1st Marine Raider History

[Gooderham 1st MRB]

This is an excerpt from Richard Tregaskis “Guadalcanal Diary.” Tregaskis was a war correspondent for the International News Service in the Pacific. He is joining the 1st Marine Raiders on Tulagi on Wednesday, August 12, 1942, five days after the Raider lead assault on the island.

We talked to Colonel Edson (Merritt A. Edson of Chester, Vermont), commanding officer of the Marine Raiders, who had assaulted and taken Tulagi. He was a wiry man with a lean, hard face partly covered by a sparse, spiky growth of grayish beard. His light blue eyes were tired and red-rimmed in appearance, for he was weary now from long days of fighting, and his red eyebrows and eyelashes, being almost invisible, heightened the effect. But his eyes were as cold as steel, and it was interesting to notice that even when he was being pleasant, they never smiled. He talked rapidly, spitting his words out like bullets, his hard-lipped mouth snapping shut like a trap. Hardly a creature of sunlight and air, he; but I could see that he was a first-class fighting man. (Colonel Edson later won two outstanding victories on Guadalcanal, and was awarded the Navy Cross and the Congressional Medal of Honor.)

Colonel Edson summarized the Tulagi campaign. “The Japs had one battalion, of about 450 men, on the island,” he said. “They were all troops – no laborers. All of their defenses were located on the southeast part of the island. Our landing was at 8:15 A.M. on Friday, August 7th, at the northwest part. There were only small obstructionist groups out there.

“The Japanese casualties were about 400. Not a single one gave up. One prisoner was taken; he had been dazed by a close mortar burst. When a man went in one of the holes to get the radio, he found seventeen dead Japs. But two were still alive. They hit the man and one other who followed him later.

“it was the same in all the dugouts. We found that an officer was alive in one of them. We sent an interpreter out to get him. The interpreter came to the mouth of the cave and asked if the officer wanted to surrender. The answer was a grenade.”

Despite opposition and casualties, the Raiders drove down the ridge-back of the island until they ran into a shovel-shaped ravine with three steep sides. Here they met the stiffest Japanese resistance. The walls of the ravine surrounded a flat space which the British, in peacetime, had used as a cricket field. Now the Japanese had dug innumerable large caves into the limestone walls of the ravine, and from the narrow mouths of these dugouts they fired rifles, automatic rifles and machine guns. There was “continuous crossfire across the ravine,” said the Colonel.

By the time the marines reached this area, it was dusk and they halted for the night. But the Japanese were organizing a counterattack.

“At 10:30 that night the Japs counterattacked,” said the Colonel. “They broke through between C and A Companies, and C Company was temporarily cut off. The Japs worked their way along the ridge, and came to within fifty to seventy-five yards of my command post. They were using hand grenades, rifles and machine guns. We suffered quite a few casualties as our men fought hard to hold them back.

“The next day the Raiders, aided by support troops under Colonel Rosecrans (Harold E. Rosecrans of Washington, D.C.) cleaned up the southeastern end of the island.

“The Japs were still in the pocket (in the cricket-field area). But we had positions for machine guns and mortars on three sides of them. We closed in on the pocket and cleaned up some of the dugouts. By three o’clock that (Sunday) afternoon we had complete physical control of the island. A few groups of snipers and machine gunners remained. It took days to finish them off.

“The Japanese defense was apparently built around small groups in dugouts with no hope of escape. They would stay in there as long as there was one live Jap. There was a radio for communication in nearly every one of these holes.

“We pulled out thirty-five dead Japs from one dugout. In another we took out thirty. Some of these people had been dead for three days. But others were still in there shooting.

“In none of these places was there any water or food. They had evidently made a dash for their dugouts when the naval bombardment came, without stopping for provisions.

“In one case there were three Japs cornered. They had one pistol. They fired the pistol until they had three shots left. Then one Jap shot the two others and killed himself.”

Colonel Edson listed some of the outstanding heroes among his Raider troops. Major Kenneth D. Bailey of Danville, Illinios, had acted with great bravery in trying to knock out a Japanese dugout emplacement which was holding up our advance.

“The cave was dug in the ravine,” said the Colonel. “The enemy fire was so severe that our men could not advance.

“Bailey got on top of the cave by crawling. He tried to kick a hole in the top. When that failed, he tried to kick the rocks away at the foot of the entrance. While he was attempting to do that, one of the Japs stuck out a rifle and shot him in the leg.”

Then there was Gunnery Sergeant Angus Goss, a one-man demolition squad. When the Japanese in one cave had resisted with particular stubbornness, Sergeant Goss had tried throwing in hand grenades. These had been promptly returned by the Japanese inside. The Sergeant then tried holding the grenades for three seconds before hurling them, but the Japanese caught the missiles and threw them back. The patient Sergeant then got TNT and thrust it into the hole. The trapped men shoved the TNT out of the cave and the dynamite exploded outside, driving splinters into Goss’s leg. He then “got mad,” went into the cave firing full tilt with his submachine gun, and killed the four Japanese who were still alive. Eight other dead Japanese were found in the dugout.