World War 2 In Review No. 24: Ground Power

By Merriam Press

Merriam Press World War 2 In Review Series

2023 eBook Edition

The following articles on World War II ground warfare:

(1) The Battle of New Guinea: A Wartime Report

(3) Six Hours at Balta: C Company, 744th Engineer Regiment, on the Russian Front, 3 August 1941

(4) Parachuting into Estonia

(5)The 1st Marine Division on Guadalcanal

(6) The War in the Solomons: A Wartime Report

(7) American Landings at Cape Torokina, Bougainville

(8) The Battle of Cibik’s Ridge: Bougainville, November 1943

(9) Christmas on Bougainville: A Marine Remembers

(10) Battle in the Bulge: A Wartime Report

(11) 123rd Infantry Regiment of the 50th German Infantry Division in the Breakthrough Battle for the Parpach Position, 8-11 May 1942

(12) The Devil Dog: With the 9th Marines On Guam

(13) The “Desert Fox” on the Run: An Easter Sunday in a World of Hell

(14) ULTRA and the Allied Breakout in Normandy

(15) The Devil’s Brigade: The First Special Service Force

(16) The Devil's Brigade: The Film

258 B&W/color photos/illustrations

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9781387325528

Book preview

On the Cover

The 1st Marine Division on Guadalcanal

by Philip A. Katcher

Guadalcanal was one of the most important battles of World War II; it was the first step towards Allied victory in the South Pacific and thereafter Japan never regained the offensive. After Guadalcanal, one senior Imperial Japanese Navy planner later wrote, I knew we could not win the war. I did not think we would lose, but I knew we could not win.

Even so, the battle is rarely given more than a brief discussion in many accounts of the war. This is not totally surprising because Guadalcanal was not a simple battle. It was more like a series of running fights, with long periods of very little action in between, at the end of which the Japanese were not really destroyed, but simply held off. The Japanese then evacuated the island fairly easily, so there was no clear-cut victory as in many other decisive battles.

One who knew the island could well even wonder why anybody would want to fight a battle there. Author Jack London, who knew the area well, called Guadalcanal a place of death, with its inhabitants mostly snakes, giant lizards, scorpions, crocodiles, poisonous spiders, leeches and ferocious white ants.

The answer was that American planners needed to take some islands in the area to secure communications between the U.S. and Australia. Their original plan did not include Guadalcanal, however, they later discovered the Japanese force there was building an airfield estimated to be able to hold sixty planes which would be finished in mid-August. Guadalcanal, therefore, was included in the plan and was to be taken 1 August.

In June 1942 the 1st Marine Division, newly arrived in New Zealand, was handed the job of occupying and defending Tulagi and adjacent positions, including Guadalcanal, the Florida Islands and the Santa Cruz Islands. The original target date of 1 August was impossible because not all the Marines had landed in New Zealand and the ships would have to be re-packed, combat loading style, before they headed towards the objectives. The new landing date was 7 Au-gust.

The 1st Marine Division, as it started out on its first great battle, had 956 officers and 18,146 enlisted men. It was made up of three regiments, called Marines in the Corps, the 1st, 5th, and 7th, each with three battalions. Its artillery was in the 11th Marines, a four-battalion regiment with a dozen 155 mm howitzers, a dozen 105-mm howitzers, and thirty-six 75-mm howitzers. The division further had the 1st Marine Tank Battalion, equipped with M3 Stuart tanks; the 1st Marine Service Battalion; the 1st Special Weapons Battalion; the 1st Pioneer Battalion; the 1st Engineer Battalion; the 1st Parachute Battalion; the 1st Amphibious Tractor Battalion; the 1st Medical Battalion; the 1st Raider Battalion; the 3rd Defense Battalion, and a headquarters battalion.

The Americans, unaware of the small size of the Japanese garrison on Guadalcanal, which was mostly made up of laborers, expected a rough landing. This is a knock-down and drag-out fight, one Marine colonel told correspondent Richard Tregaskis. Things are going to go wrong on the beach, and people are going to get hurt. But those are good kids and I think they’ll be all right.

Marines on the invasion fleet spent their time continuously taking apart their weapons, cleaning them and putting them back together again. Others sharpened bayonets, machetes and bolo knives. Some even made crude blackjacks out of canvas sacks filled with lead balls.

Final orders were issued just prior to landing. The coming offensive in the Guadalcanal area, it read, "marks the first offensive of the war against the enemy, involving ground forces of the United States. The Marines have been selected to initiate this action which will prove to be the forerunner of successive offensive actions that will end in ultimate victory for our cause. Our country expects nothing but victory from us and it shall have just that. The word failure shall not even be considered as being in our vocabulary.

We have worked hard and trained faithfully for this action and I have every confidence in our ability and desire to force our will upon the enemy. We are meeting a tough and wily opponent but he is not sufficiently tough or wily to overcome us because We Are Marines.

The troops were awakened, those who managed to sleep, at 4 a.m., 7 August 1942. Within a very short time the large black mass which were Guadalcanal’s hills could be seen from the decks against a South Pacific dawn. At 6:14 the naval barrage of the islands began; there was no reply. The troops made their way down the gangways and into invasion craft. At 9:10 the boats of the 1st and 3rd Battalions of the 5th Marines hit the shore. Still no enemy fire was heard. At 11 a.m. the 1st Marines (Reinforced) landed behind the first wave, and all units began the drive inland. Virtually the only casualty of the landing was a private who cut himself opening a coconut.

Nervous because of the unexpectedly easy landing after all that training about the ferocious Japanese, the advancing men moved, at best, slowly. On the beach west of the main perimeter I found the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, moving as if it were about to encounter the entire Imperial Army. I gave the battalion commander hell, later wrote divi-sion commanding general A. A. Vandegrift. "The day’s objective was the Tenaru River, about two miles west, which I wanted defended by nightfall.

At [Colonel Clifton B.] Cates’ CP [command post of Combat Group B, made up of the 1st Marines; 3rd Battalion, 11th Marines, and support units] I learned that his right battalion was bogged down in an immense rain forest west of the Ilu River. Our informants in New Zealand had failed to report this obstacle, a fetid morass so thick with overgrowth you couldn’t see Mt. Austen or anything else from its depths. In working their way through it the troops, in poor condition from the weeks aboard ship, seemed about done in by the heat and high humidity.

Meanwhile, other 1st Marine Division troops were landing on other islands: Tulagi, capital of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, Florida, Tanambogo, and Gavutu. There fighting was tough, against some 1,500 Japanese combat troops on these islands, of whom only twenty-five were taken alive as prisoners, while another seventy are thought to have escaped to other islands. The rest died in their positions, a clear indication of the type of fighting the Marines would face.

The islands did fall, however, and the Marines sent to take them, minus a small garrison for each, were sent on to Guadalcanal itself.

On Guadalcanal, however, invading Americans found half-eaten meals abandoned, along with a vast supply of booty which even included an ice plant. The latter was quickly decorated with a sign reading, Tojo Ice Plant, Under New Management.

The war at sea nearby, however, was not going as smoothly. On 8 August a Japanese naval force, eight ships boasting thirty-four eight-inch guns, ten 5.5-inch guns, twenty-seven five-inch and 4.7-inch guns and sixty-two torpedo tubes, came down towards the American and Australian fleet anchored off Guadalcanal. The U.S. Navy had already pulled out its carriers nearby because of the large number of enemy torpedo planes and bombers in vicinity, against which they had only seventy-eight carrier-based planes which were already low on fuel. On 10 August, at 1 a.m., the Japanese ships came into range and opened fire. Within forty-six minutes the Japanese Navy had sunk the U.S. cruisers Astoria, Quincy and Vincennes and the Royal Australian Navy cruiser Canberra, along with one destroyer. The U.S. cruiser Chicago was badly damaged. The Navy’s support forces had to withdraw, leaving the Marines on shore alone.

On 20 August, however, help arrived for the Marines in the form of two squadrons of airplanes, one of fighters and the other of bombers, which were to be stationed at the captured Japanese airfield on Guadalcanal. The field had been named Henderson Field, after Marine flyer Major Lofton R. Henderson, who had been killed at Midway.

The field was just about ready for them. The main runway was 3,778 feet long and 160 feet wide and was surfaced with a mixture of coral gravel and cement. Much of the equipment used to build it had been abandoned by the Japanese, including five steamrollers, two tractors, a large supply of cement and an electric light system which ran the length of the runway.

Morale’s gone up twenty points this afternoon, said one officer after the planes landed. It was just in time, too, for the Japanese 17th Army had decided to re-take Guadalcanal and their men were on their way. The initial force assigned the task had some 6,000 men, which were thought enough to beat the 10,000 Marines believed on the island. General Kiyotake Kawaguchi, the Japanese commander, wasn’t overconfident, although he did think his men would win, and even told one acquaintance that defeating the Marines would be serious business.

The first of the Japanese troops to land was a 900-man force under Colonel Kiyono Ichiki. The colonel left 125 men to guard the landing site and pushed on towards the waiting Marines with the rest.

A little after midnight, 21 August 1942, the Japanese force hit the Marine defenses along the Tenaru. It was on us in an instant, wrote Private Robert Leckie of the 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines, who manned a hole along the riverbank, and then we were firing. We were so disorganized we had not the sense to disperse, clustering around that open pit as though we were born of it. Falsetto screeching rose directly opposite us and we were blasting away at it, sure that human intruders had provoked the cry of the birds. I helped the Gentleman fire his gun, although I was not his assistant. He concentrated on the river bank, firing burst after burst there, convinced that the Japs were preparing to swim the river. The screeching stopped.

The Marines would not be moved. Heroic actions were almost commonplace.

Private Al Schmidt, his one leg battered and the rest of his machine gun crew dead, single-handed loaded and fired his gun time and time again. One Japanese soldier got close enough to toss a grenade into Schmidt’s foxhole, the fragments blinding him and wounding him in the arms and shoulders. God damn it, they got me in the eyes, he yelled, adding, I can smell the rotten buggers. And he kept on firing. By the time it was all over he’d been firing five hours straight. Carried towards an aid station, he handed a lieutenant his .45 and passed out. For that day’s action Private Schmidt received the Medal of Honor, one of America’s first authentic heroes of World War II.

The line was holding, but a reserve platoon was sent in about 2:30 a.m., and artillery was called in along the front a half-hour later.

When it got lighter as the sun rose, tanks from Company B, 1st Tank Battalion, drove through Japanese lines, firing canister from their 37-mm guns as they went. Getting some distance from the Marine lines, the tankers were radioed to return. Let us alone, the tank com-mander replied, we’re too busy killing Japs.

Final replacements from the 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, arrived by 8:30 and it was all over. Even the Japanese, persistent as they were, admitted so, turning and trying to escape. Some ran back into the dense forests, while others ran along the beach. Some 250 of them, escaping on the open beach route, were spotted by Henderson Field-based fighters which easily mowed them all down. Only fifteen prisoners were taken, all but two of whom were wounded to begin with. Against a Marine loss of thirty-four dead and seventy-five wounded, virtually the entire Japanese detachment had been destroyed.

The attack of the Ichiki detachment, the colonel radioed his headquarters, was not entirely successful.

The attack had also made it clear to 1st Marine Division headquarters that the Japanese, despite first appearances, hadn’t given up Guadalcanal altogether. Therefore, on 21 August, they recalled the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, from the nearby island of Tulagi. The battalion was assigned the role of a mobile reserve for the Guadalcanal garrison.

The Japanese decided that it would be harder to get the Marines off Guadalcanal than they originally thought. According to one of their training manuals, Westerners … being very haughty, effeminate and cowardly … intensely dislike fighting in the rain or mist or in the dark. They cannot conceive night to be a proper time for battle … although it is excellent for dancing. In these weaknesses lie our opportunity. This, however, didn’t appear to be true. It would take men, not propaganda, to beat the Marines.

Therefore they planned a major attack. The 35th Brigade, 2,400 men, landed at Taivu Point east of Henderson Field, while 1,100 men under Colonel Akinsouke Oka landed west of the field at Kokumbona. The eastern-based troops were to take the hill, later called Bloody Ridge, which overlooked the field, joined by Oka’s men from the west.

The 35th Brigade beat a way through almost impossible terrain to run into defensive positions of Company C, Marine Raiders, about 9:30 p.m. on 13 September. Initially the attack was a success, driving the Marine company against Company B’s position, but the terrain itself as much as the Marines stopped the Japanese from taking advantage of their initial successes and moving quickly forward.

Reinforcements, the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, were sent to the Raiders’ position, despite protests from Lieutenant Colonel Merritt E. Red Mike Edson, Raider commander, that his men alone could handle anything the Japanese could throw at them. As it turned out, a combination of Japanese airpower and thick jungle slowed the men of the 2nd down so much they never got to the Raiders. Edson’s men dug in around the southern slope of the high knob in the center of the ridge.

Towards evening the Japanese caught their second wind and began harassing the Marines. They even tossed a smoke pot into the Marine lines, yelling in English, Gas attack! Finally, as it grew dark, the Japanese, firing their weapons from the hip and yelling as they came, scrambled out of their holes and at the Marines.

Colonel William McKennon, of the Parachute Battalion, was a battalion commander on Bloody Ridge when the attack hit. The first assault, he later wrote, came vomiting forth from a triangular patch of jungle directly on our left front. There was little rifle fire, but the Japs poured blast after blast of bullets from their Nambus … light machine guns … against our own machine gun positions. A Nambu is hard to locate because it gives off no appreciable muzzle glare, and it is particularly effective in a night attack. But in firepower there is nothing like our own machine guns. The three we had set up poured it into the oncoming Japs, smashed them back, knocked them over, broke their assault. The guns never jammed. There were screams and bleating, and then comparative silence in the hollow. The firing had lasted perhaps five seconds. It seemed like hours.

The first assault had been beaten back quickly, but the Japanese did not give up after only one attack. They came again and again at the Marine line. The Marines were forced to slowly fall back, reforming along their reserve line as they called in 105-mm howitzer fire against their attackers. Still, by dawn, it was obvious that the attack had failed.

Two men from the Raiders, including Colonel Edson, received Medals of Honor for the night’s defense. The Japanese admitted a loss of 633 men, with another 505 wounded. The survivors made their way west to where Colonel Oka’s men were still working their way to join the attack. Oka’s men never even got into the fight … not that their extra bodies would have made all that much difference in the end.

Having stood off two major attacks, the Marines decided to go on the offensive themselves, to give themselves more breathing room. On 23 September the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, headed across the Matanikau River, west of Henderson Field. The plan called for Edson’s Raiders to stage a holding attack across the river at its mouth, while the main attack would be south of that, the troops turning once the river had been crossed, while another force would pass through that group and move further west before turning north to the sea double pincer movement. The three forces would