Carlson's Long Patrol, 1942: a month behind Japanese lines on Guadalcanal

On 4 December 1942 a column of thin, bearded Marines came down off Mount Austen into the American perimeter on Guadalcanal. They had been in the jungle for a month, outside the lines, hunting the remnants of a Japanese force through swamp, kunai grass and razor-backed ridges. The march became a legend of the Marine Corps. Its own historians also record what it cost the men who made it.²

Background: a second front on Guadalcanal

By November 1942 the Americans had been fighting for Guadalcanal for three months. They held a perimeter around the airfield at Lunga Point, Henderson Field, and had beaten off the great Japanese counteroffensive of October. Early in November Major General Alexander Vandegrift, commanding the 1st Marine Division, began to push west toward Kokumbona, but a new threat appeared to the east.³ › Guadalcanal Campaign, 1942 to 1943

On the night of 2 November Japanese ships landed troops of the 230th Infantry Regiment and supplies at Gavaga Creek near Koli Point, east of the perimeter. The US Army's official history puts the landing force at about 1,500 men, sent to join Colonel Toshinari Shoji's force there and build an airfield. Marine and Army battalions moved out to trap them.⁴

At the same time the Americans were opening a beachhead of their own farther east. On 4 November two companies of the 2nd Raider Battalion landed at Aola Bay, on the northeast coast, to cover the arrival of Army troops and construction units for a second airfield. Their orders soon changed. Vandegrift told Carlson to march west from Aola and fall on the Japanese around Koli Point from the rear, catching whatever slipped out of the trap.⁵

Armies and commanders

Evans Fordyce Carlson was one of the most unusual officers in the Marine Corps. He had served in the Army in World War I, tried his hand as a salesman and then enlisted in the Marines as a private in 1922, soon winning a commission again. In 1927 he went to Shanghai with the 4th Marines as an intelligence officer, the start of a lifelong fascination with China.⁶

Back in China in 1937 as an observer, Carlson received permission to travel with the Communist Eighth Route Army as it fought the Japanese. He came away convinced of the value of small units, guerrilla raids and leaders who shared the hardships of their men. When the Marine Corps created its raider battalions in February 1942, he was given the 2nd and built it on those ideas, with open discussions between officers and men and a motto taken from the Chinese, Gung Ho, which he explained as working together. He also knew Franklin Roosevelt, whose son James served in the battalion.⁷

The battalion's first test, the raid on Makin Atoll in the Gilbert Islands in August 1942, was celebrated at home as a victory but had gone badly. Caught in a confused firefight and struggling to get back through the surf to the submarines, Carlson tried to send a surrender note to the Japanese; the messenger was killed before it reached anyone. Nine raiders left behind on the island were later captured and beheaded. Some of his own officers questioned his judgment afterward, and Guadalcanal was his chance to prove himself and his methods.⁸

Against him were Japanese soldiers of the 230th Infantry and other units, hungry and tired but still dangerous. Their orders, once the airfield plan at Koli Point was given up, were to march back inland around the American perimeter to Kokumbona and the hills to the west, past Mount Austen.⁹

The patrol in phases

Into the interior

Carlson set out on 6 November with Solomon Islander scouts as guides. The trails were narrow and overgrown, the creeks swollen, and heavy packs and thick vines slowed every mile. The column worked its way to Binu, a village on the Balesuna River, where Carlson set up a base camp. On 10 November three more raider companies, B, D and F, came overland to join him, and from then on islander porters brought supplies up from the coast.¹⁰

The fight at Asamama

By then most of the Japanese had broken out of the ring on the Metapona River and were heading inland. On 11 November Carlson sent four companies out on separate patrols. Mid-morning, Company C ran into the edge of a large Japanese bivouac. The advance guard did heavy damage in the first minutes, but the rest of the company was pinned down in the open by rifle, machine gun and mortar fire.¹¹

Carlson sent other companies toward the sound of the guns. Richard Washburn's Company E met another Japanese group at the Metapona, fell back, regrouped and counterattacked as the enemy tried to cross the river. Company C pulled back under cover of its own mortars, Carlson called in aircraft against the Japanese, and by evening the main enemy force had gone. The raiders had lost men killed and wounded, but they had found their enemy.¹²

Hunting the stragglers

Carlson now turned Asamama into a trap. Japanese messengers kept walking into the old bivouac, unaware that it had changed hands, and the raiders killed 25 of them; groups seen moving nearby were shelled with mortars. On 14 November a Company F patrol wiped out a 15-man outpost near Binu.¹³

On 17 November Carlson walked into the perimeter to see Vandegrift, who gave him a new mission: swing south and west through the interior, hunt down the Japanese artillery that was shelling the airfield and search out the trails the enemy used around the perimeter. The raiders pushed into the hills between the headwaters of the Tenaru and the Lunga.¹⁴ › Battle of the Tenaru, 1942

Yancey's charge and Mount Austen

At the end of November, on the steep ridge between the two valleys, the raiders found an abandoned camp with a 75 mm mountain gun and a 37 mm antitank gun and wrecked both. Farther along the trail the advance guard stumbled on about 100 Japanese with their rifles stacked out of reach. Corporal John Yancey charged in firing and called for his squad to follow; when the shooting stopped, 75 Japanese were dead. Yancey received the Navy Cross.¹⁵

Vandegrift now ordered the battalion in. Carlson sent his most exhausted companies back to the lines and led the rest up Mount Austen, the height that overlooked the airfield from the southwest. On 3 December, near the summit, they met a Japanese platoon and fought for two hours, each side trying to envelop the other in the undergrowth; 25 Japanese were killed and four raiders wounded, one of them mortally. On the way down the next day the column ran into an ambush that cost more lives before the last of the raiders reached the perimeter on 4 December.¹⁶

Turning point

The patrol turned on the first big clash at Asamama. Strung out in the open, Company C could have been destroyed; instead Carlson used his radios, his scattered companies and air support to converge on the fight, and by evening the Japanese had slipped away. From then on the raiders held the initiative. Hoffman points out that far from the Marine perimeter the Japanese grew careless and let themselves be surprised again and again, and that the raiders, working only in the enemy's rear, reaped the benefit. In his reading Carlson's guerrilla tactics did much to explain the lopsided exchange.¹⁷

Aftermath: the price of the patrol

The scoreboard depends on whose history you read. Jon Hoffman's Marine Corps history counts 488 Japanese killed for 16 raiders dead and 18 wounded, as does John Zimmerman's 1949 monograph; David Sears gives about 500 Japanese dead and the same Marine losses. The US Army's official history, by John Miller, credits the raiders with a 30-day march of 150 miles, 12 separate actions and over 400 enemy killed, at a cost of 17 raiders.¹⁸

The battle casualties were only part of the bill. Over the month the battalion evacuated 225 men with malaria, dysentery, ringworm and other illness, several times its losses in action. The two companies that had been in the field the whole month came out with about a fifth of the men they had landed with. Hoffman blames poor rations and the rough conditions, and concludes that the guerrilla tactics inflicted heavy casualties on the enemy at an equally high cost in friendly manpower.¹⁹

The fighting on Guadalcanal went on for two more months after the raiders came in. The 1st Marine Division was relieved in December, Army divisions took over the offensive, and in the first week of February 1943 Japanese ships took the last of the garrison off the island. On 8 February the last pocket of resistance was eliminated.²⁰

Legacy and memory

Carlson's methods seemed vindicated, but the Marine Corps was not convinced it needed them. Hoffman lists the reasons: the Corps was expanding and needed men for new divisions, the raiders had mostly ended up fighting as ordinary infantry, and many senior officers disliked the idea of an elite force within an elite corps. In January 1944 the raider battalions were disbanded, and on 1 February the 1st Raider Regiment became the new 4th Marines.²¹

Carlson died in May 1947. His Gung Ho, the battalion's motto, outlived him, and so did the story of the month his raiders spent behind the lines on Guadalcanal. Hoffman calls the patrol extremely successful from a tactical point of view; the National WWII Museum notes that Carlson's tactics were admired by military leaders long after his death.²² › Battle of Tarawa, 1943