The fighting for Mount Austen

In mid-December 1942 fighting began on Guadalcanal for Mount Austen – a forested massif rising in the interior of the island, south-west of Henderson Field. Some studies date the Battle of Mount Austen, the Galloping Horse and the Sea Horse from 15 December, when Japanese raiders once again infiltrated the airfield by night. Major General Alexander Patch issued the order to take the mountain on 16 December, however; the American infantry set off on 17 December and first clashed with the main Japanese positions on the morning of 18 December. The name “Battle of the Gifu”, used in some studies, refers to the strongest Japanese point of resistance on the mountain; the fighting for it went on until 23 January 1943.

Mount Austen

Mount Austen – the Japanese called it Bear Height, the islanders Mambulu – was not a single peak but a tangle of ridges and knolls, partly covered in dense jungle and partly in kunai grass. Its highest point, about 460 metres above sea level, lay some 10 kilometres south-west of Henderson Field, on the west side of the Lunga River. Because the American positions stretched along the north coast and the Japanese held the sector west of the Matanikau River, accounts often simplified the situation by saying that the fighting was going on “in the west”. In fact the mountain lay inland, south-west of the airfield, and dominated the whole American perimeter.

The landing plan of August 1942 had provided for the mountain – then called the Grassy Knoll by the Americans – to be taken on the very first day, because from the sea it looked close. It turned out to be much further away, and the Marine commander, General Alexander Vandegrift, did not have enough men to hold so distant a point and confined himself to defending a perimeter around the airfield. From the mountain the Japanese watched the airfield, directed the fire of the artillery harassing Henderson Field, and covered the trail into the interior along which General Masao Maruyama’s division had approached for the Battle for Henderson Field in October. After that defeat Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake, commander of the 17th Army, ordered the massif to be fortified. It was occupied by Colonel Akinosuke Oka’s 124th Infantry Regiment, reinforced by the remnants of other units, and later the defence of the area was taken over by Major General Takeo Itō, the 38th Division’s infantry commander. At the turn of November and December Carlson’s Raider patrol also passed close to the mountain, fighting an action near its summit on 3 December.

The Gifu

The strongest Japanese position on the island was a fortified area between the summit of Mount Austen and the hills designated by the Americans as Hill 27 and Hill 31. The Japanese named it the Gifu, after Gifu Prefecture in central Japan. It consisted of 45–50 interconnected, carefully camouflaged log-and-earth bunkers, arranged in a horseshoe open to the west over a stretch of about 1.4 kilometres. Less than a metre of each bunker showed above ground, and the walls and roofs of logs and earth were up to 60 centimetres thick; some stood among the roots of giant trees. Each held one or two machine guns and a few riflemen, and the bunkers covered one another with their fire. Mortars were sited behind them.

The Gifu was defended by Major Takeyoshi Inagaki with some 500–600 men from the 2nd Battalions of the 228th and 124th Infantry Regiments. The position’s weakness was the condition of its defenders: they had been starving for weeks, were sick with malaria and dysentery, and lacked ammunition and heavy weapons, while supplies from the coast arrived rarely and in small quantities.

The 132nd Infantry’s attack

After taking command on the island on 9 December, Patch was preparing a general offensive to clear Guadalcanal of the Japanese. Night raids by Japanese engineers pushed him to act quickly. On 12 December a small party from the 38th Engineer Regiment slipped through the American lines from the south and destroyed a fighter and a fuel truck on Henderson Field. On 14 December a patrol of the 132nd Infantry Regiment clashed with the Japanese on the eastern slopes of Mount Austen, and during the night of 14–15 December Lieutenant Ono and four soldiers armed with picric acid charges slipped past the sentries and destroyed several P-39 Airacobra fighters on the airfield. These raids cost the Americans few casualties, but Patch concluded that as long as the Japanese held the mountain, the airfield was in danger. On 16 December he ordered the Americal Division’s 132nd Infantry Regiment to take it at once.

Colonel Leroy E. Nelson’s regiment had arrived on Guadalcanal only on 8 December and had no combat experience. The attack was led by Lieutenant Colonel William C. Wright’s 3rd Battalion, with the 1st Battalion following; support came from the Army’s 105 mm and the Marines’ 75 mm howitzers. On 17 December Wright’s battalion began to climb towards the summit. To keep to the set timetable it left its heavy mortars and machine guns behind; ammunition, water and food were carried by hand along narrow trails hacked through the jungle. At 9.30 a.m. on 18 December the head of the column came under machine-gun fire. Exhausted by the march and dehydrated, the men were unable to deploy from column into an attack.

The next morning, after an artillery barrage and an air strike by aircraft from Henderson Field, Wright went forward with artillery observers to reconnoitre and was killed by a burst from a hidden machine gun. His second-in-command reached the front only towards evening, while Japanese riflemen infiltrated between the positions and harassed the command posts and the carrier columns on the trail linking the battalions to the perimeter on the Lunga. Between 20 and 23 December the Japanese withdrew from the nearest hills, and American patrols met no resistance. Nelson therefore sent both battalions west towards Hill 31 and from there south towards Hill 27. On 24 December the 3rd Battalion was halted on the slopes of Hill 31 by heavy fire from unseen positions – the Americans had run into the Gifu.

Deadlock before the Gifu

From 25 to 29 December the 132nd Infantry tried to break the Japanese position. The 3rd Battalion, supported by artillery, attacked frontally to pin the defenders, while the 1st Battalion looked for a way round from the east. Because the Japanese bunkers covered one another, the outflanking move failed, and the 75 mm shells, and at times even the 105 mm, could not penetrate the roofs. The Americans had neither flamethrowers nor the pole charges later used to destroy such bunkers; they fought with light mortars and machine guns and had little ammunition. The wounded had to be carried on stretchers down slippery trails to the perimeter, which took hours, and many of them died of infections. By 29 December the regiment had lost 53 killed, 129 wounded and 131 sick.

On 26 December, when chronologies recorded heavy fighting on Mount Austen, it was these fruitless attacks that were under way. Once they had ended, the fighting at the Gifu took the form of exchanges of fire, patrol raids and night infiltration attempts. The Americans had not taken the Gifu by the end of the year; its defenders, who were no longer receiving supplies, ate their last rations on 1 January 1943. The US Marine officer and historian Samuel B. Griffith later judged that in this “thoroughly botched” operation Patch and his deputy had “much to unlearn and perhaps even more to learn”. Participants in the fighting, however, drew attention to the difficulties faced by an inexperienced regiment: the terrain, the lack of heavy weapons and a type of fortification it had never encountered before.

The decision in Tokyo

While the deadlock continued at the Gifu, the fate of Guadalcanal was being decided far from the island. The Japanese garrison was starving, and after the destroyer Teruzuki was sunk on 12 December, Rear Admiral Raizō Tanaka concluded that the troops on the island could no longer be supplied by sea. On 12 December the navy proposed for the first time that Guadalcanal be abandoned. The army command resisted for a long time, but on 19 December a delegation from Imperial General Headquarters flew to Rabaul, led by Colonel Jōichirō Sanada, head of the operations section of the Army General Staff. After talks with Lieutenant General Hitoshi Imamura, who since 26 November had commanded the army forces in the Solomon Islands and New Guinea from Rabaul, Sanada recommended a withdrawal on his return. On 26 December the leadership of Imperial General Headquarters accepted this recommendation and ordered plans to be drawn up for the evacuation, for a new defensive line in the central Solomons based on New Georgia, and for shifting forces to New Guinea.

On 28 December the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Hajime Sugiyama, and the Chief of the Navy General Staff, Admiral Osami Nagano, presented the decision to the Emperor. On 31 December, at a conference in the Emperor’s presence, Hirohito formally approved it. Preparations for the evacuation, named Operation Ke, were carried out in strict secrecy; the troops on the island, including the defenders of the Gifu, were to learn of it only at the last moment.

Place in the war

The first attack on Mount Austen petered out on 4 January 1943. The 132nd Infantry, which since the start of the operation had lost 115 killed and 272 wounded, had by then taken the neighbouring Hill 27 and surrounded the Gifu on the north, east and south, but it was in no condition for further attacks. On 10 January Patch’s newly formed XIV Corps went over to a general offensive: units of the 25th Infantry Division attacked the ridges named after their shapes on the map, the Galloping Horse and the Sea Horse, and the 35th Infantry Regiment relieved the exhausted 132nd at the Gifu. The cut-off Major Inagaki refused to obey Colonel Oka’s order to break out to his own lines, because he would have had to leave his sick and wounded behind. Only a few soldiers surrendered in response to an appeal broadcast by loudspeaker. On 22 January an American light tank broke deep into the position and destroyed several bunkers, and that night the defenders, Inagaki with them, made a last, suicidal charge. On 23 January the Gifu was in American hands.

According to American figures, some 250 Americans and about 3,000 Japanese died in the fighting for Mount Austen, the Galloping Horse and the Sea Horse; many of the Japanese died not from bullets but from hunger and disease. Japanese prisoners called the fighting at Hills 27 and 31 the battle of the Mountain of Blood. For the US Army it was the first serious lesson in fighting fortified Japanese positions in the jungle – with their bunkers, their crossfire and their defenders ready to die to the last man. The Japanese later used the same methods on New Georgia, Tarawa, Peleliu and Iwo Jima.

The fighting for Mount Austen did not decide the fate of Guadalcanal, however – that was settled by the starvation of the Japanese garrison and the decision of 31 December. On the nights of 1–2, 4–5 and 7–8 February 1943 Japanese destroyers took some 10,600 troops off the island, and on 9 February Patch reported that organised resistance on Guadalcanal had ceased.