Near the end of November 1942, ten American Marines fought more than one hundred Japanese soldiers on a trail above the Lunga River on Guadalcanal. Not one of the ten was hurt. The fight lasted about half an hour. Twenty-six days earlier and thirty miles to the east, two men had stood on the sand at Aola Bay beside a bonfire they had lit on purpose.
One was Martin Clemens, a British district officer who had stayed on the island after the Japanese took it and now ran the Solomon Islands scouts. The other was John Mathers, an Australian officer. The fire was a signal agreed upon in advance, the only light on that stretch of coast. Boats came out of the dark toward it before dawn on November 4, and the men who climbed out carried more guns per man than anything Clemens had watched come ashore that year.
Nobody shot at them. The ground behind the sand was swamp, and the airfield the Americans had come there to build never got built. The Japanese units in the hills behind that beach had been fighting Americans for three months. They had taken the measure of a Marine rifle line at the Tenaru in August and on the ridge south of the airfield in September, and they had a working picture of what an American formation could do and how many men it took.
Over the next four weeks, that picture came apart in a way their own reporting never accounted for. Small American parties, sometimes fewer than a dozen men, were putting out the fire of much larger units in country where a larger unit could not have been hiding. The boats at Aola carried two companies of the 2nd Marine Raider Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson. Their training was hard, and their commander had brought a guerrilla philosophy home from watching the Chinese fight the Japanese in the late 1930s.
But the thing that decided fights on a jungle track was duller than either. It was the way he had cut up his squads. Washington had given the raider battalions first call on men and equipment and the freedom to draw weapons that were not standard anywhere else in the Marine Corps. Carlson spent that freedom on one idea.
Instead of an eight-man squad acting as a single lump, he built a squad of ten: a leader and three teams of three. Every team had a Browning automatic rifle, a Thompson submachine gun, and one of the new semi-automatic Garand rifles, at a time when the rest of the Corps was going ashore in the Solomons with bolt-action Springfields. A loaded Browning weighed over twenty pounds, and its magazine held twenty rounds, which a man could empty in under four seconds if he chose to. The automatic rifleman in each team walked with a belt of spare magazines, and the two men beside him carried more.
Roughly a third of what a raider squad hauled through the jungle existed to keep three guns fed. Two armies had looked at the same rifleman and priced him differently. There were shotguns and . 45 caliber pistols spread through the outfit as well, which nobody ever seems to have added up.
The raiders also owned a few Boys anti-tank rifles, thirty-five pounds apiece firing a . 55 caliber round, weapons the Marine Corps had picked up from the Canadians and issued to nobody else. On Makin in August, raider machine guns and one of those rifles set a Japanese flying boat alight on the water and put enough holes in a second that it crashed trying to take off. Set that squad against the enemy it was walking toward.
The War Department’s own handbook on the Japanese army lays out the standard rifle company of the period: 181 officers and men, 139 rifles, almost all of them the 6. 5 mm Type 38, a bolt-action weapon in service since 1905. Nine light machine guns. A grenade discharger squad inside each of its three platoons.
That company was built to fight at a distance chosen by its officers, with its riflemen delivering aimed single shots and its machine guns doing the heavy work. On the rifle list alone, the ten men had the longer one. A Browning had two settings, a slow one throwing five to seven rounds a second and a fast one throwing ten or eleven. A Thompson of the type the raiders carried sat near that upper figure.
A trained man with a Garand got a shot away about every second. A good man working a bolt got one away every five or six. Three Brownings, three Thompsons, and four Garands in the hands of ten men who could all shoot put more metal into a tree line in the first sixty seconds than every bolt-action rifle in that enemy company firing together. Captain Oscar Spietros, who commanded one of the raider companies, later put his squad’s firepower as superior to anything known to exist in a unit of that size anywhere in the world.
None of those figures survive contact with a jungle, though. At twenty yards in second growth, a man does not pick out a target so much as put metal into the place a noise came from. And the side that manages it first tends to decide what the next three minutes look like. The enemy company had the heavier total weight of fire, and the American squad had its own concentrated in ten pairs of hands that could all move at once.
Whether any officer on either side ever set the two lists together and added them up before Guadalcanal is not something the surviving paperwork shows. None of it worked without the islanders. The battalion could carry four days of canned food and no more. Everything after that had to come up from the coast on somebody’s back, and the somebodies were Solomon islanders working under Mathers and under Sergeant Major Jacob Vouza of the Solomon Islands police force.
Rear echelon men at Aola loaded a boat every four days and ran it to an agreed spot on the shore. Carriers met the boat and walked the load inland to wherever Carlson had put his base camp that week: rice, tea, raisins, bacon, and ammunition. Scouts went ahead of the column and found the tracks because the tracks were on no map the Marines owned. At first light on November 6, Carlson took his command group, his two companies, and the scouts and carriers out of Aola and turned inland.
267 Marines. The tracks were narrow and grown over, and almost none of them ran where the Americans expected. It rained on most days. Men crossed the same river four and five times in an afternoon because the river bent back across the only footing a column had.
The job was to march west and harass a large enemy force from behind: about 3,000 men of the 230th Infantry Regiment, reinforced by a battalion of the 228th, all under Colonel Toshiro Shoji, all of them working to slip out of an American ring near Koli Point. At the Rekko Crossing in the first days of the march, the point ran into a small enemy party. The first man hit was the islander walking at the head of the Marines. He was shot and badly wounded.
Two Japanese were killed, and the march went on. That is who was in front on the first day of contact, and it stayed that way for the rest of the month. On the 9th, the Marines reached Binu, a village on the Banu River about eight miles in from the coast, and Carlson made it his base. From there he pushed patrols out to find the enemy and to link up with the Army and Marine units squeezing Shoji from the other side.
On the nights of the 9th and 10th, roughly 3,000 of Shoji’s men slipped out of that ring and started the long march back around the American perimeter to the west. They were hungry and worn out, and they had been ordered to retrace ground they had already covered once. They were also still an army, and they were now moving through country they took to be their own back area. On the 11th, Carlson had four companies out on independent patrols with a fifth holding Binu, each carrying a radio set.
At midmorning, Charlie Company crossed a wide field of grass and pushed its advance guard into the trees on the far side, straight into an enemy bivouac. The grass stood chest high and offered a man nothing to get behind. The advance guard hurt them badly in the first few minutes. Then the rest of the outfit was caught in the open, and rifle fire, machine gun fire, and mortar rounds came down on it and held it there.
Five Marines were killed and three wounded. Easy Company, sent to help, crossed the Matapona and met a second body of the enemy coming the other way, more of them than there were Marines, and they pushed the crossing party back. Major Richard Washburn got his men reorganized and attacked as they came over the river, hurt them, and still could not break through to Charlie. Dog was held down all afternoon by a third group and lost two killed.
Carlson took Fox forward himself in mid-afternoon and worked it around the flank, and by dusk the camp was empty. Charlie had already pulled itself back out of the grass under covering fire from its own 60 mm mortars over the same open ground it had crossed that morning. That was the day the new organization got a full-scale test against troops who were awake, dug in, and shooting back, and it cost the battalion more men than any other day of the operation. The next day, Carlson took two companies back to the same patch of woods and sat in it.
Enemy messengers kept walking in through the trees all day, still under the impression that the ground belonged to their own side, and the raiders killed 25 of them. Nobody had told them. On the 13th, Carlson watched groups of the enemy moving through the low ground below the ridge, sent the map coordinates back, and brought artillery and mortar fire down on five different parties in the course of the day. On the 14th, a patrol wiped out a 15-man outpost the scouts had located.
By the middle of the month, the main enemy body had gone. Carlson walked into the American perimeter on the 17th, took a new set of tasks from General Vandegrift, and went back out to hunt for the artillery piece shelling Henderson Field and the tracks the Japanese used to get around the airfield. Able Company came up from Espiritu Santo on the 25th. The battalion split into three groups of two companies apiece and went deeper into the high ground between the headwaters of the Tenaru and the Lunga, with Carlson in the middle where he could reinforce either flank.
On the 29th, the battalion came up against the steep spine of ground that divides the two river valleys. The men went up it and down the far side on ropes. On the 30th, they found a telephone wire, followed it, and walked into a large camp holding an unattended 75-mm mountain gun and a 37-mm anti-tank gun. The Marines pulled the working parts out of both weapons and threw them down the hillside into the trees.
Then the squad split up to check two rain-soaked tracks near the Lunga. Corporal John Yancey of Fox was on one of them with his men when the ground ahead opened into another camp, and there were about a hundred Japanese soldiers in it. Their rifles were stacked several paces off, the way rifles get stacked when troops are resting in their own rear, and both sides saw each other in the same instant. Yancey went straight in firing and shouted for his squad to follow.
Somebody back in the trees called across to ask what was happening. “I have flushed a covey,” Yancey shouted. What that meant in practice took about half an hour. Stacked rifles sit a few seconds from their owners in a barracks yard.
On a hillside camp with somebody already shooting into it, that distance gets much longer. Men went for the stacks and did not reach them, and others went for the trees. The raiders worked to better ground and fired from it, one team holding while another moved, shouting a recognition phrase at each other through the noise so that the men coming around the flanks would not shoot into their own. When it stopped, the survivors had gone into the bush, and the Marines had lost nobody.
No ammunition expenditure return survives for the patrol. The Navy Cross citation written for Yancey afterward says his squad killed over fifty. Carlson’s own account, and the Marine Corps monograph that draws on it, says seventy-five. Neither of them counts rounds, and nobody who was on that track ever claimed to know how many they fired.
What can be said is why ten men could do it at all, and the guns are only part of the answer. A squad cut into three teams can be three things at the same moment. One team fires and holds the enemy in place. One moves.
One waits. A squad that has to act as a single body picks one of those three and gives up the others, and picking takes time it does not have. Carlson’s men had spent months learning to work in threes at night, and by the end of November they had spent three and a half weeks doing it in country where nobody could see more than twenty yards. The automatic weapons made the smaller pieces viable, and the organization made them useful.
A Japanese platoon commander looking at those trees had no reason to think the fire coming at them from three directions was ten men, because in his army, and in most armies in 1942, it could not have been. The exchange for the whole month was 488 Japanese killed against 16 Marines dead and 18 wounded over more than a dozen actions and 150 miles of walking. Carlson credited his guerrilla methods, and he was partly right. He was also operating in an area where the enemy was behind his own lines and had grown careless.
The 30 minutes above the Lunga began with 100 men whose rifles were out of reach. The organization outlasted the men who invented it. In January of 1944, the Marine Corps disbanded all four raider battalions on the reasoning that a war of assaults on fortified islands no longer needed light units that could vanish inland for a month. That same winter, the Corps rewrote its infantry tables.
The new rifle squad was 13 men in three fire teams of four, each team built around a Browning automatic rifle, which is Carlson’s structure, with one more man in each team to absorb losses. Every Marine rifle squad has been organized that way ever since. Carlson himself did not have long. Malaria and jaundice took him off the line in the spring of 1943, and on Saipan the following year he was badly wounded in the arm and the leg while pulling his radio operator out of a machine gun’s line of fire.
He died in 1947 at 51. The battalion’s own bill does not appear in that exchange figure. 225 men were sent to the rear during the patrol, sick with malaria and dysentery and ringworm, worn down by short rations and constant wet. Charlie and Fox had landed at Aola on the 4th of November with 133 officers and men apiece.
When they walked into the Marine perimeter on the 4th of December, the two of them together numbered 57. Fever had taken most of the difference. The carriers who kept their pouches full walked home to their villages, and nobody counted them at all.