Going Long: The 2nd Marine Raiders. Army and Marine Corps ground forces under the command of Marine Major General Alexander Vandegrift in the battle for the largest of the Solomon Islands. American units controlled a knobby headland at Lunga Point, where they seized a Japanese airstrip, christening it Henderson Field after Major Lofton Henderson, a Marine flier killed at Midway. Now Vandegrift wanted to expand the Americans. Carlson saw on Guadalcanal an opportunity for redemption. NFL and the NFL shield design are registered trademarks of the National Football League.The team names, logos and uniform designs are. 80 Brave Men The Doolittle Tokyo Raiders Roster. Crew of 1st Aircraft - Plane # 40-2344 - Crew from 34th Squadron - (Bail Out) Lieutenant Colonel Doolittle's bomber. Carlson. But as the battalion was setting foot on the island, Japanese destroyers landed 1,5. Lunga Point and Aola, and the 2nd Raiders. Vandegrift deployed Marine and army units to ambush the new Japanese arrivals, and ordered Carlson. Then the Raiders were to clear areas of enemy activity west of the Henderson Field perimeter. It was a straight- line distance of just over 1. Instead, they would be forced to hack their way through dense, unforgiving jungle foliage in extreme heat. On November 6, the Raiders, accompanied by 1. Bokokimbo River in a snaking, mile- long line. FROM MAKIN TO BOUGAINVILLE: Marine Raiders in the Pacific War by Major Jon T Hoffman, USMCR. In February 1942, Lieutenant General Thomas Holcomb, the Commandant of.
Rolling coastal hills and plains gave way to condensed, dark green jungle interspersed with sunbaked clearings. Beyond the jungle loomed a jagged blue- green spine of volcanic peaks, some towering nearly 8,0. The Bokokimbo was 1. The Raiders covered only five miles that day, prompting their lean, hawk- faced commander to take the lead and accelerate the pace. Evans Carlson was an impatient man and he had much to prove. During a military tour as an American language and intelligence officer in China in the late 1. Carlson was an observer with Mao Zedong. He was intrigued by their emphasis on small unit tactics and flexible, guerrilla- style raids. He admired how the Communists stripped away most of the distinctions between officers and enlisted men and, after battles, did not mistreat their prisoners. From his experience, Carlson adapted an ethos he called . Carlson incorporated Gung Ho into their regimen and adopted a Spartan lifestyle for his Raiders. He instructed his men not only how to fight, but to understand why they fought. He also emphasized a Darwinian approach to leadership. Intended as a swift guerrilla- style strike to divert the Japanese from the American invasion at Guadalcanal, the action instead devolved into a conventional firefight, with Carlson reacting to the enemy rather than seizing the initiative. The Raiders made repeated attempts to evacuate the island amidst chaos, with waves swamping many of their rubber landing craft, stripping them of weapons, supplies, and even clothes. In those uneasy hours, an exhausted Carlson overestimated the enemy presence. He dispatched terms of surrender to the Japanese commander, but the messenger was killed before delivering the note. And when the Raiders finally made it off the atoll, during the pandemonium of their escape they unintentionally left behind nine men, whom the Japanese captured and later beheaded. But Admiral Chester W. Nimitz later criticized Carlson, especially for entertaining the notion of surrender. And Carlson himself was all too aware that the reality of the Makin Raid was far from what the public envisioned. Now, three months later, with Vandegrift. Carlson halted, posted sentries, and permitted his men to bathe. That afternoon, they heard rifle fire echo across the Bokokimbo River. The Raiders grabbed their weapons and waded across the neck- deep water. There, they surprised Japanese foragers. Three or four fled, but the Marines killed two. Carlson established base camp there to await the remainder of his battalion. The Raider force, now totaling about 6. Japanese were reported to be retreating south along the Metapona River. On the dawn of November 1. Carlson assigned four patrols to scour the Metapona from Asamana, a village northward to the coast. The patrols would fan out ahead of his command group, arrayed laterally south to north. He believed the formation would give him maximum flexibility to meet threats as they arose. Soon after 1. 0 a. Captain Harold Throneson. However the enemy recovered quickly, pinning down the Marines with rifle, machine gun, and mortar fire. He ordered Captain Charles Mc. Auliffe. Carlson, who had tried four times to transfer into 2nd Raiders. His father, reluctant to appear to play favorites, had denied each request. When the lieutenant put in his fifth request, however, the battalion. Washburn suspected that Throneson and his force had run afoul of a rear guard positioned to protect the main enemy force crossing the Metapona, and aligned his platoons in an ambush anchored by light machine guns. The gambit felled many more Japanese mid- stream. At noon, as two of his platoons charged straight at the enemy, a third got behind the Japanese and hit them with deadly crossfire from the east. A standoff of charge and countercharge lasted into the afternoon with the two sides closed to within 3. By mid- afternoon, Washburn. When a sudden enemy mortar barrage signaled a renewed attack, Washburn withdrew his company north through a gully. Two of his men had been killed and another mortally wounded, but E Company had killed some 1. Japanese. Marines take a breather in Guadalcanal. Climate and illness claimed more Raiders than did the Japanese, with 2. Not all the Raiders performed as well. While leading D Company southward, Mc. Auliffe and his nine- man squad came under heavy fire that separated them from the rest of the company and blocked their efforts to rejoin them. Mc. Auliffe finally extracted his squad and returned to Binu, reporting that the rest of D Company had been wiped out. Throneson himself, however, stayed put. Carlson arrived with elements from two companies, whose advances revealed that the main Japanese force was pulling out. He radioed for aircraft to bomb and strafe the retreating Japanese for the remainder of the day and, after dark, returned to Binu. True to his strict, unforgiving approach to leadership, Carlson swiftly relieved Captains Mc. Auliffe and Throneson of command. He tacitly acknowledged their valor, but could not ignore that under duress Throneson had failed to take the offensive, while Mc. Auliffe had gotten separated from his command. Still, 2nd Raiders had earned a decisive and indisputable victory, eliminating around 1. Carlson soon reprised his improvisational ways. The day after the Asamana battle, while scouring the C Company battlefield, Raiders found the body of Private Owen Barber. Carlson realized the enemy used Asamana as a rendezvous point, and constructed a hunter. During the first 1. Marines bushwhacked 2. He allowed larger groups of foliage- cloaked enemy troops into mortar range and hit them, too. After two days and two nights, another 1. Japanese lay dead with no Raider casualties. A sign lists the 2nd Raider campaigns fought within a six- month span of 1. As Carlson was clearing and advancing across Guadalcanal, his company commanders, too, were coming into their own. Schwerin scouted the area and noticed a lone sentry guarding a narrow entrance. When other Japanese soldiers called the guard for chow, Schwerin led his men in threes through the entrance and into position for an attack. He fired; the Marines killed 1. Japanese. On November 1. Carlson reached the Henderson Field perimeter and conferred with Vandegrift, who then ordered the 2nd Raiders to swing south to pursue Japanese remnants, silence their artillery, and disrupt their supply lines. Doing so, however, meant battling Guadalcanal itself: smothering foliage, wearisome heat and humidity, vermin, and especially disease: malaria, jaundice, dysentery, and . We were wading streams and rivers all the time. Dysentery plagued many men; some cut out the seats of their dungarees and let nature take its course. C and E companies, in the jungle the longest, saw their ranks shrink 8. In their month- long odyssey, 2. Raiders got sick. By November 2. 9, they came to a narrow spine separating the Tenaru River from the Lunga River. Roping up, then down the cliffs, they spotted two empty encampments: one with a 7. After destroying the Japanese weapons, the Raider squads diverged to scout two rain- soaked trails near the Lunga. Along one trail, F Company. Yancey and his six men instinctively started shooting, which disrupted the surprised enemy enough for the Marines to rush to better firing positions. Vandegrift ordered 2nd Raiders back to Henderson Field. The Japanese held the summit. Carlson told Washburn to shepherd the three most exhausted companies. He would lead the A, B, and F Companies up the mountain. On December 3, in steady rain, Carlson led the three companies in scaling Mount Austen. Marines seized the crest, from which a series of ridges radiated. An encounter with a Japanese patrol soon exploded into a two- hour battle, with each side desperately trying to envelop the other through dense vegetation. Four Raiders were wounded, with one. The next day, while descending hastily to get Miller to the Marine perimeter for surgery, Carlson. During the two hours needed to rout the enemy, Miller died. After their month- long patrol, the Raiders (above) were mentally and physically exhausted, but satisfied with their success in decimating Japanese forces across Guadalcanal. Despite the toll that death and illness took on 2nd Raider Battalion, their long patrol was a tactical success. For Carlson, the battalion. Carlson thanked the colonel but declined his offer. After having survived a month in the Guadalcanal wilds, accomplishing the objectives his way, and accounting for 5. Japanese dead with only 1. Americans killed and 1. Marine Raider Battalion had one more thing to prove..
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