Why Were They So Terrified Japanese Troops Feared American Marines Jungle Warfare At Guadalcanal!

If you had a father, an uncle, or a grandfather who served in the Pacific, this story may already be part of your family. You just may not know it yet. In August of 1942 on a jungle island most Americans  had never heard of, 11,000 young Marines faced an enemy that had not lost a battle in 5 years of continuous war.

6 months later, that enemy would leave the island in secret by night on the decks of destroyers. The survivors would weigh less than 90 lb. This is the story of Guadalcanal, of the Marines who held on when the Navy had to leave them, of a Japanese officer who kept a diary through 6 months of hell, and of the moment the Imperial Japanese Army first understood in the mud of a Pacific island that it was going to lose the war.

Not because America was braver,  but because America had learned something the Japanese Empire could not understand. The rain had stopped just before midnight on August 18th, 1942, but the jungle still breathed. Water dripped from banana leaves the size of a man’s chest. Palm fronds sagged under their own weight.

The air itself felt like something you had to push through, thick with the smell of rotting vegetation and salt from the sea half a mile away. A young Japanese officer named Genji ro Imi  crouched at the edge of a coconut grove near Taivu Point. His uniform was already soaked through. >>  >> He opened his diary.

He was 26 years old, an officer of the 8th Independent Anti-Tank  Gun Company, trained at the Artillery School in Chiba. He had never seen combat before this night. Around him 917 men of Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki’s detachment were moving silently through the darkness. Six destroyers had brought them here from Truk, gliding into the coast under a moonless sky, offloading men and equipment in less than 2 hours, and vanishing back into the  Pacific before dawn could betray them.

Imi wrote three lines by the glow of a shielded flashlight.  The landing is complete. The Americans do not know we are here. Tomorrow we  will drive them into the sea. He believed every word. So did every man around him. Because at that moment,  on that beach, on that island, whose name most of them still could not pronounce correctly, the Imperial Japanese Army had never lost a battle.

Not one. Since 1937, from Shanghai to Nanking, from Malaya to Singapore, from the Philippines  to the Dutch East Indies, Japanese soldiers had walked into  places European powers had held for centuries and taken them. British generals  had surrendered to them.

American armies had fled from them. Filipino defenders had died by the tens of  thousands trying to hold them back. In 5 years of continuous warfare, the sun had risen every morning on new Japanese conquests. And now Colonel Ichiki had told  his officers a very simple thing. “These are Americans, >>  >> soft, untested.

They will break at the first sound of our voices. We will sweep them  into the sea before sunrise.” He said this despite explicit orders to wait. Rabaul had been clear. The full regiment was coming. Reinforcements  were forming up. Ichiki was to establish a beachhead, dig in, gather intelligence, and hold his position until the rest of  his force arrived.

Only then with proper numbers and proper preparation  would he attack. Ichiki read the orders. He nodded.  He said he understood, and then he decided he would attack anyway.  He was 50 years old, a slender, precise man with cold eyes and a reputation across the entire Japanese  army as one of the finest infantry tacticians alive.

He had  taught at the army infantry school. He had written training manuals still used  to train young officers. He was said to have a photographic memory for terrain. He  was also, according to those who knew him best, a man who believed the Japanese  soldier’s spirit could overcome any material disadvantage on Earth. He had studied the Americans.

He had read every intelligence report. He had concluded that they were a nation of shopkeepers and film stars, a people who valued comfort more than honor, who would flee at the sound of the first bayonet  charge. He was about to test that theory with the lives of 917 men.

12 days earlier, on the morning of August 7th, >>  >> those men had not been there yet. The Americans had. At dawn on that day,  11,000 United States Marines of the 1st Marine Division stormed ashore at Lunga Point 20 miles  to the west. It was called Operation Watchtower. It was the first American offensive of the Pacific War.

It had  been planned in a hurry, launched with inadequate resources, and would be remembered by the men  who fought it by another name entirely, Operation Shoestring. They landed expecting to die on the beaches. They found the beaches almost empty. The airfield the Japanese had been building, an unfinished coral runway carved out of the jungle plane was defended by roughly 2,000 Korean construction laborers and 600  Japanese naval troops.

When the American landing craft appeared on the horizon, most  of them ran into the jungle without firing a shot. They abandoned everything. Rice cookers still warm, uniforms neatly folded,  blueprints of the runway spread out on drafting tables, trucks with their engines still running. By nightfall on August 8th, American engineers were already working to complete  what the Japanese had started.

They named it Henderson Field after Major Lofton Henderson, a Marine aviator killed at the Battle of Midway two months before. Within days, the first aircraft would land on that runway. Within weeks, it would become the single most important piece of real estate in the Pacific Ocean. Because whoever controlled Henderson Field controlled the sea around Guadalcanal in daylight,  and whoever controlled the sea in daylight controlled the campaign.

The Marines who took it were commanded by a Virginian named Alexander Archer Vandegrift. He was 55 years old, silver-haired, soft-spoken. >>  >> He had the manners of a southern gentleman and eyes that missed nothing. He had served in Haiti, in Nicaragua, in  China. He had spent 33 years in the Marine Corps learning how men fight >>  >> and how men die.

He did not raise his voice. He did not make  speeches. He looked at maps and terrain and supply lists, and he made decisions. On the night of August 8th,  he made a decision that saved his division. He ordered his men to dig in. Not to advance, not to pursue, not to chase the fleeing Japanese  into the jungle.

To dig. Machine gun positions with overlapping fields of fire. Mortar pits  registered on likely approach routes. Wire strung between coconut trees. Sandbags stacked around ammunition dumps. His engineers work through the night finishing the airfield. His infantry work through the night preparing for what he knew was coming.

He was  right to prepare. He was also at that moment more alone than he knew. Because at 1:36 in the morning on August 9th >>  >> in the black waters of the strait north of Guadalcanal, a Japanese vice admiral named Gunichi  Mikawa led seven cruisers and one destroyer through the darkness  at high speed.

They caught the Allied fleet completely by surprise. In less than an hour, four Allied heavy cruisers were sunk or sinking. The USS Quincy torn apart by shellfire burning from bow to stern. The USS Vincennes hit by three  torpedoes capsizing before her crew could abandon ship. The USS Astoria ablaze from stem to stern going down with hundreds of men trapped below  decks. The HMAS Canberra.

The Australian cruiser taking 24 shells in less than 2  minutes. More than 1,000 sailors died in the burning water. It became known as the Battle of Savo Island. It remains  the worst defeat in the history of the United States Navy. When dawn came, the American  transport ships still offloading supplies for the Marines had to make a decision.

Stay and finish and risk being  caught by Japanese air attack or leave immediately taking with them thousands of tons of food, ammunition, medical supplies, and equipment that had not yet been unloaded. They left. Vandegrift stood on the beach and watched them go. His men had barely half the food they needed. They had rifles, but not enough ammunition for a sustained defense.

They had no barbed wire beyond what they had already strung. They had no anti-aircraft artillery in position, and they were now cut off from resupply by  an enemy fleet that owned the sea around them. He said nothing.  He walked back to his command post and continued making decisions.

10 days later,  Colonel Ichiki’s men landed at Taivu Point. By then, Vandegrift had done something the Japanese had not anticipated. He had used the time. He had used every hour of every day. His Marines had transformed the ground around Henderson Field into a fortress of interlocking fire. His engineers had finished the runway.

On August 20th, the first American aircraft landed on Henderson Field. F4F Wildcats and SBD Dauntless dive bombers of Marine Aircraft Group 23. They called themselves the Cactus Air Force after the code name  for Guadalcanal. From that moment on, the daylight hours belonged to America. The night still belonged to Japan.

And into those nights, Colonel Ichiki  now walked with 917 men and the certainty of an unbroken record. What Colonel Ichiki did  not know, what none of them knew, was that a Marine captain had just  found a document in a dead officer’s pocket that would kill them all. On the morning of August 19th,  Ichiki made his first mistake.

He sent a reconnaissance patrol west along the coastal track to gather intelligence on American positions. It was standard doctrine. It was also fatal. At roughly the same moment,  a Marine patrol from Company A, First Battalion, First Marines, under Captain Charles Brush, was moving east along the same track.

>>  >> Charles Brush was a quiet officer with a habit of paying attention to small things.  He had 34 men with him. They were spread out in a standard patrol formation, weapons at the ready, eyes on the tree line.  They saw the Japanese first. The firefight lasted less than an hour. It was vicious and one-sided.

When it was over, 31 Japanese soldiers  lay dead in the grass, including four officers. Three Marines had been killed, but that was not the important part. The important part was what Captain Brush  found on the bodies. Fresh maps of the American perimeter. Detailed sketches of Henderson  Field. Notes on Marine positions written in careful Japanese handwriting.

Documents  identifying the unit as elements of the 28th Infantry Regiment. Estimates of American strength. The estimates  were wrong, wildly, catastrophically wrong. Japanese intelligence had told Colonel Ichiki that the Marines on Guadalcanal numbered perhaps 2,000 men, >>  >> poorly organized, ready to run.

The real number was over 11,000.  Captain Brush raced back to the perimeter with the documents. Within hours, they were on General Vandegrift’s desk.  Vandegrift read them, and he understood immediately. An attack  was coming, soon, from the east. And the men coming to make  it did not know what they were walking into. He gave orders.

Colonel Clifton Cates of the First Marines >>  >> was to reinforce the position along the sandbar at the mouth of the Ilu River. The Marines had been told it was called the Tenaru. The name would stick in every account written afterward, even though it was wrong. Lieutenant Colonel Leonard Cresswell’s 2nd Battalion was to move up in support.

The M1917 A1 Browning water-cooled machine guns were to be positioned to create interlocking fields of fire across the sandbar so that no square foot of it would be uncovered. The 37-mm anti-tank  guns were to be loaded with canister rounds. Artillery was to register defensive  fire missions on the approaches, and then they were to wait.

Just after midnight on August 21st, >>  >> a figure staggered out of the darkness toward the Marine lines. He was covered in blood. His hands were tied  behind his back with the rope still hanging from his wrists. His throat had been cut.  His face had been slashed. He had been stabbed with a bayonet many times. He was still alive.

His name was Jacob Vouza. He was 50 years old, a retired sergeant of the Solomon Islands Protectorate Armed Constabulary, a native scout  who had walked out of the jungle to help the Americans when so many others had run away. The Japanese patrol had caught him carrying a small American flag  hidden in his loincloth.

They had tied him to a tree. They had questioned  him for hours. When he refused to speak, they had cut him and stabbed  him and left him to die. He had chewed through the ropes.  He had crawled through 3 mi of jungle in the dark with a punctured lung, gagging on his own blood, holding the wounds in  his neck closed with his hands.

He staggered into the Marine perimeter >>  >> and found an officer. And he spoke in short breaths before he collapsed. The Japanese were coming. Hundreds  of them. Tonight. Behind him, out in the darkness at the edge of the Ilu River, Colonel Ichiki was already forming  his men for the charge.

He had not waited for reinforcements. He had not scouted the American positions. He had not sent word back to Rabaul. He had lost his intelligence patrol without ever knowing it was  gone. He did not know that the Marines were waiting for him. He did not know how many they were.

He did not know about the machine guns or the anti-tank guns or the artillery or the men lying silent in their foxholes with their fingers  on the triggers. He knew only that he was Japanese and his soldiers  were Japanese and no Japanese soldier had lost a battle in 5 years of war. He raised  his hand. The first wave of 917 men rose from the tree line and began to move toward the sandbar.

Behind them, Kenjiro Emi followed with his anti-tank  guns, still believing what he had written in his diary the night before. “Tomorrow, we will drive them into the sea.” He was wrong. He was about  to learn how wrong. The Marines had won the first battle before it began, but the jungle itself was about to become the enemy that killed more men than any Japanese soldier ever would.

The first sound was water. >>  >> Boots in the shallow river. Hundreds of them. A soft, wet, rhythmic sound that  carried across the sandbar in the dead air before dawn. The Marines in their foxholes heard it before they saw anything. They heard it and they  knew. Then came the voices, screaming. Not words, not orders, something older than language.

>>  >> The battle cries of 900 men who believed with every cell in their bodies that they could not lose. They came out of the darkness at a full run, bayonets, fixed rifles firing from the hip, grenades flying ahead of them in short arcs. Colonel Ichiki  was somewhere in the middle of the formation, urging his men forward.

The first Japanese soldiers hit the sandbar at a sprint and kept coming. The Marines waited.  They waited until the front rank was 30 yd away. Then Corporal Leroy Diamond, a machine gunner from New Jersey, who was 24 years old, pulled  the trigger on his M1917A1 Browning. The gun fired 600 rounds  a minute.

It was water-cooled, which meant it could fire indefinitely as long as the water jacket  stayed filled and cooled. The barrel would glow red before it failed. The bolt would  keep cycling through the ammunition belt in a steady mechanical rhythm that never stopped. Diamond fired for hours.

Beside him, other Brownings opened up along the entire length of the sandbar. The interlocking fields of fire that Vandegrift had ordered began to do the work they had  been designed to do. Every square foot of the sandbar was  crossed by at least two guns. There was nowhere to hide. There was nowhere to run.

The Japanese kept coming. They came in waves. They fell in waves. The .30 caliber  rounds tore through cloth and flesh and bone and the men behind them >>  >> and the men behind those. The 37-mm anti-tank guns fired canister  rounds, which were essentially enormous shotgun shells, and each round  turned a section of the sandbar into a spray of shredded meat and sand.

Some Japanese  soldiers made it across. They ran into the Marine positions with  bayonets and Marines rose out of their foxholes with rifles and knives and entrenching tools and killed them there >>  >> in the dark. Private First Class Al Schmidt from Philadelphia was blinded by a Japanese grenade at close range  and kept firing his machine gun by touch, aiming toward the voices until his gunner guided his hands.

By 4:00 in the morning, the sandbar was covered in bodies. By first light, the survivors of the first wave were trapped in a coconut grove east of the river, unable to advance and unable to  retreat. Vandegrift gave one more order. Five M3 Stuart  light tanks crossed the sandbar and drove into the grove.

Richard Tregaskis,  the 25-year-old war correspondent from International News Service,  who had come ashore with the Marines to write down what he saw, watched the tanks from a forward observation post. He wrote in his notebook in a hand that shook only a little that it was fascinating to see them among the trees pivoting  and turning and spitting sheets of yellow flame.

He wrote that the rear of the tanks looked like meat  grinders. He wrote that he had not realized there were so many Japanese in the grove until the tanks  flushed them out. By noon on August 21st, the battle was over. Of Of 917 men who had come ashore with Colonel Ichiki, roughly  800 were dead.

128 survivors, mostly from support units that had  stayed behind near the landing site, faded back into the jungle. They sent one  radio message to Rabaul. “The regiment has been destroyed. Colonel Ichiki  died on the sandbar.” Accounts differ on how. The official Japanese version published after the war  said he burned his regimental colors and committed ritual suicide when he saw that the attack had failed.

Some Japanese survivors said he  died leading a final charge into the machine guns. It does not matter. He was  50 years old and he had taught at the Army Infantry School and he had  been certain that spirit could overcome bullets and now he was dead in the sand  with his men. American casualties were 44 dead >>  >> and 71 wounded.

The Marines who had killed 800 men that night sat down on the  sand at sunrise. Some of them smoked. Some of them cried. Most of  them said nothing. They were 19 years old, 20 21. Two months ago they had been working at  gas stations in Ohio, at farms in Nebraska, at shipyards in Baltimore.

Now they had done a thing they would carry with them for the rest of their lives. That night at the edge of the coconut grove, Genjiro Emi crouched in the dark and opened his  diary. He had survived. His anti-tank guns had never fired.  He had watched from a distance and he had seen what happened to men who ran into American machine guns in the open and something  inside him had changed.

He wrote one line, “Everything we were told was a lie.” >>  >> He closed the diary. He did not write again for 9 days. In Rabaul, 560 miles to the north, Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake received the news of the Tenaru disaster and did not believe it at first. He had  been told the Americans would break.

He had been told Japanese spirit would prevail. >>  >> He had believed those things because his entire career had been built on believing them. Now, he had to plan a second attempt.  He assigned it to Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi. Kawaguchi was 50 years old, a veteran of the fighting in the Philippines and Borneo, a man with a reputation for careful planning and personal courage.

He would lead the 35th Infantry Brigade. He would have 5,000 men. He would not make Ichiki’s  mistake. But, he had a problem Ichiki had not faced. He could not bring his artillery with him. The Americans now owned the sea around Guadalcanal during daylight  hours. The Cactus Air Force flying from Henderson Field had already begun sinking any Japanese transport  ship that dared approach the island in daylight.

The old method of amphibious  warfare, slow transports carrying heavy equipment and supplies, was suicide. So, the Japanese  improvised. They used destroyers, fast, sleek warships that could sprint down the length of the Solomon Islands chain from the Shortlands, >>  >> dump troops on Guadalcanal in the middle of the night, and be gone before sunrise.

The Americans  called it the Tokyo Express. It ran almost every night between August 29th and September 4th. It delivered nearly 5,000 men of Kawaguchi’s Brigade to Taivu Point. Emi’s anti-tank company had been attached to the Kawaguchi Brigade after  Ichiki’s destruction. He now waited in the jungle with new men he did not know in a different sector under a different commander, still believing  there might be a way to win.

The Tokyo Express contained the seed of Japanese destruction,  though the Japanese did not fully understand this yet. Destroyer decks  are small. A destroyer can carry men. It can carry a little ammunition.  It can carry a few crates of rice. It cannot carry artillery. It cannot carry trucks. >>  >> It cannot carry mules or horses.

It cannot carry field kitchens or hospitals or fuel depots or any of the thousand things that a modern army needs to fight  a sustained campaign. Every Japanese soldier who came ashore at Taivu Point  came ashore with what he could carry on his back and nothing more. The rice ration for a fighting man was 600 g a day. Most of them received 200.

Some received less. They were expected to make up the difference by foraging in the jungle. Coconuts,  wild taro, whatever they could find. When they could  not find food, they were expected to keep fighting anyway. On the American  side of the line, other things were happening.

They wrote letters home when they could. Short letters. Nothing about the fear. Nothing about the friend who had died the week before. Just I am well. The food is fine. Tell Mom I love her. The letters would take 6 weeks to reach Kansas or Michigan  or Texas. By the time a mother read that her son was well, he might already be dead.

Lieutenant Colonel Merritt Edson, 45 years  old, called Red Mike for his hair and for his temper, commanded the First Raider Battalion. He was a small man with a soft voice and pale blue eyes that made  grown Marines look at their boots when he spoke to them. He had spent 25 years in the Marine Corps thinking about how to fight, and he had opinions about it that some of his superiors did  not enjoy hearing.

On September 8th, Edson led a raid on the village of  Tasimboko, 20 miles east of the American perimeter. He found something no one expected. Tons of supplies, rice in crates, artillery ammunition, medical equipment, enough  material to support several thousand men, and documents, maps, orders, detailed plans. Edson stood in the middle of the captured supply dump and read  the documents by the light of a burning storehouse.

His executive officer watched his face  change. Kawaguchi was coming. Not along the coast, not across the river. From the south. Through the jungle along a ridge that ran directly  toward Henderson Field. Edson folded the documents and put them  in his pocket and gave the order to burn everything else and pull back to the perimeter.

He walked back to Vandegrift’s command post  that night, and he laid the documents on the general’s field desk, and he said in his quiet voice, “They will come from the ridge. Let me put my men on the  ridge.” Vandegrift approved. Edson had 3 days. He used every hour of them. 840 men, raiders and parachutists.  A coral spine of high ground that ran a thousand yards south of Henderson Field.

Narrow, covered in kunai grass and scattered trees,  steep ravines on either side. Terrible ground to attack across, perfect ground to defend. Edson placed his machine guns to create interlocking fire down both slopes. He placed his mortars in defilade behind the  ridge. He walked the ground with the artillery observers from the 11th Marines and registered defensive fire missions on every likely approach route. Then he waited.

On the night of September 12th, Kawaguchi’s men came out of the jungle. They did not charge like Ichiki had charged. Kawaguchi had learned from that disaster.  His men infiltrated in small groups moving up through the ravines, probing for weak points, trying to find the seams in the American line. The seams were not there.

>>  >> The 11th Marines fired 2,000 rounds of high explosive that night. The forward observers called down artillery so close to their own positions that shrapnel wounded American Marines in their foxholes. Machine guns fired until the water in the cooling jackets boiled and the crews replaced it from canteens.

Mortar crews dropped rounds through their tubes as  fast as they could feed them. Japanese soldiers reached the American positions and were killed in the trenches with knives and pistols and hands. Others were cut down before they got close.  By dawn, the first attack had failed. Kawaguchi pulled back and prepared to try again.

The second night  was worse. Kawaguchi threw his remaining strength at the ridge in a desperate attempt to break through before American reinforcements could arrive. His men came in waves. They died in waves.  At one point in the fighting, the situation on Edson’s Ridge became so critical that Edson himself picked  up a rifle and joined the firing line and shot Japanese soldiers coming up the slope 40 yards from his command post.

By dawn on September 14th, Kawaguchi’s offensive was destroyed. Somewhere between 830 and 850 Japanese soldiers lay dead on the ridge and in the  ravines around it. American casualties on the ridge itself were  104 killed and over 200 wounded. The Marines began to call it Bloody  Ridge. Then, after a few days, they began to call it Edson’s Ridge.

The name would stick. Edson survived the battle from his rear position  with the anti-tank guns. He never fired them. He wrote in his diary two nights later, his hand shaking so badly  the characters were nearly illegible, that the ridge had been on fire in the darkness.

He wrote that he had seen a friend from the artillery school  die from a piece of shrapnel that severed his leg above the knee and that his friend had lain there for  six hours calling for his mother before he stopped. He wrote one more line. I do not think we are going to win this war. He tore the page out.

Then he put it back in the diary. By October, one man in three on the American  side was fighting with a fever. On the Japanese side, one man in three  was already dead. And Rabaul was about to send the largest attack  of the entire campaign. The environment itself became a weapon that killed with impartiality.

Malaria infected nearly  every American who spent more than a few weeks on the island. By December, the 1st Marine Division would report over 8,000 malaria cases. >>  >> Dysentery was universal. Men suffered from fungal infections that ate through the skin between their toes. Jungle rot opened sores on their legs and arms that would not heal in the constant  humidity. They lost weight.

They lost teeth. They kept fighting because they had food and they had medicine  and they had the certainty that ships would come. Ships came. American supply ships protected by aircraft from Henderson Field during daylight hours delivered  food and ammunition and medicine and replacement equipment.

There were shortages.  There was rationing. But the flow never stopped. On the Japanese side, no such flow existed.  Imi wrote in his diary on October 15th that his men had begun to  eat the paste from the artillery shell packing. It contained a small amount of starch. It was not food. It was better than nothing.

He wrote  that a soldier in his section had eaten a plant with red berries the day before and had died in the night foaming at the mouth. >>  >> He wrote that the men now called Guadalcanal by a new name, Gato, starvation island. By late October, more than 60% of the Japanese 17th Army on Guadalcanal was incapacitated by disease or malnutrition.

Combat effectiveness  had collapsed. Soldiers were dying at a rate of 50 a day, most of them not from combat wounds,  but from starvation. And Hyakutake in Rabaul still  believed the situation could be reversed. He came to Guadalcanal himself in October  to command what would be the largest Japanese offensive of the campaign.

>>  >> He brought elements of the second infantry division. He brought >>  >> artillery delivered in pieces by destroyer over multiple nights and reassembled on the beach. He brought tanks.  He brought Major General Yumio Nasu. Nasu was 49 years old, a veteran of the fighting in China, a man Hyakutake trusted  to lead the main assault.

>> On the night of October 24th, Nasu would take  5,600 men through the jungle south of Henderson Field and break the American line.  The American line at that spot was held by the 1st Battalion 7th Marines  under Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Burwell Puller. He was called Chesty. >> He was 44  years old, and he was already the kind of Marine that other Marines told stories  about.

He had a barrel chest and a bulldog jaw, and a voice that could be heard three companies away. >>  >> He had fought in Haiti and Nicaragua and China. He had received the Navy Cross three times. He was reinforced on the night of October 24th by elements of the 164th Infantry Regiment of the Americal Division, the first US Army  unit to arrive on Guadalcanal.

The rain began at sunset. >> By midnight, it was falling in sheets. >> By 1:00 in the morning, the jungle south of Henderson Field was so dark that a man  could not see his hand held 6 in from his face. That was when Nasu’s  men came out of the tree line. They came in the same way Kawaguchi’s men had come, infiltrating  in small groups, screaming, charging.

They died in the same  way. The artillery of the 11th Marines fired danger close missions all  night. Machine guns opened up on pre-registered lanes. Mortar rounds fell in the darkness  with a wet thumping sound. Puller walked his lines in the rain calm and enormous and profane telling his men where to shoot and how much to fire and when to hold.

At the critical moment when Japanese soldiers had overrun a section of the American line  Sergeant John Basilone became the difference between holding and  breaking. He was 25 years old from Raritan, New Jersey. A section leader with two heavy machine gun crews in Puller’s  battalion. When one of his guns jammed from the mud and rain, he stripped it down and repaired it under fire.

When another gun crew was killed, he took the gun himself and kept firing. When ammunition ran low,  he wrapped his shirt around the burning hot of two guns and carried them barefoot through a driving rainstorm to a new position. Then ran back through Japanese infiltrated jungle to bring belted  ammunition forward again and again for hours cutting his feet on the coral rock.

At dawn more than a thousand Japanese soldiers lay dead in front of the Marine line. Major General Yumio Nasu was among them killed by machine gun fire while trying to rally his men. Sergeant Basilone would receive the Medal of Honor for his  actions that night. He would become the first enlisted Marine of the Second World War to receive it.

He would never talk about it much. Emi watching the return of the survivors from the Nasu offensive  wrote in his diary on the afternoon of October 26th that the men who came back looked already dead. Their uniforms were black  with mud. Their eyes did not focus. One of them was carrying a rifle without a bolt.

Another was carrying  nothing at all. He wrote that he had begun to understand something. Every American soldier he had seen killed  had been replaced by two more within a week. Every American gun that broke had been replaced within a day. Every American who was wounded  had been carried to a hospital where doctors put him back together.

On the Japanese side, no one was coming to replace anyone.  He closed the diary. He looked out at the jungle. He listened to the American aircraft passing overhead in the moonlight going somewhere to bomb something. Coming back an hour later, empty and ready to be reloaded. He wondered how long it would be before he was one of the men in black uniforms with unfocused eyes walking back from a battle he had already lost.

He did not know yet that the answer was three weeks. He did not know yet that the ships he had been waiting for the ships bringing reinforcements and food and  hope were about to be destroyed at sea in the largest naval battle of the campaign. In Tokyo on the last day of December, something happened that had never happened before in the history of Imperial Japan.

The rain stopped on the morning of November 12th, 1942. Genjiro Immi stood on a low ridge above the coast  and looked out at the Iron Bottom Sound. That was what the Americans had begun  to call it. The strait between Guadalcanal and Savo Island where so many ships from both sides had already gone down.

So many that the sailors  said the bottom was paved with steel. He was 26 years old. He weighed 112 lbs.  3 months ago when he had landed at Taivu Point with Colonel Ichiki, he had weighed 155.  He was waiting for the ships. Everyone was waiting for the ships. The word had come down  through the officers a week earlier.

A great convoy was being assembled at Rabaul. 11 transport ships, the full 38th Infantry Division, artillery, trucks, medical supplies,  enough food to feed the surviving men on Guadalcanal for months, enough ammunition to launch one final offensive  that would drive the Americans off the island for good. It would be escorted by battleships, real battleships.

The Hiei and the Kirishima. 14-in guns, >>  >> steel plate a foot thick. The two capital ships that had helped destroy the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. >>  >> They were coming. Emi wrote in his diary on the evening of November 11th that he could hear his men praying. He wrote that some of them had  not eaten in 4 days.

He wrote that a corporal in his section had died the night before sitting up against a palm  tree and when they went to move the body in the morning, they discovered that he had been dead for at least 12 hours and the ants had already begun to work on his face. He wrote that the ships would come and everything would be all right.

He believed this because he had to. He was wrong. 200 miles north of Guadalcanal on the night of November 12th, the Japanese bombardment force under Vice Admiral Hiroaki Abe >>  >> ran directly into an American cruiser and destroyer force under Rear Admiral Daniel Callaghan. Neither side saw the other until they were almost close enough to throw grenades between the ships.

What followed was the closest and most confused surface action of the Pacific War. Ships firing at point-blank  range, torpedoes crossing paths in the dark, American destroyers  steaming between Japanese battleships and firing 5-in guns into the superstructures because the range was too close to depress  the main batteries.

Admiral Callaghan was killed on the bridge of the USS San Francisco by a Japanese shell that came through the armored plating  and detonated among his staff. Rear Admiral Norman Scott on another cruiser was killed by shrapnel a few minutes later.  They were the only two American flag officers killed in a surface engagement during the entire Second World War.

Both of them died in the same battle on the same night. The Americans lost two light cruisers and four destroyers.  Three more destroyers were badly damaged. It was a bloody terrible engagement that by every ordinary measure of naval warfare should be counted  an American defeat.

Except for one thing, the battleship Hiei was crippled. She could still float. She could still steer barely, but she had taken more than 80 hits from American shellfire  and her steering gear was damaged. And by the time dawn broke on November 13th, she was moving in slow circles near Savo Island unable to escape.

The aircraft of the Cactus Air Force found her at first light. They spent the day attacking her. SBD Dauntless dive bombers came down out of the sun and put 500-lb bombs into her decks. TBF Avenger torpedo bombers came in low over the water and  put torpedoes into her hull. B-17s came over from Espiritu Santo  and dropped bombs from 20,000 ft.

By nightfall, her crew opened her sea valves  and abandoned her. She sank in the darkness. She was the first Japanese battleship lost in combat  in the Pacific War. Her sister ship Kirishima came back two nights later on November 14th escorting the transport boats through the strait  for one more attempt at the bombardment mission.

She was intercepted by two American battleships that had been waiting for her, the USS Washington  and the USS South Dakota. New ships, fast ships, ships with radar-directed gunnery that the Japanese did  not yet fully understand. The USS South Dakota was crippled by an electrical failure during the engagement and could not effectively return fire.

The Kirishima never saw her killer. The Washington opened fire  at 7 minutes past midnight. She put nine 16-in main battery hits into  the Kirishima in less than 4 minutes at ranges where the Japanese lookouts could barely see her muzzle flashes. She hit the turrets. She hit the engine rooms. She hit the steering compartments.

The Kirishima was still firing at the wrong target when the shells began to land.  She was scuttled by her own crew a few hours later. And behind her in the water, she had been sent to protect the 11 Japanese transport ships carrying the 38th division were being systematically destroyed by aircraft.

Seven of the 11 were sunk during the day of November 14th. Four managed to reach the beach  at Tassafaronga in the early hours of November 15th and began  desperately unloading. The Cactus Air Force found them at dawn. Marine artillery on the beach opened up on them. The destroyer USS  Meade came in and fired on them at point-blank range.

By noon on November 15th, all four transports were burning wrecks. Of the roughly 10,000 soldiers of the 38th  division who had sailed from Rabaul only about 2,000 made it ashore on Guadalcanal. They came ashore  with the uniforms they were wearing, almost no food, almost no ammunition,  no artillery, no medical supplies, nothing.

Imi stood on the beach at Tassafaronga on the morning of November 16th and watched them come out of the surf.  He wrote in his diary that afternoon, only one line, “The ships are not coming.” He did not write again for 11 days. Up in Rabaul on the other side of the water, Lieutenant General Harukichi read the reports and understood what he had refused to understand  for 3 months.

Guadalcanal was lost. He did not use those words when he sent his message to Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo. He was not permitted to use those words, but the message was clear enough. The 17th Army could not be resupplied by destroyer alone. The convoy attempts had failed. The naval situation had deteriorated to the point where any large-scale reinforcement was impossible.

The men on Guadalcanal were dying, not tomorrow, today, 50 a day and climbing. In Tokyo at the Imperial General Headquarters, the staff officers argued for weeks. Some argued for another attempt. Some argued for a general offensive elsewhere in the Solomons to draw the Americans  away.

Some argued that the honor of the army required continued attacks until the last man died. In the end, on December 31st, 1942, in an unprecedented conference at the Imperial  Palace, the emperor of Japan approved the abandonment of Guadalcanal. It was the first time in the modern history of the empire that Japan had ordered a retreat.

The order was called Operation Ke. It would  be carried out in complete secrecy. The men on the island would not be told. The Americans,  the planners hoped, would think the movements were preparation for another offensive rather than an evacuation. Colonel Masanobu Tsuji, the staff officer from the Southern Army who had visited Guadalcanal during the Kawaguchi offensive, and had seen with his own eyes what was happening, they would later write in his memoirs about what he had come to understand on that island. He was 41 years old at the time.

He had a reputation as one of the most brilliant and one of the most difficult staff officers in the Japanese Army. >>  >> He would later be accused of terrible crimes in Malaya and Singapore. But on the subject of Guadalcanal, he wrote the truth as he had  come to see it. The Americans, he wrote, were fighting an industrial war.

Their victories on Guadalcanal had not come primarily from the courage of their soldiers, though their soldiers  had proven brave. Their victories had come from a productive  capacity that Japan could not match, from a logistical system that Japan could not match, from an operational coordination between ground, air, and naval forces that Japan could not match.

Japan, he concluded, could not win an industrial war against the United States. The evacuation began on the night of February 1st, 1943. 20 destroyers of the Japanese Navy sprinting down the Solomon chain under cover of darkness, arrived off Cape Esperance on the northwestern tip of Guadalcanal. Marine and Army units of Major General Alexander  Patch’s 14th Corps had been pressing the Japanese westward for weeks, and Patch believed they were preparing for a stand.

American intelligence expected an attack. >>  >> The Japanese were not attacking. They were leaving. Genjiro Emi stumbled onto the beach  at Cape Esperance a few hours before dawn on February 7th in the third and final evacuation run. He was one of the last men to be lifted from the island. He weighed 91 lb.

>>  >> He had a fever of 104. He was blind in his left eye from something no one had been able to diagnose. His uniform was rotting off  his body in strips. He had thrown his sword into the jungle 3 days earlier >>  >> because it was too heavy to carry. He did not remember the walk to the beach.

He remembered the destroyer. A sailor gave him a rice ball as soon as he was aboard. >>  >> He held it in his hands for a long time before he could bring himself to eat it. When he did, he ate it slowly one grain at a time because he was afraid his stomach would reject anything larger. The destroyer got underway before sunrise.

He stood on the fantail and watched Guadalcanal disappear into the darkness behind him. 10,652 Japanese soldiers  were evacuated over the three nights of Operation Ke. They were the survivors of the roughly 36,000 Japanese soldiers who had come to Guadalcanal since August, somewhere between 25 and 30,000  had died there.

Approximately 14,800 had been killed  in combat. Somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 had died of starvation  and disease. Fewer than a thousand had been taken prisoner. Two days later on the morning of February 9th, American  patrols moving west from the Matanikau found empty positions, empty foxholes, empty cooking pots with rice paste  still stuck to their sides, empty medical shelters with the dead and the too sick to move left behind  on straw mats.

They moved further west and found more empty positions. By afternoon, the  truth was clear. The Japanese were gone. Major General Alexander Patch, 53 years old, was a lean and quiet man from Pennsylvania  who had commanded the Americal Division through the last months of the fighting and had taken command of all Army and Marine forces  on Guadalcanal in December.

He read the patrol reports in his  command post. He picked up a pencil. He composed a message to Vice Admiral William Halsey who commanded the entire South Pacific Theater.  The message was short. Tokyo Express no longer has terminus on Guadalcanal. Halsey read it in his headquarters in Nouméa.

He’s said to have laughed for a long time. The campaign was over. >>  >> Six months from August 7th, 1942 when the 1st Marine Division came  ashore at Lunga Point to February 9th, 1943 when Patch sent his message. The Americans had lost approximately 1,600  men killed in ground combat, Approximately 4,200 wounded.

Several thousand more had been temporarily disabled by malaria and dysentery  and would recover, though many of them would carry those illnesses for  the rest of their lives. Naval casualties added another 5,000 American dead in the waters around the island. It was a hard price. It was a price the United States could afford.

American industry working three shifts a day  in Detroit and Pittsburgh and Baltimore and a hundred other places was  producing new ships and new aircraft and new tanks and new weapons faster than the Japanese could  sink them. New divisions were training in California and North Carolina. The men who had fought on  Guadalcanal, the survivors of the First Marine Division, were being pulled out  and sent to Australia to rest and to teach. To teach.

That was the thing. >>  >> Every hard lesson learned on Guadalcanal in blood and in malaria and in the terror of night attacks  by screaming men with bayonets would become part of the training of every American Marine and soldier who came after them. How to build a defensive perimeter. How to coordinate artillery and infantry and aircraft.

How to fight in the jungle without being defeated by the jungle. How to sustain operations at the end of a very long supply line. They took those lessons to Bougainville and to Tarawa and to Saipan  and to Peleliu and to Iwo Jima and to Okinawa. They took them all the way to Tokyo  Bay. The men who came home from Guadalcanal did not talk about it much.

Some of them never talked  about it at all. They went back to their farms and their factories and their small towns. They married girls they had  known before the war. They raised children who would eventually ask questions the fathers could not answer. If your father was one of them, this was why.

Some things a man does not put into words. He only carries them. Sergeant John Basilone received the Medal of Honor for his actions at Henderson Field. He was sent back to the United States  and he was made a hero and he was sent on a war bond tour that raised millions of dollars. He hated it. He asked  repeatedly to be returned to combat. Eventually, he was.

He landed on the black volcanic  sand of Iwo Jima on February 19th, 1945. He was killed by mortar fire the same day at  the age of 28 while trying to lead his men off the beach. Lieutenant Colonel Merritt Edson called. Red Mike  survived the war. He rose to major general. He retired in 1947.

He committed suicide in  his garage in Virginia on August 14th, 1955 for reasons his family never publicly explained. Chesty Puller kept fighting. Peleliu, Okinawa and later Korea where at  the Chosin Reservoir he became a legend all over again. He died in his bed in 1971. Alexander Vandegrift, the quiet Virginian who had held the line at Guadalcanal became the  18th Commandant of the Marine Corps.

He signed the papers that saved  the Marine Corps from being abolished after the war. He died in 1973. Jacob Vouza, the Solomon Island scout who had crawled through the jungle with bayonet wounds  to warn the Marines at the Tenaru recovered from his injuries and lived until 1984. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth  II in 1979.

The American Marines never forgot him. Genjiro Emi came home to Japan. He was hospitalized for 6 months. He recovered  his sight mostly. He gained back the weight slowly. He kept the diary he had carried through 6 months of hell in the jungle, and he  kept it in a wooden box in his closet for the rest of his life.

He worked quietly in a small town, and he raised a family, and he did not show the diary to his children. Late in his life, he gave a portion of it to a Japanese historian who was collecting first-hand accounts of the campaign.  He wrote a final reflection to accompany what he had recorded during the war. It was cleaner than the wartime entries.

The thinking was clearer. The Americans, he wrote, had not defeated the Japanese  army with braver soldiers. Japanese soldiers had been brave. Japanese soldiers had  died willingly. The Americans had defeated the Japanese army with a way of thinking about war. The Japanese, he wrote, had gone to Guadalcanal believing that the spirit of the warrior could overcome any material disadvantage.

That belief had been the true  weapon of the Imperial Army, and Japan had trusted it above all others. On Guadalcanal, that weapon had failed. Not because the spirit of the warrior was not real. It was real. He had seen  it. He had watched men do things that no ordinary man should be able to do.

It had failed because there had been an American on the other side of the line with more ammunition than a Japanese division, with a machine gun that never overheated, with an aircraft  20 minutes away, with a ship offshore, with a hospital that could put him back together if he was wounded,  and with a home country that would send another aircraft and another ship and another machine gun and another man if any of  these were lost.

Bravery, he wrote, without a system to support it, is only a way of dying. That was the thing the Japanese soldier had learned on Guadalcanal. It was the thing that had terrified him in the end. Not the American himself, not the bayonet, not the machine gun, not the artillery,  but the machine behind all of these.

The vast, unhurried, unstoppable American machine which the Japanese soldier could not see and could not understand and could not reach and which was night after night sending men and weapons  and ships across the Pacific to kill him. If your father was there, he  was part of that machine. He may never have used those words.

He may never have told you what he did  or what he saw or what he carried home with him and never set down. But he was part of the thing that broke the Imperial Japanese Army in the jungles of a small island in the South Pacific 6 months at a time, one night at a time. One boy from Ohio or Nebraska or Baltimore at a time until an empire that had never lost a battle understood at  last that it was going to lose the war. That was Guadalcanal.

That is why they came home so quiet. That is why some of them never came home at all.