The Marines who remained ashore were on their own. Firing ammunition made for World War I and living off of captured Japanese rations, they not only held on but began to clear the island of Japanese. The airfield the Japanese had been building was captured, finished, and named Henderson Field to honor a heroic Marine pilot. Australia was now safe.
On 17 August, a small group of Marines—one of whom was a son of President Roosevelt—of the Marine Second Raider Battalion staged an attack on Makin Island. The short-lived raid was a success not so much for what it accomplished in destroying Japanese supplies, but because it meant the Japanese, fearful of other submarine-launched Marine raids, would have to divert large numbers of troops to protect the islands they had captured.
America, having licked its wounds, was now slowly starting to fight successfully, even in the Japanese-occupied Philippines: On 1 October 1942, a reserve lieutenant colonel named Wendell W. Fertig, who could not bring himself to obey Wainwright’s order to surrender, pinned homemade stars to his collar points and nailed a proclamation to a tree announcing that Brigadier General Fertig was assuming command of U.S. forces in the Philippines. Large numbers of similarly minded Americans and Filipinos quickly joined him.
On the other side of the world, in the early fall of 1942, the German army was locked in an enormous battle with the Soviet Union at Stalingrad, and the English were fighting the Afrikakorps under General Erwin Rommel, who threatened to overrun Egypt and with it the critically needed Suez Canal.
The American contribution to that part of the war initially was trying to supply its allies, especially the Soviet Union, which could not win at Stalingrad without a massive infusion of American supplies—everything from aircraft, tanks, and ammunition to food.
The German navy fought this effort by intercepting the supply convoys with hunter packs of submarines. They operated in the North Atlantic near Europe, in the North Atlantic off the coast of the United States, in the Gulf of Mexico, and in the South Atlantic near Argentina and Brazil.