The good life on Bougainville indicated that it had become a strategic backwater, no longer of much importance to either side, with a kind of unspoken truce in lieu of any further major operations. The defeat of Hyakutake not only meant that Rabaul was doomed; it also signaled that the Americans were moving on from the Solomons to points closer to Japan—MacArthur in northern New Guinea and Nimitz in the Central Pacific.
