South Pacific:
Operation Dovetail, Part One
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
December 2024

The August 1942 landings on Guadalcanal and Tulagi would be the first American amphibious assault of World War II. The U.S. Marine Corps had carried out practice landings throughout the 1930’s on the islands of Culebra and Vieques just east of Puerto Rico, where the Japanese would be unlikely to position observers. More exercises took place in North Carolina in 1941 and at Solomon’s Island, Maryland in the spring of 1942.

These dry runs worked out the procedures for moving troops from ships to shore, unloading the supplies they would need, and fighting to seize a defended beachhead. From the first landings made in 1935 with battleships carrying the Marines and ships’ boats bringing them ashore, the landing craft themselves evolved into Andrew Higgins’ shallow-draft purpose-built landing boats.

The Guadalcanal landings would be overseen by Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner. Turner, noted for his hard-core alcoholism and poor performance heading the Pacific Fleet’s War Plans division in the days before the Pearl Harbor disaster, had rescued his career with a stint as assistant chief of staff to Chief of Naval Operations Ernest J. King. On 24 June 1942, King ordered planning to begin for a landing on Guadalcanal, but only tapped Turner for the job on the 30th, with a deadline of 3 July for the operational plan.

The invasion would be undertaken by the 1st Marine Division, reinforced with an extra regiment from the 2nd Marine Division to make up for the detachment of its own 7th Marines to garrison Samoa. The division commander, Alexander Vandegrift, had concentrated his formation at Wellington, New Zealand, with the expectation that he would have months to train his men, including in amphibious landings. The first echelon had only reached New Zealand on 14 June, and of its nine infantry battalions, only four had any amphibious training: the three battalions of the 5th Marines had carried out the New River landings, and the 1st Battalion of the 1st Marines had landed on Solomon’s Island.

Turner (left) and Vandegrift, shortly before the Guadalcanal landings.

Turner also wanted more training, making his case to King and Pacific theater commander Chester Nimitz during a conference in San Francisco on 3 July in which he laid out the invasion plan. The Marines would land at Ndeni in the Santa Cruz Islands, Tulagi and Guadalcanal. The Ndeni operation would later be cancelled when the 2nd Marines, slated for Ndeni, had to reinforce the Marines on Tulagi.

During his presentation, Turner told his bosses that there would be enough time for a dress rehearsal of the landings. He and Nimitz flew to Pearl Harbor the next day, and Turner recommended that the training operation take place in Fiji. Fiji lay about 1,100 miles from Guadalcanal, far enough away that Japanese reconnaissance planes would be unlikely to discover the operation. Nimitz approved Turner’s proposed six-day schedule, which would allow for two full-scale landings. The boss added live-fire exercises for the cruisers slated to provide gunnery support.

While the pre-war Marine exercises had included simulated naval gunfire, the battleships and cruisers taking part had never actually fired their guns at shore targets. Not until November 1941 did the Navy begin buying up land on Vieques for the Naval Training Range, paying large landowners more than market prices and simply ejecting small landowners and tenant farmers. The practice shelling in Fiji would be the first shots fired against a land target since the bombardment of Veracruz in 1914.

Turner joined Nimitz’s staff for three days of discussions to fine-tune the Guadalcanal operation, now called Watchtower. At their conclusion, Nimitz radioed Vice Admiral Robert Ghormley, the South Pacific commander, with orders to prepare for a six-day exercise in Fiji beginning 23 July, to be called Operation Dovetail. Ghormley in turn told Vandegrift to send a liaison team to Fiji as quickly as possible, to coordinate with the British colonial authorities and the U.S. Army garrison.

The Fiji Islands. Koro is just about dead center.

That part of Operation Dovetail would be the only thing to go smoothly. The British District Officer, David Collins, showed the three Marine officers several potential sites, none of which met their requirements. The British administrators and the U.S. Army staff all recommended Koro, a mountainous and sparsely-inhabited volcanic island noted for its abundant bird life and rich soil. Koro sported beautiful beaches, lush vegetation, and about 2,000 inhabitants in 1941. The Marines disliked the coral reefs blocking access to the beaches, but Collins and his colleagues pointed out that Koro’s proximity to Suva, the colony’s capital, would allow them to evacuate civilians in time for the exercise - otherwise, the live-fire segment would be difficult to arrange. What neither the Marine officers nor Collins seem to have realized is that they flew over the beaches and visited the island at high tide: the coral reefs were actually an even greater barrier to landing craft than they had assumed.

The Marines flew back to Auckland on 15 July, where Ghormley, Turner and Vandegrift awaited their report in person. The liaison team noted their objections to Koro, but offered no other alternative. The admirals and the general, apparently angered by the mission’s failure to find a suitable site, decided to hold their landings on Koro.

“It doesn’t make any difference,” Turner told Vandegrift and his operations officer, Col. Gerald Thomas. “We don’t have any time, we’re going to rehearse at Koro.”

The 1st Marine Regiment landed in Wellington on 11 July. The transport which brought them (Wakefield) was not part of the invasion force, so Col. Clifton Cates’ regiment spent only a few nights in the camps prepared by the New Zealanders before boarding four different ships for the journey to Fiji.

The original Higgins Boat required men to jump over the side to disembark.

A dock-workers’ strike in New Zealand delayed loading the Marines and their gear aboard the transports, and forced the Marines to do the stevedores’ work themselves (the official story, picked up by a number of secondary histories, attributed this delay to “bad weather”). That inevitably scrambled the efforts to combat-load the transports (so that the most urgently-needed items would be placed to be unloaded first) and many items were left behind due to lack of space on the ships, the inability of the inexperienced Marines to pack cargo as tightly as the professional dock workers, and simple incompetence. The division’s 155mm howitzers, all of its sound-and-flash detectors, and all of its trucks were left behind. Vandegrift and his staff knew those things had stayed in Wellington. Only in Fiji did they find that all of the division’s tents, mosquito netting, insect repellent, spare clothing, office equipment, payroll logs, bedrolls and unit muster rolls were also still sitting on Wellington’s docks along with the division’s pay clerks.

The slow departure from Wellington forced a delay of the exercise to 27 July and the actual Guadalcanal landings from 1 August to 7 August. Ghormley approved the new schedule, but delays in getting the troopships on their way led Turner to move the exercise back another day to the 28th, and shorten it to four days while keeping 7 August as D-Day on Guadalcanal.

Meanwhile, Collins and his staff made ready for the American exercise, moving 966 Koro Islanders from the north and west coasts of the island to villages in the southern half of Koro. They left behind most of their belongings including their livestock, as they would only be gone for a few days. Fiji went under a total communications blackout, and the Americans would conduct their exercises in conditions of full radio silence. While this helped maintain crucial security, it also induced a number of problems that might have been avoided otherwise (and did not fully mimic the actual conditions of the invasion, as both troops and ships would be able to communicate by radio).

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and new puppy. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.

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