Luckiest Marine Raider on Tulagi Island

On December 7, 1941 Jim Campbell was at Marine Corps boot camp. The falling of the bombs at Pearl Harbor meant he would soon be fighting against the Japanese Empire.

During his first battle with the Japanese, Campbell would narrowly escape death no less than three times in a matter of days.

Campbell, who lives in Yuma and is now 85, was 17 at the time, and had just joined the Marines in October of '41.

"We knew we were going to be in the war," he said. "It wasn’t no surprise. In fact everybody was kind of waiting, you know. When the (Japanese) bombed Pearl Harbor everybody kind of cheered hooray! Now we’re in the war! But everybody knew it was going to be tough because we had the Germans and the Italians and (Japanese) all against us."

After boot camp, Campbell trained to be a radio operator, and swiftly volunteered for the famed Marine Raiders, an elite unit established by the Marines to conduct amphibious light infantry warfare. Campbell served in "Edson's Raiders" of the 1st Marine Raiders Battalion.

"They were all older and I think they needed a few young guys to do the dirty work and do the manual labor because they didn't have any," Campbell said.

"So they came up and asked for some volunteers and I volunteered. I had never seen guys like the ones down there. They were very experienced and everything and I was kind of like the baby of the unit. I was only 17 years old by the time I turned 18, I think I was on a ship going over seas."

On August 7, 1942, Edson's 1st Raider Battalion landed on an island in the British Solomon Islands during the opening phase of the Guadalcanal Campaign. It was Campbell's first time in combat.

"The higher-ups decided we needed to stop the (Japanese) who had landed in the Solomons and started building an airport there called Henderson Field on the main island of Guadalcanal. There was a little Island a little distance away called Tulagi which is where I was in action at. That is where we hit and made the first offensive landing of World War II. The very first one."

Campbell said despite having antiquated weapons and equipment from World War I, his unit was still able to carry out its duties.

"I was in the first wave... We came up on the beach, and naturally the least experienced people go in first to draw fire to protect the other guys. We landed on landing boats that didn't have front ends that come down. We didn't have them yet, they came a little bit later."

Campbell said their landing was very peaceful and nobody was shooting at them.

"Before we went in (Navy) warships bombarded the area and it looked like they were about to sink the island from a distance.

We looked at all this stuff going on and thought wow, nobody will be alive when we get there. When we went in to land we couldn't even find where one of the shells landed. There was no evidence and no houses were blown down, but it sure looked good."

Campbell's first two near death situations happened in the same day on Tulagi. The first came after he and the other Marines he was with had set up their radios and felt at ease.

"We felt pretty safe and were walking around and everything. There was a tree in the yard and they put a chain around it for the generator for the radio. And one of the guys is out there cranking on the radio and bullets started hitting the tree, and pretty soon this guy is down on the ground as low as he could get still cranking that generator."

Campbell said at the same time, he was leaning up against a wall.

"Two of my buddies were laying down on their backs looking up at me, and we were just (shooting the breeze), but one of them looks kind of funny at me. I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ and he said 'In the last few seconds a bullet hole has appeared in that wall on each side of your head.' That was the beginning of a lot of things like that happening to me all throughout the war where I had these close calls, but I didn't get killed."

Later that day Campbell was running a message to another unit for his colonel when his second brush with death drew near.

"So I get out into the middle of this field, and the whole field erupts," he said. "Dirt is flying all around me. A couple of (Japanese) at long distance with machine guns were shooting at me, but they were so far away that (they didn't hit me). If they had gotten lucky they would have, they chewed up the whole field around me. I ran off to one side of the field and didn't get hit. That was the second time that same day."

A few days later after the Marine Raiders had already secured the island, Campbell had his last encounter with death.

"Before we left Tulagi, I had one more lucky incident," he said. "Things were pretty quiet and the island was pretty much secured. Well the Japanese Navy is pretty light on communications so one of their ships didn't get the word and sailed right in there..."

Campbell said he and about four other Marines were standing on top of a hill near the shore looking at a Japanese officer's samurai sword one of the other men had found when they became aware of the ship.

"The way the terrain was we didn't see it until, wham there it was right there. It was beautiful. It had big old turrets and the guns. I think it was white. The (Japanese) flags are flying with all the rays on it, and one of the guns turns around and points toward us."

Campbell said the men didn't believe the ship would fire at such a small group.

"Boom, they fired that sucker and the shell came right through where we were and didn't hit any of us and went into the hillside behind us and buried itself into that soft dirt and blew up. There was a great big poof and all this dirt and rock blew us all down. I got a bunch of little rocks and crap in my back the corpsman took out later. That was the third time."

For Campbell, the end of the battle of Tulagi was just the beginning of six more battles before his war was over. Next off, he would be shipping over to fight on Guadalcanal...

Chris McDaniel can be reached at cmcdaniel@yumasun.com or 539-6849.