No Bended Knee

by Merrill B. Twining

  While all this was going on, our old nemesis, Rear Adm. Kelly Turner, still playing soldier, revived his golden dream of an airstrip at Aola Bay and had moved toward its accomplishment by landing a navy construction battalion there. These Seabees were covered by the 2d Marine Raider Battalion, commanded by Lt. Col. Evans F. Carlson, USMC, plus part of an army infantry battalion and a detachment of Marines of the 9th Defense Battalion. The Seabees found, as had all of their qualified predecessors, that the project was impossible of accomplishment. It was embarrassing. As part of a face-saving solution General Vandegrift agreed to employ the 2d Marine Raiders on a pursuit mission before they were withdrawn from the island. They would take over the job of chasing the remnants of the enemy’s badly mauled Koli Point landing force inland over the mountains to Kokumbona.

  The 2d Marine Raiders were a splendid organization, meticulously trained and indoctrinated by a most remarkable man, Evans F. Carlson. He was a New England Yankee, the son of a preacher, and the grandson of a Norwegian ’49er who had sought gold in California. He had served in the U.S. Army prior to and during World War I, attaining the rank of captain. Resigning his army commission after the war, he enlisted in the Marine Corps and immediately entered the Officer’s Training School. Carlson was commissioned a Marine second lieutenant in 1922.

  I met Carlson in Quantico in 1923 upon my own entry into the Corps. We took our meals at Mrs. Mountjoy’s boarding house in Quantico, there being as yet no officer’s mess or club on the base. He was officer in charge of the post stables. Always friendly and helpful, he gave me some much-needed instruction in basic equitation. Carlson was several years older than the rest of us newly commissioned officers and much more mature. After a few days of living with us youngsters in a crowded BOQ, he requested and received other quarters.

  That fall, during the Marine Corps East Coast Expeditionary Force maneuvers, Carlson commanded the ambulance train of the Naval Medical Battalion, the last animal-drawn unit in the Marine Corps. We were beset by violent and continuing storms at the outset of our long march from Quantico to Lexington, Virginia. Soon our primitive four-wheel-drive trucks—relics of the Argonne—bogged down completely on the red clay roads of back-country Virginia. The rationing system came to a sudden stop. We went hungry until Carlson’s mule-drawn ambulances came undeterred to our rescue and rations were distributed in abundance throughout the storm-bound convoys. Carlson became an instant expeditionary force hero. His initiative also made him a lifelong favorite of Brig. Gen. Smedley Butler, commanding general, who was spared further embarrassment. Carlson modestly deflected all the credit, telling me, “ ‘Old Ned’ ” (a familiar name for a mule in those days) “will always do a good job if you just give him a chance.”

  I did not see Carlson again until the spring of 1937, when I was a student at the Army Infantry School, Fort Benning, Georgia. On a Sunday morning I drove my wife and David, our young son, to Warm Springs to visit the vacation camp of President Franklin Roosevelt. The president was not there, but we encountered Captain Carlson, who had the day’s duty. It was here that Carlson first came to the attention of President Roosevelt, who took a particular interest in Marines and the vicissitudes of our small Corps. He was impressed with Carlson’s sincerity and uncompromisingly puritanical character.

  Carlson’s third tour of duty in China—late in 1937—was for the purpose of learning the Chinese language, but as usual he did more than was expected. Carlson obtained permission from Mao Tse-tung to accompany the Communist army on part of the Long March—which covered 6,000 miles and lasted over a year—and went into the field in 1938 with Communists who were fighting the Japanese in remote parts of China.

  Carlson was impressed—probably to an undue degree— with the excellence of the discipline, training, and indoctrination of the Chinese troops. He reported what he had seen and done in China to Naval Intelligence and to President Roosevelt, as the president had requested.

  Carlson advocated the assignment of leadership positions in our own services solely on a basis of merit rather than fixed military rank. In essence, so do all our military services, and they have tried unceasingly for centuries to develop a system whereby the commissioned officer in charge is in fact the best qualified for command of a given unit. The existing system works well in all the U.S. services. Carlson’s system would never be successful on a service-wide scale for the simple reason that there are not enough Carlsons.

  Carlson’s message was not altogether clear, and it was rejected. He resigned his commission and now had time to write and make speeches about what he had seen and experienced in China.

  Lieutenant Colonel Carlson returned to the Marine Corps in April 1941 and took command of the newly formed 2d Marine Raider Battalion with Maj. James Roosevelt, eldest son of the president, as his second in command.

  Gung ho! This was the inspirational slogan that Carlson brought from China. He translated it into a war cry and used it to forge these Marines quickly into a cohesive unit with all members zealously and enthusiastically working together. The 2d Marine Raiders conducted their successful Makin Island raid in mid-August 1942.

  As a slogan to get persons to unite and work selflessly for the common good, gung ho was admirable and useful. The motto spread throughout the entire Corps, taking on a broader connotation than Carlson ever intended. In this form it has even entered our language.

  There is little reason to believe that Carlson carried out his radical leadership philosophy to any extreme degree. The rank structure of his 2d Raiders appears normal, and command seems to have been exercised by the commissioned officers serving under him in much the usual hierarchical manner.

  The Roosevelt connection, however, provided Carlson access to the White House and an opportunity to express his views. As one wag remarked, “Second Raiders will never need any artillery support. Carlson’s always got twenty-one guns in his hip pocket.”

  The setup for his Guadalcanal raid was very closely held. I was told only that there would be a raid, that Carlson would report by radio to me at intervals, and that under no circumstances was I to give him anything whatever in the way of orders or instructions. Jerry Thomas told me this several times. The next day General Vandegrift came by the D-3 section and repeated the same injunctions. I was impressed.

  Carlson was to be supplied by airdrop every four days. A large number of natives were hired as carriers by Maj. John Mather, Australian army, who was superbly qualified to lead them and who had recently conceived and participated in the successful raid on Malaita Island. The assistance of the natives would be a godsend to Carlson, especially in evacuating casualties. John was a good soldier who knew the bush and its inhabitants, and they in turn trusted him.

  The Raiders’ rations were extremely sparse. The only items allowed were rice, bacon, raisins, tea, salt, and sugar. Knowing young Marines and their prodigious appetites and love of solid food, I remained unconvinced that these 500 Raiders had suddenly become a bunch of ascetics. Jerry agreed but said Carlson had made a definite point of it. I still shook my head. Over fifty years later I read a book by one of the young participants. He put it like this:

  The awful hunger was a bad dream of its own. . . . For a month it was raisins, tea, bacon, salt, sugar, rice. Oh that rice! That was a worse dream than the running pain in the empty belly.

  Polished rice, unpolished coarse Jap rice, rice boiled, rice fried, rice raw, rice with sugar, rice with bacon, rice with tea, rice with rice! “Goddamn Colonel,” we said to him when he came by. “We’re hungry.”30

  Thousands of other Marines and soldiers then “sojourning” on the island would have found it hard to disagree. There are limits even to the powers of persuasion of a leader like Carlson.

  I monitored the progress of the raid based on Carlson’s dispatches. They came in precisely every six hours. They were informative and clear. His field radios always worked. We encountered none of the annoying nonsense of our own “Banana Warriors” such as Whaling, Puller, and Hanne
ken, who “hollered” only when they were hurt. The raid—actually a pursuit—was successful from the start despite the difficulty of orientation, as we had no maps of the area, nor did Carlson. We guided on the names of native villages. Even this was only a vague and uncertain business for the natives lived by a form of slash-and-burn agriculture that required the villages to move from time to time when the soil of their present location became worn out. Thus the village names were really the names of areas, each of considerable size. Aerial reconnaissance was our basic resort in the effort to maintain contact. Martin Clemens, the Coast Watcher, also gave us valuable information about the region Carlson was searching and guidance concerning our planned airdrops.

  Carlson won victory after victory over the stubbornly resisting Japanese; each contact produced an increased demoralization of the enemy. As a result of this prolonged flight, only a handful of survivors reached the area of Mt. Austen, immediately south of our own position on Lunga Point. By this time the Japanese had lost over 400 of their original 500 men, while only seventeen of Carlson’s Marines had been killed in action.

  A notable triumph. But how was it accomplished? Based on repeated experience with the Japanese, we had found them reluctant to react to conventional maneuvers. They would simply take up a strong position and stay there till they were killed. This made it a costly way for us to win a fight. To them, their death did not seem to matter. Our usual form of attack was the approved and conventional method adopted by all the world’s armies. On making contact with an enemy to our front, we would deploy the main force facing the enemy and feel out his position. Then we would reconnoiter his flanks and send an enveloping force to turn the flank providing the most promise of success from the point of view of favorable approach, ease of fire support, and other considerations. We avoided direct frontal assault except as a last resort. We all remembered what had happened to the Japanese at the Tenaru and Edson’s Ridge, and the fate of the Sendai Division, and we wanted for ourselves none of what we saw there.

  Too often our enveloping effort was ineffective. Hasty and inadequate reconnaissance and difficult approaches frequently led our flanking force astray, taking it off the battlefield. With our small units, it was difficult to achieve coordination of movement and the timely delivery of supporting fire from heavy weapons and artillery, which were always located in the rear of the main body.

  The enemy often felt unthreatened by our small, exhausted, and disorganized enveloping force and so remained in place until taken out the hard and costly way, involving frontal assault and a hand-to-hand struggle of extermination from foxhole to foxhole. This method is known to some as C and A: the nape-of-the-neck, seat-of-the-pants technique of the old-time barroom bouncer. In its full form, C and A translated into collar and ass. Despite its repulsiveness, the phrase describes this mindless form of combat better than sweet euphemisms such as attrition tactics, a term often used by writers but not by participants. We found C and A combat inescapable later on at Tarawa and Peleliu. Fortunately, Marines became better at this than the Japanese.

  C and A was a bad way to go, and Carlson had his own method of avoiding it. He used the main body as his enveloping force, striking momentarily at a right angle to his permanent line of advance in what I described in the final report as an eccentric form of attack, “eccentric” being used in the mechanical, not the psychological, sense of the word. Carlson used this maneuver several times during the course of his pursuit, always to good effect. It was clearly recognizable from his dispatches.

  Carlson’s companies moved separately and fluidly through the jungle. When one of them was confronted with an enemy delaying position, it would maintain contact throughout the remainder of the day and sometimes the entire next day, continuously making a show of great activity all along the hostile front by fire and movement, suggesting but not making an actual attack.

  Meanwhile Carlson would deliberately assemble all his uncommitted forces, weapons, and supplies at a point well off the main line of advance but near the enemy flank chosen as the object of his assault. The assault came on the following day, well planned, fully supported, and delivered by an overwhelming force of rested troops. Furthermore, he had not exposed his base; he had simply moved it behind him momentarily.

  The Japanese were never able to comprehend what Carlson was doing and at each confrontation showed a steadily diminishing capacity for effective resistance. For the first time in the Guadalcanal campaign, maneuver alone operated to our advantage.

  The availability of native carriers gave Carlson the freedom of movement necessary to carry out his king-size envelopments without, at the same time, exposing his base of supply to attack.

  Upon completion of this superbly commanded operation the Raiders reassembled at Lunga Point and established their camp outside the main perimeter, where they awaited withdrawal.

  I always found John Mather, the Australian army officer who had accompanied Carlson’s Raiders, to be a well-educated, thoughtful, and professional soldier, usually hard to impress and faintly skeptical of all things American. During the debriefing, Mather bestowed what for him was lavish praise of Carlson and his responses to the challenging incidents of the raid by frequently interjecting the statement: “He always went by the book. I never saw anything quite like that before.”

  During this period I saw Carlson only once. It was a strange meeting. The division chief of staff, Col. Jerry Thomas, directed me to go to Block Four, just outside the perimeter, to be present at a meeting between the two Raider Battalion commanders, Col. Merritt Edson and Lt. Col. Evans Carlson. The purpose was to obtain their views on the tactical reorganization of the Marine Corps squad.

  At the appointed time I was seated on an old picnic bench near the Block Four copra shed. The bench faced inland, and I saw Edson’s jeep proceeding up the government track from Kukum. It stopped, and as Edson got out I sighted Carlson stalking out of the palm trees across the road. There was no greeting. We all sat on the bench. I was in the middle in more ways than one. Carlson gave his views supporting a division of the squad into three fire teams. Edson then gave his own views, which were essentially the same, except for the addition of one man to act as assistant squad leader. Carlson did not dissent. We sat there for a moment staring into the palm trees across the track. Edson rose and left without another word. Carlson did the same. I returned to the division command post, where I gave Jerry an account of the meeting and offered to write up the necessary dispatch to Headquarters Marine Corps. The offer was refused. To this day I have no idea as to what lay behind this bizarre occurrence.

  Following Guadalcanal the four Raider battalions were consolidated into a Raider regiment. This was supposed to be an administrative unit rather than a tactical organization. Its major purpose, I suspect, was to make it more difficult for Rear Adm. Kelly Turner to gain access to individual battalions whenever he felt like playing soldier. If so, it failed its major purpose.

  Turner wangled control of the entire regiment for the New Georgia Operation in the summer of 1943 and sent them into the jungle on a vague, ill-conceived, and reckless foray. Known as the Bairoku Operation, it forced the Raiders to pursue the identical tactics that had brought repeated ruin on the Japanese at Guadalcanal—a prolonged and debilitating march through jungle swamps with inadequate rations and supplies and supporting arms, culminating in an unsupported attack on a strong, prepared position. Promised Army Air Corps support was not forthcoming. Like similar efforts of the Japanese on Guadalcanal, logistic shortages (rations, ammunition, and medical) limited the permissible period of contact with the enemy and necessitated immediate attack, which was abortive. Withdrawal was well conducted, and casualties, while severe, were not ruinous.

  This superfiasco was Admiral Turner’s swan song in the South Pacific. He assumed command of amphibious forces under Admiral Nimitz at Pearl Harbor, where, face to face with Gen. Holland M. “Howling Mad” Smith, USMC, he successfully fulfilled the role of “the navy’s foremost landi
ng admiral.” In final tribute to Turner, let it be said that he was successful. He was a strong, bold, and daring leader but only as long as he remained within the area of his own competence— the overall naval aspects of an amphibious campaign.

  Meanwhile, Carlson had been reorganized out of command of his old battalion. He was sorely missed by his men, who looked upon the organization of a Raider regiment as a device to deprive them of their commanding officer by assigning him upstairs as regimental executive officer on the staff of Col. Harry “The Horse” Liversedge. Liversedge was a giant of a man, a champion of the 1920 Olympic games, and a fine leader in his own way, which was not Carlson’s. If this Byzantine maneuver was conducted to relieve Carlson of command, it gives a momentary glimpse of the dark side of the upper levels of the Marine Corps showing its inflexibility of thought and a compulsive suspicion of all things new and untried. Evans Carlson was worthy of more generous treatment than he received.

  The advent of the helicopter as a substitute for John Mather’s native carriers in the early postwar years gave us an unparalleled opportunity to give speed and muscle to Carlson’s method of enveloping attack, an opportunity that we neglected and lost through a series of self-inflicted wounds. It can still be retrieved.

  CHAPTER 13

  “A Way You’ll Never Be”

  The threat to the eastern (left) flank of the perimeter was removed, we hoped permanently. But our response had been a stumbling performance from start to finish. Six battalions of infantry supported by aircraft and two battalions of artillery had defeated, but not destroyed, a bewildered, ill-prepared advance unit of a major Japanese landing force by a timely reaction on our part based on exact information provided by the code breakers at Pearl Harbor. Only by the intervention of Carlson’s 2d Raider Battalion had the operation been turned into a complete success.