The Daring Dozen by Gavin Mortimer Page B

Hebrides, 550 miles south-east of Guadalcanal, one of the southern Solomon Islands in the south-west Pacific.
    Guadalcanal was an island at the centre of a bitter struggle between Japan and the United States. Situated 1,400 miles east of Australia, the island – 92 miles long and 33 miles wide – was in the hands of the Japanese, and a major threat to the supply lines between the USA and Australia. If America wanted to win the war in the Pacific they would need to oust the enemy from Guadalcanal and seize the airstrip for themselves.
    In August 1942 the Americans landed on Guadalcanal and in the face of fierce Japanese resistance established a small foothold in the north, centred around an airfield under construction called ‘Henderson Field’. But Japanese forces were in the dense jungle all around the Field and on top of the 1,515ft mountain overlooking the American positions, on which was located their artillery piece dubbed ‘Pistol Pete’ by the Americans.
    Bitter as the fighting was on Guadalcanal, it offered Carlson and his men the perfect opportunity to re-establish their reputation after the confusion of the Makin raid. There they had been forced to fight like infantrymen, but in the jungles of Guadalcanal they could revert to being what they had trained to be: guerrilla fighters. On 22 October Carlson presented a plan to his superiors: landing on the unoccupied south side of the island, his Raiders would advance through the jungle and over the mountain and attack the Japanese from the rear. The idea was considered but rejected, and instead Carlson was ordered to land two companies at Aola Bay, 40 miles east of Henderson Field, and provide a defensive ring to allow another airfield to be constructed so that aircraft could land safely.
    On 4 November, C and E companies landed at Aola Bay and almost immediately found their mission altered; instead of acting as defensive troops they were to carry out a reconnaissance patrol to gauge the strength of the Japanese between the bay and Henderson Field, and eliminate any of the estimated 1,500 Japanese still at large following an earlier offensive by the Marines and Army.
    Carlson was delighted at the change of plan. Now at last he could put into practice all the guerrilla skills he had acquired since arriving in Nicaragua 12 years earlier. On 6 November Carlson led his patrol into the jungle. As well as the 266 men of C and E companies, he was accompanied by 150 native scouts, the latter finding the going easier in the dense jungle – in which they covered only five miles on the first day.
    Over the next few days the Raiders struggled to acclimatize to the enervating heat, a terrain that was a daunting mix of volcanic hills, jungles, rivers and open fields of kunai grass interspersed with ramshackle villages and the prevalence of venomous reptiles and aggressive insects. Though there were wasps on Guadalcanal that were 3in long, it was the millions of mosquitoes that made life miserable for the Raiders, for with the mosquitoes came malaria – the most common affliction to strike down men on the island, after dysentery and ringworm.
    The first major contact with the Japanese occurred on the morning of 11 November when they intercepted 700 enemy troops evading a large-scale American offensive to the north-west of the Raiders’ position. Throughout the day the Raiders fought a series of bloody engagements around Asamana, with Captain Richard Washburn’s E Company fighting off a far superior force and in the process killing 120 of the enemy. C Company, on the other hand, was in disarray by mid-afternoon and it required Carlson to leave his command post and take charge of the company. Having assessed the situation at first-hand, Carlson called in an air strike and, in the aftermath, the Japanese withdrew to the south, leaving behind 160 dead in total. Raider losses were ten dead and 13 killed. As a consequence of C Company’s performance, Carlson relieved its commanding