On 7 December, one year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, General Vandegrift sent a message to all men under his command in the Guadalcanal area thanking them for their courage and steadfastness, commending particularly the pilots and “all who labored and sweated within the lines in all manner of prodigious and vital tasks.” He reminded them all that their “unbelievable achievements had made ‘Guadalcanal’ a synonym for death and disaster in the language of our enemy.” On 9 December, he handed over his command to General Patch and flew out to Australia at the same time the first elements of the 5th Marines were boarding ship. The 1st, 11th, and 7th Marines would soon follow together with all the division’s supporting units. The men who were leaving were thin, tired, hollow-eyed, and apathetic; they were young men who had grown old in four months time. They left behind 681 dead in the island’s cemetery.
[Illustration: _As he tells it, “Too Many, Too Close, Too Long,” is Donald L. Dickson’s portrait of one of the “little guys, just plain worn out. His stamina and his spirit stretched beyond human endurance. He has had no real sleep for a long time.... And he probably hasn’t stopped ducking and fighting long enough to discover that he has malaria. He is going to discover it now, however. He is through.”_
_Americal Division commander, MajGen Alexander M. Patch, Jr., watches while his troops and supplies are staged on Guadalcanal’s beaches on 8 December, the day before he relieved Gen Vandegrift and his wornout 1st Marine Division._]
The final regiment of the Americal Division, the 132d Infantry, landed on 8 December as the 5th Marines was preparing to leave. The 2d Marine Division’s regiments already on the island, the 2d, 8th, and part of the 10th, knew that the 6th Marines was on its way to rejoin. It seemed to many of the men of the 2d Marines, who had landed on D-Day, 7 August, that they, too, should be leaving. These took slim comfort in the thought that they, by all rights, should be the first of the 2d to depart the island whenever that hoped-for day came.
General Patch received a steady stream of ground reinforcements and replacements in December. He was not ready yet to undertake a full-scale offensive until the 25th Division and the rest of the 2d Marine Division arrived, but he kept all frontline units active in combat and reconnaissance patrols, particularly toward the western flank.