Edson worked well with his men, undertaking any hardship or physical task he asked of them. In the field he might go out on recon operations for days at a time, then suddenly reappear sporting a reddish stubble of a beard and looking like a wild Irishman. That resulted in the first of many nicknames being hung on the man—Red Mike. He was also called ‘Eddie the Mole,’ A play on his last name, mixed in with the fact that the men said he looked like a mole with his helmet on, his small head lost beneath it, eyes glowing in the dark on patrols. His aggressive spirit also found him being called ‘Mad Merrit the Morgue Master,’ because if there was a fight at hand, he wanted to be in on the action.
When a second Raider Battalion was to be formed, the Corps asked Edson to send one company to act as its root and stem, but the man who received it, Colonel Evans Carlson, wanted no part of Edson’s ready made unit. He rejected most of the men in the company, and forced all the rest to re-apply for admission to his new unit, which he wanted to build from scratch.
Carlson had different ideas about what he wanted for his battalion. He had spent time in China, learning the language and studying the tactics of the Communist Guerilla units, which impressed him greatly. So when he built his battalion, he used much of what he saw there, including the notion that officers had no special privileges. In fact, he never gave or received a salute to emphasize that he was no different from any other man in his unit—though he was just the one giving the orders. What he wanted was cooperation at every level, using the Chinese phrase ‘Gung Ho’ to describe it, which meant ‘work together.’
Carlson then went on to change the entire structure of his unit. He wanted it fast and light, and knew it would deploy from the Navy APDs, old destroyers converted to carry a company of Marines. “You give me six Higgins boats,” he said, “and I can put an entire company ashore, and ready to fight the minute they hit the beach.”
This was due to the fact that he had reorganized his battalion into six light companies, each with two platoons instead of three, and he also added two more men to each squad, increasing from eight to ten. So instead of two four-man fire teams in the traditional Marine Squad, he built three teams of three men each, with one NCO.
Edson and many other Marine officers shrugged at this, and he also did not like or forgive the shoddy reception and treatment his men had been given by Carlson, or the fact that Carlson had the President’s ear, and even had the President’s son as his deputy commander. He would resent his opposite number to his dying day, and the two men often clashed over tactics and methods, even as they did over the organization of their battalions.
Yet no matter how they were organized, the men in those two battalions were a tough group, and ready for a brawl. When they heard that Japanese tactics often led to bayonet charges and close quarters fighting, they took to arming themselves with 9-inch bolo and Bowie knives, and thick socks stuffed with lead balls. Carlson’s men called the blades their ‘Gung Ho’ knives. Since these units wanted speed and stealth, they forsook the larger 81mm mortars and took only the smaller 60mm tubes, and instead of HMGs up to .50 Caliber, they relied on the .30 caliber BAR and the even smaller ‘Tommy guns.’ The one heavy weapon they would lug along was the Boys Anti-Tank Rifle, which they used to good effect on the Makin Island raid, blasting a couple enemy seaplanes that tried to bring in reinforcements. The troops called it their ‘elephant gun.’
The men were trained by experts, like Colonel Anthony Biddle, who demonstrated his martial arts skills by taking on eight Marines armed with the cold steel of a bayonet, and was able to disarm the entire group single handedly. They learned rubber boat maneuvers, camouflage, anti-sniper drills, patrol methods, and how to make endless jaunts through forbidding terrain, which was exactly what they were doing there on Viti Levu.
The thing that made the place bearable was the size and scale of the island. Up in those mountains, as difficult as the trek was, you had open sky, fresh air, and could see for miles in any direction. Streams cut through the ravines offering cool fresh water, and there was food to be found, even outside the hidden supply caches secreted away by the Fiji Commandos. Another thing about the island was that there was no malaria here, and that mattered a great deal when it came down to the endurance of the men who would fight there. The temperature was a constant 88 degrees by day, and 74 by night, and there was rain by the buckets in the wet season that began in January, particularly on the north and western segments of the island where all the fighting would take place. It would rain over 20 days per month through April, and the area around Tavua and M’ba would get more than any other place on the island.
So it was raining the day Carlson led his Battalion down the steep winding trail, slowly descending the north face of a ridge. They had started out seven days ago, on the first day of the year, moving by truck from the mouth of the Singatoa River on the southern coast, until they reached the small village of Tuvu. Then it was up through a low 100-meter pass and into those mountains. For the next three days the columns wound their way through a long valley, slowly approaching the higher terrain the towered 600 to 800 meters or more above the trail. There was a long ascent to the hamlet of Bukuya, then they were on a gnarled ridge that pointed north, slowly descending into a three mile wide valley again. It would take them to the upper reaches of the M’ba river at the village of Navala. That was the objective—M’ba, with one of the best airfields on the island, about 15 kilometers east southeast of Tavua where Collins and his 25th Division would be fighting.
Those airfields were the sole reason any of these men were even here. Without them, the two Japanese divisions on the island might seem dangerous, but they could really do nothing whatsoever to threaten the lines of communications between the US and Australia. But the Zeroes and Claudes and Nate fight bombers on those airfields were the whole of it. The troops were there simply to take and secure those airfields, and deny them to the enemy at the same time.
If the Japanese had thought about what they were doing there, they might have found it better to withdraw from this campaign. Their presence had only served to give the Allies a focus for their counteroffensive. Edson knew as much when he sat down with Carlson to plan this move.
“The fact that they couldn’t take the main island here by storm was the key,” he said. “Once Vandegrift’s Leathernecks stopped the Sakaguchi Detachment last May, the Jap campaign for the Fiji Group was effectively lost.”
“How do you figure?” said Carlson. “Now they’ve put in two full divisions here.”
“True, but we’ve match them, and more. Beyond that, they haven’t set one foot on Vanua Levu, and we already have four new airfields building there. That’s what it’s all about—those airfields. That’s what we’re humping through these mountains for. We get the field at M’ba, and it cuts the Japs down to the one good field they have at Nandi.”
“What about Tavua?”
“They can’t use that any longer. Collins has pushed within range of his 105s and he can shell it all day and night if he wants to. So that makes our mission to get the M’ba field mean even more. If we take that, we’re also cutting off the entire 38th Division at Tavua. There’s only a couple good crossing points over that river. Here, have a look at the map. We need to get these two bridges—the rail bridge south of this sugar mill, and then the main road bridge just north of it.”