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For the U.S. Marines on Guadalcanal during the first few days following their unopposed landing on Aug. 7, 1942, life was an unpleasant mixture of strange and diverging impressions. Food was scarce from the start, a result of the invasion fleet's abrupt departure in the wake of the Savo Island naval battle. Japanese bombers from Rabaul, 600 miles away, ruled the skies with impunity over the Marines' Lunga Perimeter; there was not even one American fighter to challenge them, and there would be none until the captured, partially completed airfield on the Lunga Plain could be put into operation. On the other hand, there had not yet been any meaningful challenge to the five Marine infantry battalions that were holding the Lunga Perimeter. And the few prisoners taken had been beaten, chastened men-Okinawan, Korean and Taiwanese labor troops with a few Japanese naval ratings thrown in.
The shock of discovery of what might lie ahead was crystallized on Aug. 13, 1942, when the first of three bleeding Marines arrived at the command post of the 5th Marine Regiment, the unit charged with defending the western half of the Lunga Perimeter. The three were all that remained of a 25-man patrol led by Lieutenant Colonel Frank Goettge, the First Marine Division intelligence officer. The Goettge patrol had been diverted on Aug. 12 from a heavily armed intelligencegathering mission to an effort to rescue starving Japanese stranded to the west of the Matanikau River. It had either stepped into a cunning trap or had blundered into an encampment of displaced Japanese naval infantry. In either case, 22 of 25 members of the patrol had gone missing and were presumed killed.
The 1st Marine Division's first offensive operation on Guadalcanal began on Aug. 19, 1942, a week after the annihilation of the Goettge patrol. The action was designed to sweep the coastal area from the mouth of the Matanikau River to Kokumbona Village of the last remnants of the dispersed Japanese Lunga garrison, an estimated 400 poorly armed Imperial Navy infantry, or "rikusentai," naval base personnel, and unarmed laborers who had been without food for nearly two weeks.
Information gleaned from patrol reports during the week following the Goettge massacre indicated that the Japanese had landed no fresh...