-Marine components of the interservice team. But as the battle continued, Army units assumed the burden of interservice coordination and, in the end, secured the American victory on the ground. The campaign also made clear the scale of operations the Americans would have to mount to take sizable island outposts from the Japanese: between fifty and one hundred thousand troops, at least half a dozen air squadrons of high-altitude bombers, dive bombers, and fighters, and between two and three hundred Navy ships and smaller craft of all types. In coming months fresh Army divisions would form new interservice teams and, applying techniques demonstrated by the XIV Corps, continue the island march to Japan.

While the Marine Corps would likely dispute that conclusion, at the time the Marine command on Guadalcanal was highly impressed with the 164th.

The DUI of the 164th.

Sundin's entry for this day also notes that Japanese naval shelling by the battleships Kongo and Haruna took Henderson Field out of operation and that the first flight of a Rolls-Royce engined P51 Mustang occurred.  It was the British, not the Americans, which made that critical change.

Indeed, on that change, it might be noted that while the P51 is thought of as the great American fighter of the Second World War, it was really an Anglo-American project, with its original ordering to its critical power plant change coming about due to the British.