Douglas Munro and the Coast Guard at Guadalcanal

A wartime painting of Coast Guard and Navy boat crews evacuating Marines of the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, from the beach west of Point Cruz, Guadalcanal, on 27 September 1942. It is an artist’s interpretation, not a photograph of the action. Photographer unknown; public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Special Units · Guadalcanal, 1942–43

Douglas Munro and the Coast Guard at Guadalcanal

How Coast Guard coxswains ran the landing craft of the Guadalcanal campaign, and how a 22-year-old signalman from Washington State became the only member of the Coast Guard ever awarded the Medal of Honor.

Most accounts of Guadalcanal are told from the foxhole or the cockpit. Between the transports and the beach, however, was another service whose part is easy to overlook: the U.S. Coast Guard. When the 1st Marine Division went ashore on 7 August 1942 (see Chapter 1, Operation Watchtower), many of the plywood landing boats that carried it were steered by Coast Guard coxswains, some of them surfmen from the old Life-Saving stations. Once the transports left, a small Coast Guard-led boat unit stayed on the island inside the Marine perimeter, moving men and supplies along the coast and pulling sailors out of Iron Bottom Sound.

On 27 September 1942 that unit was called on to rescue a Marine battalion that had been landed west of Point Cruz and then cut off by a stronger Japanese force. The rescue worked. Almost all the Marines got off the beach, but the Coast Guard signalman who had led the boats in, Signalman First Class Douglas Albert Munro, was shot as the last craft pulled away and died before reaching base. He was awarded the Medal of Honor after his death. More than eighty years later he is still the only member of the Coast Guard to receive it. The fight he died in, the second action on the Matanikau, is covered from the Marine side in Chapter 4, The Tenaru, the Goettge Patrol and the Matanikau.

This page rests mainly on the Coast Guard Historian’s Office: Dr. Robert M. Browning Jr.’s account “Douglas Munro at Guadalcanal,” the Office’s Munro biography file, and the “Long Blue Line” articles by Atlantic Area historian Dr. William H. Thiesen. The Marine side comes from John L. Zimmerman’s 1949 monograph The Guadalcanal Campaign. Where these sources disagree on a detail (which destroyer, how many boats, what Munro said), the page says so.

The Coast Guard in the amphibious Navy

In wartime the Coast Guard operated as part of the Navy, and by 1942 that meant much more than patrolling harbors. According to Browning, President Franklin D. Roosevelt directed the Coast Guard to man four large transports outright and to provide men for mixed crews on twenty-two other naval ships. When the Guadalcanal–Tulagi task force sailed, eighteen of its twenty-two troop-carrying ships had Coast Guardsmen aboard. The Coast Guard-manned attack transport Hunter Liggett (APA-14), a 535-foot ship carrying nearly 700 officers and men and 35 landing boats, led the transports to their anchorage on 7 August and served as the amphibious force’s command post until the beaches were secure.

Why the Coast Guard? The service’s small-boat men knew surf. Thiesen notes that amphibious planners went looking for Coast Guard boatswains, coxswains and surfmen because of their experience in the surf zone, and that coxswains from boat stations around the country reported for amphibious training in 1941. The boats themselves were Navy craft: the LCP(L) “Higgins boat,” a plywood personnel boat with a bow that did not drop, and the steel tank lighters (LCMs and LCTs in the language of the day) that carried vehicles and heavy loads. Browning describes Munro’s boat on 27 September as having a plywood hull and carrying only two air-cooled .30-caliber Lewis machine guns. Nothing about these craft was armored.

Munro himself came to the landing force from that world. Browning traces his path from the cutter Spencer, where he earned his signalman’s rating, to Hunter Liggett, a transfer he obtained only after what Browning calls “much pleading” with Spencer‘s executive officer. In the South Pacific he was temporarily assigned to the staff of Commander, Transport Division Seventeen, and moved from ship to ship as needed. At the invasion he was serving with Rear Adm. Richmond Kelly Turner’s staff aboard McCawley (APA-4). He went ashore at Tulagi and about two weeks later was sent across to Guadalcanal.

Naval Operating Base “Cactus” and Dwight Dexter

The transports pulled out on 9 August after the disaster at Savo Island, taking most of their boats with them, but not all. A pool of landing craft stayed at Lunga Point, on the old Lever Brothers coconut plantation, to move men and supplies along the coast. Browning places Munro among 24 Coast Guard and Navy personnel assigned to the Lunga Point base. He identifies the base’s commander as Dwight H. Dexter, USCG, “in charge of all small-boat operations on Guadalcanal.” Thiesen calls the unit Naval Operating Base (NOB) Cactus, after the code name for Guadalcanal, and writes that it was the first and only time in Coast Guard history that the service ran its own naval operating base.

NOB Cactus was small. Thiesen counts about 50 officers and men, with roughly 30 LCPs and a dozen tank lighters at its peak. Its main job was lighterage, meaning unloading the cargo ships and transports that dashed in by day. It also ran boats to outlying positions, delivered Marine detachments along the coast, made anti-submarine and picket patrols at night, and rescued sailors from ships sunk in the Sound. A Coast Guard blog summarizing Thiesen’s research says Dexter commanded from 8 August to 5 November 1942, received the Silver Star, and kept a personnel book recording where his men were, their condition, discipline and losses. That blog also passes on a later recollection that several Coast Guardsmen disappeared on night picket patrols. The sources differ on Dexter’s rank: Thiesen’s work gives lieutenant commander, and Browning gives commander.

The men lived as the Marines did, in the mud of the Lunga perimeter under nightly bombing and shelling (see Chapter 6 for the October bombardments). Thiesen’s 2024 article on Motor Machinist’s Mate Joseph Toahty, a Pawnee and Kiowa Coast Guardsman from Oklahoma who served with NOB Cactus from August 1942 to January 1943, records that Toahty was wounded when his bomb shelter took a direct hit and later caught malaria. Toahty was not awarded his Purple Heart until 1984. Thiesen describes him as the first Pawnee to go to sea and the first Native American to take part in a U.S. naval offensive operation.

The Matanikau, 24–27 September 1942

By late September, Maj. Gen. Alexander A. Vandegrift wanted to push the Japanese back across the Matanikau River, west of the perimeter, before reinforcements could build up there. Zimmerman’s monograph traces the operation. Lt. Col. Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller’s 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, newly arrived, began with a reconnaissance in force inland toward Mount Austen on 24 September and lost 7 killed and 25 wounded in a brush with a Japanese bivouac. The 2d Battalion, 5th Marines, joined on the 25th. By the 26th the combined force had reached the Matanikau and found the ridges west of the river strongly held. On 27 September the 1st Raider Battalion tried to cross upstream. It ran into a strong Japanese force on the east bank, and its commander, Col. Samuel B. Griffith II, was wounded and Maj. Kenneth D. Bailey, a Medal of Honor recipient from Edson’s Ridge, was killed.

The plan’s third element was a landing behind the Japanese. Three companies of Puller’s battalion, under Maj. Otho L. Rogers (Zimmerman’s spelling; some Coast Guard accounts write “Rodgers”), were to go by boat from the Kukum–Lunga area to a cove west of Point Cruz and attack inland. Munro, Browning writes, “just two weeks short of his twenty-third birthday,” took charge of the boats, ten LCPs and tank lighters, for the lift. The landing itself went well. Shortly after noon the destroyer Monssen fired a covering barrage with her five-inch guns. At about 1300 Rogers’s party went ashore in two waves, roughly 500 Marines, and moved unopposed to a ridge about 500 yards inland.

The evacuation

At about 1350, according to Browning, a raid by some seventeen Japanese high-level bombers forced Monssen to maneuver away from the coast. That cut off the Marines’ gunfire support just as a strong Japanese force closed on them west of the river. Rogers was killed by mortar fire and a company commander wounded. Without a working radio, the force was surrounded on its ridge. Zimmerman credits 2nd Lt. Dale M. Leslie, an SBD pilot overhead, with spotting a “Help” signal laid out in white undershirts and relaying it, and Sgt. Robert D. Raysbrook with semaphoring messages under fire. Those signals let naval gunfire clear a path back to the beach.

One boat had stayed near the beach to take off wounded, crewed by Coast Guard Petty Officer Raymond J. Evans and Navy Coxswain Samuel B. Roberts. Browning writes that a machine-gun burst cut its rudder cable and that Roberts was then hit. Evans jammed the controls and ran the boat back to Lunga Point at about 20 miles per hour. Roberts died and was awarded the Navy Cross. Ships named for him include the destroyer escort Samuel B. Roberts (DE-413), whose last fight off Samar in October 1944 became famous in its own right, and the guided-missile frigate Samuel B. Roberts (FFG-58). Puller came back to the perimeter, collected a boat group and went out on a destroyer to direct fire himself. The sources differ on which one: Browning says Monssen, Zimmerman Ballard. It is possible both ships were involved at different points in the afternoon.

Munro volunteered to lead the boats back in. Browning describes fire coming from Point Cruz, from the ridges the Marines had abandoned, and from positions east of the landing beach. Munro brought the craft in two or three at a time. He and Evans fired from an exposed position to cover the loading, while Leslie’s dive bomber strafed the shore and, in Zimmerman’s account, herded the boats toward the beach. At the decisive point Munro placed his own boat between the Japanese and the withdrawing Marines. Browning concludes that “All the Marines including twenty-five wounded” escaped. Afterward Munro saw a tank lighter loaded with Marines aground near Point Cruz and directed another lighter to pull it off, a job Browning says took about twenty minutes. As the boats finally headed out, a Japanese machine gun opened up. Evans shouted a warning that Munro could not hear over the engines, and a bullet struck Munro at the base of his skull. He died before reaching base.

The Marine cost of the day was serious, though far smaller than it could have been. Zimmerman gives the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines’ losses in the landing and evacuation as 24 killed and 23 wounded, and the division’s total for the whole three-day Matanikau operation as about 60 killed and 100 wounded. A footnote notes that the division war diary gives the higher figures of 42 killed and 129 wounded, while Zimmerman preferred the division’s own count. Plt. Sgt. Anthony P. Malinowski Jr., who covered his company’s withdrawal with a Browning Automatic Rifle until he was killed, was one of those dead. Zimmerman also names Coxswains Walter T. Bennett and Samuel B. Roberts among the boat crews’ casualties.

The Medal of Honor

Roosevelt approved the award on 1 May 1943, and Munro’s parents received it at the White House on 24 May 1943, according to the Pacific Wrecks summary of his record. Coast Guard writers have long believed that Puller himself may have written the letter recommending Munro, as the U.S. Naval Institute’s 2018 profile puts it. That is a plausible tradition, not a documented fact. Munro’s other posthumous awards were the Purple Heart, American Defense Service Medal, Asiatic-Pacific Area Campaign Medal and World War II Victory Medal. Evans received the Navy Cross in May 1943. Thiesen counts three Navy Crosses awarded for the Point Cruz operation.

The citation’s number of boats, 24, needs explaining, because Browning describes only ten boats in the original lift. The difference probably reflects the hurried gathering of every available craft for the rescue. The citation’s figure of “nearly five hundred” Marines matches Browning’s count of about 500 landed. The 2018 Proceedings piece uses both “nearly five hundred” and “several hundred.” Readers should treat these as round numbers.

The people

Munro’s last words come down in two closely matching versions, both later recollections and not contemporary records. The Coast Guard Historian’s biography file gives them as “Did they get off?” Evans’s own account, as retold in the 2022 Long Blue Line article, has Munro asking “Did we get them all off?”, and Evans recalled that when he nodded, Munro smiled and died. Both versions come from Evans, the only man in a position to hear.

The grave, the ships and the family

Munro was buried on Guadalcanal on 28 September 1942, the day after he died, under a wooden cross that Evans made. His remains were exhumed in 1947 and reburied in 1948 at Laurel Hill Memorial Park in Cle Elum, Washington, in the veterans’ section near the flagpole. A memorial plaque stands today at the Point Cruz Yacht Club in Honiara, close to the beach where the evacuation took place.

His mother turned grief into service. Edith Munro joined the SPARS, the Coast Guard women’s reserve, and the Naval Institute’s profile says that at 48 she completed training and became the first female officer on a Coast Guard district staff. As a lieutenant (junior grade) in the Coast Guard Reserve she sponsored the destroyer escort Douglas A. Munro (DE-422), launched by Brown Shipbuilding of Houston on 8 March 1944 and commissioned on 11 July 1944. The ship was decommissioned in 1947, recommissioned for the Korean War (earning three battle stars there), and finally decommissioned in 1960. Two Coast Guard cutters followed: the high-endurance cutter Douglas Munro (WHEC-724) and the national security cutter Munro (WMSL-755), commissioned in April 2017.

His name is also on buildings and an award. Munro Hall stands at the Coast Guard Academy, and another building and a statue at the Cape May, New Jersey, training center, where his Medal of Honor is displayed. Since 1971 the Douglas A. Munro Award has gone each year to an enlisted Coast Guard member for inspirational leadership. In 2013 the new Coast Guard headquarters in Washington, D.C., was named the Douglas A. Munro Coast Guard Headquarters Building.

Why the story matters

Point Cruz was a small action in a long campaign, and in its planning a failure: a three-pronged attack in which the Raiders were stopped and the landing force was cut off. The rescue mattered because Guadalcanal in September 1942 could not afford to lose a battalion. Puller’s men went on to hold the line south of Henderson Field during the October offensive, side by side with the Army’s 164th Infantry (see the 164th Infantry page). The episode also shows a less visible part of the campaign. The perimeter was supplied, reinforced and sometimes rescued by a handful of small boats with improvised crews, working at night or under air attack, out of a coconut plantation at Lunga Point.

For the Coast Guard, Munro became a model of what a petty officer is supposed to be. His Medal of Honor is unique in the service’s history, and his statue stands at the Cape May training center. For a reader at Lake Norman, the more useful lesson may be that the people who did the most at Guadalcanal were often not the ones in the best-known units. Munro was a signalman from a small town in the Cascades, on loan to a Navy staff, working a boat that was not his. He went back in because someone had to.