What Japanese Troops Believed the Night They Charged Edson’s Ridge D

The Japanese general who planned the attack was certain of one thing. He had already won. He believed there were only 2,000 Americans on the whole island. He was so confident that when his own army offered him another battalion, he turned it down. He did not need it. On the night of September 12th, 1942, his soldiers moved through the jungle toward a bare ridge on Guadalcanal, chanting into the dark that the Marines would soon be dead.

They were right about almost nothing. This is the story of the night they charged Edson’s Ridge and of the 840 men who were the only thing standing between them and the airfield that decided the Pacific. The airfield was called Henderson Field and it was the only thing that mattered on Guadalcanal. Whoever held it controlled the sky over the island by day and the sea lanes to Australia beyond it.

The Marines had taken it from the Japanese in August and were clinging to a thin perimeter around it. Sick with malaria, short of food, bombed almost every day. 1 mile south of the runway ran a low grass ridge with no name. On the maps it was nothing. In three nights it would be the most important ground in the Pacific and almost no one who tells the story of Guadalcanal stops long on the men who held it.

The general’s name was Kiyotake Kawaguchi. He commanded the 35th Infantry Brigade, veterans of campaigns in China and Borneo, roughly 6,000 men. Three weeks earlier, another Japanese force had thrown itself at the Marine line in a single reckless night charge and been all but wiped out. Kawaguchi believed he was different.

He had three times the men and a careful plan, split his brigade into columns, slip through the jungle, and strike the perimeter from the inside where the Americans least expected it. His main blow would fall exactly on that nameless ridge. He was, one historian later wrote, “suffering from a fatal overconfidence.

” On the American side, one man refused to believe the ridge was quiet. His name was Merritt Edson, a lean, soft-spoken officer with a faded red beard the Marines called Red Mike. He had already led his raiders in hard fighting across the Solomons, and a raid on a Japanese supply base had turned up documents hinting at the coming attack.

Edson studied the ground, ran his finger down the ridge on an aerial photo, and quietly said it looked like a good approach. Then he moved his men onto it, not to rest as they had been told, but to dig in and wait for an attack almost no one else expected. Please take a moment to subscribe to the channel and to give this video a like, and stay with us all the way to the end.

But to understand how a few hundred tired men could hold that ridge against a brigade, you have to know who they were and what they had already been through. Edson’s core was the First Marine Raider Battalion, a new kind of unit, hand-picked and hard-trained for fast, violent raids. Beside them stood the First Parachute Battalion, the Shoots, who had already been badly cut up taking the islands of Gavutu and Tanambogo back in August.

Together they numbered only about 840 effective men. Many were sick, all were exhausted, and they were about to be handed the most important thousand yards of ground in the Pacific. The ridge itself was a strange piece of ground. It rose out of the jungle like a fishhook, a spine of open, grassy hills about a mile long, flanked on both sides by walls of thick, green jungle and steep ravines.

From the air it looked like an obvious highway straight Henderson Field. For Kawaguchi, that was the point. Move under cover of the jungle, then burst onto the open ridge and roll down it into the airfield. For Edson, the same ground meant something else. If he could hold the high spine, he could see the enemy come, and he could bring artillery down on them in the open.

The Marine commander on the island, Major General Alexander Vandegrift, had a hard call to make. His perimeter was too long and his men too few. Where would the blow fall? Much of his staff still expected the Japanese to come along the coast, as they had before. But the captured documents and the shape of the land told Edson and the division operations officer, Colonel Gerald Thomas, something different.

Vandegrift trusted them. He put Edson’s raiders and the parachutists on the ridge, the one place the enemy thought the Americans would never expect. It was the decision the whole battle would turn on. On September 10th and 11th, the Marines dug in along the ridge. The soil was thin and the roots were thick. Foxholes came slowly.

Edson placed his raiders on the right, the parachutists on the left, and kept a small reserve behind the center. Behind them all, near the airfield, the howitzers of the 11th Marines registered their guns on the open ground in front of the ridge, marking the spots where an attacker would have to cross.

On the 11th, Japanese bombers shifted their aim from the airfield to the ridge itself. It was the first sign that the enemy, too, had decided this was the place. Edson had no illusions about what was coming. He later said he was firmly convinced they were in the path of the next Japanese attack. He walked the line, quiet and certain, telling his men what they were about to do.

“There is only us,” he told them, “between the enemy and the airfield. If we don’t hold, we lose Guadalcanal.” It was not a speech meant to thrill. It was a plain statement of the math. Then the sun went down on September 12th, and out in the black jungle to the south, several thousand men began to move. At about 9:00, a Japanese floatplane dropped a flare over Henderson Field.

Minutes later, a cruiser and destroyers offshore opened up, throwing heavy shells onto the ridge in the dark. Then Kawaguchi struck. His men had marched down the bank of the Lunga River and wheeled toward the Marine line. And now they came out of the jungle in the flickering light of their own flares. The first probes hit the parachutists on the left and the low ground near the river.

In the confusion of the dark and the broken terrain, the Japanese found the seams between the Marine positions and began to push through them. It was a brutal, fragmented kind of fighting. Small groups of men in the dark, unable to see the shape of the battle, firing at movement and sound.

A Marine platoon on the right was cut off and surrounded. Along the Lunga, the Japanese slipped between positions and tried to curl in behind the ridge. For a while, no one on the American side could tell exactly what was happening or how bad it was. What saved the line that first night was not a grand stand.

It was the ground Edson had chosen and the guns behind it already registered on the open approaches, waiting for a target. Here is the thing that makes this battle so strange. The Japanese who fought that first night did not come away thinking they had been stopped. Kawaguchi’s columns had broken through parts of the line and vanished back into the jungle.

From where he stood, the American position looked cracked and ready to fall. His men had proven, he believed, that spirit could carry them through the Marines’ firepower. They regrouped in the trees, cheered as their planes bombed the airfield the next day and made ready to finish the job.

The enemy was more confident on the morning of the 13th than he had been on the 12th. On the ridge, the daylight told a different story. Edson used the pause to shorten his line. He pulled his forward units back to a tight, stronger horseshoe on the last good high ground before the airfield, a position he could actually hold with the men he had left. It looked like a retreat.

It was the opposite. He was choosing the ground on which he would make the enemy break. He walked the new line under sniper fire, calm and exposed, and told his exhausted raiders and parachutists that tonight the Japanese would be back, and tonight there would be no more falling back.

What happens on the second night is the heart of this story. If this is the kind of history you want more of, subscribe. We’re just getting to it. As darkness fell on September 13th, the Japanese massed again in the jungle below the ridge. Around half past six, the first attacks came in against the Marine right.

Then at about nine, Kawaguchi threw his main weight at the horseshoe. The parachute flares went up, the naval guns thundered, and out of the tree line came wave after wave of infantry. Grenadiers first, then riflemen and machine gunners, as far back into the dark as the Marines could see.

The Marines heard them before they saw them. As they came, the Japanese soldiers slapped their rifle butts and shouted in a rising rhythmic chant into the American dark. That the Marines would die tonight. It was meant to break the men on the ridge, and it told those men exactly one thing: how completely the enemy believed he had already won.

The raiders and parachutists lay in their shallow holes, low on grenades, low on machine gun ammunition, and let the chanting come closer. Then Edson called for the artillery, and the open ground in front of the ridge turned to fire. The howitzers of the 11th Marines fired almost point-blank, walking their shells back and forth across the front of the ridge, crisscrossing the slopes where the Japanese had to cross.

Whole waves were caught in the open and cut down. Still they came. In places the fighting closed to grenade range, then to bayonets, rifle butts, and knives in the dark. Japanese soldiers who leapt into Marine foxholes were knifed and thrown back out. The line bent. It was pushed back. In one place, the enemy tore a gap 200 yards wide and poured toward the airfield beyond, but the line did not break.

Everywhere the fighting was worst, one figure kept appearing. Edson stood upright in his command post, barely behind the line, two bullet holes through his shirt, coolly directing the battle as if the outcome were never in doubt. He moved among the men, steadying them, pulling reserves to the gaps, refusing cover. One raider said afterward that he was more afraid of Red Mike than he was of the enemy. It was not recklessness.

Edson understood that on a night like this, on ground like this, the difference between holding and breaking were whether the men believed the man in command thought they could hold. On Company C’s part of the line stood its commander, Captain Kenneth Bailey, a big relentless officer his men called a Marine’s Marine.

Bailey took a wound to the head early and kept fighting through hours of close combat, moving along the line, hauling ammunition forward, dragging men into position, plugging holes by the force of his own will. When a Japanese machine gun pinned part of the line, he led the effort to knock it out. Through 10 hours of on-again, off-again fighting, Bailey was one of the reasons the Horseshoe held.

His war had days left to run. His name would outlast it. By 2:00 in the morning, the Japanese came again and again after that. Attack after attack against a line that was running out of everything. The Marines fought with what they had, the last grenades, bayonets, entrenching tools, fists. Small counterattacks sealed the worst gaps.

The parachutists walked forward in a skirmish line, firing and throwing grenades, and won back a stretch of the position the enemy had taken. The artillery never stopped. Every time a fresh wave massed in the dark, the Slowly, the terrible arithmetic began to turn against the men who had been so sure at dusk. Around 4:00 in the morning, Edson’s line was nearly spent.

He got on the radio to the division and asked for help, and elements of the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines began to filter up into the position, taking some of the weight off the men who had held all night. The attacks were losing their force now. The chant that had come out of the jungle at 9:00 had gone quiet. The Japanese who had been certain the Marines would be dead by morning were themselves being broken apart on the slopes in front of the ridge, wave by wave in the fire of the guns.

At first light, the airfield the Japanese had come to take answered for itself. Marine and Army fighters lifted off Henderson Field, the very runway the enemy had tried all night to reach, banked around and came down on Kawaguchi’s men in the open with machine guns and cannon fire as they tried to pull back into the jungle.

The retreat became a hard hunted thing. The general who had turned down an extra battalion because he was so sure of victory now had no choice but to break off the attack and lead the survivors away on a brutal march back through the jungle. The cost tells the story. In front of the ridge and in the jungle beyond it, Kawaguchi left roughly 800 dead and hundreds more wounded.

His brigade was wrecked as a fighting force and many more men died on the long retreat. Edson’s Marines had held, but not cheaply. The Raiders and parachutists together lost 59 men killed or missing and nearly 200 wounded. The first parachute battalion, already battered in August, was so reduced that it was finished as a unit.

Only a fraction of the men who had first landed could still walk. 840 men had gone up the ridge. Far fewer came down it whole. This is where the enemy becomes the best witness to what those men did. General Vandegrift, who commanded the whole island, said afterwards that Kawaguchi’s assault on the ridge was the only time in the entire campaign he doubted the outcome.

That had it succeeded, the Marines would have been in a very bad way indeed. And the historian Richard Frank, who wrote the definitive account of the campaign, concluded that the Japanese never came closer to winning Guadalcanal itself than they did that September night on a ridge thrusting up from the jungle just south of the airfield.

The whole battle for the island had balanced on 840 men. The nameless ridge got a name. To the men who bled on it, it became Bloody Ridge. To the Marine Corps, it became Edson’s Ridge after the quiet colonel with the faded red beard who had refused to believe it was a safe place to rest. The stand there did more than hold a mile of grass.

It kept Henderson Field in American hands at the one moment the Japanese came closest to taking it back. And as long as the Marines held that airfield, they held Guadalcanal. Six more months of hard fighting lay ahead, but the island was never again as close to being lost as it was on the night the enemy charged the ridge.

For the defense of the ridge, Merritt Edson received the Medal of Honor ME. His citation crediting his leadership for holding not just the ridge, but command of the airfield and the division’s whole position. He went on to lead the Fifth Marines in the fighting that followed, helped plan the assault on Tarawa, and rose to major general.

The men who served under him said officers and enlisted alike would follow him anywhere. The only problem was keeping up. His nickname, Red Mike, followed him the rest of his life. The ridge he held is still studied by Marines learning how a thin line holds decisive ground. Captain Kenneth D. Bailey had held wounded company commander who would not stop moving along the line also received the Medal of Honor for that night.

He did not live to wear it. On September 26th, 1942, less than two weeks after the ridge, Bailey was killed by enemy machine gun fire in the fighting along the Matanikau River. He was 32 years old and his nation awarded his highest honor after his death. Merritt Edson survived the war and died in 1955.

He rests today at Arlington National Cemetery among the men he led. The ridge itself still rises above the old airfield on Guadalcanal, marked now by a monument to the raiders who held it. The ground where for two nights 840 men decided the fate of an island. An enemy who was certain he had already won.

A ridge that wasn’t even on the map. And 840 sick, exhausted men who would not step off it. They did not hold because they were fresh, or many, or sure of the outcome. They held because Red Mike stood up in the fire, and they decided, one more time, not to break. Historians still weigh what saved the ridge. Edson’s leadership, the artillery, the ground, or the plain refusal of the men to break. Maybe you have a view.

If your father, your grandfather, your uncle, anyone in your family served in the Pacific, in the Marines, the Navy, the Army, on any island or any ship, leave their name and what they did in the comments below. Don’t just leave the name. Tell us one thing about them. One thing they did or said or one thing you remember.

The men who held that ridge deserve more than a line in a database. They deserve to be remembered as people. Subscribe if you want the next story. There are more of them.