Aaron Leslie Gelzer

Although he was born in New York City on 15 February 1919, Aaron Leslie Gelzer grew up a Jersey boy. His earliest memories were likely of the house in Jersey City’s Harsimus Cove neighborhood. Out for a walk with his mother, Pauline, he would have heard his neighbors conversing in a mixture of Russian, Polish, Yiddish, and English. It was an easy five minute stroll to Brunswick Street and the storefront of B&J Gelzer House Furnishings and Floor Coverings, where his father Joseph was a co-owner.^[1] At the age of six, he became a big brother to little Mildred Gelzer; with the new addition, the family bought a new house on Mercer Street, within sight of City Hall. Aaron’s youngest sister, Ethel, was born in 1932.

The family’s fortunes seem to have changed somewhat in the 1930s. Joseph left the lucrative home furnishings business, sold the house on Mercer Street, and moved the family out to Harrison. To support their family, both Joseph and Pauline took jobs as clerks for a retail grocery. Aaron finished high school, then college, but found his job prospects little better. He worked for A&P for a brief period, but the salesman’s life didn’t have the same allure for Aaron as it did for his father. On 21 August 1940, he made the fateful decision to enlist in the Marine Corps.

Somewhat unusually, Gelzer was not sent to Parris Island for boot camp: he received his initial training at a discrete recruit depot directly attached to the 5th Marine Regiment, then stationed with the 1st Marine Brigade at Quantico, Virginia. Upon completion of his training, which took about six weeks, he was posted directly to Company L, Third Battalion, 5th Marines. Even more unusually, he was a buck private with a college education. In just a few years, this distinction would have all but assured him an assignment to Officer Candidate School. Instead, Gelzer schlepped his pack and weapon aboard a transport and sailed for Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

They were a far cry from war-ready. “L Company’s strength was only about thirty-five men, with a cadre of maybe two or three officers and one corpsman” noted Ore J. Marion, who joined the unit in December 1940. “We were the Raggedy-Ass Marines, dressed up with campaign hats, field clothes that were part Marine Corps and part navy, leggings, high-top dress shoes, and model ’03 .30 caliber Springfield rifles.”^[2] The men were frequently out training in the field. “Old Breed” NCOs – senior sergeants who’d fought in Haiti and Nicaragua, or even in France – passed down their tricks of the trade to the younger men, who in turn instructed the steady stream of recruits. The expanding company soon had more billets available, and Gelzer was promoted to Private First Class in April, 1941. Weapons instruction was emphasized, but “we didn’t fire them, mind you,” commented Marion. “Firing weapons cost money, and… the Navy Department wasn’t about to let us expend their resources. That .30-caliber ball ammunition cost 3 cents a round in those days.” Even without firing, Gelzer demonstrated enough proficiency with the complicated Browning Automatic Rifle to be rated a specialist. There was occasional excitement to be had in demonstrations against Vichy French ships anchored at Martinique and Dakar, but nothing close to the prospect of a shooting war. There was, however, liberty on foreign shores: “French champagne and women – one cheaper than the other,” quipped Marion.^[3]

Later in 1941, the regiment returned to the United States for intensive training in New River, North Carolina. Everyone knew that war was imminent, and many suspected that the Japanese would be the target. On 5 December 1941, the regimental commander addressed all the privates and PFCs – including Aaron Gelzer and Ore Marion – hinting that the country would soon be at war, and, young as they were, they were the future staff NCOs of the Marine Corps. Sure enough, weekend liberty was interrupted by Pearl Harbor, and the following month Aaron Gelzer was promoted to the rank of corporal.

The new rank brought with it new responsibility. On 1 February 1942, Gelzer turned in his BAR and gear, said goodbye to his squad mates, and headed over to Headquarters and Service Company. He reported to Second Lieutenant James Mullins and Platoon Sergeant Denzil R. Caltrider, the two senior men of the regimental intelligence section (R-2). This small group was in charge of a wide variety of activities: maintaining a unit journal on operations, keeping the Colonel’s map up to date, acting as guides and liaisons between the regiment’s companies and battalions, and collecting information from their subordinates in the smaller battalion sections (Bn-2s). There was a higher echelon of intelligence men at the division level (D-2), headed by Colonel Frank B. Goettge who had once been a famous Marine footballer. However, the function of combat intelligence units had not been well understood in the years leading up to the war, and training at these different unit levels was not well coordinated.

In May of 1942, Lieutenant Mullins was transferred and Corporal Gelzer got a new skipper: Captain Wilfred H. Ringer, Jr., a strapping officer from Brookline, Massachusetts who had several years of sterling service to his name, but no experience in the functions of an R-2. He would have little time to practice with his men, as the word was shortly passed to prepare to leave New River. Within a month, the First Marine Division was en route to New Zealand, where they hoped to complete a training regimen cut short by the hasty departure orders. They would not get the chance: reports of a Japanese airfield under construction in the Solomon Islands spurred a fast re-packing and re-embarkation of the transports, and by late July, Corporal Gelzer was headed for combat aboard the USS American Legion.

The Marines were desperate for the latest information as to what they would face, but unfortunately the R-2 section was often as much in the dark as anyone else. Information passed down from Goettge’s D-2 men left many questions about the number of Japanese troops on the target islands of Guadalcanal and Tulagi, where they might be, and how likely they were to put up a fight. Draftsmen struggled to make sense of the hand-drawn sketches and few aerial photographs available, and as a result the map situation was poor. Many men resigned themselves to the likelihood of having to figure out the situation on the spot when they arrived.

Corporal Gelzer first set foot on Guadalcanal at about 0938 hours, 7 August 1942. He could probably see the troops of the First and Third Battalions lounging around or maintaining somewhat lazy security; there had been no resistance to the landings, and no Japanese could be found. The R-2 section moved inland about a hundred yards to the new regimental CP, set up shop, and prepared to receive information from the front lines. These first two days were marked by some nervousness, occasional firing, and searching for the Japanese. The capture of the airfield and several enemy encampments was a particular windfall for the intelligence men. Gelzer might have participated in First Lieutenant Ralph Cory‘s excursion to a captured naval base at Kukum, where “large quantities of ammunition, communication equipment, lumber, sand bags, and digging tools were found intact.”^[4]

Gelzer certainly took part in the patrols dispatched by regimental headquarters – some of which returned with prisoners. One of these captives, a naval warrant officer named Sakado, implied that a Japanese garrison to the west was ready to surrender. When this information reached Goettge, the colonel decided to personally lead a patrol to investigate. He would take some of his own D-2 men; the balance of the patrol would be from Captain Ringer’s command. “I don’t know exactly how Goettge arrived at taking… all of our intelligence personnel on this patrol,” commented Sergeant Charles “Monk” Arndt of the 5th Marines.^[5] Although Ringer had reservations about committing his men to Goettge’s plan, he had no trouble pitching the patrol to his enthusiastic young Marines.

Sergeant Benjamin Selvitelle, a machine gunner with L/3/5, was down by the Kukum naval base on the afternoon of 12 August 1942 when Goettge’s men trooped by. “It was an odd collection of personnel including a Navy doctor [Lt. Commander Malcolm Pratt, the 5th Marines’ surgeon], Japanese prisoner [Sakado] and for the most part the remaining personnel were certainly not combat Marines,” he noted. Some of the L Company men spotted their old buddy, Corporal Aaron Gelzer, heading for the boats. “We talked with him and he was in high spirits,” continued Selvitelle. “Like the others, he had volunteered to make the patrol. I recall some discussion about his being awarded with a medal. As we left Gelzer and returned to our position, we talked about the odd absence of fighting troops with the patrol.”^[6]

As the assembled men waited for their Higgins boat at Kukum, the laughter and joking turned to grumbling and impatience. They had only a vague notion of what their mission was, and as dusk gathered, those who specialized in photography or mapmaking wondered how they were supposed to do their jobs in the dark. Many were running on only a few hours of sleep. Furthermore, they were very lightly armed for an excursion into enemy territory – an area that was known to harbor at least some Japanese who were willing to fight. Captain Ringer even searched out a friend, Captain Lyman Spurlock of L/3/5, to arrange for a possible rescue just in case things went wrong. At long last, the boat arrived and twenty-five Americans, plus an angry Sakado, climbed aboard. The engine roared, and the boat lumbered out into the darkness.

Only three men returned.

Goettge’s Patrol had been a fiasco. The boat attempted to land too soon, grounded on a sandbar, and had to be physically pushed free. The Americans went ashore to establish a camp, and walked straight into a hostile guard force which had no intention of surrendering. Goettge was killed in the first burst of firing, and the rest of the men were trapped on the beach. One by one, the Japanese picked them off. The last man to escape, Platoon Sergeant Frank Few, reported the sight of “sabers flashing in the sun” as the Marines were hacked into pieces. Subsequent patrols found some dismembered bodies were found along the Matanikau River, and a burial trench was later found by the village of Horahi. None of the remains were ever recovered.

Corporal Aaron Gelzer was declared “missing in action” when he failed to return from the patrol on 13 August 1942. Despite the obvious fate of Goettge’s men, none were ever individually identified, and their official status remained as missing for a year and a day. Finally, the twenty-two men were declared officially dead.

Despite numerous searches made over the decades, no known trace of the Goettge Patrol has been seen since 1942.