The Guadalcanal campaign
Six months in the jungle for a single airfield
On 7 August 1942 US Marines landed on Guadalcanal and seized an unfinished Japanese airfield, later Henderson Field. For six months it was fought over on land, in the air and in night naval battles; the nearby strait was nicknamed "Ironbottom Sound" for its dozens of wrecks. In February 1943 Japan evacuated its remaining troops. It was the first major Allied offensive in the Pacific.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic — 24 years earlier
- 1939–1945 World War II — 3 years earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 5 years later
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 6 years later
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 7 years later
Europe
- 1928 Discovery of penicillin — 14 years earlier
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 9 years earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 6 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 1 year earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 11 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1929–1933 Collectivization in the Soviet Union — 13 years earlier
- 1936–1938 Great Purge — 6 years earlier
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 1 year earlier
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — same year
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 3 years later
Middle East
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 10 years earlier
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 6 years later
Africa
- 1922 Discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb — 20 years earlier
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 7 years earlier
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 14 years later
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 16 years later
- 1960 Year of Africa — 18 years later
Asia
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 3 years later
- 1945 Indonesia proclaims independence — 3 years later
- 1947 Independence and Partition of India — 5 years later
- 1949 Founding of the People's Republic of China — 7 years later
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 11 years later
Americas
- 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression — 13 years earlier
- c. 1930–1936 Dust Bowl — 12 years earlier
- 1945 ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer — 3 years later
- 1947 Invention of the transistor — 5 years later
- 1955 Salk polio vaccine declared safe — 13 years later
Alive at the time
- Nikola Tesla (aged 86)
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 73)
- Winston Churchill (aged 68)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 64)
- Albert Einstein (aged 63)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 61)
- Adolf Hitler (aged 53)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 53)
- Mao Zedong (aged 49)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 24)