Dedicated to the men of the Fleet - Samuel Eliot Morison

In retrospect, the person I feel most grateful to is the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt. For he appreciated the value of a history of this sort, as soon as I had called the need of it to his attention; he commissioned me to undertake it, and even during the war found time to talk with me on the subject. My admiration for the quality of his leadership of our armed forces has, if anything, increased with the lapse of years. So I have dedicated this revised Volume I, and the series, to his memory.

Generally, in an expeditionary force, a 3-to-1 ratio of superiority over the defending enemy is considered indispensable; and often in this war, as at Munda and Tarawa, that proved to be not enough. Here, the ratio at the start was about 1 to 4. Why then did the venture succeed? Simply because the United States and Australia dominated that stretch of the ocean and the air over it. The enemy had so few boats and barges that he was able to apply to his 4 to 1 superiority against the Cavalry-cum-Seabee spearhead. The Navy not only provided the Army with seagoing artillery but brought up troopers, beans and bullets in greater numbers; while the Japanese were as completely sealed off from help as MacArthur's forces had been on Bataan early in 1942.

There were more subtle implications to Guadalcanal. The lordly Samurai, with his nose rubbed in the mud and his sword rusted by the salt of Ironbottom Sound, was forced to revise his theory of invincibility. A month previously Hirohito had issued an imperial rescript stating that in the Solomon Islands "a decisive battle is being fought between Japan and America." Radio Tokyo gave out that the Imperial forces, "after pinning down the Americans to a corner of the island," had accomplished their mission and so departed to fight elsewhere. There was a laugh for Americans in that; but Guadalcanal never inspired much laughter. For those of us who were there, or whose friends were there, Guadalcanal is not a name but an emotion, recalling desperate fights in the air, furious night naval battles, frantic work at supply or construction, savage fighting in the sodden jungle, nights broken by screaming bombs and deafening explosions of naval shells. Sometimes I dream of a great battle monument on Guadalcanal; a granite monolith on which the names of all who fell and of all the ships that rest in Ironbottom Sound may be carved. At other times I feel that the jagged cone of Savo Island, forever brooding over the blood-thickened waters of the Sound, is the best monument to the men and ships who rolled back the enemy tide.