Just so we’re clear, the Pacific theater of World War II fucking sucked.

The Allies faced a tenacious enemy who refused to give up and didn’t subscribe to the Geneva Conventions; they considered anyone who wasn’t Japanese a member of an inferior race and treated them as such. Add in nasty jungle diseases and it was a whole lot of not fun. The Marines’ fight against entrenched Japanese all began in a place called Guadalcanal.

–On This Day in History Shit Went Down: December 4, 1942–

Eight months after Pearl Harbor, the United States launched its first major land campaign against the Japanese forces that had swarmed across a multitude of Pacific islands. Guadalcanal is part of the Solomon Islands, only a short distance from Australia. The American offensive on the island, which also included a naval battle, would last six months, and by the time it was over Japan would be on the defensive for the rest of the war.

This is the story of one patrol.

It was called “Carlson’s Patrol,” named for its leader, Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson. It was a 2nd Marine Raider Battalion of seven hundred men, tasked with preventing a Japanese force more than three times its size from escaping the American encirclement of the island to rejoin the Imperial Japanese Army. On November 6, the patrol landed their boats thirty miles behind enemy lines and headed into the jungle to kick some ass.

The Raiders went in blind, knowing almost nothing about enemy positions, numbers, or movements. Carlson’s Raiders went guerrilla, breaking the battalion into smaller companies and utilizing Native islanders as scouts to fan out and seek the enemy so they could fuck their shit up.

And fuck up their shit they did. For an entire month. The other name for Carlson’s Patrol is the “Long Patrol.” Utilizing repeated hit-and-run tactics against the Japanese over twenty-nine days, Carlson’s group killed a total of 488 enemy soldiers while only losing 16 of their own.

The patrol ended on December 4, 1942, when Carlson’s Raiders made their way back into friendly territory, looking like scarecrows. They were emaciated, unshaven, and covered with sores. The jungle had taken a toll; half the men were suffering from malaria, dysentery, ringworm, or jungle rot. The Marines within the American-held perimeter cheered their return.

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