On the morning of November 6th, 1942, 267 United States Marine Raiders walked into the jungle on Guadal Canal’s northeast coast and vanished. Their commanding officer was a 46-year-old lieutenant colonel named Evans Carlson. He had spent a year living with Chinese communist guerrillas behind Japanese lines in China.
He had studied how small units destroy larger ones. And he had built his battalion around a single idea borrowed from Maoadong’s eighth route army. Move fast, hit hard, disappear. Their target was somewhere between 2 and 3,000 Japanese soldiers of Colonel Toshinarish Gi’s 230th Infantry Regiment, retreating through that same jungle after escaping an American encirclement at Kohi Point.
The Japanese knew the Americans were behind them. They posted rear guards. They set ambushes. They sent patrols to find and kill the Marine column. That was November 6th. By December 4th, every one of those rear guard forces had been annihilated. Carlson’s raiders walked out of the jungle 29 days later. They had killed 488 Japanese soldiers.
They had destroyed two 75mm mountain guns. They had lost 16 men. The kill ratio was 30 to1. This is the story of the long patrol. Guadal Canal, October 1942. The campaign was 5 months old and hemorrhaging. The Marines held a single airirstrip called Henderson Field and a thin perimeter around it. Japanese warships shelled them at night.
Japanese bombers hit them during the day. A network of hidden longrange artillery. The Americans had nicknamed Pistol Pete. 150 mm howitzers and 100 mm cannons dug into the jungle behind Mount Austin, lobbed shells onto the runway around the clock. On the night of October 23rd, Lieutenant General Masau Maruyama threw his entire second infantry division at the Marine perimeter in a mass frontal assault on Henderson Field.
The battle lasted 3 days. When it was over, the Marines conducted a body count in the wire. The detail tallied 1462 Japanese dead. Maruyama survivors dragged themselves west toward the Matanaka River. But a separate force under Colonel Toshinarish Gi, roughly 3,000 men of the 230th Infantry Regiment, 38th Division, had been ordered east to Kohi Point to await reinforcement by destroyer.
The Americans moved to trap them. Between November 3rd and 12th, two marine battalions and two army battalions tried to close the encirclement at Gavaga Creek. They were too slow. Between November 9th and 11th, Shi and his men slipped through the cordon and disappeared south into the jungle interior.
3,000 armed Japanese soldiers organized into battalion-sized elements moving through the trackless center of the island toward the American rear. Someone had to go after them. Evans Fordis Carlson was not a normal Marine officer. He had lied about his age to enlist in the US Army at 16. Earned a commission in the First World War. Served on Persing staff in France, then enlisted as a private in the Marine Corps in 1922 because he wanted to start over from the bottom.
He earned his first Navy cross in Nicaragua in 1930, leading 12 Marines against a force of 40 bandits at a place called Portillo. Then came China. Carlson served three tours there between 1927 and 1938. On his third tour, he embedded with Zhuday’s Chinese Communist Eighth Route Army for nearly a year, marching behind Japanese lines through northern China, studying how guerilla fighters with inferior weapons destroyed conventional forces through speed, deception, and relentless small unit violence.
He met Maoadong. He met Zhao and Li. He came home with a philosophy he called gung-ho, an angllicization of the Chinese characters, meaning work together and a tactical concept that would reshape the United States Marine Corps forever. The three-man fire team. Every rifle squad in Carlson’s second Marine Raider battalion consisted of 10 men, a squad leader, and three fire teams of three.
Each fire team carried one M1 Garand rifle, one Thompson submachine gun, and one Browning automatic rifle. Within 15 seconds, a single raider squad could put 275 rounds into a kill zone. That three-man fire team is now the fundamental building block of every Marine rifle squad on Earth. Carlson invented it in 1942. His officers ate last.
Any Marine could speak at weekly meetings, Carlson called gung-ho sessions. There were no privileges for rank. The Marine Corps establishment thought he was a communist sympathizer. Some senior officers said it openly. He didn’t care. 3,000 volunteers applied for his battalion. He selected roughly a thousand. His interview question for every recruit was the same.
Could you cut a man’s throat without warning? November 4th, 1942. 5:30 in the morning, companies C and E of the Second Marine Raider Battalion came ashore at Iola Bay on Guadal Canal’s northeast coast, fied in by the destroyer transports McKeen and Manley. 267 Marines. Their chief scout was a man named Sergeant Major Jacob Vuza, a Solomon Islands police veteran who 3 months earlier had been captured by the Japanese, tied to a tree, and bayonetted seven times through the chest and throat.
He chewed through his ropes, crawled three miles back to American lines, delivered intelligence on an incoming Japanese assault, and collapsed. He was back in the field within 2 weeks. Vuza would walk every step of the next 29 days with the raiders. The original mission was to guard a CB construction battalion building a second airirstrip.
The site turned out to be a swamp. Within 24 hours, General Vandergri Air dropped new orders to Carlson. March overland. Find the detachment. Cut them off. By November 10th, Carlson had five companies forward at a base camp called Binu on the Balasuna River. Roughly 600 raiders now, resupplied by native Solomon Islands carriers running 4-day food drops from the coast.
Rice, bacon, raisins, and tea. No blankets. Each man cooked his own food over an individual fire, cut boughs from the trees to sleep on, and carried four days of canned rations on his back. The terrain was triple canopy jungle, razoredged vines, rivers requiring chestde crossings, volcanic ridges, rain that never stopped.
Malaria was already moving through the column. On the evening of November 7th, the patrol hit the Reiko River. Carlson led a platoon across personally after villagers warned of nearby Japanese. A small ambush opened fire in the darkness. The lead native scout went down, severely wounded. The Marines killed two Japanese. The rest vanished.
First blood. 3 days later, native scouts confirmed roughly a thousand Japanese soldiers moving south along the Metapona River, 3 mi west of Binu. Carlson gave the order to sweep. The morning of November 11th, 1942. The engagement that would define the entire patrol. Carlson fanned four companies into a south to north converging sweep.
C, D, E, and F company stayed at BU as reserve. At 1000 hours, company C under Captain Harold Thronson moved west and walked straight into a battalionized Japanese rear guard. Elements of the 230th Infantry dug in along the edge of a wide Kunai grass clearing. The enemy was covering Xi’s main body as it crossed the Metapona River.
Corporal John Bennett’s point squad entered the open grass first. The Japanese opened fire with rifles, machine guns, and mortars from the treeine. Seven raiders died in the first minutes of contact. Bennett, Harrison, Meyers, Barber, Fanslow, Marcato, Spillin cut down in waist high grass with no cover and nowhere to go. Company C was pinned.
Thronson radioed Binu. Carlson’s response was immediate. He ordered D Company to hit the Japanese left flank and E company under Captain Richard Washburn to swing wide through the village of Asamana and strike the Japanese from behind at the river crossing itself. Dmpany’s commander, Captain McAuliffe, got separated from his unit under fire and stumbled back to base camp with only nine men.
Carlson relieved him of command that night. Washburn did not get lost. E company reached Aamana, pushed through the village, and found Japanese soldiers foring the Metapona River in the open, kneedeep in the current. Rifles held above their heads. Washburn set up his light machine guns on the riverbank and opened fire.
The Japanese were caught mid-stream with no cover and no concealment. PFC Jesse Van Landingham would later say it was like shooting birds. The engagement at the river stretched on for hours. At one point, the two sides closed to within 30 paces. Washburn’s men ran low on ammunition, pulled back, then counterattacked. By midafternoon, Carlson brought F Company forward and called in two SBD Dauntless dive bombers from Henderson Field on the remaining Japanese concentration.
When the firing stopped, 160 Japanese soldiers laid dead across the Kunai field and the riverbank. 10 raiders had been killed. 13 more were wounded. And no, those numbers are not rounded for effect. The next morning, Carlson’s men swept the field where Sea Company had been ambushed. They found Private Owen Barber’s body.
He had been staked to the ground, mutilated, and castrated. Carlson had spent a year studying Mao’s philosophy of winning enemy soldiers through humane treatment. He had carried that doctrine into the Pacific. He abandoned it on the morning of November 12th, 1942. Two Japanese prisoners held at Binu were executed with his consent.
The jungle had its own rules. This is where the story turns from a battle into a hunt. Carlson set up what amounted to a hunter’s blind at Asamana. The Japanese had no idea the village had changed hands. On November 12th, Japanese messenger soldiers began walking into Asamana one by one, expecting to find their own forces waiting.
25 were killed over the course of the day. Zero raider casualties. On November 13th, Carlson spotted enemy units moving through the surrounding jungle and called in 75 mm artillery fire from the first battalion, 10th Marines. Five separate groups were targeted. After each barrage, raider patrols moved in and finished off survivors.
116 Japanese killed across five engagements in 48 hours. Zero raider casualties. You’d think someone on the Japanese side would have figured out what was happening. Nobody did. Or if they did, by then it was too late to do anything about it. The Shi detachment was hemorrhaging soldiers at every contact point.
Every rear guard sent to screen the retreat walked into a kill zone. Every messenger patrol vanished. Every supply party disappeared. The force that left Kohi Point at roughly 3,000 men was already below 1300 by the time it crossed the upper Lunga River. By November 17th, she’s main body had pushed deep inland, heading west toward the Matanikao and the Japanese 17th Army’s main line. Carlson shadowed them.
Vandergrift redirected the raiders with a new mission. Find the supply trails behind Mount Austin. Locate the Pistol Pete artillery positions harassing Henderson Field. And clear the upper Tinaru and Lunga River watershed. The patrol pushed into the volcanic highlands. The rain was constant. Every man in the column had opened soores on his legs from the endless river crossings.
The corman were running out of medication. Malaria was pulling more Marines out of action than the Japanese were. Private Ben Carson of B Company, who carried a Browning automatic rifle through all of it, would later recall that they were stumbling into small separated groups of Japanese constantly. We were wiping them out with flanking operations all the time.
And then Corporal Yansy made the one decision that turned the entire patrol into legend. November 30th, 1942. The upper Lunga River Valley. Heavy rain. A six-man squad from F Company led by Corporal John Yansy Carlson’s personal bodyguard was following a Japanese field telephone wire along a ridge between the Tenaru and Lunga watersheds.
The wire led to a barely visible trail. The trail led downhill into thick jungle. At the bottom, they found a hidden Japanese bivowak. 100 enemy soldiers resting under improvised shelters. Their rifles stacked neatly against trees in the center of the camp out of arms reach. Yansy had six men, three Browning automatic rifles, and two Thompsons.
He did not radio for backup. He did not pull back to report the position. He did not hesitate. He charged into the bivwac, firing his Thompson from the hip. His five marines followed. The Browning automatic rifles ripped through the shelters at close range. Japanese soldiers scrambled for their stacked weapons. Most never reached them.
The raiders used the call sign, “Hi, Raider.” to identify each other through the smoke and the downpour. Captain William Schwarren, hearing the eruption of automatic fire from a nearby position, called out through the jungle, “What’s up?” Yansy shouted back over the noise. I’ve flushed a CVY. Send up a squad. 30 minutes.
That’s how long it lasted. 75 Japanese soldiers were killed. Zero raiders. Six men against 100 in the rain in the jungle at a range measured in feet. Carlson called it the most spectacular of any of their engagements. His Navy Cross citation for the patrol would note the heavy toll of the enemy and the small losses to our men.
But those words don’t capture what happened on that ridge. Nothing bureaucratic ever could. Yansy received the Navy Cross and a battlefield commission to first lieutenant. 8 years later at the Chosen Reservoir in Korea, serving with the second battalion, 7th Marines, he earned a second navy cross on Hill 1282. Some men carry something in them that the mathematics of combat cannot explain.
If you’re finding these stories worth your time, hit subscribe. more like this every week. By early December, the raiders were a ghost of what had landed at Iola Bay. Companies C and E, the two that had been in the jungle since November 4th, were down to 57 men between them. Out of 266 who had come ashore a month earlier, 225 Marines had been evacuated during the patrol for malaria, dysentery, and a flesh-eating tropical infection the corman called jungle rot.
The ones still standing were gaunt, covered in soores, burning with fever. They were also still fighting. December 3rd, steady rain. Carlson personally led A, B, and F companies up the south face of Mount Austin. A 6-hour climb through mud and near vertical jungle. At the crest, they ran into a Japanese patrol.
A 2-hour closearters firefight. Both sides trying to outflank each other in vegetation so dense you could not see 10 ft ahead. 25 Japanese killed. Four raiders wounded. Among them, First Lieutenant Jack Miller of a company hit in the face by a burst from a Japanese machine gun. The wound was catastrophic.
His lower jaw was nearly gone. His men carried him down the mountain. Miller died the next morning on the trail. The raiders buried him on the slope. Lieutenant Maurice Magakian, a Navy Cross recipient from the earlier Mon raid, stood over the grave and wept. He said later he cried like a baby, something he had never done in his life.
December 4th, the final descent toward the Matanikau River. Carlson’s lead element walked into one last Japanese machine gun ambush. Four raiders killed, seven Japanese killed. Corporal Albert Hermiston was among the four who fell within sight of friendly lines. That afternoon, the patrol crossed into the Marine perimeter at Lunga Point.
A Marine colonel offered Carlson a jeep ride to Henderson Field. He declined. His men were going to walk in together. 29 days, roughly 150 mi of jungle. 488 Japanese killed against 16 raiders dead and 17 wounded. Two enemy artillery pieces destroyed, countless small arms, machine guns, and unit flags captured. Colonel Xi had left Kohi Point with somewhere between 2 and 3,000 soldiers.
By the time what remained of his column reached the Japanese 17th Army’s positions at the Matanikau River, he had 7 to 800 men. Disease and starvation killed some of them. Carlson’s ambushes killed most of the rest. The 230th Infantry Regiment was finished as a fighting unit on Guadal Canal. General Vandergrift commended the Second Marine Raider Battalion for what he called the consumate skill displayed in the conduct of operations.
Then the Marine Corps quietly erased Carlson. His egalitarian methods, the gung-ho meetings, the forums where privates could challenge officers were all intolerable to the establishment. When the raider battalions were reorganized in early 1943, Carlson was pushed sideways to a staff position. His replacement immediately reimposed conventional marine hierarchy.
By summer, Carlson was sent home. At Terawa in November 1943, Colonel David Shupe offered the only epitap that mattered. He may be red, but he isn’t yellow. Carlson was wounded on siphon in June 1944, pulling a radio man out of enemy fire. The injury ended his career. He retired as a brigadier general in 1946. He died of a heart attack on May 27th, 1947.
He was 51. The Marine Corps made no public announcement of his burial at Arlington National Cemetery. Commodant Vandergri attended anyway. A Marine who had served with Carlson in China overheard Vandergrift say as he walked away from the grave, “Thank God, he’s gone.” But the three-man fire team that Evans Carlson built in 1942 is still the foundation of every Marine Rifle Squad on the planet.
And when the Marine Corps activated its special operations command in 2006 and named its operators Marine Raiders, it was Carlson’s name they chose to carry forward. Some things outlast the men who tried to bury them. The long patrol was one of those
In 1942, Japan Tracked a U.S. Marine Raider Patrol. It Was A HUGE Mistake.
On the morning of November 6th, 1942, 267 United States Marine Raiders walked into the jungle on Guadal Canal’s northeast coast and vanished. Their commanding officer was a 46-year-old lieutenant colonel named Evans Carlson. He had spent a year living with Chinese communist guerrillas behind Japanese lines in China.
He had studied how small units destroy larger ones. And he had built his battalion around a single idea borrowed from Maoadong’s eighth route army. Move fast, hit hard, disappear. Their target was somewhere between 2 and 3,000 Japanese soldiers of Colonel Toshinarish Gi’s 230th Infantry Regiment, retreating through that same jungle after escaping an American encirclement at Kohi Point.
The Japanese knew the Americans were behind them. They posted rear guards. They set ambushes. They sent patrols to find and kill the Marine column. That was November 6th. By December 4th, every one of those rear guard forces had been annihilated. Carlson’s raiders walked out of the jungle 29 days later. They had killed 488 Japanese soldiers.
They had destroyed two 75mm mountain guns. They had lost 16 men. The kill ratio was 30 to1. This is the story of the long patrol. Guadal Canal, October 1942. The campaign was 5 months old and hemorrhaging. The Marines held a single airirstrip called Henderson Field and a thin perimeter around it. Japanese warships shelled them at night.
Japanese bombers hit them during the day. A network of hidden longrange artillery. The Americans had nicknamed Pistol Pete. 150 mm howitzers and 100 mm cannons dug into the jungle behind Mount Austin, lobbed shells onto the runway around the clock. On the night of October 23rd, Lieutenant General Masau Maruyama threw his entire second infantry division at the Marine perimeter in a mass frontal assault on Henderson Field.
The battle lasted 3 days. When it was over, the Marines conducted a body count in the wire. The detail tallied 1462 Japanese dead. Maruyama survivors dragged themselves west toward the Matanaka River. But a separate force under Colonel Toshinarish Gi, roughly 3,000 men of the 230th Infantry Regiment, 38th Division, had been ordered east to Kohi Point to await reinforcement by destroyer.
The Americans moved to trap them. Between November 3rd and 12th, two marine battalions and two army battalions tried to close the encirclement at Gavaga Creek. They were too slow. Between November 9th and 11th, Shi and his men slipped through the cordon and disappeared south into the jungle interior.
3,000 armed Japanese soldiers organized into battalion-sized elements moving through the trackless center of the island toward the American rear. Someone had to go after them. Evans Fordis Carlson was not a normal Marine officer. He had lied about his age to enlist in the US Army at 16. Earned a commission in the First World War. Served on Persing staff in France, then enlisted as a private in the Marine Corps in 1922 because he wanted to start over from the bottom.
He earned his first Navy cross in Nicaragua in 1930, leading 12 Marines against a force of 40 bandits at a place called Portillo. Then came China. Carlson served three tours there between 1927 and 1938. On his third tour, he embedded with Zhuday’s Chinese Communist Eighth Route Army for nearly a year, marching behind Japanese lines through northern China, studying how guerilla fighters with inferior weapons destroyed conventional forces through speed, deception, and relentless small unit violence.
He met Maoadong. He met Zhao and Li. He came home with a philosophy he called gung-ho, an angllicization of the Chinese characters, meaning work together and a tactical concept that would reshape the United States Marine Corps forever. The three-man fire team. Every rifle squad in Carlson’s second Marine Raider battalion consisted of 10 men, a squad leader, and three fire teams of three.
Each fire team carried one M1 Garand rifle, one Thompson submachine gun, and one Browning automatic rifle. Within 15 seconds, a single raider squad could put 275 rounds into a kill zone. That three-man fire team is now the fundamental building block of every Marine rifle squad on Earth. Carlson invented it in 1942. His officers ate last.
Any Marine could speak at weekly meetings, Carlson called gung-ho sessions. There were no privileges for rank. The Marine Corps establishment thought he was a communist sympathizer. Some senior officers said it openly. He didn’t care. 3,000 volunteers applied for his battalion. He selected roughly a thousand. His interview question for every recruit was the same.
Could you cut a man’s throat without warning? November 4th, 1942. 5:30 in the morning, companies C and E of the Second Marine Raider Battalion came ashore at Iola Bay on Guadal Canal’s northeast coast, fied in by the destroyer transports McKeen and Manley. 267 Marines. Their chief scout was a man named Sergeant Major Jacob Vuza, a Solomon Islands police veteran who 3 months earlier had been captured by the Japanese, tied to a tree, and bayonetted seven times through the chest and throat.
He chewed through his ropes, crawled three miles back to American lines, delivered intelligence on an incoming Japanese assault, and collapsed. He was back in the field within 2 weeks. Vuza would walk every step of the next 29 days with the raiders. The original mission was to guard a CB construction battalion building a second airirstrip.
The site turned out to be a swamp. Within 24 hours, General Vandergri Air dropped new orders to Carlson. March overland. Find the detachment. Cut them off. By November 10th, Carlson had five companies forward at a base camp called Binu on the Balasuna River. Roughly 600 raiders now, resupplied by native Solomon Islands carriers running 4-day food drops from the coast.
Rice, bacon, raisins, and tea. No blankets. Each man cooked his own food over an individual fire, cut boughs from the trees to sleep on, and carried four days of canned rations on his back. The terrain was triple canopy jungle, razoredged vines, rivers requiring chestde crossings, volcanic ridges, rain that never stopped.
Malaria was already moving through the column. On the evening of November 7th, the patrol hit the Reiko River. Carlson led a platoon across personally after villagers warned of nearby Japanese. A small ambush opened fire in the darkness. The lead native scout went down, severely wounded. The Marines killed two Japanese. The rest vanished.
First blood. 3 days later, native scouts confirmed roughly a thousand Japanese soldiers moving south along the Metapona River, 3 mi west of Binu. Carlson gave the order to sweep. The morning of November 11th, 1942. The engagement that would define the entire patrol. Carlson fanned four companies into a south to north converging sweep.
C, D, E, and F company stayed at BU as reserve. At 1000 hours, company C under Captain Harold Thronson moved west and walked straight into a battalionized Japanese rear guard. Elements of the 230th Infantry dug in along the edge of a wide Kunai grass clearing. The enemy was covering Xi’s main body as it crossed the Metapona River.
Corporal John Bennett’s point squad entered the open grass first. The Japanese opened fire with rifles, machine guns, and mortars from the treeine. Seven raiders died in the first minutes of contact. Bennett, Harrison, Meyers, Barber, Fanslow, Marcato, Spillin cut down in waist high grass with no cover and nowhere to go. Company C was pinned.
Thronson radioed Binu. Carlson’s response was immediate. He ordered D Company to hit the Japanese left flank and E company under Captain Richard Washburn to swing wide through the village of Asamana and strike the Japanese from behind at the river crossing itself. Dmpany’s commander, Captain McAuliffe, got separated from his unit under fire and stumbled back to base camp with only nine men.
Carlson relieved him of command that night. Washburn did not get lost. E company reached Aamana, pushed through the village, and found Japanese soldiers foring the Metapona River in the open, kneedeep in the current. Rifles held above their heads. Washburn set up his light machine guns on the riverbank and opened fire.
The Japanese were caught mid-stream with no cover and no concealment. PFC Jesse Van Landingham would later say it was like shooting birds. The engagement at the river stretched on for hours. At one point, the two sides closed to within 30 paces. Washburn’s men ran low on ammunition, pulled back, then counterattacked. By midafternoon, Carlson brought F Company forward and called in two SBD Dauntless dive bombers from Henderson Field on the remaining Japanese concentration.
When the firing stopped, 160 Japanese soldiers laid dead across the Kunai field and the riverbank. 10 raiders had been killed. 13 more were wounded. And no, those numbers are not rounded for effect. The next morning, Carlson’s men swept the field where Sea Company had been ambushed. They found Private Owen Barber’s body.
He had been staked to the ground, mutilated, and castrated. Carlson had spent a year studying Mao’s philosophy of winning enemy soldiers through humane treatment. He had carried that doctrine into the Pacific. He abandoned it on the morning of November 12th, 1942. Two Japanese prisoners held at Binu were executed with his consent.
The jungle had its own rules. This is where the story turns from a battle into a hunt. Carlson set up what amounted to a hunter’s blind at Asamana. The Japanese had no idea the village had changed hands. On November 12th, Japanese messenger soldiers began walking into Asamana one by one, expecting to find their own forces waiting.
25 were killed over the course of the day. Zero raider casualties. On November 13th, Carlson spotted enemy units moving through the surrounding jungle and called in 75 mm artillery fire from the first battalion, 10th Marines. Five separate groups were targeted. After each barrage, raider patrols moved in and finished off survivors.
116 Japanese killed across five engagements in 48 hours. Zero raider casualties. You’d think someone on the Japanese side would have figured out what was happening. Nobody did. Or if they did, by then it was too late to do anything about it. The Shi detachment was hemorrhaging soldiers at every contact point.
Every rear guard sent to screen the retreat walked into a kill zone. Every messenger patrol vanished. Every supply party disappeared. The force that left Kohi Point at roughly 3,000 men was already below 1300 by the time it crossed the upper Lunga River. By November 17th, she’s main body had pushed deep inland, heading west toward the Matanikao and the Japanese 17th Army’s main line. Carlson shadowed them.
Vandergrift redirected the raiders with a new mission. Find the supply trails behind Mount Austin. Locate the Pistol Pete artillery positions harassing Henderson Field. And clear the upper Tinaru and Lunga River watershed. The patrol pushed into the volcanic highlands. The rain was constant. Every man in the column had opened soores on his legs from the endless river crossings.
The corman were running out of medication. Malaria was pulling more Marines out of action than the Japanese were. Private Ben Carson of B Company, who carried a Browning automatic rifle through all of it, would later recall that they were stumbling into small separated groups of Japanese constantly. We were wiping them out with flanking operations all the time.
And then Corporal Yansy made the one decision that turned the entire patrol into legend. November 30th, 1942. The upper Lunga River Valley. Heavy rain. A six-man squad from F Company led by Corporal John Yansy Carlson’s personal bodyguard was following a Japanese field telephone wire along a ridge between the Tenaru and Lunga watersheds.
The wire led to a barely visible trail. The trail led downhill into thick jungle. At the bottom, they found a hidden Japanese bivowak. 100 enemy soldiers resting under improvised shelters. Their rifles stacked neatly against trees in the center of the camp out of arms reach. Yansy had six men, three Browning automatic rifles, and two Thompsons.
He did not radio for backup. He did not pull back to report the position. He did not hesitate. He charged into the bivwac, firing his Thompson from the hip. His five marines followed. The Browning automatic rifles ripped through the shelters at close range. Japanese soldiers scrambled for their stacked weapons. Most never reached them.
The raiders used the call sign, “Hi, Raider.” to identify each other through the smoke and the downpour. Captain William Schwarren, hearing the eruption of automatic fire from a nearby position, called out through the jungle, “What’s up?” Yansy shouted back over the noise. I’ve flushed a CVY. Send up a squad. 30 minutes.
That’s how long it lasted. 75 Japanese soldiers were killed. Zero raiders. Six men against 100 in the rain in the jungle at a range measured in feet. Carlson called it the most spectacular of any of their engagements. His Navy Cross citation for the patrol would note the heavy toll of the enemy and the small losses to our men.
But those words don’t capture what happened on that ridge. Nothing bureaucratic ever could. Yansy received the Navy Cross and a battlefield commission to first lieutenant. 8 years later at the Chosen Reservoir in Korea, serving with the second battalion, 7th Marines, he earned a second navy cross on Hill 1282. Some men carry something in them that the mathematics of combat cannot explain.
If you’re finding these stories worth your time, hit subscribe. more like this every week. By early December, the raiders were a ghost of what had landed at Iola Bay. Companies C and E, the two that had been in the jungle since November 4th, were down to 57 men between them. Out of 266 who had come ashore a month earlier, 225 Marines had been evacuated during the patrol for malaria, dysentery, and a flesh-eating tropical infection the corman called jungle rot.
The ones still standing were gaunt, covered in soores, burning with fever. They were also still fighting. December 3rd, steady rain. Carlson personally led A, B, and F companies up the south face of Mount Austin. A 6-hour climb through mud and near vertical jungle. At the crest, they ran into a Japanese patrol.
A 2-hour closearters firefight. Both sides trying to outflank each other in vegetation so dense you could not see 10 ft ahead. 25 Japanese killed. Four raiders wounded. Among them, First Lieutenant Jack Miller of a company hit in the face by a burst from a Japanese machine gun. The wound was catastrophic.
His lower jaw was nearly gone. His men carried him down the mountain. Miller died the next morning on the trail. The raiders buried him on the slope. Lieutenant Maurice Magakian, a Navy Cross recipient from the earlier Mon raid, stood over the grave and wept. He said later he cried like a baby, something he had never done in his life.
December 4th, the final descent toward the Matanikau River. Carlson’s lead element walked into one last Japanese machine gun ambush. Four raiders killed, seven Japanese killed. Corporal Albert Hermiston was among the four who fell within sight of friendly lines. That afternoon, the patrol crossed into the Marine perimeter at Lunga Point.
A Marine colonel offered Carlson a jeep ride to Henderson Field. He declined. His men were going to walk in together. 29 days, roughly 150 mi of jungle. 488 Japanese killed against 16 raiders dead and 17 wounded. Two enemy artillery pieces destroyed, countless small arms, machine guns, and unit flags captured. Colonel Xi had left Kohi Point with somewhere between 2 and 3,000 soldiers.
By the time what remained of his column reached the Japanese 17th Army’s positions at the Matanikau River, he had 7 to 800 men. Disease and starvation killed some of them. Carlson’s ambushes killed most of the rest. The 230th Infantry Regiment was finished as a fighting unit on Guadal Canal. General Vandergrift commended the Second Marine Raider Battalion for what he called the consumate skill displayed in the conduct of operations.
Then the Marine Corps quietly erased Carlson. His egalitarian methods, the gung-ho meetings, the forums where privates could challenge officers were all intolerable to the establishment. When the raider battalions were reorganized in early 1943, Carlson was pushed sideways to a staff position. His replacement immediately reimposed conventional marine hierarchy.
By summer, Carlson was sent home. At Terawa in November 1943, Colonel David Shupe offered the only epitap that mattered. He may be red, but he isn’t yellow. Carlson was wounded on siphon in June 1944, pulling a radio man out of enemy fire. The injury ended his career. He retired as a brigadier general in 1946. He died of a heart attack on May 27th, 1947.
He was 51. The Marine Corps made no public announcement of his burial at Arlington National Cemetery. Commodant Vandergri attended anyway. A Marine who had served with Carlson in China overheard Vandergrift say as he walked away from the grave, “Thank God, he’s gone.” But the three-man fire team that Evans Carlson built in 1942 is still the foundation of every Marine Rifle Squad on the planet.
And when the Marine Corps activated its special operations command in 2006 and named its operators Marine Raiders, it was Carlson’s name they chose to carry forward. Some things outlast the men who tried to bury them. The long patrol was one of those
