Guadalcanal Casualties

 

I have written before about the fearful slaughter existential war can cause, something I am more aware of in my wargaming and reading about war as I grow older.

Nowhere, in WW2 did the casualty returns for one army, rank so high though as they did for the Japanese in the Pacific. On island after island, whole or nearly whole garrisons were destroyed with gruesome casualty rates. In some instances suicidal pacts led to such high rates, in others it was incompetent leadership and in many cases the brutal efficiency of their opponents’ tactics; and at Guadalcanal it was all three things.

Richard Frank in his excellent book, “Guadalcanal,” spends his final pages sharing his reflections on the battle, along with a gruesome table of data in the footnotes for the Japanese 17th Army’s casualty numbers.

The principal unit returns are:

2nd Division: 74.3% losses

38th Division 67.6% losses

35th Brigade (Kawaguchi) 82.5% losses

Ichiki Detachment 87% losses

The 17th Army as a whole, 71.2% losses. That is a catastrophic number. It reflects combat deaths, combat wounded, missing soldiers, captured soldiers and death from disease (in this case starvation mostly). More than 10% of the Japanese forces on this island died from disease!

The battle of Guadalcanal lasted 186 days. It was a prolonged struggle over a 2km long airfield on a volcanic island in the middle of the Pacific. Losing 110 men per day on average, but only fighting four principal engagements is a colossal failure of leadership, tactics and logistics by the Japanese army commanders. As Frank writes, the Japanese only had to render the airfield inoperable during daylight hours, because they ruled the seas for much of the campaign around the island at night. Instead, they threw their forces in a piecemeal fashion against some of the most effective American forces and commanders in the war (Vandergrift, Puller, Cates, etc.). The result was, catastrophic.

I am nearing completion of a handful of Command Ops 2 scenarios about the battle. The setup for the battle of Edson’s Ridge is below.

I have tried to reflect the lethality of the USMC in the unit statistics for each scenario, and the incompetence of many of the Japanese unit commanders. Games don’t always render these things well. The mass, ill-fated attack by Kawaguchi on Edson is but one of the battles I will post (pictured above).

The terrain has been modified. Light and heavy jungle, rocky, volcanic ground, kunai grass and coconut groves are all represented. The battlefield is 25 kilometers wide and 13 kilometers high.

If you are interested in playing these scenarios, and don’t own Command Ops 2, you can download the base game from Steam for free here. Scenarios, map and establishment file will be released soon.