The Tenaru, the Goettge Patrol and the Matanikau, August–October 1942

The “Bloody Angle”: the mouth of Alligator Creek (the Ilu River) seen from the American lines held by the 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines. Japanese assault waves crossed the sandbar here in the early hours of 21 August 1942. Archives Branch, USMC History Division, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Guadalcanal · Chapter 4 of 9

The Tenaru, the Goettge Patrol and the Matanikau

How the 1st Marine Division held a thin perimeter on captured rice, destroyed the Ichiki Detachment at Alligator Creek, and learned in costly fights along the Matanikau where the limits of its strength lay.

9 August – 9 October 1942Lunga perimeter · Alligator Creek · Matanikau · Point Cruz~30 min read

When the transports of Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner sailed away from Guadalcanal on 9 August 1942, the morning after the disaster described in Chapter 2, they left behind roughly 11,000 men of the 1st Marine Division on Guadalcanal and several thousand more across the channel at Tulagi, with part of their supplies still in the holds. Major General Alexander A. Vandegrift had a captured airfield, a narrow strip of coast around Lunga Point, and no naval protection. The next two months, from the first bad night on the beaches to the second fight on the Matanikau River in early October, decided whether that foothold would become a base or a trap.

This chapter follows the ground war along the perimeter between the landings and the great Japanese October offensive. It covers the defensive scheme Vandegrift built around the airfield; the loss of the Goettge patrol on the night of 12–13 August; the first probes east and west on 19 August; the landing of Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki’s first echelon at Taivu Point; the warning carried by Sergeant Major Jacob Vouza of the Solomon Islands police; the battle on the night of 20–21 August at the mouth of the stream the Marines wrongly called the Tenaru; and the three actions along the Matanikau, on 19 August, 23–27 September and 7–9 October. The fight on Edson’s Ridge on 12–14 September falls in the middle of this period and has its own chapter, Chapter 5. The air war that made the perimeter worth holding is in Chapter 3.

Times are local Guadalcanal time (GMT+11) unless noted. Japanese records of the campaign generally kept Tokyo time (GMT+9), two hours behind, and some disagreements in published timelines come from mixing the two clocks. Others come from the sources themselves: the Marine Corps official history, written in the 1950s, puts the first rush at Alligator Creek at 0310 on 21 August, while Henry I. Shaw Jr.’s 1992 commemorative history and Richard B. Frank’s 1990 study put it at about 0130. Where the record disagrees, this chapter gives the competing figures and says whose they are.

Three main bodies of evidence underlie the account. The first is the Marine Corps’ own histories: Major John L. Zimmerman’s The Guadalcanal Campaign (1949), the official Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal by Hough, Ludwig and Shaw (1958), and Shaw’s First Offensive (1992). The second is the Navy and Coast Guard record of the 27 September evacuation, including a letter written by the Coast Guard officer who commanded the boats. The third is postwar reconstruction from Japanese sources, above all Frank’s Guadalcanal (1990) and the Japanese official war history (Senshi Sōshō). The three sometimes disagree, and the disagreements are part of the story.

A perimeter on captured rice

Vandegrift’s problem after 9 August was simple to state. He had to hold the airfield the Japanese had nearly finished, get aircraft onto it, and survive until the Navy could return. He could not be everywhere. The Japanese held Rabaul, controlled the sea at night, and could land troops anywhere along a coastline of more than ninety miles. His answer, as described in the 1958 official history, was a defense built first against a counter-landing from the sea. The main line of resistance ran along the beach for about 9,600 yards, from the mouth of the Ilu River in the east, around Lunga Point, to the village of Kukum in the west. At the eastern end the line was “refused,” bent back about 600 yards inland along the west bank of the Ilu; at the western end it turned inland at Kukum. The 5th Marines, less a battalion, held the western sector from Kukum to the Lunga River; the 1st Marines held the rest, including the Ilu flank.

The landward side was thinner. A line of outposts about 9,000 yards long stretched across the grassy plain and broken ridges south of the airfield, manned not by infantry but by artillerymen, pioneers, engineers and amphibian tractor crews, backed by roving patrols. The bulk of the infantry sat in assembly areas inside the perimeter as a reserve. The division had 75mm pack howitzers and 105mm howitzers, but no 155mm guns and no counterbattery equipment, and the 5-inch guns and radar of the 3d Defense Battalion had not been landed before the transports left. Barbed wire was scarce; the official history notes there was none at the mouth of the Ilu when the Japanese came.

Food was the other constraint. Shaw’s First Offensive states that the forces ashore were left with 17 days’ rations, counting captured Japanese food, and about four days of ammunition. Zimmerman records that the Marines took “a considerable stock of rice and canned food” from the Japanese camp areas, and that even so the division went to two meals a day from 12 August. Shaw adds that the reduced ration lasted about six weeks; that Marines smoked Japanese cigarettes; and that they filled Japanese rice bags as sandbags and dug with Japanese shovels. The official history put it dryly: the defenders were “indebted to the enemy for part of their daily two meals.” Japanese construction equipment also helped the engineers finish the runway, as Chapter 3 describes.

The perimeter’s shape changed through the period this chapter covers. In August it was essentially a beachhead with an inland screen. After the arrival of the 1st Raider and 1st Parachute Battalions from Tulagi, and after the Battle of the Ridge in September, Vandegrift extended it inland and south, building a continuous line on the ridges below the airfield. The arrival of the 7th Marines on 18 September, 4,262 men by Zimmerman’s count, finally gave him enough infantry to man the whole circuit and still attack outward. The slider below shows that growth from August to the end of the Marine period.

One reinforcement of a different kind arrived on 14 August. Captain W. F. Martin Clemens, the British Solomon Islands Protectorate’s district officer for Guadalcanal, who had been reporting Japanese movements by radio from the hills since the spring, walked into the Marine lines from the direction of Aola Bay with about 60 Solomon Islander scouts and police, according to the official history. Vandegrift put him in charge of liaison with the island’s people and intelligence outside the wire. Clemens’s scouts would be the division’s eyes to the east for the rest of the campaign; within a week one of them would bring the most important warning the Marines received in August. Clemens’s story, and that of the wider coastwatcher network, is told more fully in Chapter 8.

The Goettge patrol, 12–13 August

The first serious loss of the land campaign came not in a Japanese attack but in a Marine patrol that went wrong. Lieutenant Colonel Frank B. Goettge was the division’s intelligence officer, the man who had gone to Australia in July to gather maps, photographs and the knowledge of former planters and officials for the landing. By 12 August he had two pieces of information. A captured Japanese naval warrant officer, under questioning, suggested that some Japanese troops west of the Matanikau River might be willing to surrender. And a Marine patrol reported seeing what looked like a white flag in the area west of the Lunga.

Goettge organized a patrol of 25 men, mostly from the intelligence section of the 5th Marines, with Navy Lieutenant Commander Malcolm L. Pratt and Lieutenant Ralph Cory, a Japanese linguist. The 1958 history states that the patrol’s purposes were to reconnoiter the area and, if the opportunity arose, to bring in Japanese who wanted to surrender. It left the perimeter by landing boat at about 1800 on 12 August and came ashore after dark, at about 2200. Zimmerman writes that Goettge had been warned not to land between the Matanikau and Point Cruz, where Japanese troops were known to be, and that the boat landed there anyway. The patrol came under fire almost at once, and Goettge was among those killed.

Three men got back. Sergeant Charles C. Arndt was sent out early to bring help and reached the perimeter at about 0530 on 13 August by swimming and wading along the coast. Corporal Joseph Spaulding arrived at 0725 and Platoon Sergeant Frank L. Few at 0800. By the time they left, the rest of the patrol, in Zimmerman’s words, had been “wiped out.” A relief patrol from Company A, 5th Marines, found no trace of it. Later searches found a few items, including Pratt’s equipment case and a torn piece of clothing marked with Goettge’s name, but no identifiable remains. The men were carried as missing in action; the private Missing Marines project, which tracks the case, states that they were declared dead as of 14 August 1943 and that their remains have never been recovered.

Few’s account of the last minutes, given after he returned, became the basis of a story that spread quickly through the division: that the Japanese had lured the patrol with a false surrender flag and then cut the wounded to pieces in the surf. The record is narrower. Zimmerman notes that the “white flag” was probably a Japanese flag with its red disc not visible at a distance, and that no documentary record of deliberate deception was found. What the survivors saw at the end, in darkness and under fire, cannot now be checked. Several later expeditions have searched the area near the old coastal village west of Point Cruz for a burial site; none has been publicly confirmed. Postwar eyewitness accounts suggest the bodies were scattered rather than buried together, and later fighting and construction changed the ground.

The patrol’s effects were larger than its size. The division lost its senior intelligence officer, his best Japanese linguist, and much of a regimental intelligence section in a single night. It is a reasonable inference, made in many later histories, that the story of a false flag also shaped how Marines treated Japanese who appeared to be surrendering, and that this attitude was confirmed by what happened on 21 August. The patrol also taught a tactical lesson that would be repeated at Point Cruz in September: a small landing by boat behind Japanese lines, without good knowledge of where those lines were, could be cut off before anyone in the perimeter knew it was in trouble.

Probes west and east, 19 August

Within a week, Vandegrift sent stronger forces after the Japanese on both flanks. To the west, three companies of the 5th Marines attacked toward Matanikau village and Kokumbona on 19 August, the first of the actions on the Matanikau. Company B advanced along the coast road and was stopped at the river mouth by fire from the west bank, which held the Japanese in place. Company L moved inland, crossed the Matanikau about 1,000 yards upstream, and came down on the village from the south; Zimmerman says it surprised the defenders and took Matanikau village, though the official history notes a Japanese counterattack forced one platoon back. Company I went by boat to Kokumbona, farther west, and was shelled on the way by two Japanese destroyers and a cruiser before it landed and assaulted the village. The Japanese withdrew into the hills. The three companies counted more than 65 Japanese dead at a cost of four Marines killed and 11 wounded, and then returned to the perimeter. The pattern of the Matanikau fighting was set that day: the Marines could take ground west of the river but could not afford to hold it.

The more important patrol went east. Clemens’s scouts had been reporting signs of new Japanese troops east of the perimeter since 14 August. On 19 August Captain Charles H. Brush Jr. took part of Company A, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, along the coast road toward Koli Point and Tetere. Around noon his point spotted four Japanese officers and about 30 men moving in the open, laying telephone wire, without security. Brush attacked; a platoon under Jachym, one of his officers, worked around the Japanese right flank. In 55 minutes the patrol killed 31 of the party and lost three Marines killed and three wounded. Three Japanese escaped.

What the Marines found on the bodies mattered more than the fight. The helmets carried the star of the Imperial Japanese Army rather than the anchor and chrysanthemum of the naval landing forces that had garrisoned the island. The uniforms were new. There was a code for ship-to-shore signals. And the officers’ maps marked the Marine positions, which, Brush reported, showed the “weak spots all too clearly.” Translation confirmed that the party was the advance element of a larger army force. That force had come ashore the night before.

Ichiki’s first echelon

Japanese commanders in Rabaul and Tokyo did not at first believe that the American landing of 7 August was a full offensive. Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake’s 17th Army, responsible for the Solomons and New Guinea, was given the task of retaking the airfield and was assigned troops then scattered across the Pacific. The nearest suitable unit was the reinforced 2nd Battalion of the 28th Infantry Regiment under Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki (the 1958 Marine history spells his given name “Kiyono”). According to Frank and other historians drawing on Japanese records, Ichiki’s regiment had been assigned to seize Midway Island in June 1942 and was left without a mission when the Japanese carriers were sunk (the background is in our Battle of Midway collection). In August it was at Truk, and it became the first army formation sent to Guadalcanal.

The official history gives the whole Ichiki Detachment as about 2,000 men of infantry, artillery and engineers. Because shipping was short and speed was valued above weight, it went in two echelons. The first, about 900 or 1,000 men by the 1958 history’s count (Frank’s reconstruction from Japanese records gives 916 or 917), sailed on six destroyers of Rear Admiral Raizō Tanaka’s reinforcement force and was landed at Taivu Point, roughly 22 air miles east of the Lunga, during the night of 18–19 August; Frank puts the landing at about 0100 local time on 19 August. The second echelon, about 1,200 men in slower transports, was to follow, together with naval landing troops. That convoy was caught up in the Battle of the Eastern Solomons on 24–25 August and turned back (see Chapter 3); its survivors reached the island later in destroyers. The same night that Ichiki landed, about 500 men of the Yokosuka 5th Special Naval Landing Force were put ashore at Kokumbona, west of the perimeter. The destroyer runs that delivered them were the beginning of what the Americans came to call the Tokyo Express, described on our Tokyo Express record page.

According to Frank, Ichiki’s orders were to recapture the airfield if he could, and if not to hold a position near it until the rest of the force arrived. He chose to attack at once with what he had, leaving a rear guard of about 125 men at Taivu. Historians have argued over this decision since the war. Japanese staff estimates of the American strength ashore were far too low, and Ichiki’s men had been trained in a tactical doctrine that valued speed, surprise and the night bayonet attack over reconnaissance and fire support. Later Japanese scholarship has argued that the decision was not Ichiki’s alone: the orders he received and the information he was given made a quick attack look reasonable from Rabaul. The loss of the Brush patrol’s advance party on 19 August told him the Americans were awake, and he moved anyway. His force marched west along the coast through the night of 19–20 August and halted to rest during the day of the 20th.

Jacob Vouza’s warning

Jacob Charles Vouza was in his forties or early fifties in 1942. The Solomon Islands Historical Encyclopaedia gives his birth as about 1900 on Guadalcanal; other sources put it as early as 1892. He joined the Protectorate’s Armed Constabulary in 1916, was in charge of the armed police on Malaita from 1931, and retired in 1939 with the rank of sergeant major, having received the King George VI Coronation Medal and the Colonial Police Medal. When war reached the islands he volunteered to serve again, and worked with Clemens’s scouts east of the Lunga. The 1958 Marine history describes him as a retired sergeant major of police from the Tetere area, with 25 years’ service in the constabulary.

While scouting east of the perimeter he was captured by Ichiki’s men. The date is given differently in the sources. Zimmerman (1949) says he was caught on 18 August in his village east of the perimeter; most later accounts place his capture on 20 August, as Ichiki’s force moved toward the Ilu; the biographical sidebar in Shaw’s 1992 history gives 27 August, which cannot be right, since Vouza’s warning preceded the battle of 20–21 August. The accounts agree on what followed. His captors found a small American flag on him. He refused to answer their questions about the Marine positions. He was tied to a tree and bayoneted, Shaw lists wounds to his arms, throat, shoulder, face and stomach, and was left for dead. He chewed through the ropes and made his way west through Japanese-held country to the Marine lines.

Zimmerman places his arrival at the command post of Lieutenant Colonel Edwin A. Pollock’s 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines, at the Ilu at around midnight on 20–21 August. Martin Clemens, who saw him there, recalled years later that “He was an awful mess. I could hardly bear to look at him,” as quoted in an article by Major Allan C. Bevilacqua published by the Marine Corps Association. Vouza reported what he had seen of the Japanese force on its way before he was given medical care. The Marines at the creek were already on alert: the 1958 history records that listening posts on the east bank had detected Japanese troops moving forward during the evening and had been pulled back into the battalion’s lines. Vouza’s report confirmed that a large force was close and coming. He survived his wounds, though, according to the Encyclopaedia, his voice never fully recovered, and he went back to scouting.

The night at Alligator Creek, 20–21 August

The battle the Marines called the Tenaru was not fought on the Tenaru River. The stream at the eastern end of the perimeter was the Ilu, a sluggish tidal creek that the Marines also called Alligator Creek, and the Tenaru is the next river to the east. Marine maps misnamed the rivers east of the Lunga throughout the campaign, as the official history acknowledges in a footnote, and the name stuck. At its mouth the Ilu was blocked by a sandbar, a spit of beach that let a man cross dry-footed from the east bank to the west. Behind the bar the creek formed a lagoon, and on the west bank Pollock’s companies had dug in along the stream and the beach. A 37mm antitank gun of the 1st Special Weapons Battalion covered the bar with canister rounds, and the 75mm pack howitzers of the 3d Battalion, 11th Marines, were registered on the far bank.

Ichiki’s main body came up to the east bank in the hours after midnight on 21 August. His first assault, some 200 men by the official history’s estimate, rushed the sandbar at the creek mouth. Shaw and Frank give the time as about 0130, with a green flare as the signal; Zimmerman and the 1958 history record a sentry’s shot at about 0300 and the rush at about 0310. The Japanese ran into the fire of machine guns dug in on the west bank and the canister of the 37mm gun. Some broke into the Marine positions at the end of the bar, and Company G of Pollock’s battalion counterattacked and drove them out or back across the creek. A second assault followed, Frank says at about 0230, by another company that waded out through the surf to come at the beach positions from the sea side. Machine guns, the 37mm canister, which the official history says “ripped gaping holes” in the attackers, and the pack howitzers broke it as well. Japanese machine guns and mortars on the east bank answered across the creek throughout the night, and a later attempt to get around the Marine flank through the surf near dawn also failed.

One machine-gun position at the creek became the most famous of the night. The heavy water-cooled machine gun of the 11th Machine Gun Squad, Company H, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines, was manned by Corporal LeRoy Diamond, Private John “Johnny” Rivers and Private Albert A. Schmid. All three received the Navy Cross. Their citations, nearly identical, record that because there was no rifle protection for the gun, the squad had to tear down its front cover to meet the attack. Rivers was killed at the gun. Diamond and Schmid were seriously wounded; Schmid was blinded by a grenade. Later accounts, drawn from Schmid’s own telling to journalists in 1943, describe Diamond, wounded himself, directing Schmid’s fire after he could no longer see. These details come from postwar retellings rather than from the citations, and claims about the number of Japanese killed in front of the gun cannot be checked.

Morning: the envelopment and the tanks

At first light the situation at the creek was plain. The Japanese assaults had failed, with heavy loss, but the survivors were still on the east bank in a coconut grove, firing across the creek. The official history records that before the attack Vandegrift had been reluctant to send his reserve across the Ilu, judging that he lacked the men to guard the airfield and chase the enemy at the same time, and the division “sat tight.” Now the enemy had shown where he was. The decision that followed, made by Vandegrift with Colonel Clifton B. Cates of the 1st Marines, is the subject of the explorer below.

Cresswell’s 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, reported to Cates for its orders and crossed the Ilu upstream, the official history says before 0700, wading a stream Shaw describes as about 50 feet wide. It then turned north and east to come in behind the Japanese. Frank dates the start of the battalion’s attack to about 0950. Through the late morning and early afternoon Cresswell’s companies pushed the Japanese back toward the sea, while Pollock’s men held the creek and the newly arrived Wildcats strafed the grove. By 1400, the official history states, the surviving Japanese were confined between the creek, the beach and the Marine line.

To finish the action before dark, Vandegrift ordered the tanks in. At 1500 a platoon of light tanks crossed the sandbar and drove into the grove, firing canister and machine guns into Japanese positions at close range. Zimmerman calls the attack “moderately successful.” Two tanks were disabled, one by an antitank mine, and their crews were rescued; Marine riflemen then closed with the remaining Japanese. Vandegrift’s description of the tanks’ rear ends after the attack, which several historians quote, is too grim to need repeating. Organized resistance ended at about 1700.

Ichiki was among the dead. The 1958 Marine history states flatly that he “committed suicide,” and Shaw that he burned his regimental colors and shot himself. The Japanese official history also records suicide. Frank, reviewing the Japanese accounts, notes that most survivors who spoke to the question believed he was killed in the fighting, and that one recalled him last seen moving toward the American lines. Whatever the manner, no Japanese officer who saw his death and survived the campaign left a contemporary account that settles it, and this chapter leaves it open. A small number of men, including the rear guard left at Taivu, made their way back east. Frank’s count from Japanese records puts the first echelon at 917, of whom 128 survived.

Counting the dead, and the wounded who fought on

The Marine Corps’ figures for the battle are the most consistent of the campaign. Zimmerman and the official history give Marine losses as 34 killed and 75 wounded; Zimmerman adds that Pollock’s 2nd Battalion alone lost 25 killed and 44 wounded. Later counts, including Frank’s, put Marine dead somewhat higher, at 41 to 44, partly by including the three killed in Brush’s patrol on 19 August and men who died of wounds. For the Japanese, the official history gives “nearly 800” killed and 15 prisoners; Zimmerman says that of about 900 men “almost all” were killed; Shaw writes of “close to 800.” Frank’s figures from Japanese records, 917 landed and 128 survivors, imply roughly 775 to 790 dead. The chart compares the official counts.

The photographs taken the next day were among the first images Americans saw of the land war in the Pacific, and they are hard to look at. Japanese dead lay heaped on the sandbar where the assault waves had been caught, and scattered through the coconut grove where the tanks had gone in. They are shown below, blurred until selected, because they record what the battle cost the men who made the attack. They were soldiers who had marched all night through unfamiliar country and attacked a prepared position on orders, and most of them had families who never learned exactly how they died.

Something else happened on the morning and afternoon of 21 August that shaped the rest of the war in the Pacific. Marine accounts, including the official histories and Vandegrift’s letters, describe wounded Japanese soldiers lying among the dead who fired on Marines or set off grenades when Marines came near, including Marines who approached to give aid or take prisoners. Vandegrift wrote to the Commandant, Lieutenant General Thomas Holcomb, shortly after the battle that the Japanese “refuse to surrender,” and that their wounded would wait for Americans to come close and then “blow themselves and the other fellow to pieces with a hand grenade” (as quoted by Samuel B. Griffith in The Battle for Guadalcanal, 1963).

The lesson the Marines drew was to treat every Japanese body as a threat until it was certainly dead. Combined with the story of the Goettge patrol, it produced a battlefield culture in which surrender was rarely offered or accepted on either side, and in which some Japanese who might have surrendered were killed. That culture was not invented at Alligator Creek: it rested on Japanese military doctrine, which treated capture as disgrace, and on American perceptions shaped by Pearl Harbor and by reports from the Philippines and China. But the battle at the creek is where many Marines first saw it, and their accounts of it traveled through the division and into the rest of the Corps. The 15 prisoners taken that day are a reminder that the pattern was not absolute. Later chapters of this collection, and our Okinawa and Kamikaze collections, trace where it led.

For the Japanese command the battle was a shock. It was the first time in the Pacific war that a Japanese army assault on land had been broken by American troops, and it showed that the Americans on Guadalcanal were far more numerous and better organized than Rabaul had assumed. The response was not to abandon the island but to send more men: the Kawaguchi Force in late August and early September, and then the 2nd Division in October. Each was sent in by sea at night, in pieces, and each was committed to attack before it was fully assembled. The habit of feeding troops into Guadalcanal a battalion or a brigade at a time, which Ichiki’s attack began, was one of the main reasons the Japanese lost the island.

Late August to mid-September: reinforcement and Tasimboko

The weeks after the Tenaru were dominated by the air and sea war. The Battle of the Eastern Solomons on 24–25 August turned back the Japanese convoy carrying Ichiki’s second echelon; Marine fliers of the Cactus Air Force took a heavy toll of the bombers that came down from Rabaul each midday; and the first ammunition resupply since the landing reached the island. On land, the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, made a shore-to-shore landing near Kokumbona on 27 August that, in Shaw’s words, returned with no measurable results. Patrols and Clemens’s scouts kept watch east and south.

The Japanese were already landing a larger force. On the nights of 29, 30 and 31 August, Tanaka’s destroyers brought in the remnants of Ichiki’s rear echelon and then Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi’s 35th Brigade, built around the 124th Infantry. The official history gives the brigade’s strength as more than 6,000. Kawaguchi landed with most of it in the Tasimboko area east of the perimeter, while Colonel Oka landed with a battalion near Kokumbona to the west. The Marines brought over the 1st Raider Battalion, the 1st Parachute Battalion and the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, from Tulagi to meet them.

Clemens’s scouts reported the Japanese base at Tasimboko. Before dawn on 8 September, Lieutenant Colonel Merritt A. Edson took his raiders and the parachutists by destroyer-transport and small craft to a beach just east of the village, supported by aircraft and by the gunfire of the destroyer-transports Manley and McKean. They came in behind the Japanese positions, met mainly outposts and rear guards, overran several artillery pieces and destroyed the supply base. The official history records 27 Japanese dead and Marine losses of two killed and six wounded; Edson estimated that about 4,000 Japanese had been in the area shortly before. What the raiders found pointed to a Japanese move inland to attack the airfield from the south. That attack, on the ridge that now bears Edson’s name, is the subject of Chapter 5.

After the Ridge, Vandegrift had a little room. Kawaguchi’s survivors were retreating west through the jungle to join the Japanese forces beyond the Matanikau. On 18 September the 7th Marines arrived, 4,262 men by Zimmerman’s count, bringing the division nearly to full strength. With the new regiment Vandegrift could man a continuous line around the airfield, and Edson, promoted to colonel, took command of the 5th Marines on 21 September. The division could now consider pushing out from the perimeter to the west, where the Japanese were assembling and where, by the end of September, they had begun landing heavy artillery able to reach Henderson Field.

The first Matanikau offensive, 23–27 September

The Matanikau River, about two miles west of the perimeter, was the natural western limit of the Marine position: a fast stream between steep ridges, crossable on foot at a sandbar at its mouth, at a log crossing some distance upstream, and at fords farther inland. West of it the coast ran past Point Cruz, a small promontory, toward Kokumbona, where the Japanese had their main base on the north coast. The Marine plan for late September was a sweep west: Lieutenant Colonel Lewis B. Puller’s 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, would move inland past Mount Austen, cross the upper Matanikau and come down to the coast, while other units held the mouth, and the raiders would establish a patrol base at Kokumbona.

Puller’s battalion left the perimeter on 23 September. On the 24th, on the northwest slopes of Mount Austen, it surprised a Japanese force in bivouac. In the fighting that followed, the battalion lost 7 killed and 25 wounded, 18 of them stretcher cases, by Zimmerman’s count, and Vandegrift sent the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, to help bring out the wounded and reinforce the advance. By 26 September the combined force had reached the east bank near the river mouth, where attempts to cross were stopped by heavy fire from prepared positions on the ridges of the west bank; Zimmerman records about 25 Marine casualties by 1600. Japanese strength west of the river was later estimated at about 1,800.

The plan was revised on the 27th, with Edson now in command of the provisional force and Puller as his executive officer. The 1st Raider Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Samuel B. Griffith, which had been ordered to cross the river upstream at the log crossing and come down on the Japanese from inland, met a Japanese force that had crossed the river overnight. Griffith was wounded, and his executive officer, Major Kenneth D. Bailey, who had earned the Medal of Honor on the Ridge two weeks earlier, was killed. A garbled message from the raiders led Edson to believe their flanking attack was making progress, and he ordered renewed attacks at the river mouth at 1330, which failed. At the same time the division, believing the raiders were across, sent three companies of Puller’s battalion by boat to land west of Point Cruz and strike the Japanese from the rear.

Companies A, B and D of the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, under the battalion’s executive officer, Major Otho L. Rogers, landed west of Point Cruz without opposition and climbed a ridge inland. The Japanese then closed in around them with mortars and machine guns. Rogers was killed by a mortar shell; Captain Zach D. Cox was wounded; Captain Charles W. Kelly Jr. took command. The battalion’s radio had been left behind or put out of action, and the Marines on the ridge could not reach the perimeter. They laid out the word HELP with white undershirts. A Marine pilot, Lieutenant Dale M. Leslie, flying an SBD Dauntless, saw it and radioed the message back. Puller, who had returned to the perimeter, got permission to bring his men out and went up the coast by destroyer.

Which destroyer is one of the small puzzles of the record. The Marine Corps histories of 1949 and 1958 name USS Ballard, a seaplane tender converted from a destroyer, as the ship that carried Puller and gave fire support. The Coast Guard Historian’s Office account by Robert M. Browning Jr. and the Naval History and Heritage Command’s H-Gram 010 name USS Monssen (DD-436), describing her gunfire support of the landing, a Japanese air raid that drove her offshore, and her return to clear a path to the beach. The DANFS entry for Monssen does not mention the action. Both ships may have been involved at different stages; this chapter reports both and does not try to resolve it. What all accounts agree on is that naval gunfire, directed from shore by Sergeant Robert D. Raysbrook with semaphore flags, and the artillery of the 11th Marines opened a route for the trapped companies to fight their way back down to the beach.

The landing craft that went back in under fire were manned by Navy and Coast Guard crews, most of them men who had volunteered to stay on the island when the transports left in August and who ran the boat pool at Lunga Point under Lieutenant Commander Dwight H. Dexter, USCG. Their leader on 27 September was Signalman First Class Douglas A. Munro. Under fire from the ridges and the beach, the boats came in and took the Marines off, while Munro placed his own boat, armed with machine guns, between the beach and the loaded craft. Platoon Sergeant Anthony P. Malanowski Jr. covered the withdrawal on the beach with a Browning automatic rifle until he was killed. Leslie made strafing passes over the beach and guided the boats. Near the end of the evacuation, Munro was hit in the head by fire from the shore. Signalman Raymond J. Evans, his friend and crewman, took the wheel and brought the boat back toward Lunga Point; Munro died of the wound.

The operation cost the Marines about 60 killed and 100 wounded. The official history gives the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines’ losses at 24 killed and 23 wounded, and those of the raiders and the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, at 36 killed and 77 wounded. Japanese losses are not known. The Japanese kept the west bank of the Matanikau, and the division had learned that a hurriedly planned attack, in which units out of radio contact were sent around flanks the planners could not see, was as dangerous on Guadalcanal as it was anywhere. Puller would make his reputation in this campaign not at Point Cruz but in the defense of Henderson Field on 24–25 October, described in Chapter 6.

Douglas Munro, the Coast Guard’s Medal of Honor

Douglas Albert Munro was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, on 11 October 1919, to American parents, and grew up in Cle Elum, Washington. He enlisted in the Coast Guard on 18 September 1939, the same day as his friend Raymond Evans, and served on the cutter Spencer before transferring to the transport force. He was two weeks short of his twenty-third birthday when he died. He is the only member of the Coast Guard to receive the Medal of Honor.

The record of his death illustrates how evidence about a single event can differ even among contemporary documents. The Medal of Honor citation, approved in 1943 after Puller nominated him and Admiral William F. Halsey endorsed the nomination, describes Munro as the petty officer in charge of a group of 24 Higgins boats, leading five of them toward the shore and placing his own craft as a shield for the loaded boats. The Coast Guard Historian’s Office account says he took charge of ten LCPs and LCTs for the operation; Pacific Wrecks gives two LCTs and eight Higgins boats; the NHHC H-Gram describes ten boats landing the Marines and nine going back for them. The citation says he was “instantly killed by enemy fire.” Lieutenant Commander Dexter’s letter to Munro’s parents, written shortly after his death, says instead that he was wounded as the last men were boarding, and that his “only question” when he regained consciousness was “Did they get off?” Evans, who was with him in the boat, gave the same account of those words. The letter is the nearest thing to a contemporary eyewitness record and is the more likely to be accurate on this point.

Others in the boats were decorated as well. Evans received the Navy Cross, was promoted to chief signalman, and later commissioned; he retired as a commander. Navy Coxswain Samuel B. Roberts, who drew Japanese fire with his own boat to protect the others and was mortally wounded, received the Navy Cross posthumously; the NHHC account notes that the sequence of events in which Roberts was hit is uncertain. Two Coast Guard cutters and a Navy destroyer escort have since been named for him. A memorial stands at the Point Cruz Yacht Club in Honiara, close to the beach where the boats went in, and a statue of him stands at the Coast Guard’s recruit training center at Cape May.

The second Matanikau, 7–9 October

By early October the stakes on the Matanikau had grown. The Japanese were building up the 2nd Division, the “Sendai” Division under Lieutenant General Masao Maruyama, west of the river for a new offensive, and in late September they had landed 150mm howitzers able to shell Henderson Field from beyond it. Vandegrift’s object, according to the 1958 history, was to trap the Japanese east of Point Cruz, push them back across the Matanikau and set up a patrol base at Kokumbona that would keep heavy artillery out of range of the airfield. The plan was larger and more carefully prepared than the September attack. The 5th Marines would advance to the river mouth and hold the Japanese there. Upstream, a group under Colonel William J. Whaling, made up of the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines, and the division’s scout-snipers, would cross the river inland, followed by the 7th Marines’ 1st and 2nd Battalions under Puller and Lieutenant Colonel Herman H. Hanneken. They would then turn north toward the coast and take the Japanese from the flank. The artillery of the 11th Marines would support the whole operation.

The opposing force was the 4th Infantry Regiment of the 2nd Division under Colonel Tadamasu Nakaguma, with elements of the Kawaguchi Force. By coincidence, documents later taken from a Japanese officer showed that Nakaguma had planned to cross the Matanikau on 8 October himself, to secure positions for the artillery. When the Marines moved on 7 October, the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, met a Japanese force east of the river and drove it into a small bridgehead on the east bank near the mouth. Whaling’s group, inland, was harassed by snipers, bypassed the Japanese and bivouacked on high ground.

Heavy rain on 8 October grounded aircraft and turned trails to mud, and the main attack was postponed. That evening, at about 1830, the Japanese in the bridgehead tried to break out against the part of the line held by raiders who had been brought up to reinforce the 5th Marines. The fight was close and brief. The raiders lost 12 killed and 22 wounded; the Marines counted 59 Japanese dead, and the bridgehead was eliminated.

By then Vandegrift had received intelligence warning of an imminent major Japanese offensive, and he scaled the operation down to a raid in force, so that no large unit would be more than a day’s march from the perimeter. On 9 October Whaling’s group and the two 7th Marines battalions crossed the river inland and advanced north to the coast. Puller’s battalion found a large body of Japanese troops in a deep ravine below its line of march. He called down artillery on the ravine and, as the Japanese tried to climb out, his mortars fired on them; the fire continued until his mortar ammunition ran low. The Marine force then withdrew east across the river, and by 1400 on 9 October the raid was over.

Marine losses for the three days were 65 killed and 125 wounded. A diary later recovered from a 4th Infantry officer, cited by both Zimmerman and the official history, put the regiment’s losses at about 690 or 700 men, most of them in the ravine. That is the largest Japanese loss on the Matanikau in this period and one of the few for which a Japanese document survives. The second Matanikau did not end with a Marine base at Kokumbona, but it badly damaged the 4th Infantry, disrupted Japanese plans to put artillery east of the river, and pushed the Japanese front back to the west bank. When Maruyama’s main offensive came two weeks later, it came not along the coast but through the jungle south of the airfield, as Chapter 6 describes.

What the August–October fighting showed

The actions in this chapter were small by the standards of the Second World War. Fewer than 200 Marines were killed in all of them together, and the largest Japanese force involved, Ichiki’s first echelon, was the size of a reinforced battalion. Their importance lay in what they revealed. The Tenaru showed that an American division, dug in behind a river with machine guns, canister and artillery, could destroy a Japanese night assault, and that Japanese commanders, working from poor intelligence and a doctrine built on the spirit of the attack, would keep sending forces piecemeal against such positions. Kawaguchi on the Ridge and Maruyama in October would repeat the pattern on a larger scale.

The Matanikau showed the limits of the Marine position. West of the river the ground favored the defender, communications failed in the ridges and jungle, and every force sent beyond the perimeter was a force not available to defend the airfield. The division could win local fights there, as it did on 19 August and 9 October, but it could not stay. Only in November, with more men and Army units arriving, did the Americans begin the westward advance described in Chapter 8.

The period also showed how much the defense depended on people outside the Marine Corps: on Clemens and his Solomon Islander scouts, whose reports and patrols gave warning of every Japanese buildup east of the perimeter; on Vouza, whose warning arrived only hours before the attack it described; on the Navy and Coast Guard boat crews who stayed behind when the fleet left; and on the Marine and Navy fliers whose arrival on 20 August, the day before the Tenaru, began the air war over the island. The coastwatchers, the boat crews and the fliers each have their own pages in this collection’s Special Units section.

For the men who held the perimeter, these weeks were also the beginning of a long physical decline. The two meals a day, the nights in foxholes under naval bombardment and air raids, and the first cases of malaria and dysentery wore the division down long before it was relieved in December. For the Japanese soldiers who survived the Tenaru, or who came ashore after it, that decline was much worse. Cut off from regular supply by the American aircraft at Henderson Field, they began to starve, and by the end of the year they were calling Guadalcanal Gatō, the island of starvation. That story belongs to Chapter 8 and Chapter 9, but it began here, on the night when Ichiki’s men marched west from Taivu.