"Even before one drop of blood had been spilled on its fecund soil or a single corpse buried in it," Dan van der Vat said, "Guadalcanal stank". Even Morison, the US Navy's own historian, used the self-coined word "faecaloid" to describe the humid jungle island. When asked about the conditions on the island, United States Marine Corps veteran and author William Manchester said "[m]ove a thousand yards inland. Just be sure you take a compass and leave a Hansel-and-Gretel trail behind you. If you don't you will die." Such was the awful conditions that Japanese and American men fought in.
Before the Japanese began constructing an airfield on Guadalcanal, the island was mostly ignored even by the Japanese occupiers. At the evidence of such an airfield being constructed, however, the mosquito and disease-plagued island, with the waters around it, soon became a hotly contested zone for the next six months. On 7 August 1942, the US First Marine Division landed on the island of Guadalcanal successfully albeit amateurish amphibious landing techniques (this was one of the first amphibious assaults in the war). The landers lacked information about the terrain, the tide, and the weather; some of the Marines were even wielding WW1-era rifles. On 0910 that morning, two battalions of the Fifth Marine Regiment established a 2,000-yard beachhead very quickly, and the airfield subsequently fell under American control. Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa, the newly installed commander of the Japanese Eighth Fleet based at Rabaul, ordered an air assault on the Allied ships, but did not meet success. Mikawa then gathered every ship he could find and start sailing south.
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