The Battle of Bloody Ridge

On the night of 12–13 September, and again on the night of 13–14 September 1942, the Japanese 35th Infantry Brigade under General Kiyotake Kawaguchi attacked out of the jungle against a narrow, grassy ridge rising a little over a kilometre south of Henderson Field on Guadalcanal. It was defended by some 840 Marines of the 1st Raider Battalion and the 1st Parachute Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Merritt Edson. On the second night the Japanese drove the defenders back onto the last knoll of the ridge, and several of their companies reached the very edge of the airfield. On the morning of 14 September, however, the attack collapsed, and the remnants of the brigade began to withdraw westwards through the jungle. It was the second of three major Japanese attempts to retake the airfield and, according to participants on both sides, the moment when the Japanese came closest to winning the struggle for Guadalcanal. The Americans called the place Bloody Ridge or Edson’s Ridge.

Kawaguchi’s brigade

After the defeat of Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki’s detachment in the Battle of the Tenaru, the Japanese 17th Army of General Harukichi Hyakutake in Rabaul still believed that there were at most a few thousand Americans on Guadalcanal, and decided to send another, larger unit there. The choice fell on Kiyotake Kawaguchi’s 35th Infantry Brigade, veterans of the fighting on Borneo and in the Philippines. The first attempt to ship it went badly: under the original plan the brigade was to sail in slow transports, but after the Battle of the Eastern Solomons the Japanese concluded that slow ships stood no chance within range of the Cactus Air Force. On 28 August dive bombers from Henderson Field sank the destroyer Asagiri and badly damaged two others that were carrying 600 of Kawaguchi’s men; 62 of them were killed, along with 94 sailors.

Later night runs by fast warships, which the Americans dubbed the Tokyo Express, were more successful. Between 29 August and 4 September light cruisers, destroyers and patrol boats landed almost 5,000 men at Taivu Point, east of the American positions: the whole of Kawaguchi’s brigade, a battalion of the Aoba Regiment and the rest of Ichiki’s regiment. Kawaguchi himself landed on 31 August and took command of all Japanese forces on the island. He insisted, however, that part of the brigade should come slowly by landing barge. A convoy of 61 barges carrying some 1,100 men of Colonel Akinosuke Oka was attacked from the air on 4 and 5 September; about 90 men were killed and most of the heavy equipment was lost, and the survivors came ashore far to the west of the airfield. By 7 September Kawaguchi had 5,200 men east of the American positions and a thousand to the west of them. In all, his force numbered about 6,000. He was so sure of victory that he declined a further battalion offered to him by the 17th Army. He believed there were about 2,000 Marines on the island; in reality Alexander Vandegrift had more than 12,000.

The Tasimboko raid and the ridge above the airfield

The Americans knew about the new landings thanks to native scouts directed by the British colonial official and local defence officer Martin Clemens. When it was reported that Japanese troops were gathering near the village of Tasimboko, some 27 kilometres east of Lunga, Edson set out with a force of 813 men in two fast transports converted from old destroyers and two patrol boats. They landed at dawn on 8 September. The Japanese rearguard, seeing at the same time an American supply convoy approaching Lunga, concluded that a major landing was under way and withdrew into the jungle, leaving 27 dead; the Marines lost two men. At Tasimboko they found Kawaguchi’s main supply base: stocks of food, ammunition, medicines and a radio station. They took documents and some of the food and destroyed the rest. The captured papers revealed that there were at least 3,000 Japanese on the island preparing an attack. The loss of the supplies would soon tell on Kawaguchi’s men, who went into the attack hungry.

Edson and the division’s operations officer, Colonel Gerald Thomas, concluded that the blow would fall on Lunga Ridge: a narrow, grass-covered coral spine about a kilometre long, running parallel to the Lunga River just south of the airfield. The ridge was a natural route to Henderson Field, dominated the surrounding ground and was almost unoccupied. Vandegrift expected an attack along the coast instead, but Thomas persuaded him that it would be a good place for Edson’s men to “rest” after the fighting on Tulagi and the Tasimboko raid. On 11 September some 840 Raiders and parachutists took up positions on and around the ridge. The parachutists, bled white in the August fighting for Gavutu, had been placed under Edson’s command. The ridge consisted of three knolls: Hill 80, the southernmost, surrounded by jungle; Hill 123, the dominant height, more than half a kilometre to the north; and a lower, nameless rise just in front of the airfield. Edson deployed five Raider companies on the western side of the ridge and three parachute companies on the eastern side, and placed his command post on Hill 123.

The Japanese called the ridge “the centipede” because of its shape, and they too chose it as the axis of their main attack. Kawaguchi’s plan provided for a night attack from three directions: the “main force”, three battalions with some 3,000 men in all, was to strike the ridge from the south, Major Takeshi Mizuno’s Kuma Battalion from the east, and Oka’s detachment from the west. On 9 September the main force left the coast near Koli Point and plunged into the jungle in four columns. The lack of good maps, at least one faulty compass and almost impenetrable undergrowth meant that the columns lost their way and lost time. By day on 11 and 12 September Japanese bombers attacked the ridge, killing two of its defenders.

The first night

On 12 September Kawaguchi’s main force was to have been at its start lines by 2 p.m., but reached them only after 10 p.m. At 9.30 p.m. the light cruiser Sendai and three destroyers shelled the American positions for twenty minutes and lit up the ridge with a searchlight. Major Yukichi Kokusho’s battalion struck the Raiders’ C Company, which held the sector between the ridge, a small swampy lagoon and the Lunga River, overran at least one platoon and forced the company back onto the ridge. But at that point Kokusho’s men blundered into Lieutenant Colonel Kusukichi Watanabe’s battalion, which had lost its way in the dark, and in the resulting confusion the attack came to a halt. “Because of this devilish jungle, the brigade was scattered and completely beyond my control. Never in my life have I felt so disappointed and helpless,” Kawaguchi later complained. Oka’s and Mizuno’s units also tried to attack, but did not even make contact with the Americans. Twelve Marines were killed; Japanese losses are not known, but were probably somewhat higher.

At dawn on 13 September Cactus Air Force aircraft and Marine artillery pounded the ground south of the ridge. Kawaguchi decided to gather his forces and renew the attack the following night. Edson, convinced that the Japanese would return, pulled his line back by some 370 metres after a failed attempt to regain the lost ground. The new position, more than one and a half kilometres long, ran from the Lunga River and crossed the ridge a little south of Hill 123; anyone who got past Hill 80 would then have to cross several hundred metres of open ground. The foxholes were shallow, ammunition was short, and each man had a grenade or two. Vandegrift moved the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, up behind Edson as a reserve, and a battery of 105-millimetre howitzers took up positions from which it could fire directly onto the ridge; an artillery observer went into the front line. Towards evening Edson stood on a grenade box and addressed his exhausted men: “You men have done a great job, and I’ve got just one more thing to ask of you. Hold out just one more night.”

The second night

After sunset on 13 September some 3,000 of Kawaguchi’s men, supported by light artillery, faced around 830 of Edson’s. The night was moonless. At about 9 p.m. seven Japanese destroyers briefly shelled the ridge, and immediately afterwards Kokusho’s battalion struck the Raiders’ B Company on the right flank and pushed it back onto Hill 123. The Japanese pressed on through the swampy thickets between the ridge and the river and stumbled upon a store of American rations. The soldiers, who had been hungry for days, stopped to eat before Kokusho led them on. At around three in the morning they attacked the northern part of the ridge just in front of the airfield and Hill 123; in fierce fighting Kokusho was killed along with about a hundred of his men.

At the same time Major Masao Tamura’s battalion was forming up in the jungle to attack Hill 80. American observers spotted the preparations, and at about 10 p.m. twelve howitzers deluged it with shells. Even so, two of Tamura’s companies, about 320 men, charged up the hill with bayonets, drove the parachutists off the eastern slope of the ridge and cut off the Raiders’ B Company, which Edson had to pull back to Hill 123. A company from Watanabe’s battalion pushed into the gap between the ridge and the parachutists, who decided that their positions could not be held. The withdrawal in the dark turned into disorder; someone shouted that the Japanese were using gas, and some men made off towards the airfield shouting “withdraw”. Just when it seemed that the defence was about to disintegrate, Major Kenneth Bailey of Edson’s staff and other officers, not mincing their words, turned the fleeing men round and placed them around Hill 123.

The Marines formed a horseshoe-shaped line around Hill 123, and Tamura’s men launched frontal assault after frontal assault against it, climbing through the saddle from Hill 80 and up the steep eastern slope. The ground was lit by flares dropped from a Japanese floatplane. The Japanese hauled a 75-millimetre infantry gun onto Hill 80 to fire point-blank at the defenders’ positions, but its firing pin failed. At midnight, in a short lull, Edson sent the parachutists into a bayonet counter-attack; they regained the eastern slope and killed Japanese troops preparing to roll up the American flank. Bailey and other staff officers carried ammunition and grenades up the hill under fire. “The Japanese attack was almost continuous, like rain that eases for a moment and then pours down all the harder,” one of the officers recalled. That night the howitzers of the 11th Marines fired almost 2,000 rounds, some at a range of little more than one and a half kilometres; a Japanese prisoner later said that one-tenth of his company had survived. In all the Japanese attacked more than a dozen times, and some of the clashes ended in hand-to-hand fighting. Throughout the night Edson stood a dozen or so metres behind the firing line, directing the defence. “If one man can hold a whole battalion together, Edson did it that night,” one of his officers said later.

At about four in the morning companies of the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, reached the hill and helped repel the last two attacks before dawn. Meanwhile, elements of three Japanese companies had worked their way round the ridge and reached the edge of Fighter One, the auxiliary fighter strip just built by the Seabees. A counter-attack by Marine engineers forced one of them to withdraw; the other two waited for reinforcements and, when none came, went back south after dawn. Most of Watanabe’s battalion never entered the fight at all, having lost contact with its commander in the dark. At dawn on 14 September some hundred Japanese were still standing in the open on the southern slope of Hill 80, perhaps preparing for a final assault. At the request of Bailey, who carried it to the airfield in person, three P-400 fighters (an export version of the Airacobra) of the Army’s 67th Fighter Squadron strafed them and killed most of them.

Attacks on the flanks

At the same time as the fighting on the ridge, the Kuma Battalion attacked at about midnight the south-eastern sector of the perimeter, held by the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines. One company fought its way through the artillery fire into hand-to-hand combat but was thrown back, and Major Mizuno was killed. In the morning the Marines sent six light tanks out in front of the line without infantry cover; Japanese anti-tank guns destroyed or disabled three of them, and one rolled down a bank into the Tenaru River, where its crew drowned. Further, increasingly feeble attacks by the remnants of the Kuma Battalion on the evenings of 14 and 15 September were also repulsed. In the west some 650 of Oka’s men attacked the positions of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, near the coast at four in the morning on 14 September and were thrown back with heavy losses; one company seized a small hill inland but, kept under artillery fire all day, withdrew in the evening.

Retreat through the jungle

At 1.05 p.m. on 14 September Kawaguchi led the survivors of his shattered brigade deep into the jungle, where they spent the whole of the next day tending the wounded. They were then ordered to move west, beyond the Matanikau River, to join Oka’s detachment. The march began on the morning of 16 September and led through difficult terrain cut by ravines. Almost everyone who could walk helped to carry the wounded. The soldiers ate their last rations on the day they set out; exhausted and starving, they abandoned first their heavy equipment and then their rifles. When after five days they reached Oka’s positions in the Kokumbona area, only half of them still had their weapons. The survivors of the Kuma Battalion lost their way and wandered in the jungle for three weeks, almost dying of starvation, before rejoining the rest. On 17 September two Marine companies set off in pursuit and ran into an ambush laid by the Japanese rearguard; one platoon was surrounded and almost wiped out, and 24 Americans were killed.

Kawaguchi’s losses are usually estimated, following the American historian Richard B. Frank, at about 830 killed, including some 350 from Tamura’s battalion and 200 from Kokusho’s; an unknown number of wounded died during the retreat. On and around the ridge the Marines counted about 500 Japanese bodies, 200 of them on the slopes of Hill 123. Between 12 and 14 September the Americans lost between 104 and 111 killed and several hundred wounded. For the defence of the ridge Edson received the Medal of Honor, the highest American military decoration. The same medal was awarded to Major Bailey, posthumously, as he was killed two weeks later in the fighting on the Matanikau.

Place in the war

Bloody Ridge was the first defeat in this war of a Japanese land unit of this size. Hyakutake learned of it in Rabaul on 15 September and passed the news on to Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo. At an extraordinary meeting the army and navy staffs concluded that Guadalcanal might become the decisive battle of the war. This had immediate consequences on another front: Hyakutake could not reinforce Guadalcanal and conduct an offensive in New Guinea at the same time, so the troops advancing along the Kokoda Track, by now a few dozen kilometres from Port Moresby, were ordered to halt and fall back until the matter of the island was settled. The Japanese never resumed their advance on Port Moresby.

For the Americans the defence of the ridge meant that Henderson Field and the Cactus Air Force aircraft operating from it had survived the most dangerous crisis of the campaign. Vandegrift admitted after the war that this was the only moment at which he doubted the outcome of the fighting, and that had the attack succeeded “we would have been in a very bad way”. The historian Richard B. Frank wrote that the Japanese were never closer to victory on the island itself than in September 1942, on the ridge above the airfield that was thereafter called Bloody. As early as 14 September Vandegrift brought another battalion over from Tulagi to Guadalcanal, and on 18 September a convoy delivered more than 4,000 men of the 7th Marines, which for the first time made it possible to close the perimeter around the airfield with a continuous line. Japan for its part began shipping an entire division to the island, and the struggle for Guadalcanal turned into a long battle of attrition in which both sides sent ever more men, ships and aircraft to the island.