The Lost Patrol

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Last Updated: 21 July 2008

Major General Alexander A. Vandegrift (L), with his staff, including intelligence officer Lieutenant Colonel Frank B. Goettge (2nd R) enroute to Guadalcanal. [United States National Archives Photo 80-G-17065]

Sixty-six years after their deaths, efforts are under way to locate the bodies of a patrol of US Marines killed on Guadalcanal in Solomon Islands.

The famous Goettge Patrol were led into an ambush by a Japanese deserter and picked off one by one on August 12, 1942.

Only three men survived the incident, and the bodies were never recovered.

But as Bruce Hill reports, that could be about to change.

The story of this lost patrol began with the invasion of the Japanese held islands of Guadalcanal, Tulagi and Gavutu on August 7, 1942 by the US 1st Marine Division, commanded by General Alexander Vandegrift.

The objective was to deny the use of the islands to Japanese forces as bases to threaten supply routes between the US, Australia, and New Zealand.

The Allies also intended to use Guadalcanal and Tulagi as bases to support a campaign to eventually isolate the major Japanese naval and air base at Rabaul in New Britain.

The Marines experiences on Guadalcanal were immortalised in the 1943 movie, Guadalcanal Diary, starring William Bendix and a very young Anthony Quinn.

"Gentlemen, you'll be interested to know we're going to attack the Japanese strongholds on Guadalcanal and Tulagi in the Solomon Islands."

"Guadalcanal?"

"The navy and the coastguard will put us ashore. Once we've established a beach head, our chief objective is an airfield which the enemy has almost completed."

-Guadalcanal Diary (1943)

That airfield, soon to be called Henderson Field, and which is now Henderson Airport, Solomon islands main international gateway, was to prove critical in the campaign, with the Marines fighting hard to keep the Japanese garrison from overrunning the position.

The men who fought the battle were mostly green, fresh out of basic training, as this was to be the first time US troops had gone head to head with the Japanese on land.

But being Marines, they knew they had a tradition to uphold.

One man who probably knows as much about the Guadalcanal Campaign as anyone alive is Australian John Innes, who runs tours of the battlefields on the island.

He says Lt Col Frank Goettge, who was General Vandegrift's intelligence officer, blundered by believing what a Japanese deserter told him about other Japanese forces who were starving and ready to surrender.

"He was the first Marine division's intelligence officer, who was in charge of D-2 as they designated intelligence," he said.

"After they had landed here on the 7th of August, they had a very easy time of it. The initial landing was unopposed, and they took the airfield that the Japanese had almost completed...and it was so easy that after four or five days, he decided to come around to where he knew that most of the Japanese had gone to to assist them in their surrender.

"He put together a team of 25 men, with one prisoner, who they had interviewed. Really, he was getting the answers he wanted to hear from the prisoners by asking the questions in such a way that he convinced himself the Japanese wanted to surrender.

"One evening, on the 12th of August, he's come around to the Japanese positions, came ashore just where we're looking, and seen the motorway, and then proceeded to walk inland, walked up to a Japanese trench, and there were some Japanese in it at night time. He said stand up, and they shot him in the face and killed him.

"The rest of the people in that patrol weren't really combat patrol types - they had brought with them the assistant divisional surgeon, a translator...in fact, the operations people, D-3, had refused to do it, and he said if operations won't do this patrol, intelligence will. And unfortunately, he was the first man killed, and they were compromised, and the next in command was not really an operations man, and the boat had gone, and they had no way of really escaping, and they landed just where the Japanese had their main strength."

When the movie Guadalcanal Diary was made shortly after the events, it's clear the studio felt that audiences in 1943 might not be ready to hear about anythihg resembling a blunder, and so the lead up to the ill-fated patrol was slightly altered.

"These natives are here telling me there's a big bunch of Japs at Matanikau village about five miles from here. The prisoner thinks they'll surrender without putting up much of a fight. It seems they haven't any food, and most of them ran off without any weapons. Take a patrol down there and see what it's all about. But don't take any unnecessary chances.

"Yes sir, it'll be a pleasure."

"I suggest you go by boat, and stay far enough off so they can't be sniping at you from shore.

-Guadalcanal Diary (1943)

Unfortunately, that's exactly what happened to Lt Col Goettge and his men who were trapped on the beach by unexpected enemy resistance, as John Innes describes.

"One by one - there were three reputedly. Some were sent away to get help - three were sent away, one died on the way, two eventually made it, but it was dawn by the time they got to where they had to get to," he said.

"But come dawn, there were three people still alive. They decided to make a dash for the trees. Two of them were cut down immediately by the Japanese. The other chap, Frank Few, he's turned around and run into the sea and managed to swim away. He's the one in fact who looked back, and looked back at the Japanese who were then going all over the position. The sun had just come up and he saw the sun striking against their swords as they were cutting up the other 22.

"He noted that, and that was well known by all the marines, and they tended to not take any prisoners after that. So it was a mission that is very hard to be critical of some very brave men who lost their lives. But it shouldn't have been put on, it was a night-time operation, and in those days didn't do operations at night, you only moved during the day, and at night you just stayed in your position. The only people moving around were Japanese, and all they were going to do that night was bivouac, so why not bivouac in your own perimeter and then venture forth in day time when everybody has a better idea about what's going on - especially if it's a mercy mission."

The fate of the Goettge Patrol, especially the belief that they had been lured to their deaths by treachery, and the use of swords and bayonets to cut up the bodies, helped harden attitudes towards the Japanese among the Marines, something the movie captures vividly.

"Yes, we're going back to Matinakau, and this time for blood. Men, boys, going into battle for the first time in their lives - untried, new to the jungle. High school athletes, clerks, taxi drivers - men with memories of friends ambushed, tricked, slaughtered."

"Those bayonets, I saw them, I saw them!"

"Soose, they never knew it."

-Guadalcanal Diary (1943)

The mystery of what happened to the bodies of the 22 missing men may be about to be solved though.

A group of American academics including archaeologists, anthropologists and physicist, accompanied by several students, has been asked to use modern ground-penetrating radar and other high-tech equipment to try to locate any remains.

The request comes from an organisation called Greatest Generation MIA Recoveries, which researches those missing in World War II.

They'll have a much better idea of where to look for the men, thanks to fresh information from the Marine's former enemies, the Japanese, as John Innes explains.

"The remains, according to the information we now have from the Japanese map, is that they had four fighting positions in front of this village, which is now the site of a church," he said.

"The four fighting positions - enough for eight Japanese soldiers in each trench - they buried the remains of the Americans in their trenches, so the Americans wouldn't see them when the inevitable stronger patrol came through the next morning."

The map from the Japanese came to light in 1990 at a reunion of the Japanese.

"A Japanese historian who had got very friendly with the 1st Marine Division Association, he went out of his way to get together with the people who fought against the Goettge patrol, and they described what happened, and hand drew a little picture of the village and the fighting positions and the approximate distance to the Matanikau River, and that's become the best piece of intelligence we've had for the searchers" John Innes said.

"The bodies were seen the following week. There was a patrol that came down, saw the bodies, it wasn't a recovery patrol, it was just a combat patrol, so they saw the bodies and continued on with what they had to do, and nobody then, because that side of the river was in Japanese hands for a couple of months, so nobody has retrieved them."

The expedition's leader, Professor Cliff Boyd, director of the Forensic Sciences Institute at Radford University in Virginia, says he's optimistic about finding the missing marines, as the team he's brought to Guadalcanal has the best modern equipment, and a broad range of expertise in several academic disciplines.

"So we have physicists, archaeologists, physical anthropologists, historians; the students include a psychology major, a health and recreation major, a history major, an anthropology major and physics majors," he said.

"So it's very much a diverse interdisciplinary team of folks with a lot of different elements of expertise, and we even have a private archaeological consultant with us to. So we've got a lot of areas covered."

Professor Boyd says looking for the human remains of an American patrol that never came back has a strong emotional element.

"There's definitely that emotional aspect to it, when you think these guys have been missing for over six decades, almost seven decades, it's really been an honour to be able to find them and to be able to get them home for their families. Our mission right now is primarily a search mission. Our goal is to use this geophysical sensing equipment to find these guys if we can and then if we do find them, if we're lucky enough to do that, we'll notify the joint POW-MIA command in Hawaii of this discovery so that they can direct the recovery and the excavation and the analysis and repatriation of these folks to their families."

He says the geophysical radar virtually allows them to see through the ground to what's underneath.

"We actually have three major remote sensing devices that we're using, and some work better in some situations than others," he said.

"We have a ground penetrating radar (GPR), which we're using in the field, which sends radar pulses into the ground, and those pulses will bounce off any major inconsistencies in the soil - buried objects, buried house foundations, or even changes in the soil layering itself, like if it goes from a sand to a clay or clay to bedrock, it should identify those changes.

"We're also using a proton magnetometer, which measures magnetic sensitivity and resistivity in the soil, and again identifies buried objects or remains that have a different magnetic signal than the surrounding natural land."

"The remote-sensing stuff sounds really interesting, and really Star Trek like, but it's something that basically tells us something different is there. It doesn't tell us what that difference is."

"If the marines were buried in, as some accounts indicate, a Japanese rifle trench, or something like that, that dug feature, if its still preserved beneath the ground, if it's not been totally wiped out by prior construction, should be able to be seen by the remote sensing. But I'm hopeful that we're talking about just 66 years, so we should have some substantial remnants of these individuals if they can be found."

Professor Boyd also says it's amazing to be in the location of such an important event in US military history.

"I just look around every day, and I think 'Wow, this is so great'," he said.

"I've always been kind of a student of World War II history, and I've read a lot about Guadalcanal...and just to be here on this spot, is really for me an emotional experience. Last year my wife an I went up to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and toured the battlefield there. And I'd read about Gettysburg a lot, but just to actually physically be there and see the terrain, see the topography, makes all the difference in the world in terms of your view of things. And that's what's happening to me here. I look around and I see all these features that I've read about, and I think 'Man, this is what it was like'."

One of Professor Boyd's students on this Solomon islands expedition is Josh Van De Riet.

He says he some some personal reasons to join the search for the missing men.

"My step-grandfather helped to invade Guadalcanal, my father fought in Vietnam from '68 to'69, my sister was a marine, and it just makes sense to me," he said.

"It feels like it's the right thing for people of my generation to be doing, the right thing for me to be doing, to go and find the people that really help what is America today exist and what is the free world today exist, and that's important and that's what we should be doing - it feels good, it feels like it's the right thing to do, it feels appropriate, it just makes sense to me.

"[Being here] blew my dad's mind, because it was his step-father...he was a marine and my dad looked up to him his whole life, and it just blew his mind that I had the opportunity to go to this place that was almost a figment of my dad's childhood imagination, and somebody that he looked up to and emulated in his life came here when he was younger to fight in World War II and it helped shape my dad. And I get to live some of the dreams that he might have had as a child...and he kind of gets to experience them vicariously through me.

"It's good for the whole family - my sister being a Marine as well, and there's a lot of heritage and history in the Marine Corps...it means a lot to her because there was so much here that was significant to Marine Corps history and it all is tied together.

"That's like a fundamental facet to being a Marine is that absolutely nobody is left behind. You have to bring everybody home, and repatriate everybody to the country that they came from, so that they can rest in peace where they came from. And that's such an important thing to do and that's what I would like to happen to me if something bad happened. I would like to go back home, and I think we should give that opportunity to the people who passed away here, fighting for us."

The story of the Goettge Patrol produces strong emotions even today sixty-six years after the men met their fate.

The assumption is that the remains of the Marines, if they are found, would be returned to their families in the United States for burial.

But as John Innes explains, the men themselves might have something to say about that.

"I'm not at all superstitious or anything like that, but it still had me a bit worried," he said.

"The building next door is a Chinese restaurant, and when it was being built, there were holes in the ground and I, of course, went looking and asking questions. The lady owner can't speak English, but the son came to me and asked what I was doing. Then he came to me the next day and said my mother has dreams, and these American service men talk to her, and they live on the other side of the fence, where we're working, and they said 'Tell them we like it here' and 'Leave us here'. I don't believe that at all, but it still had me worried, and recently I've had the relatives of one of the Goettge patrol encouraging me to keep on the search, because [they'd] really like to have his remains back home.

"So, if in the future I do meet up with the Goettge patrol people, I will say 'I know you wanted to stay there, but your family wanted you, and orders are orders.'"

"It's not a thing you can easily forget. True, we have killed four, five, six, or even ten for every man that we have lost. That's statistics. But I find it very difficult to think of these boys as statistics. They were just Joe and Jim, Bill and Whiz and Alabam to us. God rest their souls.

-Guadalcanal Diary(1943)

This feature is based on a piece originally broadcast on Pacific Beat's On The Mat segment on July 15, 2008.

Guadalcanal Diary Dir. Lewis Seiler. 1943. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation. DVD. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2002.