Why Japanese Soldiers Feared U.S. Marines – Relentless Fighters Of The Pacific

September 12th, 1942. Guadalcanal.

Just after nightfall, Lieutenant Colonel Merritt “Red Mike” Edson stood on a jungle ridge one mile south of Henderson Field and listened to the sounds that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

The ridge itself was just a spine of coral and scrub rising out of the jungle, a strip of high ground overlooking the flat expanse where the airfield lay. By daylight, Henderson Field was a scar of crushed coral and kunai grass, dotted with fuel drums and parked aircraft. By night, it was a dark void broken only by the faintest glow from covered lamps.

Between Edson and that airstrip, there was nothing else high enough to stop an attack.

Below him now, in the black wall of vegetation, something massive was moving.

He could hear it.

The crack of branches breaking under many feet. The metallic clink of rifles and mess tins. Voices calling out in Japanese, not even whispering. They weren’t trying to stay quiet.

They were that sure of themselves.

Edson had 840 men on the ridge that night: raiders and paratroopers, veterans of raids on Tulagi and Makin, men who had already seen more in five weeks on Guadalcanal than most Marines saw in a lifetime.

He was outnumbered by more than three to one.

If the ridge fell, the Japanese would have artillery on the last rise before the airfield. They would pour shells onto the runway until every aircraft there was shredded. The planes that brought in food and ammunition, that kept the island connected to the world beyond the dark sea, would be gone.

Twelve thousand Marines and soldiers on Guadalcanal would be stranded on an island ringed by enemy warships and enemy airfields.

If those ships and planes had their way, they would be buried there.

Everything came down to this strip of coral and grass and men.

Edson gathered his officers in the gloom. They were exhausted. Their uniforms hung loose on their frames. Malaria had taken weight from faces and strength from arms. Some Marines shook with fever in the same hands that gripped rifles. They had been fighting for five weeks straight. Many had not slept in thirty-six hours.

He did not talk to them about glory.

“Hold one more night,” he told them. “Just one more night. If we hold, we’ll be relieved in the morning.”

There was nothing poetic in it. Just a simple bargain.

Hold and live.

Or don’t, and none of it would matter anyway.

Below, the jungle murmured.

Then the Japanese came.

What happened over the next twelve hours would shatter Japanese assumptions about American fighting spirit. It would burn the name “United States Marine” into the mind of every Japanese soldier who heard about it afterward. It would become the first clear answer to a question that had lingered since the beginning of the war:

What happens when Japanese infantry, certain of their own superiority, throw themselves against Marines who have nowhere to go and no intention of leaving?

To understand the Answer that came from Bloody Ridge, you have to understand why the Japanese stepped into the dark that night so confident.

In the summer of 1942, Japan was winning.

Not inching forward. Not trading space for time.

Winning.

In the six months after Pearl Harbor, the Empire’s armies and fleets had rolled over the Pacific and Southeast Asia with a speed that stunned watchers in London, Washington, and Berlin alike.

Hong Kong fell in seventeen days. Singapore—the “Gibraltar of the East,” the fortress that British officers had boasted could not be taken—surrendered in just over two months. Eighty thousand British and Commonwealth troops marched into captivity, the largest surrender in British history.

The Dutch East Indies collapsed. Burma cracked. The Philippines, Wake Island, Guam—names that would later become part of American memory as stains and promises—fell in grim sequence.

Japanese flags went up over ports and airfields and capital cities five thousand miles apart. On maps in Tokyo, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere wasn’t propaganda anymore.

It was ink.

Even more dangerous than the territory was what those victories did to Japanese minds.

They had seen British troops surrender without firing every bullet. They had watched the American garrison on Bataan starve, fight, and then collapse. For years before the war, Japanese commanders had used their campaigns in China as proof that the spirit of the Imperial soldier—his willingness to close with the enemy, to die rather than retreat—was uniquely powerful.

Put all of that together—Tsushima’s echo, China, Pearl Harbor, Singapore—and the conclusion felt obvious to Tokyo’s planners.

Japanese soldiers possessed a spiritual strength that Westerners lacked.

One Japanese soldier was worth ten Americans.

It wasn’t just propaganda posters.

It was an assumption woven into orders and plans.

Japanese intelligence briefings about the Marines reflected that contempt. Reports described them as convicts given a choice between prison or service. They were characterized as undisciplined and overconfident, brawlers in uniform, men who would fold under sustained pressure.

When a few thousand Marines landed on Guadalcanal in August of 1942, Tokyo estimated their strength at around two thousand. Perhaps less. Poorly supplied. Demoralized. Isolated.

They were wrong. On almost every count.

Major General Alexander Vandegrift, commanding the 1st Marine Division, did not share Tokyo’s illusions.

His Marines had landed on August 7th under a rolling thunder of naval gunfire. They had taken an unfinished airfield the Japanese were building and named it Henderson Field, after a fallen aviator from the Battle of Midway. Then the Navy had pulled out, savaged by Japanese surface forces off Savo Island, leaving Vandegrift with about ten thousand Marines on a hostile island, facing an enemy whose nearest major base at Rabaul was just a short flight away.

Every day, Japanese bombers came down from Rabaul to blast Henderson. Every night, Japanese cruisers and battleships came in close enough to hurl shells onto the airfield and the Marine perimeter, turning the jungle into a strobe-lit nightmare of explosions and flying metal.

Destroyers—fast and low-slung—slipped in, their decks crammed with soldiers. The Marines called it the Tokyo Express. It never stopped running.

Food rations were cut. Marines went from three meals a day to two, then smaller portions. Malaria and dysentery chewed at them. Their clothes rotted under the unrelenting humidity. Their boots mildewed. Beards grew. Bellies shrank.

From any distant staff perspective, the situation looked bleak.

Vandegrift, closer to the ground, saw something else.

These weren’t convicts dragged off the street.

They were volunteers, for the most part—men who had signed up for the Corps knowing its reputation for hard training and hard fighting.

Marine recruit training lasted thirteen weeks, longer than any other American service by that point. Every man spent more than a hundred hours with a rifle before learning any other skill. If you wore the globe and anchor, you were a rifleman first. Everything else came second.

That wasn’t just a motto printed on recruiting posters. It was enforced.

In 1899, the Commandant of the Marine Corps had discovered that fewer than a hundred Marines met acceptable marksmanship standards. It had been an embarrassment.

The Corps spent decades making sure it never happened again.

By 1942, a Marine who barely scraped through rifle qualification would have been considered an expert in many Army units.

They had also done something no other nation had really done.

They had trained to land on hostile beaches.

Since 1934, Marines had carried out exercises up and down the U.S. coast and in Caribbean waters, practicing amphibious assaults on mock islands, working out how to coordinate naval gunfire and air support with infantry pushing onto sand.

They had written the first modern doctrine for such landings, a tentative manual that the Navy, the Army, and even the British would later mine for their own operations.

They had practiced what most of the world just imagined.

They didn’t know exactly what Japanese soldiers would look like in battle, but they knew what it took to get off a landing craft under fire and still move forward.

Guadalcanal was their first big test against the Imperial Army.

It would not be gentle.

The first real collision came at a river.

On American maps, the stream running along the eastern side of the perimeter was mis-labeled the Tenaru. In reality it was the Ilu, a shallow, sluggish ribbon of water that met the sea across a wide sandbar.

To the Marines, it was mostly a line on the map and a muddy obstacle that needed watching.

To Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki, it was a place to make history.

Ichiki had brought around nine hundred elite troops ashore from destroyers. They were veterans of the China campaigns, men who had participated in the assault on Guam. Tough, disciplined, and used to winning.

He had orders to advance on Henderson Field, drive the Americans into the sea, and secure the island. Japanese intelligence said there were perhaps two thousand Marines, scattered and poorly supplied.

He brought half his regiment forward. The rest he left behind, assuming that the job ahead wouldn’t need them.

On the night of August 21st, Ichiki’s men stepped onto the sandbar at the mouth of the river.

They came at night because that was how they liked to fight. Darkness was supposed to swallow machine gun lanes, to tighten the distance between men, to amplify fear.

They went forward in tight formations, bayonets fixed, voices raised in what Americans would later call “banzai” charges—human waves intended to unnerve an enemy and crash through his lines on sheer momentum.

They found instead a trap.

On the west bank, Marines had dug in. Machine guns covered the sandbar from multiple angles. Riflemen had walked rounds onto likely crossing points in daylight, memorizing ranges and aiming points. They had strung barbed wire across the approach.

When the first Japanese crossed the sand, the night erupted.

Machine guns raked the sandbar, their tracers drawing deadly geometry in the darkness. Marines fired their rifles as they had on the range, staking their lives on muscle memory and iron sights. Artillery shells burst further back, breaking up follow-on formations.

The first wave died.

The second wave climbed over the bodies of the first.

They died too.

By dawn, the sandbar was slick with blood and so covered with corpses that Marines later joked grimly it looked like a grisly log ramp.

Estimating casualties in that chaos was difficult, but the Marines counted hundreds of Japanese bodies. Later records would put Ichiki’s losses at around eight hundred killed.

American dead: thirty-five.

When the reports reached Japan, some staff officers literally refused to believe them.

The numbers didn’t fit their universe.

Colonel Ichiki burned his colors and shot himself.

The Battle of the Tenaru should have been a lesson.

Tokyo decided it was an aberration.

The problem, they said, was not the assumption that a Japanese soldier was worth ten Americans. It was that Ichiki had not used enough men.

Guadalcanal would give them another chance to test the math.

Which was how, three weeks later, Edson found himself on that ridge, listening to the jungle move.

Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi had nearly three thousand troops under his command: infantry, support units, artillery.

He did not charge across a sandbar.

He spent weeks hacking through the jungle south of the Marine perimeter, choosing a route that would strike from the least defended direction.

Men collapsed along the way from exhaustion and disease. Supplies dwindled. But Kawaguchi’s plan was sound. If he could get onto the ridge south of Henderson Field, he could push down onto the airstrip itself.

The Marines on the ridge that night were not in ideal shape. They were not fresh, not well-fed, not well-rested.

They were, however, Marines.

They had dug foxholes and firing pits along the length of the ridge, about a thousand yards from one end to the other. They had hauled barbed wire into place. They had walked their fields of fire, checked their arcs, adjusted positions as best they could in the rocky coral.

The Japanese artillery preparation began around nine-thirty. Shells from a cruiser and destroyers crashed along the ridge line, shredding trees, blowing coral into deadly shards, shaking the men in their foxholes.

Then the shelling stopped.

The grass below the ridge, waist-high kunai, began to move.

The assault that followed was like something out of a nightmare.

Waves of Japanese infantry surged up the slope, shouting, firing, some with rifles, some with swords drawn. The Marines fired into them, rifles bucking, machine guns chattering until barrels glowed red.

The first waves died.

More came.

In places, the line bent. A paratroop company in the center nearly collapsed. Japanese soldiers broke through, pouring toward the airfield. Marines fell back in confusion, tripping over tree roots and bodies.

Edson moved through the fighting like a man with more than one body.

He stood on an ammunition box in one section, shouting orders, moving men from quiet sectors to fill gaps. He was lit intermittently by flares and explosions, a clear target. Bullets snapped by him.

Marines later said they had no idea how he survived.

At one point, he met a group of men retreating toward the rear, faces pale, helmets askew.

“Where are you going?” he demanded.

“We can’t hold, Colonel,” someone said.

He fixed them with a hard stare.

“You will hold,” he said. “You’ll get back up there and you’ll hold.”

They did.

Close quarters became brutal. When ammunition ran low, Marines used bayonets. When bayonets snapped, they used knives. When knives were gone, they used entrenching tools, fists, anything.

They could smell the men they were killing.

They could hear Japanese officers shouting orders a few yards away, swords slicing the air.

A little after three in the morning, the crisis peaked. Japanese troops had infiltrated to within a thousand yards of the airstrip. Edson had no reserves left.

Miles away, in his command post, Vandegrift listened to the reports and later admitted it was the only point in the campaign when he truly doubted they might hold.

Then the artillery came in.

The 11th Marines, who had registered their guns on the ridge’s approaches in daylight, began to fire barrage after barrage.

One hundred and five millimeter shells rained down on the lines of Japanese trying to push through the teeth of the Marine defense. The crest of the ridge and the slopes below turned into a churning storm of shrapnel and concussion.

Under that hammer, the assault stalled.

By dawn, the ridge and the jungle below were carpeted with Japanese dead. Bodies lay in clumps where entire sections had been caught by converging fields of fire. Closer to the Marine positions, corpses sprawled in weird positions, their faces frozen.

The counts varied.

Some said six hundred dead in front of Edson’s positions. Some said eight hundred.

What everyone agreed on was this: the ridge was still in Marine hands.

Kawaguchi’s brigade broke. The survivors limped back into the jungle, leaving more comrades to die of wounds, starvation, and malaria in the weeks to come.

Edson’s men—filthy, exhausted, many of them half-sick—had held against three to one odds.

It was what they had been trained to do.

For the Japanese, it was something else.

It was the first proof that American Marines would not just die bravely.

They would kill efficiently.

Second Lieutenant Genjiro Inui, with the Japanese 8th Independent Anti-Tank Gun Company, saw the aftermath.

He walked the sandbar where Ichiki’s men had died. He walked the ridge below Henderson, stepping carefully around the bodies. He listened to survivors talk about the machine-gun fire that had scythed through their formations, the artillery they hadn’t seen before it hit them.

In a diary he did not expect anyone else to ever read, he wrote:

Their firepower overwhelmed us. We placed too much faith in the power of our charges.

If we were to think of winning, he reasoned, Japan needed not just brave men willing to die, but weapons and tactics that could match the Americans.

He noted something else.

Intelligence had told them there were maybe two thousand Marines on Guadalcanal.

In reality there were around twelve thousand.

Intelligence had been wrong by a factor of six.

On maps in Tokyo, it didn’t look like such a big error.

On the ground, trying to push up a ridge under intersecting fields of fire, it was enormous.

Even so, old habits die hard.

In October, Japanese commanders tried again around Henderson Field.

This time they brought more men—over twenty thousand soldiers from multiple regiments and brigades. Battleships rained heavy shells on the airfield, crushing aircraft, blowing fuel dumps, churning the runway. They attacked the perimeter from several sides, trying to overwhelm the defense.

For three days, Marines and Army units fought off assaults.

The results looked a lot like Tenaru and Bloody Ridge.

Around 3,500 Japanese dead. Fewer than 300 American.

By February 1943, the Japanese withdrew what was left of their forces from Guadalcanal.

They had landed some thirty-six thousand troops on the island over six months.

By the end, twenty to thirty thousand of them were dead—from bullets, shrapnel, disease, or starvation.

American ground forces lost about sixteen hundred men killed.

The myth of Japanese invincibility died in the mud around Henderson Field.

Japanese officers understood it, even if Tokyo’s propaganda didn’t admit it.

What they didn’t know yet was that the Marines weren’t just good at defending jungle lines.

They were designing ways to crack open fortified islands that should, by all common sense, have been impossible to take.

The seeds of that ability lay in how Marines thought about small units.

Over the years between world wars, the Corps had restructured its squads around a concept called the fire team.

Instead of eleven men moving as a single lump with one machine gun, Marine squads by early 1944 were organized into three fire teams of four men each: a team leader, a Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) gunner, his assistant, and a rifleman.

That meant three automatic weapons per squad.

Most Army squads of the time had one BAR.

In the kind of close-range fighting that defined the Pacific—dense jungle, twisted coral, bunkers and caves at forty yards—concentrated automatic fire was everything. With three BARs and trained riflemen, a Marine squad could lay down a sheet of bullets piercing every possible approach while another team maneuvered to flank.

They had built this structure for amphibious assaults, where units would often land scattered and have to fight independently without immediate higher-level coordination.

It turned out to be just as useful on islands of volcanic ash and coral rock, where terrain made it hard for larger formations to move in coherent lines.

The Japanese were about to feel the weight of that system in places that made Guadalcanal look almost gentle.

Tarawa, November 1943.

Rear Admiral Keiji Shibasaki, commanding the Japanese garrison on Betio Island, looked out from his bunker at concrete pillboxes, anti-tank ditches, coconut-log revetments, and coastal guns.

He was confident.

He told his staff that a million men couldn’t take his island in a hundred years.

Betio was small—you could walk across it in half an hour—but it bristled with defenses. Bunkers were built with coconut logs and sand, strong enough to shrug off anything smaller than a direct hit from a battleship shell. Guns covered every likely landing beach with interlocking fields of fire. Off the beaches, coral reefs and underwater obstacles threatened landing craft.

In the early hours of November 20th, American battleships and cruisers opened up. The bombardment churned the island into clouds of smoke and dust. Many gunners on the ships believed nothing could possibly have survived.

They were wrong.

As the first waves of the 2nd Marine Division approached in Higgins boats, the tide betrayed them. The water over the reef was too shallow—barely three feet. The landing craft needed four feet to clear.

They grounded.

Machine guns opened from the shore.

Marines poured over the sides of the stuck boats and began wading hundreds of yards through chest-deep water, rifles held overhead, packs dragging at their shoulders, tracers whipping around them. Men stumbled over holes in the reef, disappeared, surfaced again. Corpsmen tried to drag wounded through the water and were shot themselves.

It was nightmare made real.

The only craft that could cross were LVTs—amphibious tractors with treads that could crawl over coral. There weren’t enough of them.

For three days, the fight for that scrap of sand and coral was a hell of point-blank fire, grenades tossed into bunker apertures, flamethrowers roaring, men pressed up against concrete walls listening to the screaming inside.

Marines died by the hundreds. Nearly a thousand were killed. More than two thousand wounded.

When it was over, only seventeen Japanese soldiers emerged alive from the original garrison of almost five thousand.

Every other defender lay buried under rubble, in collapsed bunkers, in burned-out cavities.

Shibasaki had been killed on the second day by naval gunfire when he tried to move his command post.

His prediction of “a million men in a hundred years” had been disproved by eighteen thousand Marines in seventy-six hours.

The cost shocked the American public when newsreel footage and photographs made it home.

Within the Corps, it was something else: a brutal, bloody lesson.

Fortified islands could be taken.

They had to be taken more intelligently.

Japanese commanders, watching Tarawa from afar, took a different lesson.

Defending beaches was suicide.

They began planning to make the Marines pay deeper inland.

Peleliu, September 1944.

The island was ugly and beautiful all at once: razorback ridges of white coral, caves honeycombing hills, an airstrip baking under the tropical sun.

Colonel Kunio Nakagawa had around eleven thousand men. He had studied Guadalcanal and Tarawa. He concluded that beach defenses were nothing but targets for naval guns and bombers.

He put a thin line of troops on the shore, just enough to make the landing costly.

The rest he tucked into more than five hundred caves and tunnels in the Umurbrogol Ridge—terrain the Marines would come to call “Bloody Nose Ridge.”

Major General William Rupertus, commanding the 1st Marine Division, predicted four days of hard fighting.

It took seventy-three days.

On Peleliu, Marines learned what it meant to fight a defender who would not show himself until they were nearly on top of him, who had fields of fire leaving no approach route uncovered, who had air vents and crawl tunnels connecting positions so that men could vanish from one and appear in another minutes later.

Entire rifle companies were ground down to half strength. Some squads landed on the beach intact and numbered four men by nightfall.

By the time the island was declared secure, Marine and Army losses were over eight thousand, with more than fifteen hundred killed.

Japanese losses were nearly total.

Nakagawa sent his last message on November 24th. “Our sword is broken,” he reported. “We have run out of spears.”

He burned his colors and took his own life.

Peleliu taught the Japanese high command that delaying tactics and defense-in-depth could bleed the Marines badly.

It taught the Marines that the next islands would be worse.

By 1944, Japanese doctrine had shifted under the pressure of reality.

No more massed banzai charges. Kuribayashi, assigned to Iwo Jima, would later forbid them entirely.

No more illusions that Marines would break and run when things got rough.

Instead, they dug.

Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi was an unusual officer for his time. He had traveled widely in the United States in the late 1920s, lived with American families, visited Detroit’s factories, seen Ford’s assembly lines churning out cars by the hundreds.

He had liked Americans personally, which made his later task all the more bitter.

He had read the reports from Tarawa carefully. He understood the Marines would take huge casualties and keep advancing anyway. He concluded that defending beaches was pointless. He ordered almost all of his defenders on Iwo Jima to build positions inland—caves, bunkers, pillboxes interconnected by tunnels, some deep enough that even sixteen-inch shells exploded harmlessly outside.

In his view, every Japanese soldier’s duty was to kill ten Americans before he died.

On February 19th, 1945, the first wave of Marines stepped off Higgins boats onto black volcanic sand.

The beach was uncannily quiet.

Some defenders fired desultory shots. A few mortars fell. But the storm the Marines had expected did not come.

Men began to relax.

Then the island opened.

From the slopes of Mount Suribachi and from hidden positions all across the heights, Kuribayashi’s guns spoke at once.

Machine guns. Artillery. Mortars. Rockets.

Men went down in rows.

On Iwo, Marines learned that courage alone was not enough. They fought in a landscape that felt like the surface of the moon—no soil, just ash and rock and heat. Every cave mouth promised death. Every ridge could hide an entire platoon.

They fought anyway.

They took the island at a cost of nearly seven thousand Marines and sailors killed and tens of thousands wounded.

Japan lost almost all of its garrison—over twenty thousand men.

Survivors on both sides came away with new understandings.

Japanese soldiers who lived through even part of these battles—Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Peleliu, Iwo—knew that American Marines were not the caricatures their propaganda had painted.

They were methodical.

They were stubborn.

They were terrifyingly efficient at turning firepower into slaughter.

In Japanese after-action reports and private diaries, a pattern emerged.

Again and again, you find phrases like:

“We misjudged the enemy’s tenacity.”
“They continued to attack even under the heaviest fire.”
“Their small units fought with great cohesion and fire.”
“Our assaults were broken by intersecting fire.”

Second Lieutenant Inui’s line—“We overestimated the power of our charges”—echoed through other officers’ reflections, even if not in those exact words.

The fear Japanese soldiers felt wasn’t just fear of bullets. It wasn’t fear of some mystical “Devil Dog” aura.

They feared what Marines represented: a fusion of training, equipment, and doctrine that made every hill and ridge into a machine.

On a tactical level, a Marine squad’s ability to pour automatic fire while maneuvering meant that any Japanese squad that showed itself risked being pinned and flanked in minutes.

On an operational level, the Marines’ integration with naval gunfire and close air support meant that a bunker complex that might have taken days to reduce using only infantry could be smothered under shells and bombs coordinated from a single radio.

On a psychological level, the willingness of Marines to keep attacking despite casualties that would have broken many units—Tarawa’s wading assaults, Peleliu’s repeated pushes against the same ridge, Iwo’s endless, grinding advances fifty yards at a time—told Japanese defenders that victory, in the sense they had once understood it, was gone.

They could kill many.

They could not stop them all.

The image of the Marine that took shape in Japanese minds by 1945 was nothing like the one Tokyo’s intelligence officers had sketched in the summer of 1942.

Not a convict forced to fight.

A professional who chose the hardest fight.

Not undisciplined brawlers.

Men who held a foxhole under artillery, who executed small-unit tactics in terrain that looked like the inside of a furnace.

Not men who would break under pressure.

Men who did not seem to notice pressure.

Saburo Sakai, Japan’s legendary ace, wrote later of seeing Marines on Guadalcanal moving under fire in a way that reminded him of ants—ordered, relentless, constantly advancing despite the swatting hand overhead.

On the ground, Japanese infantrymen experienced that relentlessness at the end of a barrel.

If you look at their words—at the diaries, the memoirs recorded years later—you find something else accompanying the fear.

Respect.

Not admiration in a romantic sense. That would have been too much for men raised on Bushido and imperial ideology.

But a quiet acknowledgment.

They were not beaten by weaklings.

They were beaten by men who had been trained for exactly this.

After the war, the story most Americans heard about the Pacific focused on island names and famous photographs: the flag on Suribachi, the jungle mud of Guadalcanal, the coral beaches of Tarawa.

Japanese veterans carried a different set of images.

They remembered hearing the crack of M1s fired with eerie accuracy from unseen positions. They remembered attacks that did not stop when their own doctrine said they should. They remembered looking through sights and seeing Marines still coming toward them despite mortars and machine guns.

They remembered, too, the small things.

Marines who gave them cigarettes when they were taken prisoner. Corpsmen who treated wounds without regard to uniform. Faces of men about their own age staring up the barrel of their rifle or theirs.

Fear and humanity are not mutually exclusive.

For Japanese soldiers, U.S. Marines in the Pacific came to embody a paradox.

They were ruthless in attack, relentless in defense, and unshakable under fire.

And yet, when the firing stopped and the surrender flags went up, they were also the same young men they had always imagined Westerners to be incapable of being: professional, disciplined, bound by rules they took seriously even when no one could have blamed them for throwing those rules away.

In the end, that combination—deadly in battle, principled in victory—may be why the fear lasted as long as it did.

It is one thing to fear an enemy because he is brutal.

It is another to fear him because he is good at war.

In the jungles and on the beaches of the Pacific, Japanese soldiers learned the difference, one ridge and one bayonet charge at a time.

They called the Marines relentless fighters.

And when they said it, there was no longer any trace of contempt in their voices.