The fighting on the Matanikau

On 23 September 1942 Lieutenant Colonel Lewis “Chesty” Puller’s battalion of US Marines set out westwards from the perimeter around Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, towards the Matanikau River. Its task was to clear the area of the remnants of the Japanese units defeated in the middle of the month and to reconnoitre the country around the village of Kokumbona. The expedition turned into several days of fighting involving three American battalions. On 27 September their attack across the river broke down, and three companies landed from the sea behind enemy lines were surrounded and escaped with their lives only thanks to a destroyer’s guns and the crews of the landing craft. Covering the evacuation, Coast Guard Signalman Douglas Munro was killed – the only member of that service ever awarded the Medal of Honor. It was the only defeat of this scale suffered by the Marines in the entire Guadalcanal campaign.

Some chronologies describe 23–27 September as the “Third Battle of the Matanikau”, in which “Japanese naval bombardment and landing parties almost destroyed Henderson Field”, after which the Japanese land forces were repulsed. Events took a different course. In September it was the Americans who attacked and the Japanese who defended – successfully. The airfield was not under threat at the time: Japanese destroyers did shell it at night and aircraft bombed it by day, but they did it no serious damage. The great bombardment of Henderson Field by Japanese battleships, which really did come close to putting the airfield out of action, took place only on the night of 13–14 October. In the English-language literature the September fighting is usually called the Second Matanikau action, while the third is the successful American attack of 7–9 October.

The river on the western edge

The Matanikau, a small river but deep at its mouth, flows from the mountains to the sea a few kilometres west of Lunga Point. At its mouth it forms a sandbar, and inland its valley cuts between grass-covered ridges and jungle. To the west lie the Point Cruz peninsula and the village of Kokumbona. From the start of the campaign this was the area where Japanese troops driven from the vicinity of the airfield gathered, and a place from which they could observe and attack the western part of the American defences.

The first clashes on the river taught the Americans a painful lesson. A few days after the landings on Guadalcanal, on the evening of 12 August, a 25-man patrol led by the division’s intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Goettge, landed by boat west of the perimeter, hoping to make contact with Japanese troops who were supposedly ready to surrender. The patrol ran into an ambush by Japanese naval troops; only three men survived, swimming back to their own lines. In response, on 19 August General Alexander Vandegrift sent three companies of the 5th Marine Regiment to the Matanikau. One attacked across the sandbar at the mouth, the second crossed the river inland and struck at the village of Matanikau, and the third landed from the sea further west, near Kokumbona. After briefly occupying both villages the Marines returned to their lines; according to American figures they killed some 65 Japanese for the loss of four men. This is sometimes called the First Battle of the Matanikau. Two days later Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki’s detachment was almost entirely wiped out in the Battle of the Tenaru, on the eastern side of the perimeter.

On 27 August the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, landed from boats near Kokumbona with a similar task. Difficult terrain, heat and well-prepared Japanese positions slowed the advance, and when the Marines moved on the next morning they found that the enemy had withdrawn during the night. The battalion returned to Lunga by boat. Both August expeditions inflicted losses on the Japanese, but did not deprive them of the Matanikau valley as an assembly area and defensive position.

After Bloody Ridge

In the first half of September the Tokyo Express – Japanese destroyers and barges running at night – brought to Guadalcanal some 6,000 men of Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi’s 35th Brigade. Most landed east of the perimeter, but about a thousand men under Colonel Akinosuke Oka came ashore in the west, near Kokumbona. On the nights of 12–13 and 13–14 September Kawaguchi’s main force attacked the ridge above the airfield from the south and was repulsed in the Battle of Bloody Ridge. Oka’s attacks from the west and those of the detachment in the east also broke down. Kawaguchi was ordered to withdraw westwards to the Matanikau valley, where he was to join up with Oka. His exhausted, hungry soldiers, carrying their wounded, struggled through the jungle for about a week; most reached the river by 20 September.

Meanwhile the Americans had been reinforced. On 18 September, despite the sinking of the carrier Wasp by a Japanese submarine, Rear Admiral Richmond Turner’s convoy brought the 7th Marine Regiment, some 4,200 men, to the island. From 19 September Vandegrift was able to surround the airfield with a continuous defensive line. The airfield, kept in operation since August by engineers and naval construction troops, was the base of the Cactus Air Force, whose aircraft now also supported operations on land.

Vandegrift’s staff knew that groups of Japanese stragglers were wandering between the perimeter and the Matanikau, and that larger forces were gathering beyond the river. The general decided not to wait for the enemy to dig in there, but to send out several small expeditions to wipe out the scattered Japanese east of the river and prevent the main force from organising itself right next to the western flank of the defences. The first task went to Puller’s 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, supported by the fire of the 11th Marines’ artillery. The plan was for the battalion to cross the Mount Austen massif, ford the Matanikau inland and reconnoitre the area as far as Kokumbona, while the 1st Raider Battalion – now commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Griffith, since its previous commander, Merritt Edson, had taken over the 5th Marines – was to cross the river at its mouth and advance along the coast.

The Americans expected to find about 400 Japanese beyond the river. In fact Kawaguchi, fearing a landing in the area, had entrusted the defence of the Matanikau to Oka’s 124th Infantry Regiment, about 1,900 strong; one of its battalions had dug in at the foot of Mount Austen and along both banks of the river. Together with other units around Kokumbona there were some 4,000 Japanese in the area.

Puller’s march

Some 930 of Puller’s men left the perimeter on the morning of 23 September. That same day they drove off two Japanese reconnaissance patrols. On the afternoon of 24 September, climbing the north-eastern slope of Mount Austen, they stumbled on a Japanese bivouac and killed a dozen or so soldiers. The shots alerted the companies of Oka’s battalion, which attacked the Marines. By nightfall the Japanese, as ordered, had broken contact and withdrawn towards the river. The Americans counted about 30 enemy dead; they themselves lost 13 killed and 25 wounded. Puller radioed for help in evacuating the wounded, and Vandegrift sent him Lieutenant Colonel David McDougal’s 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines.

On 25 September Puller sent the wounded back to the perimeter with three of his companies, while he himself pushed on with one company, his headquarters and McDougal’s battalion. On the morning of 26 September the units reached the Matanikau, but could not get across the river, either inland, by a single-log footbridge built earlier by the Japanese, or at the mouth, across the sandbar. In the afternoon Griffith’s Raiders reached the mouth, together with Edson, who brought a plan of attack for the next day, hastily prepared at division headquarters.

27 September

The plan, drawn up chiefly by Lieutenant Colonel Merrill Twining of Vandegrift’s staff, provided for the Raiders, with Puller’s company, to cross by the footbridge inland and strike the Japanese at the mouth from the south, while McDougal’s battalion simultaneously attacked across the sandbar. If the attack succeeded, the rest of Puller’s battalion was to land from boats west of Point Cruz and hit the enemy in the rear. Support was to be provided by aircraft from Henderson Field and by artillery.

On the morning of 27 September none of the attacks made any headway. The Raiders were pinned down at the footbridge by Japanese machine-gun fire; Major Kenneth Bailey, a hero of the defence of Bloody Ridge, was killed and Griffith was wounded. An attempt to outflank the enemy further upstream also failed. During the night Oka had reinforced the defence at the mouth with more companies, and McDougal’s men could not get across the sandbar. Years later one participant recalled that platoon after platoon sent across the sand was cut down one after another.

Then a series of errors turned failure into a dangerous situation. A Japanese air raid on Henderson Field interrupted communications, and Griffith’s unclear reports were read at headquarters as news that the Raiders had crossed the river. Edson and Vandegrift therefore ordered the landing to go ahead. At 1 p.m. three companies of Puller’s battalion under Major Otho Rogers landed from boats just west of Point Cruz and occupied a ridge marked as Hill 84, a few hundred metres from the shore. Oka quickly grasped what had happened and threw troops at them from the west and east. Rogers was killed by a mortar round, and Captain Charles Kelley took command. The surrounded Marines had no radio; they laid out the word “HELP” on the hillside with white undershirts. The message was spotted by a dive-bomber pilot, who passed it on to Edson.

Edson, having learned that the Raiders had not crossed the river, was inclined to call off the whole operation. Puller, whose men were stranded on the other side, protested vehemently, ran down to the beach and with the help of his signaller summoned the destroyer USS Monssen, which was supporting the operation. He went aboard and led a dozen or so landing craft towards Point Cruz. Using signal flags he made contact with Kelley. The Japanese were already cutting the hill off from the shore, so for about half an hour the destroyer shelled the ground between the ridge and the beach, clearing a path for the Marines to withdraw. They came down, suffering losses from their own artillery as well, and by 4.30 p.m. most had reached the beach. They had to leave behind their dead and most of their heavy weapons.

Douglas Munro

The landing craft – mostly Higgins boats and similar craft – were manned by sailors of the United States Coast Guard assigned to the base at Lunga Point. The group that had landed the Marines in the morning and returned for them under fire in the afternoon was led by 22-year-old Signalman First Class Douglas Albert Munro, born in Vancouver to an American father and a British mother and raised in Washington State. As the Marines boarded the boats on the beach, the Japanese were firing heavily from the shore. Munro placed his boat between the enemy and the loaded craft and covered them with machine-gun fire. Mortally wounded, he died soon afterwards; according to his comrade Raymond Evans, his last words were: “Did they get off?” In 1943 he was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor – the only one in the history of the Coast Guard.

Losses and recriminations

For the Japanese, dispirited by their defeat at Bloody Ridge, it was their first success in weeks. Oka’s soldiers counted the bodies of 32 Marines around Hill 84 and gathered up the abandoned weapons, and the chief of staff of the 17th Army at Rabaul, Major General Akisaburo Futami, wrote in his diary that this was “the first good news from Guadalcanal”. Estimates of American losses in the whole action of 23–27 September vary: according to Richard B. Frank, author of the standard history of the campaign, about 60 Marines were killed; according to Michael T. Smith, as many as 91, with more than a hundred wounded. Japanese losses are estimated at 30–60 killed.

The defeat set off mutual recriminations among the Marine commanders. Puller blamed Griffith and Edson, Griffith blamed Edson, Twining blamed Puller and Edson, and the division’s operations officer, Colonel Gerald Thomas, blamed Twining himself. Historians point to a hasty plan, poor reconnaissance of the enemy’s strength, unreliable communications and the splitting of the battalions into several groups that could not support one another. Lessons were learned quickly: the next attack on the Matanikau was planned far more carefully.

Place in the war

The September fighting did not change the situation on the island, but it showed both sides that the Matanikau valley would be the key to the next phase of the campaign. The Japanese were preparing a jumping-off point there for a new and much larger attack on the airfield. At the end of September and the beginning of October the Tokyo Express began bringing Lieutenant General Masao Maruyama’s 2nd Infantry Division to Guadalcanal, and the commander of the 17th Army, Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake, prepared to move his headquarters to the island.

The Americans forestalled this plan. On 7–9 October a much stronger and better organised Marine force, again including Puller and Edson, crossed the Matanikau inland and surprised the Japanese 4th Infantry Regiment as it prepared to attack. The Japanese lost about 700 killed, the Americans 65, and the enemy had to withdraw from its positions east of the river. On the night of 11–12 October American cruisers and destroyers defeated a Japanese force in the Battle of Cape Esperance. Two nights later, on 13–14 October, came what is sometimes wrongly attributed to September: the battleships Kongō and Haruna fired nearly a thousand heavy shells at Henderson Field, destroying about half the aircraft based there and most of the fuel stocks. For several days the airfield all but ceased to function.

On this basis the Japanese launched their main attack. In the Battle for Henderson Field, on 23–26 October, tanks and infantry struck first at the very mouth of the Matanikau, and Maruyama’s main force from the south, through the jungle. Both attacks were bloodily repulsed; Puller’s battalion was again fighting in the defensive positions in the south. In November the Marines crossed the Matanikau westwards, towards Point Cruz and Kokumbona, and fighting in the area continued until the January offensive, after which the Japanese evacuated the island at the beginning of February 1943.

The September defeat on the Matanikau, though small on the scale of the whole war, was an important lesson for the Marines in command, reconnaissance and communications in the jungle – a lesson they put to use only two weeks later. It is remembered above all thanks to Douglas Munro, whose name is borne today by Coast Guard ships and facilities, and the anniversary of whose death is marked every year by Cle Elum, the town where he grew up.