5 Dollars - Elizabeth II Battle of Guadalcanal

The Guadalcanal campaign, fought between August 1942 and February 1943, was the first major Allied offensive in the Pacific and cost the United States Navy more ships than any other single campaign of the war. The Solomon Islands themselves were the literal terrain of that fighting — Henderson Field, Iron Bottom Sound, and the Tenaru River were not distant battlefields but the ground beneath what is now the national capital, Honiara.

This commemorative was issued forty years after the campaign, when veterans were still alive and the political relationship between the Solomons and its wartime allies — particularly the United States and Australia — remained a live diplomatic consideration.