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1ST MARINE RAIDERS AT TULAGI AND EDSON’S RIDGE
BY DWIGHT JON ZIMMERMAN
– Lt. Col. Merritt “Red Mike” Edson, Sept. 13, 1942
On the morning of Aug. 7, 1942, in a remote section of the southwest Pacific Ocean and seven months to the day after the Imperial Japanese Navy sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States was responding with its first offensive campaign in the war: Operation Watchtower. Hastily planned, executed on a shoestring, and hampered by inexperience, even fear, that reached the highest levels of command, the reason for Watchtower was simple: Capture the Japanese airfield on Guadalcanal and prevent it from becoming a staging area for bombers that could cut the vital sea lane between the United States and New Zealand and Australia.
Watchtower included Marine amphibious landings on the islands of Tulagi, Tanambogo-Gavutu, Florida, and Guadalcanal in the southern Solomon archipelago. Literally leading the way in the offensive was the 1st Marine Raider Battalion commanded by Lt. Col. Merritt “Red Mike” Edson.
The Marine raider concept was the result of a combination of factors prior to America’s entry into the war. They included lessons learned from amphibious operations in Fleet Landing Exercise 7 (FLEX 7), observations of British Commando organization and training by Captains Samuel B. Griffith II and Wallace Greene (the latter a future commandant of the Marine Corps), Lt. Col. Evans Carlson’s personal experience fighting with Chinese Communist troops against the Japanese, and, most importantly, pressure from President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, who were enamored of the British Commandos.
The full fury of the desperate battle of Edson’s Ridge is depicted in the oil painting titled “Night Attack” by Marine Corps combat artist Donald L. Dickson, then a captain and public information officer for the 1st Marine Division on Guadalcanal.
MARINE CORPS ART COLLECTION
Despite resistance within Marine Corps senior leadership against forming an “elite within an elite,” shortly after he became the first lieutenant general in Marine Corps history, Commandant of the Marine Corps Thomas Holcomb formed on Jan. 6 and Feb. 4, 1942, respectively, the first and second separate battalions for “expeditions of raid character for demolition and other destruction of shore installations.” On Feb. 16 and 19, these units were redesignated Raider battalions, with Edson appointed commander of the 1st Marine Raiders and Carlson the 2nd Marine Raiders.
Watchtower, under the overall command of Maj. Gen. Alexander A. Vandegrift, was divided into two assaults. The main effort by the 1st Marine Division was against Guadalcanal (codenamed Cactus). It was preceded on Aug. 7 by a supporting assault to secure Tulagi (Ringbolt), Tanambogo, Gavutu (Acidity and Almond), and Florida (Lantana) islands and the deepwater harbor they surrounded, by the 1st Marine Raiders, the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, and the 1st Parachute Battalion, all under Brig. Gen. William H. Rupertus.
Landing unopposed at the northwest side of Tulagi, the Raiders and Paramarines hacked their way through the jungles of the steeplysloped coral ridge that formed the spine of the lozenge-shaped twomile long and half-mile wide island. Despite tenacious defense by 350 Japanese troops that lasted three days, on Aug. 8 Edson was able to declare Tulagi secured.
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Meanwhile, on Guadalcanal, the bulk of the Marines landed unopposed at Lunga Point and secured a perimeter around the Japanese airfield they named Henderson Field, after Capt. Lofton Henderson, a Marine pilot killed in the Battle of Midway.
Japanese response to the offensive was swift. Operating from its regional base at Rabaul on the northern tip of the island of New Britain, in a series of night naval shuttle runs the allies named the Tokyo Express, the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) sent troops, matériel, and warships to Guadalcanal to attack the Marines and U.S. Navy ships.
U.S. Marine Raiders wade ashore unopposed at Blue Beach on Tulagi Island. After a short, three-day campaign to secure Tulagi, the Raiders were sent to “rest” in positions on what would become known as “Edson’s Ridge” and “Bloody Ridge” near the airfield on Guadalcanal.
For the rest of August, even though their positions were regularly shelled and bombed by Japanese ships and planes, for all practical purposes the 1st Marine Raiders were spectators in the drama playing out at Guadalcanal and Sealark Channel (soon to be named Ironbottom Sound for the large number of warships sunk). These included the repulse of a Japanese attack by the Ichiki Butai, or Ichiki Detachment (the Battle of the Tenaru, Aug. 21) and the naval battles of Savo Island (Aug. 8-9) and Eastern Solomons (Aug. 24-25).
Henderson Field, Guadalcanal, photographed from a USS Saratoga (CV 3) plane in the latter part of August 1942, after U.S. aircraft had begun to use the airfield. The view looks about northwest, with the Lunga River running across the upper portion of the image. Several planes are parked to the left, and numerous bomb and shell craters are visible. Edson’s Ridge would be situated at the bottom of the photo, but is out of view.
Ichiki Butai’s defeat caused the Japanese high command to doubledown with the landing of the 35th Infantry Brigade, a veteran of campaigns in China and Borneo, and other troops under the overall command of Maj. Gen. Kiyotake Kawaguchi. Kawaguchi’s plan to retake the airfield was to launch an attack from the south, supported by land artillery and IJN warships, the night of Sept. 12.
To augment his thinly-held perimeter, on Aug. 31, Vandegrift ordered the transfer of the Raiders and Paramarines to Guadalcanal, a process that was completed on Sept. 4.
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Aware that Kawaguchi had established a supply base at Tasimboko near Taivu Point about 15 miles east of the Marines’ toehold, division staff began planning for a hit-and-run raid by the 1st Marine Raiders, exactly the type of mission they were created and trained to execute.
The raid called for Edson’s force of about 500 Marines to land approximately 3,000 yards east of the base at daybreak on Sept. 8. The Raiders would conduct a coordinated two-pronged attack – one company from along the beach, two companies from inland. Supported by APDs (World War I-era destroyers and destroyer escorts converted for amphibious operations) and aircraft from Henderson Field, the Raiders would overwhelm the reportedly 300 poorly armed and half-starved defenders, destroy supplies and installations, and then leave before Japanese reinforcements could respond.
A Marine 75mm pack howitzer emplacement shown in October 1942. Marine artillery played a key role in breaking up and stopping Japanese attacks on Edson’s Ridge.
On the night of Sept. 7-8, while en route to the landing site, Edson received an update claiming that though their conditions were unchanged, Japanese troop strength had increased to 3,000 men. Edson decided to continue anyway. Luck then sided with the Raiders. A heavy rainstorm hid their ships from Japanese warships escorting a supply convoy that had delivered cargo to Tasimboko. Then, as dawn was breaking and the Raiders were launching their assault, a U.S. Navy convoy composed of two cargo ships and five destroyers heading to Lunga Point appeared. Mistaking the two separate fleets as one large amphibious operation, most Japanese defenders panicked and disappeared into the jungle.
The Raiders advanced steadily against scattered and uncoordinated opposition. The relative ease of the Marines’ assault caused Edson to suspect he and his men were entering a trap. But instead of destruction, at Tasimboko the Raiders encountered treasure: huge stockpiles of food, supplies, ammunition (by one estimate as much as 500,000 rounds), even Kawaguchi’s dress white uniform.
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The Raiders immediately began gathering intelligence and, because rations within the perimeter were short, as much food as they could carry. Then they destroyed the rest.
“At Tasimboko we found lots of supplies,” recalled Raider John Sweeney in Patrick K. O’Donnell’s Into the Rising Sun. “Medical supplies, and strange, almost fishbowls filled with fluid of some kind. As far as we could tell, it was a type of firebomb. You light it, throw it, it breaks, and there’s a blast. There was a lot of food, some saki, and brown bottles of beer. The food was particularly inviting: anchovies, sardines, crab, and lots of rice. We took whatever we could and destroyed the rest. Most importantly, we found a trove of valuable documents.
Marines wait beside their weapons on the ridge. The Leathernecks are armed with (left) a Browning M1919 .30-caliber machine gun, and (right) an M1928 Thompson submachine gun with a drum magazine. Pouches with box magazines lie close at hand, along with a supply of fragmentation grenades. uAttackers and defenders.
“We destroyed everything we couldn’t take. One way of despoiling the food was to urinate on it. We peed on it.”
By 1730, the Raiders had embarked and were returning to Lunga Point. Griffith, now a major and the executive officer of the 1st Marine Raiders, later called it “one of the really very successful small operations of World War II.” At a cost of two dead and six wounded, the Raiders had destroyed an important base that contained food and supplies for 6,000 troops, and gathered priceless intelligence.
A grainy photo of Japanese troops marching along the shoreline of Guadalcanal shortly after landing in the first week of September 1942.
On Sept. 10, Edson told his mixed battalion of Raiders and Paramarines, approximately 840 strong, that they would be going to a “rest area” along a T-shaped ridge located about a mile south of Henderson Field. Because Vandegrift believed that any Japanese attack would come from along the coast, as had happened earlier with Ichiki Butai, the area was regarded as a quiet sector and was lightly defended. Certainly the complexities of the terrain downplayed the possibility of attack. The dominant landmark was the ridge itself, whose stem ran north-south and was bordered by thick jungle, steep gullies and a large lagoon between the ridge and Lunga River. But the next day, Edson began ordering them to prepare defensive positions and dig in. It was the Raiders’ and Paramarines’ first clue that their rest area might be anything but. Two subsequent Japanese air raids that dropped bombs on their position instead of Henderson Field, the usual target, reinforced speculation that something big was up.
In a departure from standard infantry tactics then in use, Edson divided his rifle units into “fighting groups” of three or four Marines organized around an automatic weapon (such as a Browning Automatic Rifle or Thompson submachine gun). It was a technique he had found successful when fighting rebels in the Nicaraguan jungles during the interwar Banana Wars.
Though the island’s jungle proved a bigger impediment than he anticipated, Kawaguchi managed to get his 3,000-man Kawaguchi Butai assembled south of the Raiders’ position in time for the scheduled attack. At 2100 hours on the night of Sept. 12, the first rounds of Japanese artillery fell on the Marines on the ridge, followed by additional gunfire from Japanese warships offshore.
Minutes later Japanese soldiers rushed out of the jungle, screaming and hurling strings of firecrackers to help confuse the defenders. Several listening posts and forward positions were quickly overrun. But these veterans of lopsided battles against Chinese troops discovered that the Marines were made of sterner stuff. Even when surrounded and isolated, individual Marines and companies continued to fight hard. Accurate artillery fire by Marine artillery also helped collapse the momentum of the attack and the first night’s battle dissolved into vicious skirmishing that ended with the dawn and Japanese withdrawal into the jungle to regroup.
Despite harassing sniper fire, Edson pulled his Marines back about 100 yards, consolidated his line, and prepared new defensive positions and fields of fire. New artillery coordinates were plotted and registered.
Despite suffering heavy casualties, Kawaguchi’s force still heavily outnumbered the Marine defenders on the ridge. After regrouping his command, at 1830 on Sept. 13 he launched his second attack. Kawaguchi’s soldiers breached the Marine right flank, creating a 200-yard gap that the Japanese troops surged through.
From left to right: Lt. Gen. Thomas A. Holcomb, Col. Merritt A. Edson, and Maj. Gen. Alexander A. Vandegrift confer during Holcomb’s inspection on Guadalcanal in December 1942.
Once again, Marine artillery rained death on the Japanese. One Marine forward artillery observer was Pfc. Tom Watson, an artillery battery clerk who had rushed forward to help. His directions were so accurate that shortly after the fight he received a battlefield commission.
But unrelenting Japanese pressure had reduced Edson’s command to about 300 effectives. At one point, it looked as if Kawaguchi’s attack would succeed. Isolated groups of Japanese troops advanced as far as the recently built fighter airstrip before being cut down. And a Japanese officer and two soldiers even reached the division command post, where they were shot as they attacked Vandegrift.
U.S. Marines march down through the valley and over the new fighter strip to rest before leaving the Solomons to reorganize and train for future operations.
Meanwhile, Edson seemed to be everywhere on the ridge, rounding up and rallying Marines, directing fire and counterattacks. Once again Marines and Japanese troops found themselves chaotically intermingled and the attack became a desperate hand-to-hand combat between individuals and small units.
When dawn finally broke, Edson’s exhausted Marines still held the ridge. Kawaguchi’s second attack had failed as well. The Battle of Edson’s Ridge was over.
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Edson received the Medal of Honor for his actions in the battle, promotion to colonel, and command of the 5th Marine Regiment. Griffith would also be promoted and succeed Edson as commander of the 1st Marine Raiders. In early November Carlson and two companies of the 2nd Marine Raiders arrived on the island and conducted a 29-day guerrilla-style operation behind enemy lines known as the Long Patrol. On Feb. 9, 1943, America’s first step in the long journey to Tokyo was complete.
A Marine contemplates Edson’s Ridge, where Marine Raiders and Paramarines made their stand, defeating a series of Japanese attacks that aimed straight up the coral spine of the ridge.
Later, Kawaguchi wrote, “Guadalcanal is not the name of an island; it is the name of the graveyard of the Japanese Army.” In his monumental History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, historian Samuel Eliot Morison echoed the Japanese general’s words: “Guadalcanal is not a name but an emotion, recalling desperate fights in the air, furious night naval battles, frantic work at supply or construction, savage fighting in the sodden jungle, nights broken by screaming bombs and deafening explosions of naval shells.” Perhaps the most poignant observation, though, was made by Marine Jerry McDonnell, who at age 18 fought at Guadalcanal. In his poem, “The Grassy Knoll” he wrote:
The dead and the wounded were littered Most everywhere you could see. There was sadness in spite of victory For dead friends – and enemy.
It’s hell when you stop to consider The price that was dearly paid For this lousy chunk of God’s green earth That on a lonely island laid.
Many a man paid the maximum price He forfeited his life for the toll. And all he got forevermore Was a plot on the big “Grassy Knoll.”
