Japanese Troops Were HORRIFIED by American Marines Jungle Warfare at Guadalcanal

The morning of August 21, 1942, on a sandbar where a small river empties into the Solomon Sea, the water is running pink. About 800 men lie on that sand. Most of them are very young. Some are still holding their bayonets. They wear the uniform of the Imperial Japanese Army, and three nights ago, they had been told that they were going to sweep the Americans into the sea before sunrise.

This is the story of what happened to them and of the six months that followed when more than 30,000 other Japanese soldiers would learn the same lesson on the island they themselves would come to call the hungry island. To understand how those men came to be lying on that sand, we have to go back three nights.

August 18, 1942, six Japanese destroyers slid toward the coast of Guadal Canal. On their decks stood 917 men packed shoulderto-shoulder, rifle slung, boots polished, faces set in the particular stillness that comes before a landing. They wore the uniform of the Imperial Japanese Army. They belonged to the first echelon of the Ichiki detachment, and they believed to a man that they were about to end an American incident that had barely begun.

At the front of the column stood their commander, Colonel Konao Ichiki, 50 years old, a veteran of China, a former instructor at the Toyama Infantry School, the elite academy where Japan trained the men who trained everyone else. Ichiki was small, wiry, sharp featured. He wore round spectacles that caught the faint reflection of the sea.

He spoke rarely. When he did, his officers listened with the reverence reserved for men who had never known defeat. Earlier that day, aboard the flagship in the harbor at truck, Ichiki had received orders that he chose to interpret loosely. Wait for the rest of your regiment, the orders said. Wait for the second echelon.

Do not attack until you have your artillery, your machine gun companies, your full strength. Wait. Ichi did not wait. He had studied the Americans. He had read the intelligence reports, the afteraction summaries from China, the assessments from the Philippines campaign. The Americans, he told his officers, lacked discipline.

They fought only when comfortable. They broke under pressure. They had never faced a real bayonet charge in the dark, and they never would. These are Americans, he said. We will sweep them into the sea before sunrise. The destroyers reached their launch point off Cape Tyu, 15 mi east of the American perimeter at Lunga Point. Landing barges lowered.

Men climbed down cargo nets in silence. The only sound the creek of ropes and the distant slap of water against steel. There was no naval gunfire, no air support, just the black jungle and the darker sea and 917 men walking down into history. To understand what these men were walking into, we have to turn back the calendar.

11 days, August 7, 1942. Dawn, a young war correspondent named Richard Tregas stood at the rail of a transport ship as the sky over Guadal Canal turned from black to gray to pale gold. He was 25 years old, 6′ 7 in tall, so tall he had to duck through every hatch. He worked for the International News Service, and he had talked his way into this operation with the confidence of a man who did not fully understand what he was about to see.

Below him, the first waves of the First Marine Division were climbing into landing craft. There were 11,000 of them. Young men, most in their late teens or early 20s, their faces pale from weeks at sea. Their commanding officer, Major General Alexander Vandergrift, watched from the bridge of the USS McCauley. Vandergrift was 55, silverhaired, courtly in speech, ruthless in planning.

He had spent his career preparing for a moment he never expected to command. Now he stood on the eve of the first American ground offensive of the Pacific War, and he was afraid. They called it Operation Watchtower. Some of the men who planned it called it something else, Operation Shoresting, because that was what it was.

A gamble stitched together from what the United States could spare in the summer of 1942, which was very little. The Marines carried only 60 days of supplies. Their air cover would depart within 72 hours. Their transports could barely be defended. But the objective was worth the risk. On the northern coast of Guadal Canal, Japanese construction crews were finishing an airfield.

If completed, that airfield would put Japanese bombers within range of the shipping lanes between the United Australia. If lost, the shipping lanes lived. If not, Australia might starve. So, the Marines came. Traascus watched them wade ashore. He watched them crouch behind palm trees, rifles ready.

He watched them advance across the beach in short sprints, expecting at any moment the crack of Japanese rifles, the whistle of mortars, the tearing sound of machine guns. None came. Here is the first twist of the Guadal Canal campaign, and it belongs to no one. It was simply the way things happened.

There was almost no one on the beach. At the airfield, roughly 2,200 laborers were at work. Most of them were Korean, conscripted by the Japanese military and shipped south to break their backs pouring coral runway. A smaller force of about 600 naval troops was supposed to protect them. When American shellfire began to fall in the predent darkness, the laborers scattered into the jungle.

The naval troops followed. They abandoned trucks with keys still in the ignition. They abandoned meals still warm on the tables. They abandoned crates of rice, cases of Japanese beer, and most importantly, an airfield nearly 90% complete. Marine engineers walked onto the site by nightfall on August 8th.

They looked at the runway with the disbelief of men who had prepared for a battle and found a gift. They named it Henderson Field in honor of Major Loftton Henderson, a Marine aviator who had been killed leading his squadron against a Japanese carrier at the Battle of Midway 2 months earlier. Henderson had never seen this place, but every takeoff and every landing for the next 6 months and beyond would carry his name.

Tragus walked the perimeter that first afternoon. He picked his way through kunai grass taller than he was. He kicked over an abandoned Japanese cooking pot. He wrote in his notebook that the war he had come to cover did not seem to have arrived yet. He would find [music] in the coming weeks that he had been very wrong because Guadal Canal itself was already fighting them.

The island was 90 mi long and 25 mi wide. A spine of mountains ran down its center, rising to 8,000 ft, permanently wrapped in cloud. The coastal plane where the Marines had landed was a flat green ribbon of jungle swamp and grass that grew tall enough to hide a standing man. Rain fell without warning. Humidity never dropped below 90%, mosquitoes moved in clouds so thick that men breathed them in and coughed them out.

The rivers, which looked bright and beautiful in reconnaissance photographs, [music] carried malaria and dissentry, and a dozen tropical paracets no one at Quantico had ever briefed the Marines about. Cuts on the skin did not close, feet rotted inside boots, teeth unattended, went septic.

None of these men, from Vandergrift downward, had been trained for jungle warfare. There was no doctrine for it. There was no textbook. The Marine Corps had prepared for beach landings and open country maneuvers. What lay beyond the beach at Lunga Point was something the core would have to learn on the run and pay for in the learning.

They did not know that first afternoon how much time they had to learn they had less than they thought. Because a 100 miles to the north at the Japanese naval base at Rabal on New Britain, an admiral had already made a decision that would change everything. Vice Admiral Gonichi Mikawa was 53 years old, thin, calm, and in the words of one American officer who studied him after the war, one of the best surface tacticians Japan produced.

When the news of the American landing reached him on the morning of August 7, he did not hesitate. He assembled seven cruisers and a single destroyer. He steamed south down the passage the Americans would eventually call the slot. He arrived off Guadal Canal in the darkness of August 8 into 9 undetected. What happened next was the worst defeat in the history of the United States Navy.

The battle of Tsavo Island lasted less than an hour. Mikawa’s ships appeared out of the black like ghosts. The Allied warships guarding the transport fleet were caught with their guns unloaded, their crews asleep, their captains uncertain what they were seeing until the Japanese torpedoes hit their hulls. The heavy cruiser USS Quincy took a torpedo amid ships and healed over.

Her captain died on the bridge. She sank with the loss of over 300 men. The heavy cruiser USS Vincens was hit by 74 shells and three torpedoes. She burned from bow to stern before she went down. The heavy cruiser USS Atoria fought back through the smoke, put shells into a Japanese cruiser, and then sank at dawn with the flag still flying.

Off her port, the Australian heavy cruiser HMAS Canra took 24 hits in the first two minutes. She lost power. She burned through the night. She was scuttled the following morning. More than 1,000 Allied sailors died in the water. Some drowned, some burned, some were taken by sharks that came from every direction as the sun rose over the wreckage.

Mikawa turned north and went home. He never touched the transport ships that were still unloading at Lunga Point, the ships that were the entire reason for the raid. He decided at the last moment that dawn was too close, that American aircraft might catch him before he escaped the slot.

It was one of the most fateful decisions of the Pacific War. He left the transports and he left the Marines and he went home. But the damage was done. The surviving Allied naval forces withdrew the next day. They took with them most of the supplies that had not yet been unloaded. They took with them the air cover the Marines [music] had been promised.

They took with them in effect the strategic assumption that the United States could support a landing on Guadal Canal at all. Vandergrift stood on the beach and watched them go. He had 11,000 men on an island in enemy waters. He had roughly 2 weeks of food if his men ate lightly. He had ammunition for a defensive battle, not an offensive one.

He had an airfield he could not yet use because his own aircraft had not arrived. And he had, according to his intelligence officers, an enemy force he could not begin to count. For the next 36 hours, the Marines waited to be attacked and were not. Then Henderson Field came alive. The first American aircraft touched down on August 20.

19 F4F Wildcats, 12 SBD Dauntless dive bombers. They came in over the palms one after another, and the Marines on the ground stood up in their foxholes and cheered until they could not hear themselves cheer. The pilots climbed out of their cockpits and stared at the mud and the rot and the abandoned Japanese equipment and understood in that moment that they were now the Cactus Air Force and that they were not going home for a long time.

and 150 mi to the north in Rabbal. Lieutenant General Heruki Hakutake was getting his orders. Hakutake was 54 years old. He commanded the Japanese 17th Army. He had assumed based on the intelligence he had been given that the American landing was a raid, a hit and run, a nuisance. Now Tokyo was telling him it was a full-scale operation, that the airfield had fallen, that the enemy was digging in, and that the airfield had to be retaken.

Immediately, Hiakut looked at his forces. [music] His 35th Infantry Brigade under Major General Kyotake Kawaguchi was still in Palao. His fourth infantry regiment was in the Philippines. His second division was scattered across the Dutch East Indies. The only combat ready unit he could reach quickly was Colonel Ichiki’s 28th Infantry Regiment, which had been sitting near Guam, waiting for a midway operation that would never happen.

So, Ichiki was ordered south. He arrived at truck. He received his briefing. He was told to wait for the rest of his regiment before attacking. He did not wait and on the night of August 18, he stepped off a destroyer at Cape Tyu with 917 men and a certainty that would kill them all. Meanwhile, 15 mi to the west, a young Marine captain was preparing to take a patrol out along the coast.

His name was Charles Brush, Company A, First Battalion, First Marines. He was in his late 20s, a career officer, competent, unremarkable, and about to become the first American to touch the edge of what was coming. On the afternoon of August 19, Brush led 60 men east along the coastal track. He was supposed to conduct a reconnaissance, look for signs of enemy activity, and be back before dark.

About halfway to a village called Kohley Point, his lead scout froze and pointed. There on the trail ahead was a group of Japanese soldiers. They saw the Marines a heartbeat later. Both sides opened fire. The firefight that followed lasted less than an hour. When it was over, 31 Japanese soldiers lay dead in the palm grove.

Three Marines were dead. Brush’s men fanned out cautiously among the bodies, searching pockets, searching packs, searching for anything that could tell them who these men were and where they had come from. They found more than they expected. They found detailed maps of the American perimeter.

They found reconnaissance sketches showing the airfield defenses. They found personal papers, orders, and a briefing document that would land on Vandergri’s desk within hours and would tell him in cold black ink three things that would change the war. The first was that Colonel Konau Ichiki was on the island.

The second was that Ichiki had brought roughly a thousand men. The third was the number that stopped Vandergrift’s breath. Japanese intelligence estimated the American strength on Guadal Canal at approximately 2,000 men. Vandergrift had 11,000. He read the number twice. Then he read it a third time. He looked at his staff. He said very quietly that this was either a catastrophic error or the greatest gift they had received since the airfield itself.

Because a Japanese officer marching against an enemy he had underestimated by a factor of five would attack recklessly, would attack without waiting for reinforcements, would attack with the assumption that boldness alone could carry the day. Ichiki, Vandergrift said, is going to walk into us before dawn. The Marines began to prepare along the sandbar at the mouth of what everyone kept calling the Tenaru River, though it was actually the Elu.

Lieutenant Colonel Leonard Creswell’s second battalion, First Marines dug in. Water cooled Browning machine guns were set up in mutually supporting positions. 37mm anti-tank guns were loaded with canister rounds. Each canister containing hundreds of steel balls that would turn the guns into oversized shotguns. Barbed wire went out.

Fields of fire were sighted. Every angle across the sandbar was covered by at least two weapons. There were no gaps. There would be no gaps. The sun set. The Marines waited. They did not know that a man was crawling toward them through the jungle at that moment. A man who would arrive with information that would seal Ichiki’s fate. His name was Jacob Vuzer.

He was in his 50s, a Solomon Islander, a former sergeant of the Solomon Islands protectorate armed constabularary retired for years. When the Japanese arrived, the district officer had asked him to serve as a coast watcher and scout for the Allied forces. Vuza [music] had agreed without hesitation.

For weeks, he had moved through the jungle, observing Japanese positions, reporting through the mission network. The day before, moving too close to Ichi’s landing site, he had been captured. The Japanese had tied him to a tree. They had questioned him about the American positions. When he refused to answer, they had bayoneted him in the chest, in the throat, in the arms.

They left him for dead and moved on. He was not dead. Sometime in the darkness of August 20 into 21, Vuza chewed through the ropes around his wrists. He crawled. He walked. He staggered. He held his own wounds closed with his hands. And at some point, after midlapsed into a marine listening post on the west bank of the Elu River, his body a map of stab wounds, blood running from his mouth.

Before he lost consciousness, he told the Marines what they needed to know. The Japanese were coming tonight straight down the beach. Enforced him. In the dark palm groves east of the Elu, Colonel Konowiki lined up his 917 men. He gave the order to fix bayonets. He looked at his officers. He looked at the sandbar in the distance, faintly moonlit, and he saw victory there. He raised his hand.

The Marines behind the Brownings heard something moving in the darkness across the water. They looked at each other. They tightened their grips. Somewhere in the palms, a bugle began to blow. And the first great collision of the Guadal Canal campaign, the collision between an army that believed in the spirit of the sword and an army that had never fought this kind of war before, was about to begin.

The bugle carried across the water and died in the palms. For a long second, nothing moved. The marines lying behind the Brownings could hear their own breathing. The dark shape of the sandbar sat there pale under the thin moon, empty and still, the way an empty stage sit still before the curtain rises. Then the sandbar filled.

They came in a solid mass. Hundreds of men running, shouting, the sound of their voices strange and thin at that distance. A high, ragged howl that some of the Marines would remember for the rest of their lives. Rifles cracked, grenades sparked in the air. The front rank of Ichiki’s assault broke onto the sand at a full sprint.

Bayonets fixed. Officers withdrawn swords running ahead of the men. And for one heartbeat, it looked like a picture from an old book about a war that had already ended. Then the Marines opened fire. The water cooled Browning started first. Long sustained bursts, each gun capable of firing hundreds of rounds a minute through its water cooled jacket, tearing across the sandbar at knee height and rising.

The 30 caliber rounds went through men and kept going and went through the men behind them. The muzzle flashes lit the palms in flickering yellow and the sand kicked up in a low continuous mist as the tracers walked across it. Then the anti-tank guns opened up. The 37 mm canister rounds tore the front rank apart in a way that had nothing to do with combat as Ichiki’s men had ever known it. It was not fighting.

It was industrial machinery meeting flesh in the dark. The first wave went down inside 40 seconds. The second wave stepped over the first. Ichiki’s officers were shouting. Some of them were still using their swords, waving the men forward, screaming that the Marines would break, that the Americans always broke, that one more push would carry the position.

The Americans did not break. For 6 hours, the Japanese came across that sandbar. Ichuki sent them in waves, in wedges, in single, desperate rushes by small groups who had found what they thought was a gap. There were no gaps. The interlocking fields of fire had been laid out by men who understood exactly what would happen if a single killing zone was left unwatched.

Some Japanese soldiers reached the American wire. A very few reached the American foxholes. What happened there was fought with bayonets and rifle butts and pistols and the sharpened edges of entrenching tools. And it did not last long because behind the men in the foxholes were more men and behind them more.

Dawn came slowly. The Marines lifted their heads and looked out across the sandbar and did not believe what they saw. The sand was carpeted with the dead. They lay in windows, in piles, in single sprawled shapes. Some still moving, most not. Rifles lay everywhere, and helmets and pieces of equipment and pieces of men.

The water at the river mouth ran pink. A few wounded Japanese soldiers tried to crawl back into the palms. Some of them, unable to bear capture, put their own grenades against their bodies. The muffled thump of those grenades went on for hours in the underbrush. General Vandergrift did not wait long. At midm morning, he sent five M3 Stewart light tanks across the sandbar to finish what remained.

Richard Tascus watched them go from a marine position. He would write in his diary that afternoon in a passage that would become one of the most quoted lines of the Pacific War that it was fascinating to see the tanks bustling among the trees, pivoting, turning, spitting sheets of yellow flame. what he did not put in the printed book. But what he saw was that the tanks were not fighting an enemy anymore.

They were hunting the last living men of a regiment. By noon on August 21, the battle of the Tenaru was over. Of the 917 men Ichiki had led ashore three nights before, roughly 800 lay dead. About 128 escaped into the jungle to the east, mostly from support units that had never crossed the sandbar. Marine losses were 44 killed and 71 wounded.

Colonel Konowo Ichiki did not survive. The official Japanese report claimed he burned his regimental colors and shot himself. Other accounts say he died at the front of a final charge. The truth is that his body was never conclusively identified. Somewhere in the tangle of the dead on the sandbar of the Elu River, an infantry school instructor who had taught the finest young officers of the Japanese army lay with his glasses knocked off and his sword still in his hand.

And no one would ever know which one he was. The Marines walked the sandbar that afternoon. Some of them were quiet. Some of them were sick. Some of them, without saying much about it, went aside and wrote letters home. A young corporal wrote to his mother in Ohio that he had learned that morning what the war was going to be. He did not tell her what he meant.

He would not have known the words. 10 days later, on August 30, another Japanese destroyer slid into the anchorage off Cape Tyu in the darkness. Down its cargo net climbed a slight quiet man in the uniform of a second lieutenant of the Imperial Japanese Army. 27 years old, roundfaced, nearsighted, a platoon leader in the eighth independent anti-tank gun company, attached to what was left of the Ichiki detachment.

His name was Genjiro Emi. He carried a small notebook wrapped in oil skin. He had been keeping a diary since the day he left Japan, and he would keep it faithfully for the next 5 months. Everything that we know about what the Japanese soldier saw and felt on Guadal Canal in these coming weeks, we know because Genjiro I wrote it down.

He came ashore in the darkness. He formed his platoon. He looked around at the shapes of the palms against the starlight, and he did not yet understand what he was standing in. His first notebook entry from the island is almost business-like. He records that he has arrived. He records the strength of his platoon. He records that his company has been assigned only two small 70 mm battalion guns as heavy weapons.

He records that a landing operation must be carried out with strong support by naval vessels and planes. And then in a marginal note he would add later, a note written after he had learned what the price of that lesson would be, he adds a single sentence. We realized it keenly on the island. It is one of the honest sentences of the entire Pacific War.

By the time I arrived, the second Japanese attempt to retake Henderson Field was already forming. Its architect was Major General Kawaguchi. He was 49 years old. Quiet Proud, a professional officer of the old school. His command, the 35th Infantry Brigade, was being fed down the slot by the Tokyo Express, the nightly destroyer runs that had become Japan’s only way to supply the island.

Between August 29 and September 4, some 5,000 of his men came ashore at various points along the coast, carrying what they could carry, leaving behind almost everything they would need. That was the flaw in the Tokyo Express and it would kill more Japanese soldiers than the Marines ever would. A destroyer could reach Guadal Canal from the Shortlands in a single night and turn around before American aircraft caught it in the morning.

But a destroyer could not carry field artillery. It could not carry trucks. It could not carry the kind of food supply a division would need for a long campaign. What arrived at Cape Tyu night after night was infantry and rice. Never quite enough rice. Kawaguchi’s plan was more sophisticated than Ichiki had been. He would not attack across an open sandbar.

He would send his men through the jungle south of the airfield up the spine of a low coral ridge that dominated Henderson from the interior. He would strike where he believed the American defenses were thinnest. He would attack in coordinated columns in the darkness using the infiltration tactics that had worked so well against the British in Malaya.

He believed the Americans would not know he was coming. He was wrong. And here is where the second great turn of the campaign happened because the Americans by then had a man named Merritt Edson. [music] Edson was 45, a lieutenant colonel, commanding officer of the first Marine Raider battalion, red-headed, thin, precise, so quiet that his men called him Red Mike behind his back and were half afraid of him to his face. He did not raise his voice.

He did not need to. He had been at Bellow Wood as a very young man in 1918 and he had spent the intervening quarter century thinking in a cold and careful way about how infantry survives against a determined enemy in the dark. On the night of September 7, Edson took his raiders on a raid. They landed at a coastal village called Tasimokco, east of the marine perimeter, where intelligence suggested Kaguchi had set up a supply base.

The raid itself was small and quick and would have counted as a footnote in most campaigns, but what the raiders found at Tasimokco changed the war on Guadal Canal. They found a supply dump enormous beyond expectation. They found artillery pieces. They found stacks of ammunition. They found rice, medical supplies, uniforms. And in a set of officers trunks left behind in the retreat, they found something worth more than any of it.

They found Kawaguchi’s operational plan. The maps were there, the roots were there, the dates were there, the very ridge Kawaguchi intended to use as his approached in red pencil with the timings of his three columns, along with the assumption written in the margin by a staff officer that the Americans had no serious defenses in that direction.

Edson brought the maps back. He laid them on Vandergrift’s desk. He said in the low even voice his men had learned to listen for that he wanted the ridge. Vandergrift gave him the ridge. For the next 3 days roughly 840 marines from the raider battalion and the first parachute battalion prepared the coral spine that Kawaguchi’s own maps had chosen for them. Edson walked every yard of it.

He placed machine guns to cover every ravine on both sides. He registered the mortars. He worked with the 11th Marines to plot artillery concentrations directly onto the reverse slope and when necessary directly onto his own position. He looked at the ground the way an executioner looks at a scaffold, checking every angle, adjusting every rope.

On the night of September 12, Kawaguchi came up the ridge. It was not the reckless frontal assault Ichiki had made 3 weeks earlier. It was a careful layered penetration by infantry moving quietly through the ravines, feeling for weak points, concentrating where they thought they had found one. In the darkness, in the tangled brush of the two flanks, small savage fights broke out at ranges measured in feet.

Some Japanese soldiers reached the crest of the ridge. A few reached the marine command post. Edson himself at one point was standing behind a Browning, firing at figures that were 40 ft away and closing. The 11th Marines fired more than 2,000 rounds of artillery that night. The shells landed so close to the ridge itself that marine wounded were hit by fragments from their own guns.

It did not matter. Edson had told the gunners before the battle that if the ridge was in danger of being overrun, he wanted their shells on his position, not in front of it. They had understood. By the second night, the pattern was set. Kawaguchi threw in his last uncommitted betalians.

His men came again and again against a machine gun line that would not break, and they died in numbers Edson himself would never publicly describe. When it ended on the morning of September 14, roughly 830 Japanese soldiers lay dead in the grass and the ravines of what the Marines were already by then calling Bloody Ridge. Marine losses were 104 killed and about 240 wounded between the two battalions.

Two Marines would receive the Medal of Honor for that fight. Edson was one of them. He never particularly liked to talk about it afterward. It was said [music] by men who worked under him for the rest of the war that after Bloody Ridge his eyes changed. They did not become haunted exactly. They became further away.

Genjiroimi was not on Bloody Ridge. His unit was in land further east, still trying to move up. But he heard what happened. And in the pages of his diary from those weeks, something begins to shift. The tone in his early entries had been dutiful. careful, almost cheerful in places in the way a young officer will be cheerful when he is trying to be worthy of his commission.

Now in midepptember the diary begins to close in on itself. The entries become shorter. The subjects narrow. He writes about food. He writes that his platoon has been issued rations for 10 days. He writes a week later that the rations have been cut. He writes about a foraging detail that returned from a village called Kimbo with 9 L of rice and four packs of dried bread, and how glad his men were, how briefly they were refreshed.

He writes that a friendly battalion commander gave him a small share of miso soup one lunch, and that it was the first miso he had tasted in a month. reading his diary now 80 years later that miso soup sits on the page like a small candle in a darkening room and he writes about the deaths. Private Kitazawa died on a morning Emmy does not describe in detail.

He notes only that it was the second death in his platoon. He notes that Kitazawa’s death grieves him deeply. He writes that he had planned to hold a funeral service at 1,400 hours, but the group leader Sato did not come back in time. That is the entry. The words are those of a young officer trying to do his duty in a war that has begun to eat his men one at a time.

Later, when Kawaguchi’s brigade filed its official afteraction report for the Ridge Battle, EI and the other platoon leaders were required to submit their own reports. Ey wrote that four of his men whose names he recorded carefully had died in the battle of the Teneru River on September 13. This was not true. They had died of illness. I knew it.

He changed the cause of death himself in his own hand to give the families a story they could carry. He wrote in his diary that night that he felt he had done his duty as an officer. It is one of the quietest sentences ever written by a man at war. Through late September and into October, the Marines began to move. The days of pure defense were ending.

Vandergrift had received reinforcements. In midepptember, the Seventh Marines had come ashore. On October 13, the Army’s 164th Infantry Regiment landed, National Guardsmen from the Dakotas, part of the American Division, who would fight harder than anyone in the Pacific had expected them to fight. and Vandergrift had begun to send patrols outward from the perimeter, feeling for the Japanese positions along the Matanikau River to the west.

Those patrols were not the clean victories that the news reels would suggest. In late September, along the Matanikau, a marine patrol was cut off and nearly destroyed before it could be extracted. In early October, a larger operation crossed the river, was hit hard by Japanese counterattacks, and pulled back with heavy losses.

This was not the choreographed advance of a superior army. This was a force of exhausted, malariidden young men learning, one bloody patrol at a time, how to fight in a place their training had not prepared them for. The word for it in the diaries of the men who were there was not glorious. The word was work.

And a thousand miles to the north in Rabbal, General Hiakutake decided he had waited long enough. He would go to Guadal Canal himself. For a lieutenant general commanding an army to place himself on a contested island was almost unheard of in Japanese practice. Hiakutaki did it because he no longer trusted his generals in the field to see what he saw.

He brought with him the veteran second division, the Sendai Division under Lieutenant General Masau Maruyama, 53 years old, a stiff formal officer who had spent his career waiting for a command like this one. He brought Major General Yumasu, 50, a solid infantry commander who would lead one of the two main attack columns. He brought finally most of the artillery Japanese logistics could scrape together for one more attempt.

The plan was to attack from multiple directions at once. From the west, a mixed force with nine light tanks would cross the Matanikau and pin the Marines along the river line. From the south, deep in the jungle, Maruyama’s body would swing wide through terrain no army had ever moved through and strike Henderson Field from behind.

The dates were set. October 23 for the western attack. October 24 for the main assault. On October 23, the western attack went in. The nine Japanese tanks, small light vehicles carried down the slot with tremendous difficulty, rolled forward across a river crossing near the mouth of the Matanika. They were met by marine anti-tank guns and a single M3 Stewart.

Within minutes, all nine tanks were burning. The infantry that had followed them was cut down by artillery from the 11th Marines and machine gun fire from prepared positions along the river. The attack collapsed before it had properly begun. But the western attack was the diversion. The main attack came the following night, October 24 into 25.

Roughly 5,600 Japanese soldiers under Nasu and Maruyama moved out of the jungle south of Henderson Field. They had to spend days cutting their way through terrain. Their commanders had not properly reconited. They arrived exhausted, disoriented, in fragments several hours behind their planned assault times.

They struck a single battalion in prepared defensive positions. That battalion was the first battalion, 7th Marines. Its commander was Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Puller. Chesty Puller they called him. 44 years old, barrel-chested, jutjorded, in a permanent condition of quiet fury with anyone he considered less than serious about the profession of infantry.

He did not give speeches. He walked his line during the fighting in the open with a rifle in his hands and a cold pipe in his teeth, and he told his men in a voice that carried no theatrics that they were going to hold because there was no place behind them worth falling back to. Along that line, in a section held by his sea company, was a machine gun section run by a 25-year-old sergeant from Raritan, New Jersey.

His name was John Basselone. For most of that night, Basselone did what a machine gun section leader is supposed to do. He kept his guns firing. When a gun jammed, he cleared it. When a gun crew went down, he replaced them. At one point, when a section of the line was in danger of being overrun, and his gun position was low on belts, he ran through fire back to the ammunition point, gathered what he could carry, and ran back.

He did this more than once. When one of his guns was captured briefly by Japanese infantry, who broke through a gap, he led a small counterattack that retook the position with pistols. He was not fearless. Men who were with him would say afterward that he was frightened the entire night. He was competent. He had trained his crews well.

The Brownings had been positioned well. The mortar support had been called. Baselone that night was a well-prepared American professional doing a job he had been prepared to do and doing it under conditions that would have broken many men. He would receive the Medal of Honor for it.

He would become in the months that followed one of the most photographed enlisted men of the Pacific War. He did not want that. He wanted to go back to his machine guns. In the end, he did and he died on the beach at Ewoima in 1945 at 28 years old. Major General Nasu did not survive the night. He was hit during one of the failed attacks on Puller’s line.

He was carried off the field. He lingered for 2 days. He died on October 27. By dawn on October 26, the Japanese offensive had broken. Somewhere between 2,000 and 30 and Japanese soldiers lay dead in the jungle and along the wire. Unlothsy in the ground fighting were roughly a hundred killed. The Marines who walked out of their foxholes that morning did not celebrate. They were too tired.

Puller sat on a crate near his command post, drinking coffee from a canteen cup and looked out at what his battalion had done. He did not say anything for a long time. Two weeks later, in the waters just north of the island, the Japanese made one last serious attempt to turn the campaign around. It was called in the American afteraction reports, the naval battle of Guadal Canal.

It was fought over four nights from November 12th to November 15th, 1942. Some of what happened during those nights would enter naval history as the closest, most confused surface actions ever fought. On the night of November 13, an American force of five cruisers and eight destroyers ran head-on into a Japanese bombardment group that included two battleships.

The action [music] lasted from the first radar contact to the last shot roughly 34 minutes. The two American task force commanders, Rear Admiral Daniel Callahan, 52 years old, and Rear Admiral Norman Scott, [music] 53, were both killed. They remained the only two American admirals killed in a surface engagement in the entire Second World War.

But the Japanese battleship Hay was crippled and finished off the next day by American aircraft flying from Henderson Field. On the night of November 14 into 15, the last major surface action of the campaign took place. The battleship USS Washington using her radar to see through darkness that the Japanese lookouts could not penetrate tore into the Japanese battleship Kirishima with 16in shells at close range.

Kiriroshima was reduced to a burning wreck. Her crew scuttled her before dawn and in the same period an American strike force found the Japanese convoy carrying the men of the 38th Division to reinforce Guadal Canal. Of the 11 transport ships, only four reached the island. All four were destroyed on the beach before they could finish unloading.

Several thousand Japanese soldiers died in the water or on those beaches without ever setting foot in the fight for which they had been sent. That was the last serious Japanese attempt to reinforce Guadal Canal. On the island in the jungle east of the Matanika, Genjiro wrote in his diary that the rations had been cut again.

He did not yet know what had happened at sea. He only knew that the destroyers had stopped coming. December came to Guadal Canal the way winter never comes to the tropics. There was no cold. There was no change in the light. There was only the same wet green heat day after day and a slow quiet subtraction of men. In the jungle east of the Matani, Yji opened his diary in the late afternoons and wrote shorter and shorter entries.

The rice ration was one ball a day. He described it with the care of a man who no longer takes food for granted. A single ball of rice formed in the palm, salted if there was salt, eaten slowly. Some men made it last. Some men ate it in three swallows and then walked into the jungle and did not want anyone to see their faces.

The men were eating grass. They were eating the inner bark of certain trees. They were digging for roots that the local scouts before they had all disappeared had once said were edible. Some of those roots were not. Men died from the roots. Men died from insects they tried to eat raw. Men died from drinking water they knew they should not drink because the alternative was to die of thirst.

Malaria was universal. Dyentry was universal. The wounded, when they were wounded, mostly did not survive their wounds because there was no quinine, no sulfur powder, no morphine, no plasma. There was a bandage if a man was lucky. There was, if he was not, a grenade left within reach, and a quiet understanding between him and the men who left him behind.

An internal medical report from the 17th Army in late October had already put the situation on paper. More than 60% of the Japanese force on Guadal Canal was incapable of combat. 50 men a day were dying. Most of them were not dying of American bullets. The men on the ground had a name for the island by then.

They did not use the Japanese pronunciation of Guadal Canal anymore. They called Guardit to the Hungry Island. It was written in some of their letters home. Letters that were never sent. letters that were found later in the pockets of the dead. At Rabal, the men in the planning rooms were beginning to say a word out loud that they had refused to say before.

Withdrawal. The word could not be used in public. It could not appear in newspapers. It could not appear in the daily communics read out on the radio. But in the closed offices of the Imperial General headquarters in Tokyo and in the operations room at Rabbal, the officers who had counted the transports lost in November and who had read the medical reports and who had watched the airfield they could no longer take from the Americans start receiving bomber squadrons from home had begun to understand that the arithmetic

of Guadal Canal had turned against them and would not turn back. York. On December 31, 1942 at an imperial conference in Tokyo, the decision was formalized at the highest level. The 17th Army would be evacuated from Guadal Canal. Of the approximately 36,000 Japanese soldiers who had come to the island, perhaps 11,000 remained alive.

Of those 11,000, only about 7,000 could still walk on their own. The rest lay in makeshift jungle hospitals or in the rotting shelters their comrades had built for them waiting. The operation to bring them home was given a code name operation K. It would be executed with the same destroyers that had brought them there.

Three separate nightly runs in the first week of February. The plan was to pull the walking wounded first, then the rear guard, then as a final gesture, the men who had held the outermost lines to cover the withdrawal itself. The Americans did not know what was happening. This is one of the strangest and most quietly stunning facts of the entire Pacific War.

The largest evacuation Japanese naval forces would conduct during the war. An operation involving thousands of desperate men and a nightly run of destroyers directly under American air surveillance took place under the noses of American intelligence and the intelligence officers guessed wrong. They saw the destroyers massing at the Shortlands.

They saw the increased Japanese air activity over the slot. They put those pieces together with what they knew about the Japanese character and they concluded that the enemy was preparing another major offensive to retake Henderson Field. New American units were rushed to strengthen the perimeter. Patrols went out looking for the point of the coming Japanese attack.

There was no coming Japanese attack. There were only tens of thousands of men waiting on the beaches at Cape Espirans in the darkness of three consecutive nights, staring out at the water, waiting for the destroyers to come and take them home. On the night of February 7th, 1943, the last destroyer group arrived.

Second Lieutenant Genjiro Emi was among the men who boarded that final run. He had been on the island for 160 days. He had come ashore as a young officer with a small platoon of anti-tank gunners and a diary wrapped in oil skin. He was leaving with the same diary and with almost none of the men he had lost weight he did not have to lose.

His uniform hung on him. He had malaria that would flare in him on and off for the rest of his life. His diary from that night is very short. He wrote later when he was recovering in a field hospital on Bugenville that he lay on the deck of the destroyer as it began to move north and he looked at the dark shape of the island falling away behind him and he did not entirely believe that he was still alive.

Behind him on the beaches at Cape Espirans, the fires the rear guard had lit to make the American aircraft think the Japanese still held their positions were still burning. By the time those fires went out, roughly 10,652 Japanese soldiers had been taken off Guadal Canal in three nights. It was one of the most successful operations the Japanese Navy would conduct during the war.

And its success came from a decision no one at Imperial Headquarters would ever advertise. It was the successful evacuation of a defeated army. On the morning of February 9th, 1943, American patrols moving carefully westward along the coast came into positions they had expected to find defended. They found no one. They advanced further. Still no one.

They came to villages where the cook fires were cold, where equipment lay abandoned, where the sick and the dying had been left behind because there had been no way to carry them to the beach. Later that day, Major General Alexander Patch, 52 years old, commanding what was now the 14th Corps of Army and Marine Units, sent his radio message to Admiral William Howy at Numere.

Tokyo Express, he wrote, no longer has a terminus on Guadal Canal. It was in its way one of the flatter and more American sentences of the whole war. There was no triumph in it. There was only a report from a professional officer that a job assigned 6 months earlier had been completed. The numbers of the campaign once they were assembled told a story that Americans of a certain age would carry the rest of their lives.

The United States had suffered roughly,600 killed in the ground fighting on Guadal Canal and roughly 4,200 wounded. Thousands more had been temporarily removed from the war by malaria, dysentery, and the tropical diseases the island had used as its own quiet weapons. The Navy had lost more than 5,000 men in the waters around the island in the hammering nights that had come to be called Iron Bottom Sound because of the number of ships resting on its floor.

Japanese losses were far greater. Best modern estimates drawn from historian Richard Frank’s exhaustive work with both American and Japanese records put Japanese ground deaths at roughly 19,200. But the composition of that number is where the true weight lies. Only about 8,500 of those men had died from wounds received in combat.

The rest, more than half, had died of starvation, of malaria, of dysentery, of infections that would have been treatable anywhere else on Earth. Of the entire Japanese force sent to Guadal Canal, fewer than a thousand had been captured alive, and most of those were too weak to resist their captives. The Marines who came off the island did not, when they went home, described themselves as jungle warriors.

They described themselves as very tired. They described the island in language that [music] did not translate well into peace time conversation. They wrote letters to the parents of the men who had not come back. And they carried for the rest of their lives the small precise memory of what one particular friend had looked like on a particular morning and the way the light had come through the palms.

Genjiro went home to Japan by way of a long convolescence. He recovered slowly. He returned to service. He survived the war. On the 3rd day of March 1944, in the middle of a war that Japan was already losing, he was married at the Hyen Shrine in Kyoto. It was a Shinto ceremony, quiet, small, held in the way such ceremonies had been held in Kyoto for centuries.

He was 30 years old. His bride’s name was Akira. In the photograph from that day, he is very thin and he is smiling. He would live for many decades after the war. He worked. He raised his family. He kept the diary he had brought back from Guadal Canal and he kept the notebooks he had filled during his convolescence.

And for 12 years, he edited them together with other veterans accounts he had gathered into a private book he titled simply my guad canal. He published it in a small private edition in 1992. In his own introduction, he wrote a sentence that was [music] in its way the epitap of the entire Japanese effort in the South Pacific.

I was no excellent soldier. He wrote it plainly, without shame, without pride, without embellishment. He wrote in the same introduction that most war memoirs are dressed up by the men who write them for their own reasons. He said that his was not. He said that his book contained a lot of disadvantage and disgrace and shortcoming because those were the things that had actually been there.

It is the honest voice of a man who had gone to a war he had been told he could win and had come home from a war he had learned Japan was going to lose. Kiotake Kawaguchi, who had lost his brigade on the ridge Merritt Edson had named after himself, also survived. He wrote in postwar reflections that the Japanese belief in the supremacy of the warrior spirit had run into something on Guadal Canal that the doctrine of the Imperial Army had never accounted for.

He did not mean superior American soldiers exactly. Kawaguchi respected the Marines who had killed his men, but he did not think they were as fighting individuals unusually gifted. What he thought was that they had been supported by a system his own army could not match. Artillery that never ran out of shells, aircraft that appeared over the beaches every morning.

Ships that could resupply a division indefinitely. Medical evacuation that meant a wounded man had a chance to live. That was what had beaten him. Not the American infantrymen, the American factory. The Japanese destroyer Captain Riso Tanaka, who had commanded many of the Tokyo Express runs, and who had brought many thousands of soldiers to the island and taken far fewer of them home, wrote after the war that Guadal Canal had become, in the end, the graveyard of the Imperial Japanese Army.

For the men who fought there on both sides, that word had a very specific meaning. It was not a metaphor. The Marines who left the island in December of 1942 were sent to Australia to rest and rebuild. They were emaciated. Photographs from that period show young men who look old. Some of them would fight again in New Britain, in Pelleu, in Okinawa.

Some of them would not. The Japanese survivors of Operation Ki were scattered to other units across the shrinking perimeter of the empire. Many of them would die in later battles on other islands in places that would become their own famous names. A few of them would go home in 1945 to find cities they no longer recognized and to spend the rest of their lives trying to explain to sons and grandsons what it had actually been like on the hungry island.

Guadal Canal became in the memory of the Pacific War the place where the tide turned. That is a phrase historians use and it is not wrong. But for the men who had been there on either side, it was less a turning point than the moment when the truth of the war became visible. What they had learned in 6 months of fighting in the mud and the rain was that the war was not going to be decided by the courage of any particular battalion or by the honor of any particular flag or by the spirit of any particular nation. It was going to be

decided by the factory and by the ship and by the endless slow procession of supply and replacement that a modern industrial power could sustain and a smaller nation could not. The Japanese soldiers who had come ashore in August of 1942, believing they would sweep the Americans into the sea before sunrise had learned this the hard way, in the dark, one meal at a time.

The Americans had learned it, too, though it would take them longer to say so. And somewhere in Kyoto decades later, an old man named Genjiro opened a small private book he had written for his children and read again the sentence he had put in the introduction and closed it and did not say anything.