The Makin Island raid

Before dawn on 17 August 1942 some two hundred men of the US Marine Corps’ 2nd Raider Battalion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson, came ashore in rubber boats on Makin Atoll, or Butaritari, in the Gilbert Islands. They had been brought there by two submarines. Within a few hours the raiders had overwhelmed the small Japanese garrison and destroyed the seaplane base, but the withdrawal from the island through heavy surf turned into an ordeal that lasted until the following night. Nine Marines were left behind on Makin, and the Japanese later murdered them.

Carlson’s Raiders

The raid was the work of one of two new Marine special units. At the beginning of 1942 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had taken an interest in the British Commandos and wanted an American counterpart, while Admiral Chester Nimitz was asking for troops to raid lightly defended islands. The Commandant of the Marine Corps disliked the word “commandos”, so in February 1942 two raider battalions (Raiders) were formed. The first was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Merritt Edson, who landed on Tulagi on 7 August. The second was entrusted to Carlson.

Carlson was an unusual figure. In the 1930s, as a military observer in China, he had marched with the Communist Eighth Route Army and admired the guerrilla tactics of Zhu De. He trained his battalion in the spirit he had brought back from there: officers and men ate the same food and discussed the aims of the war, and the unit’s motto became the Chinese gung ho, “work together”. His executive officer was Major James Roosevelt, the President’s eldest son. These unorthodox methods aroused the suspicion of many Marine officers, but the battalion was regarded as superbly trained.

The target: Makin

The Gilbert Islands belonged to Britain; the Japanese had occupied Makin without a fight on 10 December 1941 and set up a long-range reconnaissance seaplane base in the lagoon. In February 1942 aircraft from Yorktown bombed the base during the first American raids on the Marshall and Gilbert Islands. In August its garrison numbered about seventy naval infantrymen under Warrant Officer Kyūzaburō Kanemitsu, along with a dozen or so mechanics, meteorologists and civilians. The raid was meant to destroy the base, take prisoners and documents, and above all divert Japanese attention from the Solomon Islands, where the offensive on Guadalcanal was just beginning.

On 8 August the two largest American submarines left Pearl Harbor (PL): Nautilus, which had fought at Midway in June, and the submarine minelayer Argonaut, carrying two companies of the battalion, some 220 men. The voyage in the crowded, stuffy hulls took more than a week. On the evening of 16 August the submarines met off Makin.

The landing and the fighting

The surf proved far heavier than expected, and water swamped the outboard motors of the rubber boats. Carlson therefore changed the plan and ordered everyone to land on a single beach instead of two. The message did not reach one boat: Lieutenant Oscar Peatross and twelve men landed at the originally designated spot – which, as it turned out, was behind the enemy. When one of the Marines fired his weapon by accident, surprise was lost; the Japanese sent off a report of the landing, and their counter-attack soon followed.

The raiders crossed the island and ran into heavy machine-gun fire and snipers hidden in the crowns of the palm trees. In this fighting Sergeant Clyde Thomason was killed, the first enlisted Marine of this war to be awarded the Medal of Honor. Twice the Japanese launched bayonet charges and were wiped out, and Peatross’s group, striking from the rear, killed Kanemitsu and destroyed the radio station. Nautilus, directed by radio from the shore, shelled the ships in the lagoon and, according to American reports, sank a transport and a gunboat. At about 1.30 p.m. Japanese aircraft arrived; two Kawanishi H6K flying boats carrying reinforcements tried to alight on the lagoon and were destroyed by fire from the shore. Carlson did not know that the garrison had to all intents and purposes ceased to exist.

The withdrawal

On the evening of 17 August the raiders began to return to the submarines. Eighteen boats reached the surf, most of them with dead engines. Only seven crews, 93 men in all, managed to get through; the rest, after many attempts, were thrown back onto the beach without weapons or equipment, exhausted and soaked. Carlson, convinced that in the morning he would have to fight Japanese reinforcements, even sent a note to the Japanese commander offering to surrender; it never reached him, and the episode itself was long passed over in silence. On the morning of 18 August the submarines sent a boat with a line, but Japanese aircraft sank it and forced the submarines to stay submerged all day. Only on the night of 18–19 August did Carlson’s men build a raft from rubber boats and local outrigger canoes, cross the lagoon to its entrance and get picked up by the submarines.

According to American figures, 18 Marines were killed and 12 listed as missing; Japanese studies give 21 killed and 7 drowned during the withdrawal. Carlson counted 83 dead Japanese and estimated their losses at about 160, but Japanese documents speak of 43 killed and 3 missing. In the haste nine living Marines were left on the island. Japanese reinforcements, brought in from Jaluit and Chuuk, captured them a few days later.

The fate of those left behind

The prisoners were taken to Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshalls. According to post-war testimony they were at first decently treated, but in October 1942 all nine were beheaded with a sword. Responsibility was borne by the commander of the 6th Base Force on Kwajalein, Vice Admiral Kōsō Abe, who claimed he had followed a suggestion from a naval staff officer from Tokyo. An American tribunal on Guam sentenced him to death, and he was executed on 19 June 1947; two of his subordinates received prison sentences. The remains of nineteen Marines killed on Makin were found in 2000; thirteen were buried the following year at Arlington National Cemetery. The remains of the nine executed on Kwajalein have never been found.

Place in the war

The submarines returned to Pearl Harbor on 25–26 August, and the raiders were welcomed as heroes. The press, hungry for victories, described the raid as a daring strike deep into the Japanese empire, and the President’s own son had taken part in it and received the Navy Cross. In 1943 the film Gung Ho!, loosely based on the story, was released. Militarily, however, the raid achieved little: no prisoners or important documents were taken, and the Japanese did not move a single unit from the Solomons.

It did, on the other hand, have the opposite effect to the one intended. The Japanese command realised how weakly defended the Gilbert Islands were, and as early as September 1942 it sent naval infantry units there and began building on the islet of Betio in Tarawa Atoll a system of bunkers that in November 1943 cost the Americans more than a thousand dead in three days of fighting for the Gilbert Islands. Historians still argue over how far the raid was to blame and how far the general strengthening of Japanese defences in the Central Pacific. Carlson’s experience, by contrast, influenced the whole Marine Corps: the three-man fire team he introduced later became the basis of the organisation of the Marine rifle squad, and the motto gung ho passed into everyday English.