The 1st Marine Division on Guadalcanal

Original caption: “Moving to Jungle Front: A detachment of United States Marines pauses in a jungle clearing for a brief rest en route to the front on Guadalcanal Island. The Marine in the right foreground has attached to his helmet netting for use in camouflaging himself in the dense undergrowth. Shortly after this photo was snapped, these Leathernecks drove an enemy band far into the hills. December 1942.” (USMC photo)

by Philip A. Katcher

Guadalcanal was one of the most important battles of World War II; it was the first step towards Allied victory in the South Pacific and thereafter Japan never regained the offensive. “After Guadalcanal,” one senior Imperial Japanese Navy planner later wrote, “I knew we could not win the war. I did not think we would lose, but I knew we could not win.”

Even so, the battle is rarely given more than a brief discussion in many accounts of the war. This is not totally surprising because Guadalcanal was not a simple battle. It was more like a series of running fights, with long periods of very little action in between, at the end of which the Japanese were not really destroyed, but simply held off. The Japanese then evacuated the island fairly easily, so there was no clear-cut victory as in many other decisive battles.

One who knew the island could well even wonder why anybody would want to fight a battle there. Author Jack London, who knew the area well, called Guadalcanal a “place of death,” with its inhabitants mostly snakes, giant lizards, scorpions, crocodiles, poisonous spiders, leeches and ferocious white ants.

The answer was that American planners needed to take some islands in the area to secure communications between the U.S. and Australia. Their original plan did not include Guadalcanal, however, they later discovered the Japanese force there was building an airfield estimated to be able to hold sixty planes which would be finished in mid-August. Guadalcanal, therefore, was included in the plan and was to be taken 1 August.

In June 1942 the 1st Marine Division, newly arrived in New Zealand, was handed the job of occupying and defending Tulagi and adjacent positions, including Guadalcanal, the Florida Islands and the Santa Cruz Islands. The original target date of 1 August was impossible because not all the Marines had landed in New Zealand and the ships would have to be re-packed, combat loading style, before they headed towards the objectives. The new landing date was 7 August.

The 1st Marine Division, as it started out on its first great battle, had 956 officers and 18,146 enlisted men. It was made up of three regiments, called “Marines” in the Corps, the 1st, 5th, and 7th, each with three battalions. Its artillery was in the 11th Marines, a four-battalion regiment with a dozen 155 mm howitzers, a dozen 105-mm howitzers, and thirty-six 75-mm howitzers. The division further had the 1st Marine Tank Battalion, equipped with M3 “Stuart” tanks; the 1st Marine Service Battalion; the 1st Special Weapons Battalion; the 1st Pioneer Battalion; the 1st Engineer Battalion; the 1st Parachute Battalion; the 1st Amphibious Tractor Battalion; the 1st Medical Battalion; the 1st Raider Battalion; the 3rd Defense Battalion, and a headquarters battalion.

The Americans, unaware of the small size of the Japanese garrison on Guadalcanal, which was mostly made up of laborers, expected a rough landing. “This is a knock-down and drag-out fight,” one Marine colonel told correspondent Richard Tregaskis. “Things are going to go wrong on the beach, and people are going to get hurt. But those are good kids and I think they’ll be all right.”

Marines on the invasion fleet spent their time continuously taking apart their weapons, cleaning them and putting them back together again. Others sharpened bayonets, machetes and bolo knives. Some even made crude blackjacks out of canvas sacks filled with lead balls.

Final orders were issued just prior to landing. “The coming offensive in the Guadalcanal area,” it read, “marks the first offensive of the war against the enemy, involving ground forces of the United States. The Marines have been selected to initiate this action which will prove to be the forerunner of successive offensive actions that will end in ultimate victory for our cause. Our country expects nothing but victory from us and it shall have just that. The word failure shall not even be considered as being in our vocabulary.

“We have worked hard and trained faithfully for this action and I have every confidence in our ability and desire to force our will upon the enemy. We are meeting a tough and wily opponent but he is not sufficiently tough or wily to overcome us because We Are Marines.”

The troops were awakened, those who managed to sleep, at 4 a.m., 7 August 1942. Within a very short time the large black mass which were Guadalcanal’s hills could be seen from the decks against a South Pacific dawn. At 6:14 the naval barrage of the islands began; there was no reply. The troops made their way down the gangways and into invasion craft. At 9:10 the boats of the 1st and 3rd Battalions of the 5th Marines hit the shore. Still no enemy fire was heard. At 11 a.m. the 1st Marines (Reinforced) landed behind the first wave, and all units began the drive inland. Virtually the only casualty of the landing was a private who cut himself opening a coconut.

Nervous because of the unexpectedly easy landing after all that training about the ferocious Japanese, the advancing men moved, at best, slowly. “On the beach west of the main perimeter I found the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, moving as if it were about to encounter the entire Imperial Army. I gave the battalion commander hell,” later wrote division commanding general A. A. Vandegrift. “The day’s objective was the Tenaru River, about two miles west, which I wanted defended by nightfall.

“At [Colonel Clifton B.] Cates’ CP [command post of Combat Group B, made up of the 1st Marines; 3rd Battalion, 11th Marines, and support units] I learned that his right battalion was bogged down in an immense rain forest west of the Ilu River. Our informants in New Zealand had failed to report this obstacle, a fetid morass so thick with overgrowth you couldn’t see Mt. Austen or anything else from its depths. In working their way through it the troops, in poor condition from the weeks aboard ship, seemed about done in by the heat and high humidity.”

Meanwhile, other 1st Marine Division troops were landing on other islands: Tulagi, capital of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, Florida, Tanambogo, and Gavutu. There fighting was tough, against some 1,500 Japanese combat troops on these islands, of whom only twenty-five were taken alive as prisoners, while another seventy are thought to have escaped to other islands. The rest died in their positions, a clear indication of the type of fighting the Marines would face.

The islands did fall, however, and the Marines sent to take them, minus a small garrison for each, were sent on to Guadalcanal itself.

On Guadalcanal, however, invading Americans found half-eaten meals abandoned, along with a vast supply of booty which even included an ice plant. The latter was quickly decorated with a sign reading, “Tojo Ice Plant, Under New Management.”

The war at sea nearby, however, was not going as smoothly. On 8 August a Japanese naval force, eight ships boasting thirty-four eight-inch guns, ten 5.5-inch guns, twenty-seven five-inch and 4.7-inch guns and sixty-two torpedo tubes, came down towards the American and Australian fleet anchored off Guadalcanal. The U.S. Navy had already pulled out its carriers nearby because of “the large number of enemy torpedo planes and bombers in vicinity,” against which they had only seventy-eight carrier-based planes which were already low on fuel. On 10 August, at 1 a.m., the Japanese ships came into range and opened fire. Within forty-six minutes the Japanese Navy had sunk the U.S. cruisers Astoria, Quincy and Vincennes and the Royal Australian Navy cruiser Canberra, along with one destroyer. The U.S. cruiser Chicago was badly damaged. The Navy’s support forces had to withdraw, leaving the Marines on shore alone.

On 20 August, however, help arrived for the Marines in the form of two squadrons of airplanes, one of fighters and the other of bombers, which were to be stationed at the captured Japanese airfield on Guadalcanal. The field had been named Henderson Field, after Marine flyer Major Lofton R. Henderson, who had been killed at Midway.

The field was just about ready for them. The main runway was 3,778 feet long and 160 feet wide and was surfaced with a mixture of coral gravel and cement. Much of the equipment used to build it had been abandoned by the Japanese, including five steamrollers, two tractors, a large supply of cement and an electric light system which ran the length of the runway.

“Morale’s gone up twenty points this afternoon,” said one officer after the planes landed. It was just in time, too, for the Japanese 17th Army had decided to re-take Guadalcanal and their men were on their way. The initial force assigned the task had some 6,000 men, which were thought enough to beat the 10,000 Marines believed on the island. General Kiyotake Kawaguchi, the Japanese commander, wasn’t overconfident, although he did think his men would win, and even told one acquaintance that defeating the Marines would be “serious business.”

The first of the Japanese troops to land was a 900-man force under Colonel Kiyono Ichiki. The colonel left 125 men to guard the landing site and pushed on towards the waiting Marines with the rest.

A little after midnight, 21 August 1942, the Japanese force hit the Marine defenses along the Tenaru. “It was on us in an instant,” wrote Private Robert Leckie of the 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines, who manned a hole along the riverbank, “and then we were firing. We were so disorganized we had not the sense to disperse, clustering around that open pit as though we were born of it. Falsetto screeching rose directly opposite us and we were blasting away at it, sure that human intruders had provoked the cry of the birds. I helped the Gentleman fire his gun, although I was not his assistant. He concentrated on the river bank, firing burst after burst there, convinced that the Japs were preparing to swim the river. The screeching stopped.”

The Marines would not be moved. Heroic actions were almost commonplace.

Private Al Schmidt, his one leg battered and the rest of his machine gun crew dead, single-handed loaded and fired his gun time and time again. One Japanese soldier got close enough to toss a grenade into Schmidt’s foxhole, the fragments blinding him and wounding him in the arms and shoulders. “God damn it, they got me in the eyes,” he yelled, adding, “I can smell the rotten buggers.” And he kept on firing. By the time it was all over he’d been firing five hours straight. Carried towards an aid station, he handed a lieutenant his .45 and passed out. For that day’s action Private Schmidt received the Medal of Honor, one of America’s first authentic heroes of World War II.

The line was holding, but a reserve platoon was sent in about 2:30 a.m., and artillery was called in along the front a half-hour later.

When it got lighter as the sun rose, tanks from Company B, 1st Tank Battalion, drove through Japanese lines, firing canister from their 37-mm guns as they went. Getting some distance from the Marine lines, the tankers were radioed to return. “Let us alone,” the tank commander replied, “we’re too busy killing Japs.”

Final replacements from the 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, arrived by 8:30 and it was all over. Even the Japanese, persistent as they were, admitted so, turning and trying to escape. Some ran back into the dense forests, while others ran along the beach. Some 250 of them, escaping on the open beach route, were spotted by Henderson Field-based fighters which easily mowed them all down. Only fifteen prisoners were taken, all but two of whom were wounded to begin with. Against a Marine loss of thirty-four dead and seventy-five wounded, virtually the entire Japanese detachment had been destroyed.

“The attack of the Ichiki detachment,” the colonel radioed his headquarters, “was not entirely successful.”

The attack had also made it clear to 1st Marine Division headquarters that the Japanese, despite first appearances, hadn’t given up Guadalcanal altogether. Therefore, on 21 August, they recalled the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, from the nearby island of Tulagi. The battalion was assigned the role of a mobile reserve for the Guadalcanal garrison.

The Japanese decided that it would be harder to get the Marines off Guadalcanal than they originally thought. According to one of their training manuals, “Westerners … being very haughty, effeminate and cowardly … intensely dislike fighting in the rain or mist or in the dark. They cannot conceive night to be a proper time for battle … although it is excellent for dancing. In these weaknesses lie our opportunity.” This, however, didn’t appear to be true. It would take men, not propaganda, to beat the Marines.

Therefore they planned a major attack. The 35th Brigade, 2,400 men, landed at Taivu Point east of Henderson Field, while 1,100 men under Colonel Akinsouke Oka landed west of the field at Kokumbona. The eastern-based troops were to take the hill, later called “Bloody Ridge,” which overlooked the field, joined by Oka’s men from the west.

The 35th Brigade beat a way through almost impossible terrain to run into defensive positions of Company C, Marine Raiders, about 9:30 p.m. on 13 September. Initially the attack was a success, driving the Marine company against Company B’s position, but the terrain itself as much as the Marines stopped the Japanese from taking advantage of their initial successes and moving quickly forward.

Reinforcements, the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, were sent to the Raiders’ position, despite protests from Lieutenant Colonel Merritt E. “Red Mike” Edson, Raider commander, that his men alone could handle anything the Japanese could throw at them. As it turned out, a combination of Japanese airpower and thick jungle slowed the men of the 2nd down so much they never got to the Raiders. Edson’s men dug in around the southern slope of the high knob in the center of the ridge.

Towards evening the Japanese caught their second wind and began harassing the Marines. They even tossed a smoke pot into the Marine lines, yelling in English, “Gas attack!” Finally, as it grew dark, the Japanese, firing their weapons from the hip and yelling as they came, scrambled out of their holes and at the Marines.

Colonel William McKennon, of the Parachute Battalion, was a battalion commander on Bloody Ridge when the attack hit. “The first assault,” he later wrote, “came vomiting forth from a triangular patch of jungle directly on our left front. There was little rifle fire, but the Japs poured blast after blast of bullets from their Nambus … light machine guns … against our own machine gun positions. A Nambu is hard to locate because it gives off no appreciable muzzle glare, and it is particularly effective in a night attack. But in firepower there is nothing like our own machine guns. The three we had set up poured it into the oncoming Japs, smashed them back, knocked them over, broke their assault. The guns never jammed. There were screams and bleating, and then comparative silence in the hollow. The firing had lasted perhaps five seconds. It seemed like hours.”

The first assault had been beaten back quickly, but the Japanese did not give up after only one attack. They came again and again at the Marine line. The Marines were forced to slowly fall back, reforming along their reserve line as they called in 105-mm howitzer fire against their attackers. Still, by dawn, it was obvious that the attack had failed.

Two men from the Raiders, including Colonel Edson, received Medals of Honor for the night’s defense. The Japanese admitted a loss of 633 men, with another 505 wounded. The survivors made their way west to where Colonel Oka’s men were still working their way to join the attack. Oka’s men never even got into the fight … not that their extra bodies would have made all that much difference in the end.

Having stood off two major attacks, the Marines decided to go on the offensive themselves, to give themselves more breathing room. On 23 September the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, headed across the Matanikau River, west of Henderson Field. The plan called for Edson’s Raiders to stage a holding attack across the river at its mouth, while the main attack would be south of that, the troops turning once the river had been crossed, while another force would pass through that group and move further west before turning north to the sea double pincer movement. The three forces would trap any Japanese along the river.

Right from the start, however, the attack got bogged down on strong Japanese defenses. The 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, was sent in after them, but by the 26th the Marines were still stalled on the Matanikau. The Raiders then came in, but it still took three assaults before the Marines could force their way across the light brown stream.

The 1st Marine Division lost more men in that series of attacks than it had in any other action of the entire campaign.

By 9 October the Marines were securely dug in on the western bank of the Matanikau, their lines some three miles deeper into Japanese-held Guadalcanal than they had been before the attack. At that point the Marine drive was called off.

While the Marine offensive was slowly grinding on, a decision had been reached in Tokyo to make a major new effort on Guadalcanal. The 2nd (Sendai) Division was chosen for the task, their commander telling them, “This is the decisive battle between Japan and the United States, a battle in which the rise or fall of the Japanese Empire will be decided.”

The Japanese landed a series of reinforcements on the island. Artillery landed 11 October; the 2nd Division and two battalions of the 38th Division, along with three batteries of heavy artillery, a battery of mountain artillery, a mortar battalion, three rapid-fire gun battalions and sixteen tanks landed 19 October. For the first time Japanese outnumbered Americans on Guadalcanal.

Not only did they outnumber them, but they had badly shocked the Marines with an astounding naval barrage on the night of 13 October. The battleships Haruna and Kongo sent in 14-inch shells, while supporting ships shelled Henderson Field with thousands of eight- and four-inch shells. The bombardment, which lasted two-and-a-half hours, ending about three in the morning, put at least thirteen shell craters in the airfield’s runway, virtually ruined the pagoda headquarters, and knocked down trees among nearby artillery and air units left and right. Yet, except for some momentary cases of shell shock, the basic aim of the nighttime barrage wasn’t accomplished. At the first sign of dawn scout bombers managed to take off on the pitted runway, only to spot the transports and destroyers, filled with Japanese troops, which were heading towards Guadalcanal.

The Marines had been warned to expect another, perhaps larger, attack. This one would obviously be the big one.

Before it came, however, the 1st Marine Division also received reinforcements in the form of the Army’s 164th Infantry Regiment, an unblooded National Guard outfit.

The Japanese plan was as elaborate as the American one on the Matanikau had been. It, too, called for a three-prong attack. Two attacks would fall on the Matanikau, one along the beach to the north, the other to the south, while Colonel Oka’s troops would attack positions around Bloody Ridge. The plan called for all attacks to be launched the same time on 22 October.

The Japanese plan was one which, if it were to work, would require excellent communications, an ability for all the troops to be in their proper places in time and plain old luck. The Japanese, as it turned out, would have none of these. Not only did the almost impossible terrain slow down the heavily-equipped Japanese troops, preventing most of them from being in position in time, but frankly very poor communications meant that the various commanders didn’t know where the other prongs were.

The easiest position to reach was along the lower Matanikau, and the Japanese 4th and 124th Regiments were in their proper places there on time. On 22 October, at 6 p.m., their artillery opened up, dropping shells on the defenders from the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, and a battalion of the 164th. As the barrage let up, the attack, led by nine 18-ton medium tanks, came towards the defenders. Infantry ran forward, in between the tanks, yelling, “Blood for the Emperor! Marine you die!”

“To hell with your Goddamned Emperor,” one Marine yelled back. “Blood for Franklin and Eleanor!”

The Marines called in supporting fire from 105-mm howitzers. That and anti-tank fire from the Marine and Army line knocked out all but one tank. That tank rolled over American foxholes until one Marine jumped up, ran over, and jammed a hand grenade in its tracks. The explosion blew the tracks apart, the tank rocking back and forth once and then coming to a stop. A nearby tank destroyer spotted it, took quick aim and put one shell directly into the Japanese tank. The lucky shot must have hit the tank’s ammunition supply because a giant explosion blew the unlucky tank and its obviously dead crew back 20 yards into the sea.

By 3 a.m. the Japanese had made almost eight separate attacks, each one of which had been beaten back, but the Marines were running out of ammunition. The 3rd Battalion, 164th Infantry, came into the line, bringing with them the newly-issued M1 rifles. The Marines on Guadalcanal still used the older M1903 bolt-action rifles, and the increased firepower from the Army’s weapons made a difference. The Japanese were stopped.

Afterwards the Marines counted 250 Japanese dead along their front, including one major whose last diary entry read, “I do not know what excuse to give. I apologize for what I have done … I am going to return my borrowed life today with short interest.” Marine casualties were nineteen dead, thirty wounded and twelve missing.

The attack served to warn the Marines that the Japanese they had seen on transports were landed and around the Marine positions. Quickly the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, was sent to the upper Matanikau, where the next attack was expected. Sure enough, the Japanese hit again … but not on 22 October, but at 3 a.m., 24 October, and not on the Matanikau.

It was then they hit Bloody Ridge in a typical ‘banzai’ charge. Sergeant John Basilone, who was later awarded the Medal of Honor for his part in that night’s action, told a Marine combat correspondent a few days later, “They kept coming and we kept firing. We all thought our end had come. Some Japs would sneak through the lines and behind us. It got pretty bad because I’d have to stop firing every once in a while and shoot behind me with my pistol. At dawn our guns were just burnt out. Altogether we got rid of 26,000 rounds.”

The Japanese rushes were stopped by 7 a.m., and the Marines later counted 941 bodies under their burnt-out guns.

The final Japanese attack, as uncoordinated as the others but made with a larger force, came where it was expected, the upper Matanikau. There the 29th and 16th Japanese Infantry Regiments hit Companies E, F, and G, 7th Marines. Company F was virtually destroyed, while Company E fell back under extreme pressure. There was only one machine gun platoon holding the position between the companies.

Sergeant Mitchell Paige, the platoon commander, had lost virtually all his men to wounds. He actually picked up his machine gun in his arms, like a scene from a B-grade movie, and went on the attack. Later he described what he did. “Anyway, I decided it was too unhealthy to stay in one place for too long, so I would fire a burst and then move. Each time I shifted, grenades fell just where I had been. Over the nose of the ridge in the tall grass, which was later burned for security, I thought I saw some movement. Right off the nose, in the grass, thirty Japs stood up. One of them was looking at me through field glasses. I let them have it with a full burst and they peeled off like grass under a mowing machine.” Paige said he got “… so wound up I couldn’t stop,” rounding up a skirmish line of assorted Marines and driving back the Japanese attack almost by himself. He received both a battlefield commission and the Medal of Honor for his actions. When the Japanese finally gave up the attack some 110 of their soldiers lay dead in front of Paige’s position.

Every Japanese attack failed. But what the Japanese Army and Navy could not do, Guadalcanal itself was doing to the division. In October alone the division reported 1,941 men ill with malaria, while men who were supposedly well were just about totally mentally and physically exhausted.

General Vandegrift decided one way to restore morale would be to return to the attack, instead of passively waiting for the next Japanese attack. He returned to a drive across the Matanikau, with the 5th Marines taking the brunt of the action. Their 1st Battalion was stopped, but the 2nd Battalion moved ahead fairly rapidly, so the 3rd Battalion was sent in with the 1st. By 2 November the regiment had reported 450 dead Japanese accounted for, against Marine losses of about forty, although most Japanese facing them did manage to retreat successfully rather than be trapped by the Marines.

The 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines, and three artillery battalions were sent forward, too. However, the Marines, even with an additional Army regiment, were so hard-pressed to defend the territory they already had within their lines that they could not hold any more. Therefore, on 4 November, when General Vandegrift learned that the Japanese had landed additional troops east of the American lines, at Tetere, he ordered the drive stopped and the troops pulled back to their original defensive lines.

While the offensive was going on, Vandegrift sent men to try to build another airfield, this one at Aola Bay. The 2nd Marine Raider Battalion was sent with the engineers on the mission. The engineers promptly discovered that the area was too marshy to build a landing strip on. The Marines then returned overland to their main defensive positions. Their march took them 150 miles through Japanese lines. They lost, however, only seventeen dead and eighteen wounded, while killing 488 Japanese during their trek.

Illness continued to plague the 1st Marine Division, which had already been stationed in a combat zone far longer than the typical Marine unit was supposed to. Finally General Vandegrift had to admit officially the division was “no longer capable of offensive operations.” The division’s final report said that, “The cumulative effort of long periods of fatigue and strain, endless labor by day and vigilance by night were aggravated to an alarming degree by the growing malarial rate.”

The Army’s Americal Division was landed to take over the job of defending America’s first step on the road to Tokyo. The command of the island was turned over to the Army on 7 December 1942, one year to the day after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor to force America into the war.

The 5th Marines were the last to leave, according to General Vandegrift, “… some so weak they could scarcely climb the cargo nets draped over the sides of the fat transports.” On the 9th the general visited the site of the graves of so many of his men, almost 7,000 of them. Then he, too, left.

What had it all meant? It was not a total victory for the Americans in that the Japanese had been able to evacuate their troops fairly easily when they finally decided to abandon the island. And yet, in the long run, it may have been one of the most important victories of the war. The Japanese had lost some 32,000 men, while Marines killed in action were 1,979 with an additional 6,000 wounded. The airfield was, at the end of it all, securely in American hands. American tactics, communications and weapons had proved themselves superior to those of the Japanese. And, perhaps the most important, the long road of Japanese conquests came to an end. They were never again to capture any major pieces of territory, while the Americans were just beginning to build their list of conquests … conquests which eventually ended at Tokyo.

Bibliography

Katcher, Philip. U.S. 1st Marine Division, 1941-1945. London, 1979.

McMillan, George. The Old Breed. Washington, D.C., 1949.

Smith, S. E. The United States Marine Corps in World War II. New York, 1969.

Tregaskis, Richard. Guadalcanal Diary. New York, 1943.

Toland, John. The Rising Sun. New York, 1970.

Vandegrift, A. A. Once A Marine. New York, 1964.

Marines serving food, Guadalcanal, circa 1942. Marines in the front lines at Guadalcanal take time out for food. It was prepared in the comparative safety of a behind-the-lines galley and brought to the front in big containers. (USMC photo)

A few yards from the front lines on Guadalcanal, marked by barbed wire, a U.S. Marine fighting force pitched their tents and dug adjoining foxholes. The occupant of this tent placed his rifle and two hand grenades close to the foxhole just in case. (USMC photo)

A well-camouflaged machine gun emplacement on the front line position of U.S. Marines. (USMC photo)

Dug-in 37mm anti-tank gun of the 1st Marine Division on Guadalcanal, late 1942.