Fighting in the Solomon Islands: Capt Frank Guidone

Ken Harbaugh:

I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Today, we’ll hear from Captain Frank Guidone. Guidone served in World War II with the Marine Raiders, a special ops force that specialized in amphibious guerilla warfare. In this interview, he recounts his service in the Solomon islands, including the Battle of Edson’s Ridge, the New Georgia campaign, and the Matanikau Offensive.

Capt Frank Guidone:

I joined the Raiders when they became the Raiders in Quantico in 1941. Previous to that, I was with the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, and I joined them down in Cuba during maneuvers. We later moved to Quantico as the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines. The rest of the division was down at New River, North Carolina where they were forming the base and the division was going to train. Then things happened that somebody got the idea of having something similar to the Commandos that was all a higher echelon and before you knew it, we became the first separate battalion. Then we started working with rubber boats, long hikes, and weapons education, and finally it melted down to the first-rated battalion and our mission was probably going to be to prepare the beaches, make reconnaissance for a later landing by bigger units and stronger units, and that's where I started with the Raiders.

Those of us that were with the 1st Battalion came up, we were given the opportunity to get transferred or become Raiders. Well, if you didn't want to be a Raider, then that meant you were going to get transferred back down to New River, North Carolina, and nobody wanted that. So most of the old hands, I would say, accepted it. They would get volunteers from the bootcamp and other posts and stations that came in and they had to volunteer to be a Raider.

Our training highlighted, I think, physical conditioning first, and we got a lot of hand-to-hand combat instructions. We had covered each and every weapon very well so that everybody was tuned into every weapon. Our training wasn't that much different than the regular infantry battalion. I was in both of them and there wasn't that big of a difference, except that we did a lot of work with the rubber boats and the APDs and we rehearsed getting out of the APDs underway into a rubber boat and then paddling towards shore and those kind of things all up and down the Atlantic coast.

But I think we may have had more spirit as Raiders and we felt we were a little different than the regular infantry battalions. But I know regular infantry battalions, I've talked to men that said the only thing we had was the Raider name. We were all the same. And I agree with that.

We left Quantico and headed for San Diego and ended up in Samoa where we got into some deep training there. And it was probably our first time that we became aware of a kind of jungle warfare, because it got thick there in some parts of Samoa, and the heat and the physical training and we were eating like two meals a day and a little bread and butter sandwich for lunch. All this to keep us tuned in pretty good. And it was good training and we finally really thought we were becoming a very cohesive unit. And a lot of us knew each other from Cuba and we'd been together quite a while. Then as ships would pull in there, troop ships, the officers would go aboard and ship and interview people to join and recruiting was done there. Then we got more of our replacements until we became full strength. And from there we went to New Caledonia, which was a different climate, a nice climate, and we were able to refine a lot of our shooting and hiking and conditioning, and we were beginning to think that maybe this might be the real thing.

The real thing really didn't come to me until Tulagi. I mean, we made a practice landing off of the Fijis before that and then we headed north and we still didn't think... We hadn't been tuned in very well where we were going or what we were going to do. And then we were on APDs and we got a briefing just a couple of days before that we were going to Guadalcanal and the 1st Raider Battalion I think with the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines were going to Tulagi. And we hit the beach and had to wade in a little ways, but we hadn't seen an enemy. And on the way up to working toward the middle of the island, we ran into a couple snipers, but I didn't see any snipers. I heard about it.

Then we did a right wheel and put the whole battalion line and we moved in to hit the south part of the island where we thought the Japs were. We were in a skirmish line moving up. The dive bombers were dropping their bombs on the point and we heard some machine gun fire. And I was a squad leader at the time. "You know, I think this might be the real thing." We were beginning to think that. I said, "Yeah." So that's about the time I thought that this was it. I hadn't really seen any action up until that time.

So when we moved up to a top of a ridge and we rested on the slope of the ridge, we got our packs and gear squared away because the word was that we were going to go up to the top of the ridge and then charge down the ridge toward the enemy. Supposedly, we knew they were down there now. So when I get up there with my squad and we got the word to move out, we started down this slope, which was bare and it was about 50 yards. And we ran down there in the line and got to the bottom of the hill and found out that two of my men were missing and later, they had been killed running down the ridge. And one man was wounded and two killed, and that was my indoctrination, really. Now we knew we were in a battle.

And we were the only squad that got down to that low ground. The other two squads on our left and right had pulled back at a command of the company commander. So we were down at the bottom of the hill and we knew that the Japs were just ahead of us, like about 50 yards. We'd see them darting back and forth from shelter to shelter. We made our way to a red tin shack. No good thing, we all got behind that shack and that was our shelter for a while. And every time we'd peep out from the side of the shack, the Japs would fire on us, so we were just about frozen in that position till about dusk. And we made our way back up to the top of the ridge where the company, the battalion was still formed.

And I reported to the company commander and he sent a platoon leader up to a part of the line that needed filled in. And I put my squad into this gap and it was too late to dig in, so we just threw our packs down and put our rifles on top. And now we're facing upward toward the ridge and instead of being on the other side of it, we were on the reverse side of it and going into a defensive position. I passed the word to not do any firing or make no noise and keeping quiet, because we were expecting a Jap attack.

And just as it got dark, down below and behind the ridge, there had been a fire, a burning building, and it lit up the skyline on the ridge and we noticed some movement on the ridge line. We kept looking, we couldn't believe it. It looked like it was some alligators or lizards moving and they were coming over the ridge and then we heard the Jap voices, so now we knew. So that's when we started throwing hand grenades and they kept coming and they kept moaning and groaning and every time we'd hear a groan, we'd throw a grenade, that way we weren't using a rifle fire because it would've been ineffective. And that fight went on all night long and they just kept coming and we kept throwing, and the squad was great. They were well-disciplined as to no firing. And we kept going, we went back to CP, which was about 20 yards behind us, to get more grenades and we threw them all night long.

And the next morning just at dusk before we could see what we had done, there had been two attacks: one to our right against C Company and this one against us, against my squad, really. And we had about 25 to 30 Japs that were piled up in front of us, and they weren't 20 yards away from us, but they were just like they'd been chopped up with a meat grinder. And that night, that was the, we knew now we were in combat. And the next morning we saw some of our friends and buddies under ponchos and we realized then that this was going to be a long haul.

Well, from then on, they had the big battle out to see where we lost four or five cruisers. And now, we started digging battle lines, foxholes, stringing barbed wire, because we thought we were going to have a landing against us. And the morale was pretty bad at that time because all the ships were gone and all kind of rumors were floating around. And from then on, it was just a matter of digging the Japs out of the caves. There was no more of the line-to-line fighting. It was all caves and grenades. And then the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines came up and helped us push all the way to the end of the island and we secured it, then from then on we were in a defense position.

And there was one day that a submarine came up right in the bay where we were. Everybody saw them and they thought that the Japanese, that they still had control of the island, and they fired a couple shots from their three-inch gun on the sub, and we had a couple mortars and they fired back and then I guess the sailors figured out that we'd better get down below, so that was the exciting part of that. They was right out there in the open.

But we were never bothered again. We secured it. We made a couple patrols over on Florida Island. We did a couple more patrols around Savo, made sure they were all clean, and that was it for Tulagi. We thought we had done our job. We didn't know until we went over to Guadalcanal, and I'll never forget, we had a word that the battalion commander wanted to talk to us. He was talking to each company. And rumor had gotten around it. We had done our part in the war, we're ready to get out of here. And that, I remember Colonel Edson came up in a Jeep with his staff. And we were all, we had maybe a company or two companies waiting for Colonel Edson. And we all admired him, he was our leader. He had the background, he did a good job putting us together. And he started talking about what a good job we had done on Tulagi. We're thinking, "Here it comes now with the good news." And he says, "You know, the Japs are a tough fighting outfit. You saw them, you know what they're like. Well, there's a long road ahead of us, so don't any of you get any thoughts about thinking you're going elsewhere. You're going to stay right here until we take care of the Japanese here." Well, morale went down that fast. But he was right. We had just started the road back

Interviewer:

What was your assignment on Guadalcanal?

I was a squad leader. I got promoted to sergeant and then I was a sergeant guide, then I was a platoon sergeant, always in a rifle platoon. And that's as far as I got with being a platoon sergeant.

Well, the 1st Battalion, as was the whole division, was responsible for maintaining the perimeter defense and we had our section in the line to take care of. They did manage to assign us to a mission that we were trained for and that was to make a raid. Just down the coast, there was a village called Tasimboko, which was occupied by the Japanese. General Kawaguchi had a brigade there and at this time, he was moving toward our perimeter with the bulk of his men. He left a rear echelon back here at Tasimboko, and it was decided that we would make a raid on that.

So we had two companies that embarked on... The company I was with, one company went on APD and the others were split up on something like trawlers, small wooden boats, that's all they had. And man, we were on that, the trollers would rock like that and the water would swish in there, we'd be all wet. So at dawn, we went in and landed. And I was with A company and we did a flanking move around Tasimboko and B Company went in straight ahead and we enveloped them. But that morning before we landed, a couple transports that were coming in were behind us and the Japanese thought that that was an invasion force, the Japanese who were at Tasimboko, and they hauled out of there. They left to move up toward the line toward General Kawaguchi's place. And it wasn't, the transport had nothing to do with us, but it was a good thing it happened. So we had no opposition there, so we just went ahead and just destroyed supplies, their clothing, their medicine. We just had a ball. And he'd lost all the supplies back in the rear echelon while he was up there getting ready to make that attack on the Bloody Ridge Battle, so it hurt him.

And we came off of Tasimboko, went back up to Coconut Grove where our camp was and word came down that General Vandegrift and Edson wanted to put us in a more restful spot because we'd been through quite a bit and they wanted to get us off the beach because every time they'd come in the shell, the shells would, they would go over us, but they would keep us awake. So they picked this place on a ridge and there was something funny, because all we were doing was digging foxholes and laying barbed wire and cutting fire lanes and going on small patrols. It didn't seem like a rest area to us. We had a bivouac area that was right behind the ridge line where we had our pup tents and all our clothing and things like that, gear. Edson wanted to run a patrol toward the Japs to see where they were located and get an idea how far away they were. So they picked a reinforced platoon and our platoon leader, who was Cliff McLaughlin, he said, "They want one sergeant to go and I got two sergeants in the platoon, so whichever one of you want to go can go."

So me and his name was Flater, we flipped a coin and I lost, so I got to go with the patrol and Flater was going to stay back in the bivouac area as security. So cut down, we moved out on the patrol and we went out quite a ways until we got to the point where we could hear the Japanese chopping brush and talking. We were getting, the point was getting close. And just as the point got up, the firing broke out, and then we all halt in the column and waited. Because we weren't going to deploy, we were going to pull back. The mission was just to see where they were.

At the same time, the bombers came over for their noon raid and they started dropping these bombs on the ridge, and of course they came down toward us and they were bombing the Japanese and us both. And I remember hiding behind a banyan tree with one of the squad members, his name was Nabalsky. And the bombs were coming in pattern and finally it stopped, I think, about 500 yards from us that just picked us up and threw debris all over us, both of us. And I looked over and Sky's on the ground. He has his rosaries out, he's saying his prayers, and it must have worked.

So we pulled the platoon and we went back to the bivouac area, and our bivouac area was in shambles. The bombs had hit right in the area. And the sergeant that won the toss was killed by concussion. That that was the beginning of the Battle of the Ridge. And at that time, I was with A Company and we were on the flank over by the Lunga River. All the fighting was going on over toward our left along B Company and C Company, and we didn't get into the real fight. But both those nights we had to keep our eyes at the front. We were right on the river, but that's all that happened there.

C company got hit and they moved back a little bit and the next day, we sent A company in to counter-attack the Japs, and we moved in on them and we got as far as we could get and they stopped us cold. They had too much fire. And I was up there with my squad at the time. We started pulling back, we got word to pull back, so I sent some of men back in groups of two and three and just before I got ready to move back, I heard somebody say, "Marine." And I says, "Wait a minute." I says, "Did you hear that?" He says, "Yeah," but we knew the Japs were always pulling tricks like that. I said, "Wait a minute." He says, "Marine." So then we kept looking. We were in prone because you couldn't get up because the Japs would fire, and they'd just firing right over our head as we were laying prone. And then I saw this figure up there had utilities, and I said, "That's a Marine up there." So we scooted up there and he had been shot across both legs and he had a cartridge belt tied around his legs and he says, "Get me out of here." He said, "I've been here all night." He says, "The Japs been walking all over me." So we started dragging him out of there and we got him back and then the company commander ordered some mortar fire there. I never saw that Marine again, but I understand he lived for quite a while. And that was about it as far as the Battle of the Ridge went for us, for A company.

Prior to about March of '42, I think it was, it looked like the next mission was going to be New Georgia. And I was leaving the mess hall one day where A company was bivouacked on New Caledonia and this Jeep came by and it was Captain Boyd. He was company commander of C Company. And I used to do boxing, battalion smokers, and I went down in the May and I boxed in some of the smokers down there and he was an ex-boxer. And he stopped me and I saluted him and he said, "How would you like to go up north and do a little fighting?" Well, I thought he was talking about boxing. I said, "Oh, sure." Because he had come to the fights. That's the only way he knew me, except he knew that I'd done well in Guadalcanal, Tulagi. He knew that.

So I went down there the next morning and I went in this big tent and there's the naval officers in there and a lot of brass. And I, "What am I doing here?" And I looked up on the wall and I saw a picture of New Georgia. And so I still couldn't make the connection. So he says, "How'd you like to go up on a little reconnaissance up on New Georgia?" Well, you know, "Sure." So that's how I got to be a part of the patrol.

So there was five of us all together on the patrol, and one of them was from intelligence section, and I went because I was an infantry sergeant and there was two more naval officers and Captain Boyd. And this is the first patrol that went up there. And we made the landing in a PBY boat late at night and we got, the native war canoes came out and picked us up and took us in.

And the coast watches were doing their job. Those coast watches are former plantation owners, most of them were and they commissioned them. They had lived there before the war, and they stayed there and had the radio and they would send us warnings of Japanese air approaching or ships and things of that nature. And there was one there that he was a captain, his name was Kennedy, and he lived there on a point called Segi that was the very southern point of the island. The rest of the island was Japanese. Munda, they were building an airfield at Munda. They had Japanese over in Bairoko and at Rice Anchorage. They were all north of us, so to speak. So from then on, we started mapping the trails and checking the beaches and getting as near as we could to the Japanese and the natives that was there, because they didn't want us to go blundering into the Japanese, which we did one night.

One day I went out on a two-day patrol with Gunnery Sergeant Joe Skaera, he was from C Company. And we had two natives and they didn't speak English, but the coast watcher had tried to give an idea of where we were going. So we traveled all one day and just at night, I say, "Get up there, top of this ridge and we'll spend the night up there." And so as we start making our way up there... And it was kind of near dusk, almost dark when we heard the awfullest noise, pots and pans and yelling and screaming and all in Japanese. And we froze because we were just down the ridge from where all this noise was going on and we couldn't go back down in the dark. So we pulled off the trail and the four of us just leaned up against the trees and just stayed there. We froze. Mosquitoes were eating us alive. They didn't eat the natives, though, they didn't mind. So at first light, we edged back and got out of there. But that was the closest we came at that time to running into the Japanese. Because they had the coastlines, that's where they stayed, most of the Japanese while we all worked from the inland and we would work out to the coast. So we did that for about, I think, 10 days. We got a lot of material.

And then later on, I think the 4th Battalion sent out two patrols. One patrol went on actually a 600-mile canoe ride. They actually went around New Georgia to Kolombangara, which was the next island up. And that was Captain Ed Wheeler then who later became a general and another communicator named George Lewis, he was in the party, and I can't think of the other. I think Lieutenant Olden was another one. That was a separate patrol.

Then the next patrol would be the one that we would go in just before the invasion. At that time, we went up there and we found a landing site up a river, it was called the Pundakona River, and two Raider battalions were coming in, 4th and the 1st were going to be in the operation. They would come in in rubber boats, come up this river, and land at a shore or a bank, on a riverbank, at night. And meanwhile, the Japanese at Enogai, they had a couple, I think they were eight-inch guns and they were firing toward us, but they were too close and the shots were going over us and they couldn't depress those guns far enough down, but they didn't damage us. So that night was kind of just mass confusion, dark.

But had previously that we had cut four bivouac areas, the natives had. Well, A, B, C, and D Companies. And as they got on the beach while we were scouts, we would take them to the bivouac areas and then they'd bunk down, take their packs off. And the next morning, they made the approach march to Enogai. But the patrol had the natives cut three trails almost toward Enogai which helped the advance march. But after the trails left, it petered out then it was pure swamp and rivers. And by the time the battalion got through there and got to Enogai, you never thought they would be able to fight when they got there, but they did. And they took Enogai and two or three days later, they reformed and they went about five miles to where Bairoko, where Bairoko stronghold. They had a trail that went from by Bairoko to Munda and Kolombangara to Bairoko, they would move their forces from Kolombangara to Bairoko down to Munda where the army was having a hard time, so we were going to cut that trail off by taking Bairoko.

And we went in without any artillery, without any 80 millimeter, no air, that didn't materialize, and I don't know why the ships never fired in their support, but we made the attack and we couldn't do it. We had to back off and we came back to Enogai. That's the only time, I think, that we didn't get our objective, and that was kind of the story of New Georgia.

I had luck with me, too, and I never was seriously injured. On that run down that ridge that I told you about on Tulagi, I had a pack on and a carabine and I tripped. I turned a complete somersault, came up, and that carabine handle caught me right here in the ribs. That's the only thing I can ever remember that I got hurt on.

Then another one was on the Matanikau one afternoon, and it was in the morning. The Japanese had come across the river. The Matanikau was kind of a boundary between us and the Japanese, the river was. They were on that side of the river, like the west side, we were on east side. Well, during the night about, oh, I guess say maybe 75 of them got across the river on our side and had dug in, so we have a pocket right in our lines. And my squad was on the left flank, I think I was tied into the 5th Marines. And I had left, I wanted to go back and talk to my platoon leader who was near the beach. And as I went back there, I saw these two men standing alongside the trail and I recognized one of them as Lew Walt. He had been my company commander when through Tulagi, and now he was with the 5th Marines and he was the operations officer. And the guy he was talking to was Colonel Edson, who now was his command officer of the 5th Marines. And Walt saw me and he called me over and asked me what I was doing. I said, "Well, I'm going back to see my platoon leader. I want to know what I'm supposed to do from here on in." And he said, he directed me to go back to the beach and get a couple guys to help and bring some hand grenades.

All this time we're talking, you can hear the Japanese talk. That's how close they were. And this is a commanding officer of the 5th Regiment and the operations officer. Those two men feared no one. So I got a volunteer and came back up and we threw a bunch of grenades into the pocket, and then I went back to my platoon and of course, that night that those Japanese in that pocket... We were defending, defenses were set up facing seaward, thinking that there was going to be an invasion instead of building our defenses up from an inland attack. And they had these Japanese on our side of the river and we had a line around them in case they came out of there.

Well, when they came out it was just about dusk and they put smoke up first and they come charging out of there, and they were running toward the beach and they got through our mortar section, which was the weakest part of our line, and they killed seven or eight of them. They were all killed. And when they got to the beach, they ran into the double apron barbed wire, and there was a machine gun firing down the wire. This was all at night. And I looked over there and I saw they were hanging on the wire and those traces were just chewing them up. None of them made it out of there. But it was a bad night for us because of the losses that we had with the mortarmen there. All they had were pistols, when there should have been rifle platoons up there, and the mortarmen should have probably been on the beach. So it was a bad situation. That was the one Matanikau battle. We had two battles on that river. Become a very historic river, I'll tell you, even after we left. So right after that, we came back to the beach and I think the Army troops came in and we left.

Then the next thing was New Georgia. But we did go to New Zealand to R and R, and that was about the whole length of the whole thing.

We had R and R twice. We went to Wellington once and then Auckland after New Georgia. And if you're going to have R and R, there's no place like New Zealand. That was really great, but we found out about steak and eggs and fresh milk and homemade bread and it was great. A lot of us didn't want to leave there.

This has only come to pass within the last five or six years. For 20 years before that, nobody said anything about Raiders. It's all come, you'll agree, some of these guys will tell you. Now there's the flock of books coming out and the website and everything else. And sometimes I had some concern about that. We were with the 1st Marine Division on Guadalcanal when the issue was in doubt that the Japanese might overtake us and we were being shelled and we were being bombed, we were being strafed. It never happened again after that. Every campaign after that, there was no doubt who was going to win. You know what I mean? And so I felt that we were in the right place at the right time and we did the same job as the division did. And the Guadalcanal can be responsible, what we did at Guadalcanal can be responsible for turning that war into an offensive war instead of a defensive war. From then on, it was a matter of just taking island by island and taking up and those guys did it.

I think a lot of the guys will tell you, those battles that we were in, I think when you compare them to Peleliu and Tarawa and Iwo and Okinawa, it's just the fact that our situation was in doubt whether we would win or not, but those bigger places, they lost a lot more people and everything, but there was no doubt who was going to win.

Well I'm proud to have been a Raider because I think we did a job when it had to be done. I was proud of the officers that we had and a lot of the old-timer NCOs that started this thing, you had to give them a lot of credit, and that's about how I feel. Sometimes I think, I don't want to say we're getting too much credit, but I kind of always look at the rest of the war and what those guys went through. I said, maybe they did, maybe some other Raiders did, they went through more than I did. I think of those guys over in Europe and those guys, the war all over the world at that time. I think you got to give everybody credit no more than any other.

Well, where were the, these raiders that they came from kids that just finished high school out of a Depression area. Young junior officers and salty NCOs, they all just blended together and became something. Strong leadership. Probably stronger than... That's where we differed from the regular infantry, I tell you. I think there weren't too many officers I can think of that didn't make it. There might've one or two, but they didn't last very long. Because General Edson and probably Carlson and a few of them were pretty good at evaluating officers and it didn't take long. Or even NCOs got moved, too. The 1st Battalion sent some people to the second Battalion and also had sent some to the 3rd and some the 4th from the 1st Raider Battalion as nuclei, so certain things were passed on to new battalions.

I guess now in sight of all the books that are being written and all the action I see on the internet, I'm a link on the website for the Raider Battalions and I get numerous emails from relatives now asking for their father and their uncle and their brother. And, "Was he a Raider?" Sometime they weren't. Or, "Was he a Raider? What company was he in?" And I'll run things in the past through John McCarthy, you know. Mention their name, somebody might see it and make contact. It's worthwhile. I enjoy doing that. We found a lot of people. We still have a lot of Raiders out there that don't know anything about our association and don't come to the reunions or anything.

Remember I told you about throwing these grenades at them on the Matanikau? This kid's name was Beaver, and I looked for him one time on the internet and I found him. He was living in a little town down in Tennessee, so I thought I would call him up. And I called him up and his wife answered the phone. She said, "Hello?" I says, "Is this Warren Beaver?" She says, "It sure is." I says, "Where is he?" She said, "Oh, he's out here on the porch." So he came to the phone and I told him who I was and he just could not believe it. And he's a minister. I said, "Why don't you come to the reunion?" He says, "What are you talking about?" I says, "We have an association." He says, "Well, I never heard nothing about it."

We got so many people like that throughout the country, so they apparently didn't think anything about being a Raider. Go ahead and living their lives. One's a minister, one's a plumber, carpenter. So we try to pull as most of them as we can in. Now, the 1st Battalion has an association. We've had it for 50 years. We've had it for 50 years. We've met for 50 years from Camp Lajeune and now for the last maybe 20 years, we've been meeting in Quantico, Virginia. And we're not a big band now, we're only about 80 or 90 come and still, the guys that are with it all that time. I think that's what we are benefiting now, is the fact that we're still able to be together more than being a Raider. I mean, we've been every place together. You go from Quantico to Samoa to Caledonia and then all through the battles, and you're with the same guys. And I am closer to these guys than I am my brothers, I hardly ever see them. So that's what I think we have mostly going for us. And I'll tell you, if anybody rubs the Raiders the wrong way in any way, they're going to hear about it. Because they just did. They published something on the internet about a book that was coming out about an execution of two 2nd Battalion Raiders, and that book didn't get off the line because I think everybody had a computer and got to the publisher and let him know that he was going to publish a book that wasn't going to work. If there was going to be a book written, we were going to write it.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Captain Frank Guidone.

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