South Pacific:
Operation Dovetail, Part Two
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
January 2025

The story begins with Part One.

The landings would take place along the northern short of the island, with three beaches (Red, Blue, and Green) designated to represent Guadalcanal, Tulagi and Gavutu (though the Ndeni landing had not been officially cancelled at this point, the 2nd Marines would land as reinforcements on the “Guadalcanal” beach - exactly as they did on 9 August). The division’s attached 1st Marine Parachute Battalion would hit Beach Green, and the 1st Raider Battalion would land on Beach Blue.

All 18,134 Marines in the invasion convoy would hit the beaches on D-Day, in five waves. This would include not only the Marine Rifle companies of the assault wave but all of the support elements including artillery, medical and anti-aircraft units as well as two companies of M2A4 light tanks from 1st Marine Tank Battalion. Only the pay clerks, still dazedly wandering about Wellington, would be left out.

Task Force 62, the Guadalcanal invasion convoy, numbered 23 amphibious assault ships (13 transports, six attack cargo ships and four destroyer-transports). As an escort, they had one American and three Australian cruisers and nine American destroyers. The fire support groups totaled four cruisers and six destroyers. Five fast minesweepers rounded out the invasion force.

The beaches of Koro Island.

Frank Jack Fletcher had overall command, of both the invasion force and Task Force 61 providing distant cover. The latter included three aircraft carriers, one fast battleship, six cruisers and sixteen destroyers. Five oilers provided underway replenishment. Each carrier operated in its own task group with its escorts. The carrier aircraft would directly support the landings with air strikes as well as providing cover against Japanese attack. John S. “Slew” McCain’s Task Force 63, commanding land-based aircraft in New Caledonia and the New Hebrides, would not participate in the exercise, instead conducting bombing raids on Guadalcanal.

The ships came to Fiji from multiple directions; most of the transports came from Wellington, while the warships had concentrated at Tonga. After the exercises, they would proceed together to Guadalcanal. The four destroyer-transports carried the 1st Marine Raider Battalion from Nouméa, New Caledonia; their much greater speed allowed the Raiders extra time to practice landings on New Caledonia before heading to Fiji. The transports Zeilin and Betelgeuse, dispatched from Pearl Harbor on 22 July with the Third Marine Defense Battalion (anti-aircraft guns and coast-defense artillery), did not arrive until 3 August, after the exercise had concluded and the fleet had already departed Fiji on their way to Guadalcanal. The fleet oiler Kaskaskia had left Pearl Harbor on 20 July bound for Tonga and was diverted to Fiji; she also had not arrived when the exercises began but joined in time for the journey to Guadalcanal.

The Marines would land in Higgins boats, which would also be configured as lighters to ferry ashore the tanks, artillery, and supplies. The transports carried the boats on their davits, in three forms. The original Higgins Boat, known officially as the LCP(L) (Landing Craft, Personnel, Large), did not have the ubiquitous bow ramp. Instead, the 36 Marines carried aboard would have to jump over the sides into the shallow water just off the beach. The early version of the LCVP had a narrow ramp at the front, which constricted the Marines’ ability to quickly disembark, and so a new version with a broader ramp extending across the entire bow had also begun to arrive. All three versions of the wooden boats would be used in Operations Dovetail and Watchtower.

The destroyer-transport McKean carried Marine Raiders.

The plan called for the entire division to land, consolidate, and move inland to occupy objectives chosen on a British map of Koro: the liaison team had not actually seen these locations from the ground. There, most of the Marines would spend the night, and be taken off the beaches in the morning and returned to the transports. A few units would be ferried back on the same day.

The transports lowered their boats at 0900 on 28 July, and fully combat-loaded Marines began clambering down cargo nets slung alongside the ships and then hopping into the waiting boats. Failures showed up almost immediately: most of the transport captains had not inspected and tested the Higgins boats prior to the exercise, and at least some of the boats (the exact number doesn’t appear to have been recorded) turned out to have defective engines.

The boats (most of them manned by Coast Guardsmen) then circled in their assembly areas about 8,000 yards off the beaches, waiting for all of the boats in their wave to finish loading and arrive. When all of the boats had been accounted for, they moved up to the line of departure, about halfway to the beach.

H-Hour, the moment when the boats would physically hit the beach, had been set for 1230 hours. Most of the boats made their deadline; off Red Beach, the largest landing zone, the boats from two transports were not ready until 1400. The chosen landing time came at low tide on Koro Island, not the high tide the Marine liaison team had observed. The boats’ coxswains immediately found coral outcrops directly under the surface and visible through the clear water. The wooden-hulled boats scraped across them, but on boat after boat the coral caught and mangled the bronze propellers. Some coxswains simply halted at that point, about 100 yards off the beach, and told their Marines to jump off; in many locations this sent them into water over their heads bearing a 70-pound pack plus their weapons. These unfortunates had to be quickly dragged back aboard. Other coxswains successfully threaded the coral maze to bring their charges directly to the beach, while others unloaded off the beach but at a survivable depth.

An LCPR, what the Marines and Navy called a “ramp boat.” No weapons have been fitted in the machine-gun positions.

Only two landing craft would be declared total losses, but the Navy left no record of how many were abandoned as beyond repair, or reparable but not in time for the Guadalcanal landings little more than a week later. In addition to a great many lost or damaged propellers, the boats also suffered considerable damage to their wooden hulls. The initial plan for Operation Dovetail had called for all 18,134 Marines to come ashore on the first day; thanks to boat damage only 7,700 actually landed. In Operation Watchtower, the Marines could not land all of their troops on the first day, with Vandegrift citing a lack of landing craft for the inability to bring the rest ashore.

The Marines that did make it to the beach collected themselves and headed inland toward their objectives. At least one battalion came ashore a mile away from its assigned beach, but otherwise the landings were more or less on target. As word filtered back of the coral obstacles, Turner ordered the landings (though not the rest of the exercise) suspended. Under the conditions of radio silence, that could only be passed on by way of visual signals, and not all boats got the word.

Because their boats did not reach the line of departure on schedule, some troops assigned to the first wave never landed. And since their boats therefore never returned for another load, many of the support troops scheduled to land in the fourth and fifth waves never even got off their transports. All five waves landed on Beach Blue, disembarking about 100 yards offshore to wade through the shallow water to the beach. On Beach Green, the 1st Parachute Battalion’s 395 men landed without problems, and then re-embarked as scheduled to return to their transport after only a few hours on the beach, where they gathered coconuts.

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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 and three children. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.

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