As Kondo's ships pulled back, the four Japanese transports landed near Tassafaronga on Guadalcanal at 04:00 and began unloading. At 05:55, U.S. aircraft and artillery began attacking the transports, destroying all four transports along with most of the supplies that they carried.
Only 2,000–3,000 of the army troops made it ashore. Because of the failure to deliver most of the troops and supplies, the Japanese were forced to cancel their planned November attack on Henderson Field.
On 26 November, Japanese Lieutenant General Hitoshi Imamura took command of the newly formed Eighth Area Army at Rabaul. The new command included both Hyakutake's 17th Army and the 18th Army in New Guinea.
One of Imamura's first goals was to retake Henderson Field and Guadalcanal. The Allied offensive at Buna in New Guinea, however, changed Imamura's goals.
Because the Allied attempt to take Buna was considered a more severe threat to Rabaul, Imamura delayed sending new troops to Guadalcanal to concentrate on the situation in New Guinea.
The Japanese continued to have problems in delivering enough supplies to their troops on Guadalcanal. Attempts to use only submarines the last two weeks in November did not provide enough food for Hyakutake's forces.
A separate attempt to establish bases in the central Solomons to use to send barge convoys to Guadalcanal also failed because of Allied air attacks. On 26 November, the 17th Army told Imamura that it lacked food. Some front-line units had not been supplied for six days . This forced the Japanese to return to using destroyers to deliver the necessary supplies.
Eighth Fleet sailors thought of a plan to help reduce the time that destroyers delivering supplies to Guadalcanal were exposed to Allied attack. Large oil or gas drums filled with medical supplies and food and strung together with rope. When the destroyers arrived at Guadalcanal they would cut loose the drums and a boat from shore could pick up the rope.
The Eighth Fleet's Guadalcanal Reinforcement Unit (the Tokyo Express) was told to make five deliveries to Tassafaronga on Guadalcanal using the drum method on the night of 30 November. Tanaka's unit had eight destroyers, with six destroyers carrying 200 to 240 drums of supplies each.
When Halsey learned about the Japanese supply attempt, he ordered the newly formed Task Force 67, which had four cruisers and four destroyers under the command of U.S. Rear Admiral Carleton H. Wright, to attack Tanaka's force off Guadalcanal. Two additional destroyers joined Wright's force during the day of 30 November.
At 22:40 on 30 November, Tanaka's force arrived off Guadalcanal and prepared to unload the supply barrels. Meanwhile, Wright's warships were approaching from the opposite direction. Wright's destroyers detected Tanaka's force on radar and the commander requested permission to attack with torpedoes. Wright waited four minutes before giving permission.
This allowed Tanaka's force to escape from being torpedoed. All of the American torpedoes missed their targets. At the same time, Wright's cruisers opened fire, hitting and destroying one of the Japanese destroyers. The rest of Tanaka's warships abandoned the supply mission, turned, and launched 44 torpedoes in the direction of Wright's cruisers.
The Japanese torpedoes hit and sank the U.S. cruiser and heavily damaged the cruisers , , and . The rest of Tanaka's destroyers escaped without damage, but failed to deliver any of the supplies to Guadalcanal.
By 7 December 1942, Hyakutake's forces were losing about 50 men each day from malnutrition, disease, and Allied ground or air attacks. Further attempts by Tanaka's destroyer forces to deliver supplies on 3 December 7 December, and 11 December, did not solve the supply problem. One of Tanaka's destroyers was sunk by a U.S. PT boat torpedo.
On 12 December, the Japanese Navy thought about abandoning Guadalcanal. At the same time, several army staff officers at the Imperial General Headquarters (IGH) said retaking Guadalcanal would be impossible. A group led by IJA Colonel Joichiro Sanada, chief of the IGH's operations section, visited Rabaul on 19 December and talked to Imamura and his staff.
When this group returned to Tokyo, Sanada recommended that Guadalcanal be abandoned. The IGH's top leaders agreed with Sanada's recommendation on 26 December. They ordered their staff to plan for a withdrawal from Guadalcanal. A new defense line would be set up in the central Solomons, and soldiers and weapons could be sent to the campaign in New Guinea.
On 28 December, General Hajime Sugiyama and Admiral Osami Nagano told Emperor Hirohito of the decision to withdraw from Guadalcanal. On 31 December, the Emperor agreed with the decision. The Japanese secretly began to prepare for the evacuation, called Operation Ke, scheduled to begin during January 1943.
By December, the tired 1st Marine Division was brought back for a rest, and over the next month the U.S. XIV Corps took over operations on the island. This corps consisted of the 2nd Marine Division and the U.S. Army's 25th Infantry and Americal Divisions. U.S. Army Major General Alexander Patch replaced Vandegrift as commander of Allied forces on Guadalcanal. By January this was over 50,000 men.
On 18 December, Allied (mainly U.S. Army) forces began attacking Japanese soldiers on Mount Austen. A strong Japanese fort, called the Gifu, made the attacks hard and the Americans had to stop their attacks on 4 January.
The Allies attacking the Japanese on 10 January on Mount Austen. They also attacked two nearby ridges called the Seahorse and the Galloping Horse. The Allies captured all three by 23 January. At the same time, U.S. Marines advanced along the north coast of the island. The Americans lost about 250 killed in the operation while the Japanese suffered around 3,000 killed–about 12 to 1 in the Americans' favor.
On 14 January, destroyers delivered troops to guard the "Ke" evacuation. Japanese warships and aircraft moved around the Rabaul and Bougainville areas in preparation to withdraw their troops. Allied forces detected the Japanese movements, but thought they were another attempt to retake Henderson Field and Guadalcanal.
Patch, afraid of another Japanese attack, sent only a small portion of his troops to continue an attack against Hyakutake's forces. On 29 January, Halsey sent a resupply convoy to Guadalcanal protected by a cruiser task force. Sighting the cruiser task force, Japanese naval torpedo bombers attacked the task force and heavily damaged the U.S. cruiser . The next day, more torpedo aircraft attacked and sank "Chicago".
Halsey ordered the remainder of the task force to return to base and directed the rest of his naval forces to take station in the Coral Sea, south of Guadalcanal, to be ready to respond to a Japanese attack.
The Japanese 17th Army withdrew to the west coast of Guadalcanal while rear guard groups stopped the American attacks. On the night of February 1, 20 destroyers from Mikawa's 8th Fleet under Shintaro Hashimoto removed 4,935 soldiers, mainly from the 38th Division, from the island. The Japanese and the Americans each lost a destroyer from air and naval attacks.
On the nights of 4 and 7 February, Hashimoto and his destroyers completed the removal of most of the remaining Japanese forces from Guadalcanal. Apart from some air attacks, Allied forces did not try to stop Hashimoto's efforts to withdraw his troops. In total, the Japanese removed 10,652 men from Guadalcanal. On 9 February, Patch realized that the Japanese were gone and declared Guadalcanal secure for Allied forces, ending the battle.
After the Japanese withdrawal, Guadalcanal and Tulagi were developed into major bases. These bases supported the Allied advance further up the Solomon Islands chain. In addition to Henderson Field, two additional fighter runways were constructed at Lunga Point and a bomber airfield was built at Koli Point.