Merritt A. Edson

Merritt Edson was a small, quiet, red-haired Vermonter — hence Red Mike — who had been a Marine since 1917, flown as a naval aviator, and spent the early 1930s chasing rebels up the Coco River in Nicaragua in open boats, which is where he learned what a handful of men who know the ground can do. He won his first Navy Cross there.

In 1942 he took command of the 1st Raider Battalion, the Marine Corps' answer to the British Commandos, and led it ashore at Tulagi in August. That earned him a second Navy Cross. Three weeks later the Raiders were on Guadalcanal, tired, thinned by malaria and dysentery, and Edson looked at an unremarkable grassy ridge a thousand metres south of Henderson Field and concluded — against the opinion of almost everyone — that the Japanese would come that way.

They came on the night of 12 September 1942, and again on the 13th. About 830 Raiders and paramarines held the ridge against some 2,500 men of the Kawaguchi Brigade, falling back from knoll to knoll in the dark, calling artillery onto their own positions. Edson spent the second night standing upright a few metres behind the line where his Marines could see him, correcting fire in a flat voice while the grass burned. By dawn the attack had broken. Had it not, the airfield — and with it the campaign — would have gone.

The place has been called Edson's Ridge ever since. He was awarded the Medal of Honor, went on to Tarawa, Saipan and Tinian as a chief of staff, and finished the war a major general.

Afterwards he built the Vermont State Police from nothing as its first commissioner and ran the National Rifle Association. In August 1955, at fifty-eight, he closed his garage door with the engine running. Those who knew him spoke of a man who had never quite come back from the ridge.

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