The Reporter and the Raiders: Richard Tregaskis and the First Raider Battalion

The tip came from Lieutenant Colonel Merritt “Red Mike” Edson to International News Service correspondent Richard Tregaskis on the morning of Monday, September 7, 1942. Edson and his men, the First Raider Battalion, assisted by the First Parachute Battalion, about 850 in all, were planning a mission to investigate reports of a Japanese buildup that had grown from an initial estimate of 300 troops to anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 in size.

Edson and marine intelligence officers on Guadalcanal had selected the small village of Tasimboko in the Taivu Point area as their target. They were to be ferried there from Kukum by two destroyer-transports (the Manley and McKean) and two smaller vessels classified by the navy as YPs (patrol craft), or “Yippies,” as the raiders called them. Undeterred by the pelting rain that greeted him at the embarkation point, or the small size of the craft in which he would make the journey, Tregaskis climbed aboard, accompanying Samuel B. Griffith, Edson’s executive officer, and a group of approximately one hundred high-spirited marines. One of them jokingly inquired, “This is the battleship Oregon, I presume?” after stepping on the deck of what had once been a California tuna boat.

Those high spirits were dampened a bit as the raiders and Tregaskis attempted to find enough room on the diesel-powered boat (YP 346) to get some rest before the next day’s attack. “Getting to sleep was a terrible job,” Tregaskis recalled. “The ship’s steaming hold, full of the noise of the engines, was crammed with marines; no room to sprawl there. Every nook about the deck seemed to be filled as well.” Those sheltering in the cramped engine room kept busy by “munching canned rations, and oiling up their guns,” Tregaskis reported, adding that in a marine’s estimation, food, guns, and ammunition “run a close tie” for premiere importance.

One of the raiders described the night as “the most miserable” he had ever spent, as rough seas caused some of his comrades to become seasick. At least the waves that cascaded over the deck helped to wash away the vomit of the men who had become ill. Although the ship’s cheerful Portuguese skipper, Joaquin S. Theodore, told those aboard that they should not smoke on deck, lest their lighted cigarettes alert the enemy, the marines questioned his reasoning. Griffith pointed out: “Belching showers of bright red sparks as they chugged eastward through the blackness with engines pounding, the Yippies announced their presence to all but the blind and deaf.” Unable to find a decent place on deck that could shelter him from the rain and the cold, Tregaskis stumbled his way to the stuffy captain’s room, collapsing on the floor and drifting off. “It was better than sleeping in the rain,” he noted.

Tregaskis accepted the discomforts of traveling on a ship that was little more than “a floating engine room” because he knew that wherever the hard-charging raiders went, he would be sure to encounter action intense enough to satisfy the curiosity of even the most jaded newspaper reader on the home front. Viewed as the American counterpart to the British commandos, the raiders depended upon speed and surprise for successful completion of their quick strikes deep behind enemy lines. They trained intensely to become experts in the art of combat—both armed and unarmed—and were in top physical condition after a punishing training regimen that included punishing hikes interspersed with runs at top speed. The raiders became an elite within an elite in the all-volunteer (at the time) U.S. Marine Corps, which held to the concept that every marine was a rifleman, whatever their specialty might be. As Robert L. Sherrod, a reporter from Time magazine, who followed the corps as its men leapfrogged their way across the Pacific, pointed out, “The Marines assumed that they were the world’s best fighting men.”

The raiders attracted the “most dedicated, aggressive, competitive, and ambitious Marines,” and so had little hesitation in considering themselves to be a superior fighting force. In covering the raiders’ activities on Tulagi and Guadalcanal, Tregaskis had become fascinated with their courage and fighting skills, as well as being particularly impressed by Edson’s deft leadership and bravery while under fire. “He knew his business was killing the enemy and making his men fight well,” Tregaskis said of Edson. “He was a devoted, loyal, honorable ‘Can-Do’ Marine, a brilliant officer—and when we needed his kind to protect us, he was in there swinging with every ounce of energy and brain power in him.”

Edson instilled in his men the belief that they had been trained to be the best—“second to none,” as a raider sergeant once told Tregaskis. No matter what kind of dangers they faced, Edson made his men believe they would prevail, which translated into a “terrific amount of confidence,” the sergeant recalled. For their part, the raiders also admired Tregaskis’s determination to risk his life alongside them, naming him, years after the war had ended, an honorary member of the battalion.

The expedition to Tasimboko came as a result of the most determined effort made yet by the Japanese to eliminate the Americans from Guadalcanal. Approximately 6,000 troops under the command of Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi had reached the island and were struggling through the jungle on their way to—they were confident—tear through the marines’ main line of resistance and capture Henderson Field. Kawaguchi reminded the soldiers of his Thirty-Fifth Brigade that the Americans feared their massed bayonet charges. “The strong point of the enemy is superiority of fire power. But it will be able to do nothing in the night and in the jungle,” Kawaguchi boasted. The general was so certain of victory that he packed his white dress uniform to wear when Japan’s Rising Sun flag was raised in triumph over Henderson Field.

Unfortunately for Kawaguchi, while his troops were positioning themselves for an attack on the American airfield, Edson and his raiders were on their way to hit Tasimboko, where the Japanese had left behind a large cache of supplies. Because intelligence reports indicated the enemy’s defenses faced west, Edson planned to land his men east of Tasimboko near Taivu Point and attack the encampment from the east.

The raiders could always tell by looking at their commander’s face that he had managed to find them another dangerous assignment, noted Lieutenant Houston Stiff. He remembered fellow raiders exclaiming, “Oh, Christ! The Old Man’s got that so-and-so grin on his face again. Now there’ll be hell to pay!” Later, a few of the raiders grew disenchanted with Edson’s eagerness to involve them in hazardous missions, referring to him by the unflattering nickname Mad Merritt the Morgue Master.

Tregaskis and the raiders had some good fortune early in the morning of September 8 as they climbed into the Higgins boats taking them to shore. A small convoy of American cargo ships, escorted by a cruiser and four destroyers, passed close by them on their way to another part of the island, Lunga Point. With what seemed to be a large armada approaching their position, many of the Japanese—about 300 members of Kawaguchi’s rear echelon—panicked. They abandoned their positions and fled into the jungle, leaving unmanned two antitank guns that could have decimated the American force. “But we naturally had no way of knowing this as we dashed for shore in our landing boats,” Tregaskis reported. “We were ready for a real struggle, and a bit puzzled when there were no shots from shore.”

Robert C. Miller of United Press, who also joined the raid; he remembered the twenty minutes it took for him to make it to shore as the longest twenty minutes of his life. “I made the mistake of being in the front of the boat and got pushed ashore first—unarmed,” Miller reported. “Ran like hell for the bush and found four Marines had beaten me to it.”

Tregaskis and the raiders were mystified again when, shortly after landing, they found along a trail not only a “serviceable 37 mm field piece” complete with ammunition, but also full packs, life preservers, entrenching tools, and shoes “strewn in disorder on the ground.” There were also fresh foxholes dug in the black jungle earth and camouflaged with palm leaves. “I’m thinking they’ve gone up for breakfast and knocked things off,” Edson said to Tregaskis.

The group pushed on, hurrying through a small village with only two huts and others “in skeletal condition (having been burned),” noted the correspondent. Tregaskis could hear aircraft engines in the distance—dive-bombers and fighters from Henderson Field attacking Tasimboko from the air. As the Americans circled around a small pond, forded a stream, and struggled through the jungle’s thick, tangled vines and leaves, they remained puzzled, Tregaskis noted, by the lack of any Japanese resistance, fearing they might be walking into a trap.

Shortly after eight in the morning the raiders encountered their first enemy resistance. Tregaskis could see the marines running around “in numerous directions at once,” and knew immediately that something had happened. He ran to the beach and encountered a line of Japanese landing boats lying on the sand, and with them a small group of figures clad in brown uniforms. Edson quietly called out for Major Floyd Nickerson, who anticipated his commander’s order to open fire. Soon, raider machine-gun crews hammered at the enemy, who responded in kind. “I heard the familiar flat crack of the .25 [caliber] rifle, and the repetition of the sound in long bursts of light machine-gun fire,” said Tregaskis, who sought cover by burrowing deep into the wet jungle foliage as bullets whirred among the leaves behind him. “Others of our men joined in the firing and it swelled in volume. In the midst of the outburst, we heard the crash of a heavy explosion,” he said. 

Edson, who had taken cover, told the correspondent that it sounded like mortar fire. With a lull in the firing, which Tregaskis said seemed to be a common occurrence in jungle warfare, Edson hurried ahead, and the reporter struggled to keep pace, noting that he found the colonel to be “one of the quickest human beings” he had every known.

The firing started up again, and Tregaskis heard cries calling for a corpsman to tend to a wounded raider. The Americans came under fire from what seemed to be a heavy artillery piece (they turned out to be 75-mm field guns). Tregaskis could hear the “furry whistle of a shell” passing over his head and heard it explode a couple of hundred yards to the rear. “It was so loud it made my ears ring, and the concussion shook chips of wood on my head from the trees above,” he reported.

As the raiders killed the crew manning one of the guns, another took its place, continuing to fire on the Americans. Tregaskis, who had taken cover among a tangle of vines and dwarf trees, could feel a blast of hot air from the gun’s muzzle each time it fired. He also had to keep an eye out for Japanese riflemen, later learning that one had been no more than fifty feet away from where he had been—all this while being soaked by a sudden rainstorm. “There’s nothing worse than lying in a jungle, wringing wet, with a war going on around you,” joked Miller.

At about 10:45 a.m. a raider reported to Edson that the second Japanese 75-mm gun had been put out of action. “It began to look as if we might have tackled a bigger Jap force than we could handle,” noted a concerned Tregaskis. Edson called for naval gunfire support for his men, and the Manley and McKean responded and shelled Tasimboko. “I went out to the beach to watch the yellow flashes and the geysers of smoke and debris rising where the shells had hit,” Tregaskis said. He learned later that one of the marines, Corporal Maurice Pion, had suffered a shattered left arm in the shelling. Pharmacist Mates Alfred W. Cleveland and Karl B. Coleman used a penknife to amputate what remained of Pion’s arm, saving his life in the process. Private Andrew J. Klejnot used his skills as a marksman to shoot and kill one of the two Japanese soldiers manning one of the guns. The other tried to hide behind some boxes in a small ammunition dump, Klejnot told Tregaskis, so he “fired into the dump and set it afire.”

In any engagement he participated in during the war, Tregaskis noted that there came a time, always a “very pleasant one,” when his doubts and fears suddenly cleared away, and he could see a successful conclusion nearing. Such a time came in the raid on Tasimboko at about noon. A raider from a company led by Captain John J. Antonelli came into Edson’s command post to report, “we secured the problem and took the village.” The clouds that had been unleashing torrents of rain, cleared, and Nickerson indicated that his forces had also reached the village. Once they were in Tasimboko, the marines set about destroying numerous cases of Japanese food and sacks of rice (urinating on the contents or spilling it on the ground), as well as burning approximately 500,000 rounds of ammunition, Griffith estimated, and destroying radio equipment.

As they neared the bamboo huts in which the ammunition was stored, Tregaskis heard Nickerson tell his men: “All right. Here you go. In here and start burning, you arson artists.” Miller joined in, helping the marines torch the huts. “It was fun,” he told his readers. “Especially when I remembered I would have gone to jail back home for doing the same thing. . . . . Had more fun later, towing some Japanese artillery pieces out into the ocean and leaving them there to rust.” Raider Marlin “Whitey” Groft recalled that he and other members of his team picked through the pockets of the dead Japanese for whatever they could find, including documents, possible souvenirs, and even photographs and letters from the soldiers’ families in Japan. Groft added that some of the more “stalwart” raiders used their knives or stilettos to cut out gold teeth from the dead men’s mouths. “It’s funny how in war,” he remembered, “men do things they would never consider doing under normal conditions.”

According to Griffith, Tregaskis, whom he described as the “lanky I.N.S. correspondent adopted by the Raiders,” also lent a hand, poking around the village and filling a Japanese blanket with papers, notebooks, maps and charts that were later used by marine intelligence officers to gain a better understanding about the pending Japanese offensive.

The raiders suffered eight casualties (two killed and six wounded), counted twenty-seven Japanese bodies, and estimated they had killed a total of fifty. A pleased Griffith described the raid as “one of the really very successful small operations of World War II.” The marines left Tasimboko late in the afternoon for the return to Kukum, with officers and enlisted men, Griffith remembered, “sagging under a load of tinned crab and sliced beef packed in soy.” Twenty-one cases of Japanese beer and seventeen half-gallon flasks of sake, he added, were also smuggled aboard.

Tregaskis reported that the raiders also helped themselves to large numbers of British-made cigarettes, still bearing Netherlands East Indies tax stamps, and brought back captured Japanese medical supplies. As a final insult to the enemy, the raiders liberated the dress uniform Kawaguchi had intended to wear at his expected victory ceremony at Henderson Field. Tregaskis credited Corporal Phil A. Oldham with coming up with the classic line of the excursion when, upon seeing an enemy soldier pop up in front of his platoon, he shouted: “Don’t shoot him. Let me get him. He’s mine!”

With the setting sun only a reddish glow in the sky, Tregaskis and the raiders had a final bit of excitement as the transports and YPs neared their homeport. A report passed among the marines that a dozen Japanese aircraft had been spotted. Fortunately for them, the enemy aircraft did not strike Guadalcanal, but selected Tulagi as their target. The correspondent could see “cup-shaped bursts of bright white light rising from the direction of the island, just over the horizon rim,” as well as hearing the “distant thudding of bombs” a few seconds later.

The tension and exhaustion of the operation hit Tregaskis early that morning as he tried to get some rest. He could hear others in his tent dashing outside to a nearby shelter. An officer with the Fifth Marines, Major Bill Phipps, shouted for him to join them, but Tregaskis was “too tired to move,” and remained behind.

At breakfast the next morning he heard that Japanese ships had shelled Tulagi, hitting Captain Theodore’s tuna boat, setting it afire and wounding him through the chest; the Portuguese sailor was expected to live. “This is the second time that I have left a ship in the evening and it has been attacked and lost before morning,” Tregaskis observed. “This fact gives rise to the thought that my luck has been good, so far.”

Using documents captured on the Tasimboko operation, Edson consulted with General Alexander Vandegrift and his intelligence staff to devise a strategy to blunt the Japanese offensive. The raiders and parachutists were to be sent to defend the bare slopes of ridge located about 2,000 yards south of the vital airfield. Griffith described the new position as “a broken, rugged, kunai-covered coral hogback which paralleled the Lunga [River] south of the airfield. Jungle lapped at its south, east, and west slopes; to the north the ground gave off gently toward battered Henderson.”

On September 10 Edson told his men that there had been too much bombing and shelling around their position in a grove near the abandoned Lever Brothers coconut plantation, and they would be moving to “a quiet spot.” If the raiders expected a rest, they were soon jolted back to reality. Their suspicions were heightened when they saw forward artillery observers from Colonel Pedro del Valle’s Eleventh Marines identifying probable target areas for their guns, as well as a scattering of other officers scouting the territory. “On top of this,” noted a raider sergeant, “were our own officers and NCOs [noncommissioned officers] constantly pushing us in the laying of barbed wire, digging foxholes, building machine gun emplacements and cutting fire lanes.”

Preceded by a bombardment from cruisers and destroyers, Kawaguchi’s forces struck the raiders’ defensive line on the ridge on the evening of September 12. Tregaskis and his fellow correspondents were bivouacked in Vandegrift’s command post, located about a hundred yards from Edson’s position. At about nine o’clock that evening a marine poked his head into their tent and told them, “Get up, fellas, we’re moving up the ridge.” The reporters wasted no time in grabbing their helmets and shoes and leaving. From their vantage point on the ridge top, they could see the distinctive flashes of naval gunfire coming from the direction of Kukum. “Just as we heard the boom of the gun, the shell whizzed over our heads and crashed a few hundred yards around,” Tregaskis recalled. “There was a second’s pause, and then more flashes followed, so continuously that the sky seemed to be flickering constantly, and shells whined overhead almost in column. They kept coming for minutes on end, fortunately hitting into the jungle several hundred yards behind us, skimming over the trees under which we were lying. We simply lay there clutching the side of the ridge and hoping the Japs would continue to fire too high.”

Edson told Vandegrift the next morning that he believed the enemy had been just “testing us” when they had hit his men. The raider commander expected Kawaguchi’s forces to try again that night. “He [Edson] spent the day moving back his front, tying in automatic weapons, improving fields of fire and laying more communication wire,” Vandegrift recalled. At Edson’s request the general moved his reserve force—the Second Battalion, Fifth Marines—closer to the raiders’ lines, while marine artillerymen pinpointed possible targets for their fire and the Cactus Air Force received reinforcements, including two dozen Wildcat fighters and additional dive-bombers and torpedo planes. The Japanese commander Kawaguchi felt only frustration. He had fully intended to make his main attack against the Americans on the evening of September 12, but had been impeded by the “devilish jungle,” which caused his forces to be “scattered all over and completely beyond control. In my whole life I have never felt so helpless.”

As the raiders prepared for another onslaught by the Japanese against the ridge, Tregaskis had the foresight to, when told once again to move from his tent to the ridge top, take along a blanket and his satchel full of notes. He spread his poncho and blanket on the ground and tried to get some sleep, but was jolted awake shortly after midnight on September 14 by the noise of action that has welled into a “cascade of sound” from the raider lines. He saw a gray mist drift in among the trees on the ridge and wondered if it might be smoke from the Eleventh Marines’ howitzers (he later learned it had been smoke released by the Japanese to fool the Americans into thinking they were using gas, the dreaded weapon from World War I).

Enemy snipers infiltrated Vandegrift’s command post, causing Tregaskis to hug the ground to avoid ricocheting bullets that skidded among the trees. In all the commotion, with rumors that the Japanese had landed parachute troops, Tregaskis noted that Vandegrift remained calm, sitting on the ground outside of the operations tent and cheerfully observing, “Well, it’s only a few more hours till dawn. Then we’ll see where we stand.”

Calls came in from Edson’s command with urgent requests for more machine-gun ammunition and hand grenades, while at about midnight Vandegrift learned that one of his battalions dug in along the upper Tenaru River had been hit as well. Tregaskis reported that a marine from the outpost under attack eventually staggered into Vandegrift’s headquarters, gasped out, “They got ’em all,” and promptly fainted. Snipers continued to pepper the command post from all sides. “We had our hands full,” Tregaskis noted.

So did the marines on the ridge. The situation grew so desperate that Edson had to call in artillery fire almost directly on top of his positions. Terrified Japanese soldiers tried to escape the withering fire by jumping into their enemy’s foxholes; the marines pitched them back into the maelstrom. The artillerymen fired more than 2,000 rounds during the battle, and a grateful raider later acknowledged, “They saved our asses.” 

Edson seemed to be everywhere on the ridge, rallying his men with harsh words when they seemed to be wavering. Groft remembered seeing his commanding officer yank his .45 automatic from his holster and threaten to shoot any man who dared flee to the rear. “The only thing they have that you don’t have is guts,” Groft quoted Edson as saying. “Get back in line. You’ll die in your foxholes.” 

Major Ken Bailey also proved to be an indomitable presence on the ridge, delivering badly-needed ammunition and shoving his men back to the positions, yelling out a question made famous by another Marine in World War I: “Do you want to live forever?” (Edson and Bailey both later received the Medal of Honor for their actions on the ridge.) The raiders and parachutists held their ground, strengthened by reserve forces from the Second Battalion of the Fifth Marines. When daylight finally appeared, P-400 fighter aircraft from Henderson Field swooped down upon the Japanese that remained to unleash additional carnage upon the battlefield.

Although the marines had triumphed, pockets of resistance remained. Tregaskis remembered returning to Vandegrift’s command post for a cup of coffee after working his way to catch a glimpse of the battlefield only to hear a loud, blubbering shout, “like a turkey gobbler’s cry, followed by a burst of shooting.” When the commotion had died down he walked to the spot and saw the bodies of two dead Japanese and one dead marine. Three Japanese, who had been hiding in a bush at the edge of the ridge road, decided to make a suicide charge against the Americans.

According to Tregaskis’s report about the attack, Master Technical Sergeant John McAdams had spotted the trio’s leader, fell upon him, and shot him in the side. Another marine, Corporal Harvey W. Skaugen, threw his rifle at another charging Japanese, knocking him to the ground, and Sergeant Major Shepherd Banta interrupted his dressing down of a clerk long enough to fire the shots that finished off the invaders, then returned to finish his reprimand.

In the battle that the correspondents on Guadalcanal had agreed to call “Edson Hill” in their stories, and later also came to be known as Edson’s Ridge and the Battle of Bloody Ridge, the raiders suffered 135 casualties and the parachutists lost 128; of those numbers, fifty-nine were dead. The Japanese left behind approximately 700 to 800 men killed on the ridge, with another 500 wounded, who did their best to join the other survivors struggling through the unforgiving jungle. 

The six-mile-long retreat to Point Cruz took the tattered remnants of Kawaguchi’s command five days; some barely subsisted by eating roots and tree bark and quenched their powerful thirst by drinking from puddles or unhealthy river water. A Japanese naval officer later noted regretfully that the army “had been used to fighting the Chinese.” For his part, Edson, usually guarded when it came to praising his men, felt only satisfaction about the raider’s performance. The morning after the fight, he borrowed a cigarette from one of his men, sat down beside him, and commented, “Now I know I have a real fighting outfit.”