What Japanese Soldiers Wrote After Facing Marine Raiders on Guadalcanal

Some weeks the bags held hundreds of pages. Some weeks they held thousands. The operational documents went to the G-2 staff. The personal diaries were translated as time permitted. The translations filed and the originals retained in evidence boxes.

 Many of these translations would survive the war. Many of the originals would not. The voices in the captured diaries are in many cases the only voices that survive at all from the Japanese soldiers who faced the Marine Raiders between August and December 1942. The Japanese Army did not survive Guadalcanal as an institution that could later collect and publish memoirs.

 The men who fought there mostly died there, and the men who did not die mostly died later on other islands before the war ended. What the Marines took from the bodies is, for the most part, all there is. The first Japanese soldiers to face the first Marine Raider battalion died on Tulagi on the morning of August 7th, 1942.

 They were the 350 men of the 3rd Kure Special Naval Landing Force, ordered by Imperial Navy doctrine to fight to the last man. Over 3 days they did. 20 were captured alive, or most of them wounded and unconscious when found. The rest died in their bunkers and in the caves they had cut into the coral, attacking the Raiders at night with grenades and bayonets, and in some cases bare hands.

Among the bodies, the Marines found diaries. The translations from Tulagi recorded a uniform pattern. The Japanese sailors had not expected a landing. They had been training for what they thought might come eventually somewhere else. When the landing came, their entries shifted within hours from routine garrison observations to short fragmentary lines.

 One read, “Enemy is coming.” Another read simply, “It is decided.” The men who wrote those entries were already dead by the time the Marines could read them. Some of the original notebooks were kept by the Raiders who took them and would resurface decades later after the war when the men who had taken them died and their families found small leather-bound notebooks in cigar boxes in attics, often with the dried blood of the original owner still on the cover.

On September 8th, 1942, Edson took 813 men of the 1st Raiders and the 1st Parachute Battalion ashore at Taivu Point, 17 mi east of the Marine perimeter. Native scouts had reported a substantial Japanese force in the area. The raid was supposed to disrupt their preparations and destroy any supply base they had set up.

 Both objectives were achieved within hours, and then the Raiders found something they had not been looking for. The Japanese force had left behind operational documents in the haste of withdrawing into the jungle. The documents were collected and carried back to Henderson Field, where the divisional intelligence section translated them within 48 hours.

 The translations identified the Japanese force as the Kawaguchi Detachment, approximately 6,000 men under Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi, ordered by the Japanese 17th Army at Rabaul to retake Henderson Field. The captured plans called for a three-pronged assault, with the main effort coming from the south through the jungle along an avenue of approach that ended at a particular grass-covered ridge approximately 1 mi south of the airfield.

Edson had identified that ridge from aerial photographs the week before. He had argued to Vandegrift that it was the obvious approach for a Japanese night attack and had requested permission to position his force there. Vandegrift had been skeptical. The captured Tasimboko documents settled the argument.

 By September 10th, Edson’s Raiders and Paramarines were dug in along the ridge that would, 4 days later, be called Bloody Ridge. The personal diaries captured at Tasimboko, distinct from the operational documents, recorded the Japanese soldiers’ march through the jungle. Kawaguchi had landed his troops at Taivu in nighttime convoy runs and ordered them to march overland to assembly areas south of the airfield.

The diaries described the worst physical experience of their lives to that point. There was no trail. They had cut their way through jungle that was, in places, impassable, carrying artillery pieces by hand, and abandoning them when the terrain became impossible, all on reduced rations from the start.

 By the time they reached the assembly areas, many of the men were already physically broken. What they wrote during those marches is striking for what it does not contain. There is little expression of doubt and little expression of fear. The Japanese Army’s institutional culture in 1942 did not encourage soldiers to write down feelings of doubt or fear, and the diaries reflect the discipline of men trained to record only what could be safely written.

 What they recorded instead was physical detail, the weight of equipment, the condition of the trail, the temperature, the presence or absence of mosquitoes, the state of their boots. The diaries are, in the aggregate, a record of bodies under intolerable physical pressure, written by men who could not, by training and culture, write that the pressure was intolerable.

On the nights of September 12-13 and 13-14, approximately 2,500 Japanese soldiers attacked the American defensive line on the ridge. Edson had 840 men. The first night, the Japanese attack was disorganized, hampered by the difficulty of coordinating movements through the jungle and darkness, and was repulsed after 8 hours of confused fighting.

 The second night, Kawaguchi committed the rest of his force in a coordinated assault that came close to breaking the American position. Marine artillery, firing at ranges as close as 1,600 yd, destroyed the Japanese attack as it was forming. By dawn on September 14th, approximately 600 Japanese were dead on the slopes of the ridge or in the jungle immediately behind it. 40 Marines were dead.

104 were wounded. The Japanese soldiers who survived retreated west into the jungle, attempting to reach the Matanikau River Valley. The retreat covered 6 mi of broken terrain, took roughly a week, and produced the diary entry that would become the most quoted Japanese sentence about Guadalcanal. The officer who wrote it has no name in the surviving record.

His translation, made by an unnamed translator at the divisional intelligence section, runs, “I cannot help from crying when I see the sight of those men marching without food for 4 or 5 days and carrying the wounded through the curving and sloping mountain trails. The wounds couldn’t be given adequate medical treatment.

 There wasn’t a one without maggots. Many died.” The officer almost certainly died himself, either during the retreat or in the subsequent fighting in the Matanikau Valley. The diary was found on a Japanese body by an American patrol some days or weeks later. The original has been lost. The translation is what remains.

 What that translation reveals is something the writer almost certainly did not intend to reveal, that he had been broken by what he had seen. Japanese officers in 1942 did not write that they could not help from crying. The convention was the opposite. The convention was to write nothing about emotion and everything about duty. The fact that an officer who had survived the assault and was attempting to lead his men out of a catastrophic defeat had written down that he was crying and had written it in his diary where the words could be discovered by his superiors or

by the enemy, suggests the convention had broken in him. The Marine Raiders had broken it. The 2nd Marine Raider Battalion, under Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson, came ashore at Aola Bay on November 4th, 1942. Carlson’s force was used differently than Edson’s. Where the 1st Raiders had been used as conventional infantry holding a ridge, the 2nd Raiders were ordered by Vandegrift to operate behind Japanese lines for an indefinite period, hunting the dispersed elements of the 17th Army that had been broken up by the failed October

offensives. The patrol lasted 29 days. Carlson’s 700 men moved approximately 150 mi overland, fought more than a dozen actions, killed, by Carlson’s count, 488 Japanese soldiers, and lost 16 Americans dead and 17 wounded. The casualty disparity was the result of tactics Carlson had developed during his time as a military observer with the Communist 8th Route Army in China in 1937 and 1938.

The 2nd Raiders moved by stealth, attacked from ambush, struck supply trails and bivouacs, and disengaged before the Japanese could mass against them. The Japanese soldiers killed during the long patrol carried diaries. The second Raiders, like the first, took them from the bodies. The translations recorded the Japanese experience of being hunted in their own rear areas by an enemy that did not appear to be subject to the conventions of the war they had been trained to expect.

 The Japanese Army’s institutional view of the American Marine in 1942 was that he was a conventional soldier who would attack frontally, withdraw when fired upon, and respect certain operational boundaries. The second Raiders did none of those things. They appeared in places they should not have been, attacked at times they should not have attacked, and disappeared into terrain that the Japanese had considered impassable.

One diary entry from late November translated and filed at Espiritu Santo recorded the writer’s observation that the Americans had stopped fighting the way the Americans were supposed to fight, and that and that this development was not understood by the Japanese command. The entry was written by a soldier who almost certainly died within days of writing it in a country he was never going to leave, in a war his side was beginning to understand it could not win.

The diaries that survived from the Marine Raider operations on Guadalcanal between August and December 1942 number, by the rough estimate of the military historians who have surveyed the National Archives collections, somewhere between several hundred and a few thousand. The actual figures are larger at every stage of the chain.

 Many more were than translated, many more translated than preserved, many more preserved as translations than as originals. The originals that survived survived because individual Marines kept them as souvenirs and brought them home. The translations survived because the divisional and core intelligence sections filed them, and because the National Archives accessioned the intelligence files at the end of the war.

Read together, the surviving translations describe a Japanese experience of the Marine Raiders that diverged sharply from the Japanese command’s official assessment. The official assessment communicated up the the chain to Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo characterized the American forces as well equipped, but tactically unimaginative, and predicted that they would be defeated by the spiritual superiority of Japanese soldiers willing to attack at night and willing to die.

The diaries written by the men who actually faced the Raiders did not contain that assessment. The diaries contained instead observations of being outmaneuvered, of being outshot, of being killed in their fighting holes by Marines who had moved through the jungle without being heard, of watching their officers be killed and not knowing what to do.

 The men who wrote those observations could not have known what they wrote would survive them. The writing was done in small notebooks, in pencil or in fountain pen, using kanji and katakana, and the personal abbreviations Japanese soldiers in the field developed to record information quickly. It happened in foxholes and in bivouacs, and during the brief halts of forced marches.

 The men wrote because writing was what their training had told them to do, and because the diary was a place where information could be recorded that might eventually be useful to someone. It would be useful to the divisional intelligence section at Henderson Field, which translated the writing into English and filed it with the operational documents from Tasimboko.

Decades later, it would be useful to the historians who would assemble the campaign narrative and quote the Japanese officer’s lament about the maggot-infested wounds. And finally, in a way the writers had not intended and could not have anticipated, it would be useful to the historical record of of what the Japanese soldiers on Guadalcanal had thought about the American Marines who killed them.

 The Marine Raiders did not write down what they thought of the Japanese soldiers they killed. The Marines who survived Guadalcanal would write memoirs decades later, and many of them would describe the fighting in detail. But the immediate record of what the Marines thought during the fighting was not preserved in diaries because the Marine Corps did not did not encourage its men to keep diaries on operations, and most of them did not.

The Japanese soldiers, by contrast, kept diaries because their army required it, and because the institutional culture of the Imperial Japanese Army held that the soldier who recorded his observations was performing a duty. What survives, therefore, is asymmetrical. The Marines spoke about the Japanese after the war in the voices of older men remembering.

The Japanese spoke about the Marines during the war in the voices of men who would soon be dead. The two records do not match in any conventional historical sense. They are written from different positions in time and from different positions in the war. The Japanese voices, closer to the events they describe and possessing the advantage of immediacy, the Marine voices possessing the advantage of perspective and the knowledge of how the war ended.

 The Japanese voices know only what their writers could see in the foxhole the night before they were killed. The diaries as artifacts sit now in archive boxes and in private collections and in the donated papers of veterans whose families understood that what their grandfathers had brought back from Guadalcanal was, in some cases, the last words of men who had died facing them. The boxes are mostly unopened.

 The translations are mostly un- read except by a small number of military historians and by the staff of the small number of institutions that hold them. What the diaries contain is the testimony of the dead, taken by the men who killed them, preserved by accident, and waiting in the dark for the readers who almost never come.