Carlson's Long Patrol, 1942: a month behind Japanese lines on Guadalcanal

On 4 December 1942 the last of Evans Carlson's raiders walked down off Mount Austen into the Marine perimeter on Guadalcanal. They had been in the jungle for a month, living on rice, tea, raisins and bacon, fighting more than a dozen small battles over about 150 miles of ridges and rivers. The patrol became a legend of the Marine Corps. Its own historians also record what it cost the men who made it.²

Carlson's raiders

The 2nd Raider Battalion had already fought before it reached Guadalcanal. Two of its companies reinforced Midway in June 1942, and the rest landed from submarines on Makin Island in the Gilberts in August. Its commander, Lt. Col. Evans Carlson, favored guerrilla tactics and light, portable rations. In early September, Hoffman writes, the battalion sailed for Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides.³

On 4 November two of its companies, C and E, landed unopposed at Aola Bay on the northeast coast of Guadalcanal to cover the building of a new airfield. The site turned out to be swamp; the airfield project there was a bust and moved to Koli Point in December.⁴

Into the jungle

The next day General Vandegrift dropped Carlson a message. A large Japanese force, the 230th Infantry Regiment and a battalion of the 228th, was near the Metapona River east of the Marine perimeter, and Army and Marine units were closing in on it from the west. Vandegrift wanted the raiders to march from Aola and harass it from the rear. Carlson set out on 6 November with a coastwatcher and several Solomon Islander scouts as guides, among them Sergeant Major Jacob Vouza, already a hero of the campaign.⁵ › Battle of the Tenaru, 1942

The scouts proved invaluable on the narrow, overgrown trails. On 10 November three more raider companies landed at Tasimboko and joined Carlson at his base at Binu on the Balesuna River. From then on islander porters, landed on the coast by boat, kept the battalion supplied.⁶

On the nights of 9 and 10 November, Hoffman writes, about 3,000 Japanese broke out of the American ring on the Metapona and began to retreat west, hungry and tired but still formidable. On 11 November Company C ran into a large force bivouacked near Asamama. Its advance guard did heavy damage but lost five killed and three wounded, and the rest of the company was pinned down in the open. It pulled back under the cover of its own mortars, while Carlson brought up other companies and called in two dive bombers. Shaw's history notes that on 12 November the raiders beat off attacks by two enemy companies and then pursued the Japanese relentlessly.⁷

Hunting the retreat

For the next three weeks the raiders shadowed and ambushed the retreating Japanese. At Asamama they killed 25 messengers who walked into the bivouac thinking it was still held by their own side; a patrol wiped out a 15-man outpost reported by the scouts. On 17 November Vandegrift gave Carlson a new mission: find Pistol Pete, the Japanese artillery that kept shelling the airfield, and search the trails that circled the perimeter.⁸

On 30 November, between the headwaters of the Tenaru and Lunga rivers, a telephone wire led the raiders to a camp with an unattended 75 mm mountain gun and a 37 mm antitank gun; they took key parts and scattered them down the hillside. Farther on, the advance guard walked into about 100 Japanese with their rifles stacked. In Hoffman's account Corporal John Yancey charged in firing, his squad followed, and 75 Japanese were killed, the same count as in the Marine Corps' 1949 monograph. Carlson called it the most spectacular of their engagements, and Yancey received the Navy Cross.⁹

Mount Austen and the reckoning

Ordered in on 1 December, Carlson asked for a few more days. On 3 December, Hoffman writes, he held one of his Gung Ho meetings, sent the most exhausted companies back to the lines and led the rest to the top of Mount Austen, where they destroyed an enemy platoon after a two-hour fight. Coming down on 4 December, the point was ambushed by seven Japanese, who killed four Marines by Hoffman's count, three in the 1949 monograph, before they were wiped out.¹⁰

Jon Hoffman's history counts 488 Japanese killed for 16 raiders dead and 18 wounded, as does John Zimmerman's 1949 monograph; Henry Shaw's gives nearly 500 Japanese dead and the same Marine losses. But, Hoffman adds, the battalion had also evacuated 225 men with malaria, dysentery and ringworm, worn down by poor rations and the rough conditions. Companies C and F, the only two in the field for the whole month, had landed with 133 men each and came out with 57 between them. Hoffman quotes General Vandegrift's citation of the raiders for their skill, stamina and aggressive spirit. Hoffman's verdict is that the guerrilla tactics inflicted heavy losses on the enemy, at an equally high cost in friendly manpower.¹¹