Edson’s Ridge, 12–14 September 1942

A Marine stands guard on Hill 80, the southern knob of the grassy ridge a mile south of Henderson Field, Guadalcanal, 1942. On the night of 13–14 September Japanese infantry took this ground and fought the Raiders and Parachutists for the hill behind it. user:Cla88; public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Guadalcanal · Chapter 5 of 9

Edson’s Ridge, 12–14 September 1942

Kawaguchi’s brigade came out of the jungle on the one piece of open ground that led straight to the airfield, and about 800 Marines on a kunai-grass ridge, with artillery firing close in front of them, stopped it in two nights.

8–18 September 1942Tasimboko · the Lunga ridge · Alligator Creek~30 min read

Five weeks after the landings of 7 August, the Lunga perimeter on Guadalcanal was still a narrow pocket around one airfield. The 1st Marine Division held the beach from the Ilu River (the “Tenaru” of the Marines’ maps) west to Kukum, but south of the runway the line was little more than a chain of outposts and listening posts in the jungle. The Navy had pulled the transports out after the disaster off Savo Island. The Marines were eating captured Japanese rice. Henderson Field had become an unsinkable carrier, and the Cactus Air Force owned the waters around the island by day, but at night Japanese destroyers came down the Slot and put soldiers ashore east and west of the perimeter.

The first of those soldiers, Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki’s advance detachment, had been destroyed at Alligator Creek on 21 August (Chapter 4). The second attempt was bigger and better planned on paper. Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi brought the headquarters of the 35th Infantry Brigade, most of the 124th Infantry Regiment, a battalion of the 4th Infantry and what was left of Ichiki’s regiment. His plan was to march inland through the rain forest, unseen, and fall on the airfield from the south, where the Americans had the least.

What happened instead is the subject of this chapter. On 8 September Colonel Merritt A. Edson’s 1st Raider Battalion and the 1st Parachute Battalion landed behind Kawaguchi’s base at Tasimboko, burned his supplies and carried off his papers. Edson then put the same two worn-down battalions on a long, bare ridge south of the airfield because he thought the Japanese would come that way. They did, on the nights of 12–13 and 13–14 September. The fight on what Marines called the Ridge, and later Edson’s Ridge or Bloody Ridge, was one of the closest-run actions of the Pacific war. It ended with Kawaguchi’s men retreating west across the Matanikau in a march many of them did not survive, and it convinced Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo that Guadalcanal was a battle Japan had to win.

All times below are local Guadalcanal time (GMT+11) unless marked otherwise. Japanese records often use Tokyo time (GMT+9), two hours behind, and that difference explains some of the apparent disagreements between American and Japanese timetables of the battle.

Kawaguchi’s brigade and the argument over barges

Kawaguchi was 49, a graduate of the Imperial Japanese Army Academy (1914) and the Army Staff College, and he had commanded the 35th Infantry Brigade since 1940. The brigade had invaded British Borneo in December 1941 and had then gone on to Cebu and Mindanao in the Philippines. By June 1942 it was at Palau. When the Americans landed on Guadalcanal, the Japanese 17th Army at Rabaul, under Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake, believed it faced perhaps 2,000 to 3,000 Americans. A study by the Japanese National Institute for Defense Studies notes that this was the estimate on which Imperial General Headquarters approved Kawaguchi’s attack. The real figure was more than 10,000 on Guadalcanal alone.

Getting the brigade to the island was the first problem, and it produced an argument that the Japanese themselves later described in vivid terms. Rear Admiral Raizō Tanaka, who commanded the reinforcement force, wanted to run the troops down in fast destroyers at night. Kawaguchi preferred to move by ship to the central Solomons and then make the final leg in motorized landing barges (daihatsu), hopping from island to island and hiding by day. The Marine Corps official history quotes Tanaka’s postwar account: “Kawaguchi was a barge man, and he did not care much for this idea of going down to Guadalcanal in destroyers.” Tanaka referred the dispute up the chain to Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa and General Hyakutake, who ordered the whole movement made by destroyer.

The two methods came to have names. The destroyer runs were the nezumi yusō, “rat transportation,” because they moved at night and scurried back before dawn; the Americans called them the Tokyo Express. Barge movement was “ant transportation,” slow and in small loads. Both had serious limits. The NIDS study gives the capacity of a destroyer on these runs as “110 men, 0.3 guns (or barrels), and rations for two weeks.” Destroyers could not carry artillery in any quantity, vehicles or a real stock of food. Barges could carry more but were slow, wallowed in a seaway and were easy prey for aircraft in daylight.

In the end Kawaguchi got both. The main body went by destroyer. On the night of 29 August the main body of the 1st Battalion, 124th Infantry (about 450 men) landed at Taivu Point, east of the perimeter. The brigade headquarters and the 3d Battalion, 124th Infantry, waded ashore near Tasimboko, just west of Taivu, on the night of 31 August, and further destroyer runs on 2, 4, 5 and 7 September brought the rest. A separate group of about 1,000 men, mostly the 2d Battalion, 124th Infantry, under the regimental commander, Colonel Akinosuke Oka, made the trip in small craft and barges. Marine dive bombers and P-400 fighters caught the barges in the open in early September. The NIDS study says Oka’s group came ashore far to the west, at a place it calls Malbobo, about 50 kilometers west of Lunga Point, with only about a third of the force still together. Later counts of Oka’s losses at sea vary widely: Richard Frank and Michael Smith put the dead at about 90, Samuel Griffith at about 400 (as summarized in the Wikipedia article on the battle). The scattered survivors gathered over the following days in the area west of the Matanikau, toward Kokumbona.

How many men Kawaguchi had in all is another question on which the sources differ, partly because they count different things. The Marine Corps official history, citing the 17th Army’s operations record as used by the Army historian John Miller, says the force numbered more than 6,000 when it had formed up. Frank’s count, as summarized in the Wikipedia article, puts about 5,200 men at Taivu and about 1,000 west of the perimeter by 7 September. For the attack itself, Major John L. Zimmerman’s 1949 Marine monograph counts 3,450 men: 850 from the rest of the Ichiki unit, 2,050 from the 124th Infantry and attached units, and 550 from the 2d Battalion, 4th Infantry. Henry Shaw’s 1992 commemorative history puts about 2,000 men with Kawaguchi when he began the attack, and Jon Hoffman’s history of the Raiders about 2,500 for the main assault. The Marine Corps History Division’s biography of Edson says about 800 Marines withstood more than 2,500 Japanese. These numbers differ less than they seem to. Not all of Kawaguchi’s units reached their start lines, and on the night itself he was never able to bring them all into action at once.

The Tasimboko raid, 8 September

The Americans knew Japanese troops were landing east of the perimeter, but not how many. Most of what they knew came from Solomon Islanders. Martin Clemens, the British Solomon Islands Protectorate district officer for Guadalcanal, had come into the Marine lines with his scouts in mid-August, and Vandegrift gave him charge of native administration and of intelligence outside the perimeter. His scouts, men of the Protectorate police and local villagers, watched the coast around Taivu and reported a growing Japanese presence there. Division intelligence discounted their numbers. Zimmerman’s 1949 monograph, written in the idiom of its day, records that “little credence was placed in the mathematical accomplishments of Clemens’ followers.” The scouts were right. Hoffman notes that they also reported, correctly, that the Japanese defenses at Tasimboko faced west, toward the Marines.

By then Edson’s Raiders had already had a hard month. The 1st Raider Battalion had taken Tulagi on 7–8 August. The 1st Parachute Battalion, fighting as infantry, had lost its commander and many men taking Gavutu and Tanambogo. At the end of August Vandegrift brought both battalions across to Guadalcanal as a reserve near Lunga Point, with the parachutists attached to Edson. The force also lost its transport. On 30 August Japanese aircraft sank the destroyer-transport Colhoun, and on the night of 4–5 September Japanese destroyers sank the destroyer-transports Little and Gregory off Lunga Point, hours after they had carried two Raider companies back from a patrol of Savo Island.

The division approved a raid on Tasimboko on 6 September. Edson’s plan was to land east of the village, near Taivu Point, and take it from the rear. The force embarked at Kukum at 1800 on 7 September in the remaining destroyer-transports Manley and McKean and two converted tuna boats serving as patrol craft. The ships could not take everyone at once, so the Raider rifle companies went first, and the ships went back for the weapons company and the parachutists. Pacific Wrecks puts the whole force at 813 men, and Zimmerman says it numbered no more than 850.

The first boats grounded at about 0520 on 8 September. Ashore the Raiders found signs of a much larger force than they had expected. Hoffman describes more than a thousand life preservers laid out in neat rows, many foxholes and several unattended antitank guns. Kawaguchi’s main body had already gone into the jungle on its march toward the airfield, leaving a rear guard that Hoffman puts at about 300 men. Marine aircraft bombed and strafed at about 0630, and the Manley and McKean shelled the area. By chance, an American convoy (the transport Fuller and the cargo ship Bellatrix, with escorts) passed offshore during the landing. Zimmerman suggests that the Japanese took it for a major landing.

The Japanese rear guard fought back with field guns firing point-blank down the coastal track. Edson pinned it with two companies and sent Captain Samuel B. Griffith’s Company A around the left. At about 1045, with resistance stiffening, he asked for a second landing to the west. Hoffman quotes the end of the message: “If not, request instructions regarding my embarkation.” The division declined to send more troops and told him he could re-embark if the enemy proved too strong. He kept attacking instead. With a strafing run by P-400s and the envelopment by Company A, the Raiders entered Tasimboko around 1100 to noon and found it empty of defenders.

What they found instead was Kawaguchi’s base. Hoffman lists large stocks of food, ammunition and weapons up to 75mm artillery, a powerful radio station and medical supplies. Accounts differ on the caliber of the antitank guns captured: Hoffman says 37mm, Zimmerman 47mm, and Zimmerman adds that they “plagued us later on.” The Marines towed guns out into deep water behind landing boats, bayoneted cans, scattered rice, and burned the rest. They also took papers. Zimmerman notes only that “documentary material was taken for intelligence purposes,” but Pacific Wrecks summarizes what the documents showed: at least 3,000 Japanese troops on the island and an attack in preparation. The correspondent Richard Tregaskis, who went on the raid, helped gather them, according to later accounts. The Japanese left 27 dead. The Raiders lost two killed and six wounded; the Marine casualty cards list Privates Seraphine B. Smith and William D. Carney as killed in action on 8 September. The force was back at Lunga by about 1730, many of the men carrying captured food, cigarettes and liquor, and Vandegrift signaled “well done.”

The raid did not destroy Kawaguchi’s brigade, but it cost him most of his reserve food, ammunition and heavy weapons, and his radio link, before the battle began. Hoffman calls it a serious blow to Japanese logistics, fire support and communications. It also told Edson and the division staff that an attack was coming soon, and roughly in what strength. Edson now estimated about 1,000 well-armed troops near Tasimboko; after the raid, Zimmerman says, the estimate rose to no less than 4,000 Japanese in the vicinity.

Vandegrift’s perimeter and why Edson chose the ridge

By early September Vandegrift had far more perimeter than infantry to hold it. His line ran along the beach and bent inland at both ends. On the east the 1st Marines held the line of the Ilu and refused their flank about 4,000 yards inland from the river mouth. On the west the 5th Marines held from Kukum and refused their flank about half as far. South of the airfield there was no continuous line at all. Pioneers held positions south of the field, engineers to the east, and the division command post sat between them. The 2d Battalion, 5th Marines, which had come across from Tulagi on 21 August, was the division reserve.

The Japanese air raids made things worse. At 1210 on 11 September, the Marine Corps official history records, twenty-six bombers and eight Zeros struck the airfield area, killing 11 Marines and wounding 17. That afternoon 24 Navy F4F-4 Wildcats of Fighting Squadron 5, flown in from the damaged carrier Saratoga, landed at Henderson Field, a welcome reinforcement for the Cactus fighters. Behind the runway, the division command post stood in the gap south of the field, not far from a long, low ridge about a mile to the south.

That ridge was Edson’s choice of ground. Hoffman writes that Edson studied an aerial photograph and fixed on it as the likely Japanese route. His reasoning was simple. The Japanese attacked at night, partly so that their warships could support them without facing American aircraft. A night attack through jungle could succeed only along a well-defined avenue, and the grass-covered ridge, pointing north toward the airfield like a finger, was the obvious one. In words Shaw quotes, Edson “was firmly convinced that we were in the path of the next Jap attack.”

Vandegrift was not convinced that the attack would come there, and Hoffman says he disagreed with Edson’s reading. But he and his operations officer, Lieutenant Colonel Gerald C. Thomas, agreed to move the Raiders and Parachutists onto the ridge, partly to get them away from the bombing near the airfield and give them a rest. The Marine Corps official history sums up the division’s view of the ground: the ridge, “unless well defended, offered the Japanese an inviting avenue of approach to the field.” It was still a gamble. West of the Lunga there were only a few strongpoints, and east of Edson’s line lay about a mile of jungle with nobody in it.

The ridge itself was unlike most of the ground the Marines had fought on. It ran roughly north and south, parallel to the Lunga, for about 1,000 yards, a spine of bare, steep-sided knolls covered in kunai grass, with fingers of jungle reaching up the ravines on either side. At the southern end, nearest the jungle, stood a knob the Marines called Hill 80, for its height in feet. About 600 yards north rose the highest point, Hill 123. Beyond that the ground fell away toward the airfield; Pacific Wrecks puts the northern edge of the ridge about 1,700 yards from the runway. On the west, between the ridge and the Lunga, lay a swampy lagoon and dense growth. The Japanese, seeing the ridge’s shape from the air, called it the Centipede.

Edson’s men moved onto the ridge on 10 September. Hoffman describes the layout. The spine of the ridge divided the two battalions. On the left (east) of it were the Parachutists, one company forward and the rest echeloned back to cover the open flank. On the right (west) were Raider Companies B and C. Company B, under Captain Sweeney, held the grassy forward slope; Company C, under Major Kenneth D. Bailey, ran from the ridge down across the lagoon to the Lunga. Machine guns were attached to the forward companies, and the rest of the Raiders, including a Company D reduced to about platoon size, were held back as a reserve. An engineer company was tied in nearby. Edson put his own forward command post on Hill 123, a few hundred yards behind the front. Artillery observers of the 11th Marines came up to register the guns on the ground in front of him. The 2d Battalion, 5th Marines, moved into reserve between the ridge and the airfield.

There was no continuous wire, very little of it at all, and the Marines had few entrenching tools. They were tired, and many were sick. Shaw notes that Japanese planes bombed the ridge itself on 11 September, which suggests that the Japanese had seen the Marines move there, though there is no evidence that Kawaguchi changed his plan as a result.

Through the jungle: Kawaguchi’s approach

Kawaguchi’s plan called for three forces. His main body, about three battalions, would come from the south and strike for the airfield up the line of the ridge, the 1st Battalion, 124th Infantry (Major Kokusho) and the 3d Battalion, 124th Infantry (Lieutenant Colonel Watanabe) toward the river side, and the 2d Battalion, 4th Infantry (Major Tamura) along the ridge. On the east the Kuma Battalion would attack across the Ilu plain against the 1st Marines. This unit was built around Ichiki’s second echelon under Major Takeshi Mizuno; most of its men, like Ichiki’s, came from Asahikawa on Hokkaidō, and its name means “bear.” On the west Colonel Oka’s force would attack the 5th Marines near the coast. The attack was set for the night of 12 September.

To get into position unseen, Kawaguchi’s engineers began about 2 September to cut a trail inland from the Tasimboko area, over steep ridges and through gorges, toward a point south of Henderson Field. The Marine Corps official history notes that the route was chosen to avoid observation. It also took the brigade through some of the worst country on the island. The men carried what food and ammunition they could, and after Tasimboko there was little behind them. Rain forest, ravines, swollen streams and the lack of usable maps broke the columns apart. Later accounts mention at least one faulty compass. Units lost touch with one another and with brigade headquarters, and Kawaguchi had only a vague idea of where his battalions were in relation to the Marines, or to each other.

By the afternoon of 12 September, the time set for the battalions to be on their start lines, most were still in the jungle. According to the reconstruction drawn from Frank and other modern studies, only the Kuma Battalion on the east was in place on time; the battalions of the main body reached their assembly areas only after dark, and Oka on the west was also late. Kawaguchi decided to attack anyway rather than lose another day without food. He had no artillery to speak of, only the support of a cruiser and destroyers offshore.

The first night, 12–13 September

The first night began from the sea. At about 2130, Zimmerman records, a light cruiser and three destroyers (later accounts identify the cruiser as Sendai) shelled the perimeter for about twenty minutes. Hoffman writes that a Japanese plane dropped green flares over the ridge first. Much of the fire went over the Marine positions and fell in the jungle behind them. A second bombardment, according to Zimmerman, ran from about midnight to 0045.

The infantry attacks that followed were not the coordinated blow Kawaguchi had planned. They came piecemeal, mostly against the right of Edson’s line, where Bailey’s Company C held the low ground between the ridge and the Lunga. Japanese troops of Kokusho’s battalion pushed along the lagoon and between the Raider platoons. Zimmerman says two platoons of Company C were cut off, Hoffman says three; either way they had to fight their way back to the ridge in the dark, and the Japanese held their positions at dawn. Kokusho’s men then became tangled with Watanabe’s battalion in the swamp, and the attack on the ridge died out. Shaw says there were three separate attacks during the night. On the east and west, the Kuma Battalion and Oka’s force made no real contact.

By 0230, Shaw writes, Edson was able to tell Vandegrift that his men could hold. At dawn Raider Companies A and D tried to retake the lost ground on the right and failed. Zimmerman records that Company D was down to about 30 men. Cactus aircraft and Marine artillery hit the jungle south of the ridge at first light.

13 September: “They’ll be back”

Edson did not take the quiet morning as a victory. Shaw records what he told his company commanders: “They were just testing, just testing. They’ll be back.” He drew his line back during the afternoon to higher and more compact ground along the center spine of the ridge, closer to the airfield. Later reconstructions put the move at about 400 yards. The new position crossed the ridge south of Hill 123 and was anchored on the right on the Lunga. The parachutists held the left (east) of the spine, the Raiders the right, and Edson kept companies on and behind Hill 123 as his last line.

The Japanese spent the day trying to get organized. Zimmerman notes several Japanese air attempts on the perimeter on 13 September, one of which got through, and the Cactus fighters met them. On the ground Kawaguchi’s battalions searched for one another in the jungle and moved closer to the ridge. On the American side Vandegrift ordered the 2d Battalion, 5th Marines, up behind Edson, and the 105mm howitzers of the 5th Battalion, 11th Marines, registered on the ground in front of the ridge. The Marine positions were still shallow and the men short of grenades and ammunition. Many had not slept for two nights.

The main assault, night of 13–14 September

The second night began early. Zimmerman records an attack at 1830 at the junction of two Raider companies, and Hoffman says the Japanese hit the ridge just after dark and drove part of Company B out of its position. At about 2100 Japanese destroyers offshore shelled the area; the Marine Corps official history says a flare marked their registration point. By then Japanese troops were massing around the southern nose of the ridge, below Hill 80. Kawaguchi attacked without an artillery preparation of his own.

The main assault came at about 2130 to 2200, across the whole front. Tamura’s battalion of the 4th Infantry attacked up the ridge, and Kokusho’s battalion pressed the right again. Edson estimated that he faced at least two battalions. The 105mm howitzers of the 5th Battalion, 11th Marines, already registered, shifted their fire closer and closer to the Marine line until, Zimmerman says, it fell within 200 yards of Company B. At about 2230 the Japanese struck the Parachutists on the left after heavy mortar fire and smoke. The Marine Corps official history records that they came through the smoke shouting “Gas attack! Gas attack!” Some of the Parachutists broke and fell back behind Hill 123.

That was the crisis of the battle. Company B, Zimmerman says, was down to about 60 men and could not hold Hill 80. Its commander, Captain Sweeney, “withdrew his men one-third of the way back the ridge,” as Zimmerman put it, under a standing barrage of Marine artillery that covered them as they went. On the left, Hoffman writes, Captain Harry L. Torgerson, the Parachute battalion’s executive officer, ordered a withdrawal, and the Parachute companies followed. The battalion commander broke down under the strain, and Edson relieved him on the spot and put Torgerson in charge. Torgerson re-formed two companies and led them in a counterattack against a Japanese thrust along the jungle edge on the left. Edson later called this “a decisive factor in our ultimate victory.”

Edson moved his command post to the top of the knob. In Zimmerman’s words he put it on “a high knob that dominates the northern half of the ridge”: Hill 123. What was left of his force formed a horseshoe around it, Raiders and Parachutists mixed together, with the Lunga on the right and open grass falling away in front. Edson ordered them to hold at all costs. The Marine Corps History Division’s biography describes him moving along the line through the night, exposed to fire, while his artillery observers called the howitzers in front of the hill. Major Bailey, already wounded in the head, went up and down the line keeping men in their holes.

From about 2300 until nearly dawn the Japanese attacked Hill 123 again and again. They came up the ridge in the open and up the jungle ravines on either side, under flares dropped from a Japanese float plane. The Marine artillery broke up many of the attacks before they reached the hill. The 5th Battalion, 11th Marines, fired 1,992 rounds of 105mm ammunition during the battle at ranges of 1,600 to 2,000 yards from the guns, and Zimmerman adds that the 2d and 3d Battalions of the 11th Marines fired another 878 rounds of 75mm pack howitzer ammunition in defense of other parts of the line. Japanese who got through the barrage met rifles, machine guns and grenades at a few yards’ range, and the fighting on the hill was hand to hand in places. Shaw writes that it was as fierce as any Marine there had seen.

Not every Japanese attack went at the hill. Small groups slipped past the Marines in the darkness and the ravines. One reached the division command post behind the ridge, where, Shaw writes, Division Sergeant Major Sheffield Banta shot an intruder. Later accounts describe parts of three Japanese companies, mostly from Kokusho’s battalion, getting through the swampy ground between the ridge and the Lunga to the edge of the fighter strip, where Marine engineers and other troops pushed them back. Some hungry Japanese soldiers stopped to eat American rations they found in abandoned positions. At about 0300, according to these reconstructions, Major Kokusho led a final assault on the north end of the ridge and Hill 123 and was killed with many of his men. At about 0530 a group of some 30 Japanese stumbled into the thin line of Company C, 1st Engineers, east of the division command post, and the Marine Corps official history records four engineers killed and 14 wounded there.

At about 0400 Edson asked for the reserve. The companies of the 2d Battalion, 5th Marines, filed into the line on his left one at a time, and they helped beat off the last attacks before dawn. When daylight came, Japanese troops were still on the southern end of the ridge and around Hill 80. Army P-400 Airacobras of the 67th Fighter Squadron came in low over the ridge and strafed them. By mid-morning organized resistance in front of the ridge had ended. Marines spent the rest of the day hunting infiltrators through the jungle behind their lines, and the 2d Battalion, 5th Marines, took over the ridge from Edson’s exhausted men.

The flanks: the Kuma Battalion at the Ilu and Oka in the west

While the main body fought for the ridge, the two flank attacks Kawaguchi had planned went in late and alone. On the east, around midnight, the Kuma Battalion came out of the jungle and attacked the 3d Battalion, 1st Marines (Lieutenant Colonel William N. McKelvy Jr.), across the grass plain south of the old Tenaru battlefield. The Marines caught them in the open and the artillery smothered them. Shaw and Zimmerman both put the Japanese dead in front of the battalion at about 200. Mizuno was killed. The sources have changed their minds about who these attackers were. Zimmerman’s 1949 monograph identified them as the 1st Battalion, 124th Infantry. The 1958 Marine Corps official history thought they were possibly the Ichiki rear echelon. Later studies, using Japanese records, identify them as the Kuma Battalion, which had been formed from Ichiki’s second echelon.

After daybreak on 14 September the 1st Tank Battalion sent six light tanks across the plain, without infantry, against the Japanese still dug in there. The Marine Corps official history describes what followed. Japanese antitank guns hit two at once. One tank plunged down the bank into the river, killing its crew of four. A fourth was hit, the fifth withdrew, and the crew of the sixth bailed out after it stalled fifty yards short of a Japanese gun. Zimmerman says three tanks were lost, and the official history notes four crewmen killed in the one tank; later accounts put total tank crew deaths at eight. The Kuma Battalion attacked again at 2300 on 14 September and made a final weak attempt the next evening; both were repulsed, and the survivors withdrew on 16 September.

In the west, Colonel Oka’s force attacked the 3d Battalion, 5th Marines, near the coast at about 0400 on 14 September. Later accounts say two companies were thrown back with heavy losses, and a third seized a small ridge inland but was pinned by artillery and pulled back that evening. Zimmerman describes this as a weaker attack, easily repulsed. It was too late and too small to draw American strength away from the ridge.

Edson, Bailey and the men who held

The ridge made Merritt Edson famous. Correspondents named it for him. Vandegrift, in recommending him for the Medal of Honor, cited what Hoffman quotes as a “marked degree of cool leadership and personal courage.” Zimmerman wrote that the award came for Edson’s “outstanding coolness and skill under fire.” His men called him “Red Mike,” for the red beard he had worn in Nicaragua; the Marine Corps History Division notes that it was also his code name during the battle on the ridge.

Kenneth Dillon Bailey commanded Raider Company C, which took the worst of the first night between the ridge and the Lunga. He was born on 21 October 1910 in Pawnee, Oklahoma, grew up in Danville, Illinois, and graduated from the University of Illinois in 1935. On the second night, with his company already mauled, he served as the reserve company commander behind the line, and when the line gave way he covered the withdrawal, reorganized men from several units and extended the position on Hill 123.

Counting the cost

The casualty figures for the ridge are a good example of how numbers change as historians work through the records. They also differ because they count different units and different days. For the Marines the main figures are these. Zimmerman, writing in 1949 from the reports then available, gave Marine casualties in the ridge battle as “about 20% of the men engaged,” 31 killed, 103 wounded and nine missing. Hoffman, with access to fuller records, puts the losses of Edson’s two battalions at 135 Raiders and 128 Parachutists, 263 men, of whom 59 were dead or missing. Shaw gives the same total as 59 dead, 10 missing and 194 wounded. Shaw also says that only 89 men of the 1st Parachute Battalion walked off the ridge, and the battalion ceased to exist as a fighting unit. The Marine Corps casualty cards, as compiled on naval-history.net, list 92 Marines killed in action on 14 September alone, most of them from the ridge and its flanks. Counting all the Marine units engaged between 12 and 14 September, later studies (Christ, Griffith, Smith) give between 104 and 111 Marines killed or missing.

Japanese losses are less certain still, because many of the wounded died on the retreat and no full Japanese count survives for the September attacks in the sources used here. Zimmerman says “more than 600 enemy dead were found” on the ridge and the ground immediately around it, and that Japanese documents and prisoners put total casualties at about 1,500. Hoffman counts about 700 Japanese bodies on the battlefield and about 500 wounded, “few” of whom would survive the march. Frank’s detailed study, as summarized in the Wikipedia article, totals about 830 dead: about 350 in Tamura’s battalion, 200 in Kokusho’s, 120 in Oka’s force, 100 in the Kuma Battalion and 60 in Watanabe’s. To those must be added the roughly 200 killed in front of the 3d Battalion, 1st Marines, which some counts include and some do not.

The dead on both sides were young men, most of them a long way from home. The Marines were buried in the new cemetery near Lunga Point. Many of the Japanese dead were buried by Marines in the grass where they fell, or never buried at all. Some of the Japanese wounded were carried off by their comrades into the jungle, where most of them died. Some Japanese were taken prisoner; the Marine Corps official history records that eight Japanese prisoners left the island with the wounded on 18 September.

Retreat across the Matanikau: the road to Starvation Island

By midday on 14 September Kawaguchi knew the attack had failed. Later reconstructions say he led his survivors away from the ridge into the jungle in the early afternoon. Japanese records cited in the NIDS study show that the 17th Army ordered him to occupy positions west of the mouth of the Matanikau and to keep harassing American air operations. Getting there meant going back into the jungle he had just come through, with no food and many wounded.

The Marine Corps official history describes the main body cutting a new trail across the southern slopes of Mount Austen and through the country south of the perimeter toward the Matanikau and Kokumbona. Men carried the wounded on improvised stretchers, and many of the wounded died on the way. Equipment was abandoned along the trail. Shaw calls it a “grueling, hellish eight-day march”; by the time the survivors reached Oka’s positions near Kokumbona, later accounts say, only about half of them still had their rifles. About 400 men of the Ichiki rear echelon and some of the 4th Infantry went east instead, toward Koli Point. The survivors of the Kuma Battalion, according to later accounts, wandered lost in the jungle for about three weeks and nearly starved before they found Kawaguchi’s camp.

The retreat is where many Japanese soldiers first met the enemy that would kill more of them on Guadalcanal than American weapons: hunger, and the diseases that came with it. Japanese soldiers began calling the island Gatō, written 餓島, “Starvation Island.” That story belongs mostly to the autumn and winter (see Chapter 8), but it began on the trail from the ridge in September.

What the ridge changed

Seen from Tokyo, Edson’s Ridge was the moment Guadalcanal stopped being a nuisance and became a crisis. The Japanese had already started to rethink. The NIDS study notes that on 5 September the Army chief of staff, General Hajime Sugiyama, reported to the emperor that the Army in the South Pacific had “no choice but to assume the defensive in Eastern New Guinea” and must put its main effort into the Solomons. Kawaguchi’s failure, the study says, “prompted the Imperial General Headquarters to make serious efforts to recapture Guadalcanal Island.” The Army redirected the 2d (Sendai) Division, which had been scheduled for the Port Moresby operation, to Guadalcanal. Imperial General Headquarters sent Colonel Haruo Konuma and a team of staff officers to Rabaul, and the 17th Army’s staff grew from three officers to twelve. On 27 September Konuma sent Lieutenant Colonel Masanobu Tsuji to Truk to ask the Combined Fleet for a large convoy to move the 2d Division, and on 28 September the 17th Army drafted a new attack plan using the Matanikau as its jumping-off point. That plan led to the October battles (Chapter 6).

In New Guinea the Japanese South Seas Detachment under Lieutenant General Tomitarō Horii had crossed the Owen Stanley Range on the Kokoda Track and reached Ioribaiwa Ridge, about 40 kilometers from Port Moresby, in mid-September. On 18 September, according to the Australian government’s Kokoda Track remembrance history, Japanese High Command ordered Horii to withdraw. That history attributes the order to the exhaustion of Horii’s supply line under Allied air attack and to the Japanese defeat at Milne Bay, not to Guadalcanal. Other accounts, including the Wikipedia summary of Smith’s study, link it directly to the news from Guadalcanal, which reached Hyakutake on 15 September. Both explanations fit the evidence: by mid-September Japan did not have the shipping, aircraft or troops to push both offensives, and Guadalcanal was given priority.

For the Americans the ridge bought time. On 14 September Vandegrift brought the 3d Battalion, 2d Marines, across from Tulagi. On 18 September the reinforced 7th Marines, on their way from Samoa for weeks, finally arrived. The Marine Corps official history records that the convoy, Task Force 65, unloaded 4,262 men, 147 vehicles, 1,012 tons of rations, 3,823 drums of fuel and nearly all the regiment’s ammunition; other accounts give 4,157 men. With them came the 1st Battalion, 11th Marines, more artillery. When the transports left at 1800 the same day, they took the 1st Parachute Battalion, 162 American wounded and eight Japanese prisoners. The Parachutists reached Nouméa on 22 September, the first unit of the division to leave the island.

The cost of that convoy fell on the Navy. On 15 September, while covering it south of the Solomons, the carrier Wasp was torpedoed and sunk by the Japanese submarine I-19, and the battleship North Carolina and the destroyer O’Brien were hit by torpedoes from the same spread (see Chapter 3). O’Brien broke up and sank weeks later on her way to repair. That left Hornet as the only American fleet carrier in the South Pacific.

With the 7th Marines ashore, Vandegrift reorganized the perimeter. His operation plan of 19 September divided it into sectors with infantry along the south as well as the beach. For the first time the Lunga perimeter had a continuous line around it, and the ground south of the airfield where Kawaguchi had nearly broken through was held by battalions instead of outposts. The Japanese would attack there again in October, in greater strength, and the ridge would see fighting again (Chapter 6), but the airfield would never again be guarded by quite so thin a line.

How close did the Japanese come? Vandegrift later said, in accounts summarized in Smith’s study, that the ridge was the only time in the campaign he had real doubts about the outcome. Smith’s study also cites Frank’s judgment that the Japanese never came closer to victory on the island. Those are judgments, not facts, but it is hard to argue with them. If Hill 123 had fallen around midnight on 13–14 September, the way to the airfield and the division command post would have been open, and the Marines would have been fighting a Japanese force among their own aircraft, guns and supply dumps in the dark.

The ridge today

The ridge is still there, on the southern edge of the Honiara area, a few kilometers from the airport that grew out of Henderson Field. Grass still covers the crest, and the jungle still fills the ravines, though houses and roads have crept close. Pacific Wrecks records the Bloody Ridge Memorial on Hill 123, near the site of Edson’s command post, and a surviving Quonset hut from a 1944 New Zealand Army camp east of Hill 80. Martin Clemens, who lived on long after the war, helped organize an early memorial on the ridge. A Japanese memorial stands on another hill about 400 meters from the American one. The campaign’s other memorials, including the American memorial on Skyline Ridge and the cemeteries, are described in Chapter 9.

In January 2016 Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare pledged to establish a memorial park on the ridge. For the 80th anniversary of the campaign in August 2022, the government of Solomon Islands hosted the last of five ceremonies, on 8 August, at what DVIDS calls the Bloody Ridge National Peace Park. The U.S. delegation, led by Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, included Major General Watson of the 1st Marine Division, the division that had held the ridge. Radio New Zealand reported that the ridge carries two monuments, one Japanese and one American, both honoring the young men who died. Speakers at the Honiara ceremonies that week paid tribute to the Solomon Islanders who served as scouts and coastwatchers and to those whose homes became a battlefield. Sherman said that no one can say for certain how many Solomon Islanders were killed.

The commemorations continue. On 7 September 2026, according to the Embassy of Japan in Solomon Islands, the National Commemorations at the Bloody Ridge National Historical Park marked 84 years since the battle. Prime Minister Matthew Cooper Wale attended, with U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, the Japanese ambassador and the high commissioners of Australia, Britain and New Zealand. The flags of Solomon Islands, the United States and Japan were raised, and the participants laid wreaths first at the U.S. memorial and then at the Japanese one. The Japanese ambassador spoke of the need for each generation to pass the lessons of history to the next, and welcomed the progress in preserving the ridge as a national heritage site.