Carlson's Long Patrol

At dawn on 6 November 1942 two companies of the 2nd Marine Raider Battalion set out from Aola Bay on the north coast of Guadalcanal into the jungle. They were led by Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson, a commander already known for the Makin raid, and local scouts and carriers showed them the way. So began the Long Patrol – a 29-day operation behind Japanese lines during which the Raiders covered some 240 kilometres, fought more than a dozen skirmishes with units escaping from Koli Point and, according to Carlson’s reports, killed 488 Japanese soldiers for the loss of 16 dead. The patrol passed into Marine Corps legend, although its results and costs are sometimes assessed more cautiously.

The Raiders at Aola Bay

The 2nd Raider Battalion was an exceptional unit. Carlson, who in the 1930s had marched with the Chinese Communist Eighth Route Army as a military observer, had built it on principles he had seen there: closing the gap between officers and men, discussing decisions together, and the motto gung ho (“work together”). Unlike Merritt Edson’s 1st Raider Battalion, the battalion was trained not so much for swift commando landings as for guerrilla-style operations – infiltration and fighting at night. It consisted of six independent rifle companies and a headquarters company.

At 5.30 a.m. on 4 November two companies of Raiders landed from boats at Aola Bay, some 60 kilometres east of Lunga Point. Together with soldiers of the Army’s 147th Infantry Regiment they were to protect some 500 Seabees who were starting to build a new airfield there; the plan, put forward by Rear Admiral Richmond Turner, had been approved by the commander in the South Pacific, Vice Admiral William Halsey. The battalion’s other companies were to arrive by sea from Espiritu Santo.

In those same days, west of Aola, the fighting at Koli Point was under way. The Japanese 230th Infantry Regiment of Colonel Toshinari Shōji, which after the defeat in the Battle for Henderson Field had withdrawn to the east of the American perimeter, was being hemmed in there by two Marine and two Army battalions. The commander of the 1st Marine Division, Major General Alexander Vandegrift, ordered Carlson to move overland from Aola towards Koli Point and cut off any Japanese who slipped out of the encirclement to the east or south.

Through the jungle to Koli Point

Carlson organised his supplies in his own way. Every four days boats from Aola were to deliver rations to an agreed point on the coast, from which carriers took them inland to the patrol’s base. The column was guided by local scouts led by Major John Mather of the Australian Army and Sergeant Major Jacob Vouza of the Solomon Islands Protectorate police – the same man who in August, while being tortured by the Japanese, had managed to warn the Marines of the attack at Alligator Creek. Without the islanders, who knew the tracks, the rivers and the villages, the patrol would not have been possible at all.

On 7 November the column reached the Reko River, where the Raiders learned that the Japanese had raided the Christian mission there and killed two missionaries. In the first skirmish two Japanese were killed, and the scout at the head of the column was badly wounded. On 8 November the Raiders reached the village of Tasimboko, and on 9 November the village of Binu, about 5 kilometres south-east of Koli Point, where Carlson set up his base. On 10 November he was joined by three more companies, which had arrived at Aola the day before.

Meanwhile Shōji’s soldiers, on the orders of Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake, were escaping from the pocket on Gavaga Creek through a gap in the American ring and heading south into the interior of the island. On the morning of 11 November Carlson sent four companies out on patrol. Company C ran into a large body of Japanese near the village of Asamana on the Metapona River and was pinned down by their fire; Companies D and E, coming to its aid, were themselves drawn into fierce fighting. The commander of Company D, who returned to base with a few men reporting that the rest of his company had been killed, was immediately relieved by Carlson when the company came back intact under a sergeant. That day the Raiders lost 10 killed; they estimated Japanese losses at about 120.

The pursuit

On 12 November Carlson occupied Asamana with two companies; Japanese signs in the village marked it as a rallying point for Shōji’s units. Dug in around the village and the river crossing, the Raiders killed 25 approaching Japanese that day, and the next day broke up a company-sized column with fire from the 75 mm howitzers of the 1st Battalion, 10th Marines, called in by radio. On 15 November Carlson moved his base to Asamana, but Shōji’s main force was by then far into the interior of the island, heading west. From then on the patrols mostly caught stragglers and smaller groups, often weakened by hunger and disease.

At the end of November the battalion was given a new task. It was to move to the upper reaches of the Tenaru River and the Lunga area, south of the perimeter, find the trail by which Maruyama’s division had approached the airfield in October, and destroy the Japanese guns that had been harassing Henderson Field with their fire for weeks. On 20 November the Raiders set up a base about 3 kilometres south-east of the perimeter, and on 25 November they were joined by the last company from Espiritu Santo.

On 30 November, on a ridge about 6 kilometres south of the perimeter, the Raiders found a Japanese 75 mm mountain gun and an anti-tank gun. A six-man squad of Company F, patrolling the area, stumbled into a hidden camp where about a hundred Japanese soldiers were resting with their rifles stacked. In a chaotic fight the Marines killed – by their own account – some 75 Japanese; the rest fled. On 3 December, on the way back, part of the battalion fought a hand-to-hand action near the summit of Mount Austen, and on 4 December the column ran into an ambush in which four Raiders were killed. That same afternoon the last companies entered the perimeter at Lunga Point.

The balance sheet

Carlson reported that his men had killed 488 Japanese soldiers and captured or destroyed two guns and a large quantity of weapons and ammunition. The figure comes from the reports of the participants themselves and should be treated as an estimate; studies usually give a round figure of “nearly 500” killed. The Raiders’ battle casualties were 16 killed and 17 wounded, plus two wounded local guides. Disease was far more damaging: 225 men were put out of action by malaria, dysentery and tropical skin infections, and almost all the rest were ill to a lesser degree. Lieutenant Cleland Early recalled that his platoon had gone out on patrol 32 strong and come back with 20 – “all with malaria, worms, diarrhoea, ringworm and high morale”.

For Shōji’s force the march across the island was a catastrophe. According to American studies, of the several thousand soldiers who had escaped from Koli Point about 1,300 were still with him on the Lunga River, halfway along the route, and only 700–800 reached the Japanese positions beyond the Matanikau. Most of the losses were caused not by skirmishes with the Raiders but by hunger and disease, but the constant harassment of the columns in the jungle hastened their disintegration.

Place in the war

The Long Patrol was one of the few operations of the campaign in which the Americans fought in the way the Japanese regarded as their own: in small units, deep in the jungle, far from their supplies. It showed how important the Solomon Islanders were as scouts and carriers, and it strengthened the legend of Carlson and his battalion. At the same time the cost was high: on 17 December the exhausted Raiders sailed from Guadalcanal to Espiritu Santo, and in March 1943 the battalion was unofficially judged unfit for combat. It returned to action as a whole only on Bougainville in November 1943. The Guadalcanal campaign itself was meanwhile decided elsewhere – at sea in mid-November 1942 and in the Army’s offensives at the turn of 1942 and 1943, after which the Japanese evacuated the island in February 1943.