The Things Our Fathers Saw—The Untold Stories of the World War II Generation From Hometown, USA-Volume I: Voices of the Pacific Theater

by Matthew Rozell

  Nevertheless, the Japanese advance had to be checked, and out of these desperate times came the First Marine Raider Battalion. Schooled by Marine veterans of Central America and China operations in the 1920s and 30s, specially selected young men became a lightly armed, highly mobile commando unit that could conduct operations in the sub‑equatorial jungle, the vanguard for larger troop landings to follow. Edson’s Raiders, named after their highly respected colonel ‘Red Mike’ Edson, would earn combat honors in eighteen weeks of violent engagements at Guadalcanal that are unparalleled in Marine Corps history. Twenty‑four Navy ships would be named in honor of individual members of the battalion before the war was over.[26]

  Remarkably, out of the 900 original Raiders trained in punishing conditions, two veterans who resided around the “Falls” were members of this elite group. Robert Addison, originally from Ohio, would later spend 29 years as the Athletic Director of Adirondack Community College (SUNY Adirondack). He had a personal ‘bone to pick’ with the Japanese—his 19th birthday was that day of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

  Robert Addison

  I was home celebrating my birthday with a few of my friends. It was a Sunday and my youngest sister had gone to the movies. She came back and she said they stopped the movie and said they bombed Pearl Harbor. So that’s when I heard about it. So we turned on the radio, no television during those days, and that’s about all you could hear.

  A month after the war started, I joined the Marine Corps, January 7th, 1942, and was sent down to Parris Island for boot camp. Prior to the war, boot camp had been thirteen weeks. But they had to get a division; they had parts of a division, so they had to get a division ready quickly, so they cut boot camp to six weeks.

  By this time, so many recruits were signing up that boot camp had to be cut short, and advance training taken somewhere else.

  Boot camp to me was not much [snaps his fingers] because I found that playing high school football in Ohio was harder than boot camp was. You were supposed to spend two weeks of close order drill, three weeks on the rifle range and a week of extended order drill. Well, when it came close to the time for us to go to the rifle range, there was not any room down there because we recruits were coming in at five hundred a day, so after our close order drill they gave us the week of extended order drill and put five hundred of us on a train and shipped us up to Quantico to fire at the rifle range. When I was just about ready to finish boot camp they were filling up and forming this ‘Raider’ battalion.

  22 Miles with a Pack and a Rifle

  Addison made the cut. When interviewed by a Marine captain, he was told that the Raiders would be the ‘cream of the Marine Corps,’ but also warned that their mission would be likely ‘first in and last out’.[27] He was accepted and was assigned to a mortar squad in the fledgling Raiders. More training would follow. Somedays they would march, fully equipped, dozens of miles in the day, only to turn around and re-navigate the same terrain in the dark, through swamps and across rivers.

  When we got into the Raider Battalion, then we really got into the force. On a Saturday morning we would go on a 22-mile, full pack, forced march in the morning and then they give us liberty in the afternoon…And Edson was known for getting people in good physical condition. He was the type of guy, you would follow him anyplace, because what he would do when we were on these forced marches, he would stop and watch everybody go by and he would ‘walkie-talkie’ to the head of the column, and they would hold up and he would start jogging past the men double-time up to the head of the column... When we came in at the barracks he would stand there and watch every man go by and give compliments to us, you know, ‘good job, good job’. That’s the type of leader he was. Everybody practically worshipped him. He was quite a leader.[*]

  Born in 1919, the other original Raider, Gerry West, pointed out to his teenage interviewer that his birth was unusual because he was born in the ‘hospital at Glens Falls, and not at home’. He grew up in Fort Ann and like many youths during the Depression, decided to enlist in the Marine Corps following high school. He was already a Marine when he heard the news of Pearl Harbor.

  Gerry West

  I’ll never forget it. I was sitting in a barracks in Quantico, Virginia. I had the duty that weekend, and there were about ten of us there listening to the Washington Redskins football game which had just started; maybe five minutes they had been playing. It started at one o’clock and something like 1:05 they broke in with the announcement saying that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. You heard so much about all these meetings [Japanese delegation in Washington, DC], but still you didn’t expect something like that to happen. So I couldn’t believe it really, to tell you the truth.

  West would join the Raiders and under expert tutelage be the first in his battalion to qualify for specialty pay as an expert in mortars, demolition explosives, and as a machine gunner.

  They came out with the $6.00 a month pay for the four guys that were gunners, and I was the first one in the battalion to get that six bucks. Well, when you’re making $21.00 a month, you make six more dollars, that’s a big raise… Later, I went from private to platoon sergeant in fourteen months in the Raiders.

  The Raiders embarked on a cross-country train journey and were then carried across the vast South Pacific to Samoa for two weeks on reconverted World War I destroyers. Strenuous training would continue with night operations, punishing hikes in rugged mountain terrain, hot muggy weather, frequent rain and steep ridges with slippery trails. They practiced landings in inflatable rubber boats, survived on skimpy rations, and were sometimes pushed from five in the morning until ten or twelve at night. Judo and bayonet training, first aid, stalking and demolition were all part of the schedule.[28]

  The Landings

  In order to secure Guadalcanal, the Raiders were assigned to take the neighboring island of Tulagi, where they would be up against the best of the Japanese combat forces, the rikusentai—the Japanese Special Naval Landing Forces. Coming in on Higgins boats in the morning hours of August 7, 1942, the Raiders clashed for three days in vicious fighting characterized by hitherto unknown cave bunkers, their enemies’ deadly sniper actions, night fighting, and their willingness to fight to the death. Thirty-eight Raiders would die, but the 350-man Japanese garrison would be eliminated with only three prisoners taken. [29]

  Robert Addison

  We went ashore eight months after Pearl Harbor to the day. Our battalion was given the task to take the island of Tulagi, which was across North Channel. And it was only a little island about half mile wide; three miles long. Before the war, this was the island residence for the governor of the British Solomon Islands; a beautiful little island; great grounds, great fields and big, almost mansions there. And this is where the Japanese were…

  Guadalcanal, Sept. 1942. Drafted by Susan Winchell-Sweeney.

  On the first day, we had them in what we thought was a pocket... but, unbeknown to us, we had bypassed a lot of them who were in caves. And at night they came out, and then all hell broke loose in the night. They like to fight at night because they think it’s a psychological thing. We think ‘oh Jesus, they fight at night, they can see in the dark, they know what they’re doing.’ Well, it didn’t take us long to figure out that they couldn’t see any better than we could. So it took us a while to dig them out, and very few of them would surrender. We had darkened our faces. We had strips of burlap sacks painted green on our helmets, and after a few days what few Japs were left said, ‘Don’t let the men with the sacks on their heads get us!’

  A lot of them we just left in the caves and blocked them up with explosives because they just wouldn’t come out. And so it took us several other more days to secure the island. Anyway, after we had taken Tulagi, we kind of rested up a little bit, then they took us over to Guadalcanal.

  Edson’s Raiders, including Addison and West, were the very first Americans to engage the Japanese offensively on land in World War II.

  ‘Confusion to t
he Extreme’

  An hour after the Raiders landed on Tulagi, the other troops of the 1st Marine Division began to land unopposed at Guadalcanal, across the channel. Thomas Jones, another local Marine, was born in 1913 and enlisted for his first tour in 1931 and rejoined later when the clouds of war began to form. His experience illustrated just how unprepared the nation was, and later, how chaotic the sea-to-land operations in the Guadalcanal campaign would be.

  Tom Jones

  When I was about to be drafted into the army, I decided against being drafted and reenlisted in the Marine Corps. Sometime late November or early December, we were called and sent to Parris Island … on December 7th [1941] I recall we were standing waiting in line for our noon day meal, when we got the word, someone announced the Japs were now bombing Pearl Harbor. Of course that caused great excitement with us. From then on it was a lot of speculation and wondering what would happen next.

  Late in May we went aboard trains and were taken to the west coast. We left San Francisco sometime during the first week in June. We landed in New Zealand late in June or early July; we were aboard ship for about 30 days. When we arrived in New Zealand, we disembarked and I remember it was during the rainy season. I believe it started to rain every day we were there and continued until we left, and what we did was unload our ship and reload another ship to be transferred somewhere north of New Zealand. What island we didn’t know, but before we left New Zealand evidently the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington had gotten word that the Japanese were building up an island called Guadalcanal.

  Things were confused, and when I say that, it was not the homegrown garden variety of confusion, but this was confusion to the extreme… We got to Guadalcanal, then we found out we had loaded our ammunition first and all our supplies on top of our ammunition! Now this was turning out to be a combat operation and we were going to make an assault on Guadalcanal, but fortunately, opposition was not that heavy. … Part of the division [the Raiders] was landing across the bay at another island called Tulagi. Those Marines were hit pretty hard, casualties were relatively heavy in that battalion…Anyway, to get to the ammunition, we hauled all of this material that we had above the ammunition and we threw that over the side into the Pacific Ocean! That was part of the confusion.

  The Japanese, who had never before experienced defeat, were taken by surprise by the audacity of the 1st Marine Division assaults, but immediately showed their skill at nighttime naval engagements. At the battle of Savo Island off the coast of Guadalcanal, the U.S. Navy suffered one of the worst defeats in history, losing four ships and over a thousand sailors during the night. When the men on the island surveyed the carnage the following day, the Navy was gone, taking with it most of the supplies and ammunition meant for the Marines on Guadalcanal. They would have to fend for themselves, and the ‘Tokyo Express’, the destroyer convoys out of the Japanese stronghold at Rabaul, would be landing reinforcements nightly in days and weeks to follow. Rabaul was the principal Japanese forward operating base in the South Pacific at New Guinea, with tens of thousands of troops in reserve.

  The second part of the confusion was that a reconnaissance plane had picked up the Jap fleet headed toward us. Well, all the cargo ships got the word and left the area but we left four cruisers behind and they didn’t get the word about the Jap fleet coming down on them, so the night of August the 8th the Japs attacked our cruisers… consequently we lost four cruisers. One of the cruisers, the Astoria, burnt. The next morning you looked out in the distance into the ocean and you could see the smoke. Eventually it sank.

  Now we were on Guadalcanal. We had about three days’ food supply in our packs and all of our other stuff was gone. So we were now relying on Japanese supplies and equipment that we captured. Things were pretty tough for a while....

  Jones was assigned to scout the Japanese.

  Sometime after mid-August they sent me and Barney McCarthy and another guy out, Norbert Bush. Prior to our landing on the ‘Canal’, the Japanese had landed in another spot, and it was logical that you should keep that spot in mind, because they might want to land there again sometime. So they sent us out—it was called a forward observation post—we concealed ourselves in the jungle. We arrived on the spot late in the afternoon, and no sooner than it got dark, we could see a couple of barges and they were starting to unload in that spot.

  I was in charge of the post, so the next morning we kind of kept track of what we could see, and we could see they were unloading troops. And by morning the barges were gone, so I sent Bush back to report what we had seen and that left Barney McCarthy and me, and nothing happened during the day. We could look down and we could see the troops and what they were doing. Gee whiz, no sooner than it got dark again, the barges started showing up with more troops and supplies. Now I estimated there were so many troops, so I sent Barney back. Incidentally, all we had were three canteens of water and hardtack to eat.

  Anyways, now Barney is gone, so it’s now the third night, they are coming in again that night. And there are more troops and I now estimated they had about 1200 to 1500. So I’m running out of water and hardtack, and I thought I’d better get in, so I left and went in and reported. Now that would be about the 16th or 17th of August, now I’m not sure of my dates but anyways we now knew… So we were expecting it [a major attack, which came on the 21st]. And they didn’t disappoint us!

  The Battle of the Tenaru

  The first major attempt by the Japanese to retake Guadalcanal was to come at night. Nearly 900 battle hardened frontline troops with over five years’ fighting experience moved out silently toward Marine Corps lines.

  Tom Jones

  We had been able to string a single lane of barbed wire, Japanese barbed wire, we had captured. We were on one side of the Tenaru [River, misnamed on Marine Corps maps, actually the Ilu River] and they were coming from the other side, so they had to cross the Tenaru to get to us and for some reason or another, I don’t know, the Japanese … attacked on a narrow front, consequently their casualties in wounded and dead were more or less bunched. They would throw up a flare and you could see a target—boy, we laid down a sheet of steel! During the night I think I fired off a hundred rounds or better, and the rifle was an ’03—it kicks like a mining mule, it’s a very accurate rifle. The next morning I had a jaw on me like I had the mumps, that damn rifle kicking me! Well, the next morning we counted something like 600 dead Japs and we found out it was the Ichiki Battalion, it was supposed to be the premier fighting group of the Japanese, and it had had considerable success in the Philippines and the Orient and they were hastily sent on to Guadalcanal. And that was just the first battle.

  Jones was describing the first major Japanese offensive to regain control of Guadalcanal, where the enemy had 774 killed. The Marines lost 44 men. Still, night after night, the ‘Tokyo Express’ would continue to deliver men and supplies to the island.

  Later, on another scouting patrol, he describes losing his best friend.

  We were on patrol and this Jap, he shoots and he hits my buddy, Barney McCarthy. The bullet hit him in the head and knocked his helmet off. Now I’m looking around for the guy that shot. All of a sudden he comes running out of the jungle and he’s about from here to the door from me [motions] and he doesn’t see me. And he’s grinning from ear to ear. Then he spots me. I couldn’t get the rifle to my shoulder to aim, so I squeezed off the shot and I hit him in the abdominal region, he jack-knifed and he went down. He threw his rifle. I immediately reloaded.

  Rage is instantaneous. He’s looking at me from a crawling position. I didn’t shoot him; I went and kicked him in the head. Rage does funny things. After I kicked him, I shot and killed him.

  By that time, the other guys in the platoon were coming. I took Barney’s religious medals off his body and put them in his pocket.

  You get so that you accept death. Anyway, I didn’t think too much more about it until I got back to San Francisco. Then I remembered. Barney was from San Francisco
. Barney’s father worked for the Pacific Industrial Supply Company.

  I’m walking around San Francisco and I see this building with ‘Pacific Industrial Supply’ on it. So I go in, to find his father. I asked the receptionist if they had a Mr. McCarthy. He owned it. I asked if I could see him. I told her to tell him I was Barney’s friend and I was with him when he was killed. Mr. McCarthy came running out and that was the beginning of a real good friendship.[30]

  Tom Jones saw much more action on the ‘Canal.’

  For the next four months it was very heavy fighting and battles at sea. Off the coast of Guadalcanal, the waterway there, they gave the name of the ‘Iron Bottom Sound’. I think that fifty-some ships were sunk within a couple months there in these naval battles with the Japs. On a nightly basis we held no more than a mile of beachfront property, and we were consolidated in that area and the Japs would come down nightly with their cruisers and battleships and shell us. They’d get out of there before morning because we still had a few airplanes that could bomb them. That went on until sometime in October when things began to change. The Japs would attack but we were able to beat them off.

  Edson’s Raiders Come Ashore

  The Raiders were then assigned to be transported from the now-secured Tulagi to Guadalcanal following the Battle of the Tenaru.