Who Ordered The Heroic American Marines To Bait Japanese Troops They Killed 800 in One Night! D

Somewhere in your family, a father, a grandfather, an uncle, a neighbor down the street who used to fix your bicycle, there is probably a man who came home from the Pacific. He did not talk about it. He sat in a chair on Sunday afternoons and watched the football game and drank one beer and did not talk about it.

When you asked, he changed the subject. When your grandmother asked, he stared at the wallpaper. This is the story of one of the nights that explains why. If you are old enough to remember the sound of Walter Kankite reading the evening news, you are old enough to remember a time when every American on this continent knew the word Guadal Canal.

It was on the front page of every newspaper in the fall of 1942. It was in the news reels before the movies. It was the word your mother whispered when the letter from the War Department came to the house down the block. Today, most Americans could not find it on a map. But 83 years ago, on a Friday morning in August of 1942, on a strip of white sand at the mouth of a stagnant creek on the northern shore of that island, a young man from from Philadelphia was about to hold down the trigger of a machine gun until it glowed red in his hands. He was 21 years old. In 4 hours, he would be blind for the rest of his life. In 4 hours, more than 200 Japanese soldiers would lie dead in front of his gun, part of nearly 800 who would die on that sandbar before the sun came up. And the Marines who fought beside him that night, the boys of 19 and 20 and 21 did something in the dark at 3:00 in the

morning that has been misunderstood for 80 years. They let the enemy come. They watched them cross the sand. They did not fire. Not at 100 meters, not at 50, not at 40. This was not a mistake. This was fire discipline. And this is the story of the night the Pacific War began to turn.

The time is 3:10 in the morning. The date is August 21st, 1942. 200 Japanese soldiers are running across a strip of sand no wider than a suburban driveway. They are running in silence. Their boots barely touch the ground. Their rifles are held low. Their bayonets catch the faint green light of a flare that has just burned out overhead.

They are elite infantry from the 28th regiment of the Imperial Japanese Army, one of the most storied light infantry units in the Pacific, and they are less than 100 m from the American line, 90 m, 80, 50. On the far side of the creek, hidden behind sandbags and coconut logs and palm frrons, the American machine guns are already loaded.

Young men are already lying behind them, cheeks against the wooden stocks, fingers curled inside the trigger guards. Not one of them fires. Not one. 30 meters. Now the Marines can hear the sand under Japanese boots. They can hear breathing. They can smell sweat and gun oil carried on the humid tropical air. Still no one fires.

They are waiting. Waiting because their officers have taught them what every American infantry officer has been taught since 1918. that at close range on ground the enemy must funnel through. Patience is not cowardice. Patience is arithmetic. Every meter closer the enemy comes is one more meter he cannot escape.

But to understand why the Marines waited, why they let a full battalion of the Emperor’s finest walk to within 30 m of their guns before pulling the trigger, we have to go back two weeks back to a morning when 11,000 young Americans woke up on the deck of a ship and looked out at an island most of them had never heard of.

The morning was August 7th, 1942. The island was Guadal Canal, a green mountainous scar of jungle in the southeastern Solomon Sea, named by Spanish explorers four centuries earlier for a village in Andalucia. But Guadal Canal had an airfield, or rather, Guadal Canal was going to have an airfield. Japanese naval construction battalions had been carving one out of the coastal plane at Lunga Point for weeks.

When it was finished, land-based Japanese bombers would be able to reach the sea lanes between the United States and Australia. They would be able to cut the supply lines. They would be able to isolate the entire South Pacific. The airfield had to be taken and it had to be taken now. So on that morning, the first marine division came ashore.

They came ashore under the command of Major General Alexander Archer Vandergrift, 55 years old, Virginia, quiet, methodical. the kind of officer who spoke in complete sentences and never raised his voice. Vandergrift had spent his career in the small wars of the Caribbean and had never commanded a division in combat.

Neither had most of his officers. Neither had almost any of his men. They were young, painfully young. The average marine in the first division that morning was 19 years old. Some were 17 and had lied about their age. Some were 21 and already married. Almost none of them had ever fired a rifle at another human being.

They landed against no resistance. The Japanese construction workers ran into the jungle. The unfinished airrip fell into American hands within 36 hours. The Marines renamed it Henderson Field after a pilot killed at midway 2 months earlier. They dug a defensive perimeter around it, a rough oval 3 mi long, 2 mi deep, and settled in to wait.

They did not wait long. 2,500 miles to the north at the Japanese naval fortress on the island of Truck, a 50-year-old army colonel was reading a cable that had just arrived from Rabal. His name was Konowo Ichiki. He had been born in Shizuoka Prefecture in 1892. He had graduated from the Imperial Japanese Army Academy in 1916, the 28th class.

He had spent two tours as an instructor at the infantry school in Chiba where he had drilled into an entire generation of young officers a single uncompromising doctrine. The doctrine was this. Spirit defeats matter. The bayonet defeats the machine gun. The Japanese soldier properly trained and properly motivated is worth 10 of any enemy on Earth.

Ichiki was not a philosopher. He was a believer and he had proof. On the night of July 7th, 1937, Ichiki had been the battalion commander whose actions escalated the incident at the Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing. The incident that ignited full-scale war between Japan and China. In the 5 years since, he had watched his doctrine be vindicated on battlefield after battlefield.

China had fallen, Malaya had fallen, Singapore had fallen, the Philippines had fallen. American and British armies twice the size of the Japanese forces attacking them had surrendered, been captured, been marched to death. The bayonet worked. The spirit worked. Ichiki had been chosen earlier that summer to command the ground assault on Midway Island.

The Japanese Navy’s catastrophic defeat there in June had cancelled his mission. He had never gotten the chance to test his doctrine against the Americans. Now, reading the cable from Rabal, he was being given that chance. His orders were simple. Take a portion of the 28th regiment, roughly 900 men, the elite advance element, and land on Guadal Canal.

Move to the American airfield, recapture it, drive the Marines into the sea. The cable also contained an intelligence estimate. According to the estimate, there were approximately 2,000 American troops on Guadal Canal. This was the first mistake. There were not 2,000 American troops on Guadal Canal. There were 11,000.

The intelligence estimate was based on a single reconnaissance flight over the Lunga perimeter on August 12th. The Japanese staff officer conducting the flight had looked down at empty beaches, empty roads, empty air strip. He had seen almost no one. He had drawn the obvious conclusion. The conclusion was wrong.

The Marines had not withdrawn. The Marines were in the jungle. The Marines were digging, camouflaging, sighting their machine guns, laying wire, ranging their mortars, and waiting. The Marines were doing exactly what Marines are trained to do, and they were doing it invisibly under a triple canopy of palm and mahogany and vine from a plane at 10,000 ft.

But the report went up the chain, and at Imperial General Headquarters, no one questioned it. The Battle of the Tanaru was already decided. It was decided before Ichiki set foot on the island. Before he left truck, Ichiki was briefed by the staff of the 17th Army. He was told what to expect. He was told the enemy strength.

He was told the terrain. At the end of the briefing, according to accounts preserved in Japanese archives, Ichiki asked whether after retaking the airfield on Guadal Canal, his detachment could also retake Tulagi, the smaller island across the sound that had also fallen to the Marines on August 7th. The room went quiet.

Tulagi was defended by a full American regiment. Retaking it would require an amphibious assault across 20 miles of open water against dugin infantry without air cover, without naval support, without reserves. Ichiki was asking whether he could do this with 900 men after he had already retaken the airfield with 900 men.

The question tells us everything about the mind of Kona Ichiki in August of 1942. He was not stupid. He was not inexperienced. He was in fact one of the most decorated infantry officers in the Imperial Army. But he was infected and the disease had a name. The Japanese called it Shri Bio, victory fever. It was the mental sickness that had settled on the officer corps after Pearl Harbor, after Singapore, after Baton.

It was the belief that the Japanese soldier was by nature and by training superior to any Western enemy. It was the belief that boldness alone won battles. It was the belief that intelligence failures did not matter, that terrain did not matter, that numbers did not matter because spirit conquered all.

Cheeki had it, his officers had it, his men had it, and he was about to carry it on six destroyers into the guns of the first marine division. The destroyers left truck on the night of August 16th. There were six of them. They carried 916 men of the 28th regiment, the first element of the Ichiki detachment.

The remaining 1,200 men of the detachment would follow in slower transports 2 days behind. Ichiki decided not to wait for them. On the night of August 18th, the destroyers reached Guadal Canal. They put in at Tyvu Point, a coastal inlet roughly 20 m east of Henderson Field. The men came ashore in silence.

The destroyers turned and vanished into the darkness before dawn. 916 men now stood on a beach in enemy territory. Ichiki formed them up. He gave a brief speech. He reminded them of the honor of the regiment, the will of the emperor, the certainty of victory. He told them they would march that day and the next through the jungle.

And on the third night, they would strike the American line at a place where the jungle met the sea, a place called on Japanese maps, the mouth of the Elu River. The Americans had mislabeled the river on their own maps. They were calling it the Tenaru. The name would stick. The battle would be remembered forever by a name that was wrong. The march began at dawn.

20 miles to the west. Three young men were digging a hole. The hole was on the western bank of Alligator Creek, the tidal lagoon at the mouth of the misnamed river. The men were digging with entrenching tools, cursing quietly, sweating through their utility shirts in the damp equatorial heat.

The oldest of them was Corporal Loy Diamond. He was about 23 years old. He was Jewish from Brooklyn. He was the gun commander. The gunner was Private First Class Johnny Rivers. He was 22. He was a Native American from rural Pennsylvania. His fellow Marines liked him. He talked quietly, laughed easily, and could strip a Browning machine gun blindfolded.

The third man was Private Almid. Albert Andrew Schmid was 21 years old. He had been born in the Burholm neighborhood of Philadelphia on October 20th, 1920. His mother had died young. He had worked as an apprentice steel burner at the Dodge Steel Company. He had a girlfriend named Ruth Hartley.

Everyone called her Babs, who worked the counter at Sears. On the morning of December 7th, 1941, Almid had been listening to the radio when the news came through from Pearl Harbor. The next day, December 8th, he had walked into a recruiting office and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. He had told Babs he wanted to be done with the war and home in time to marry her.

Now he was on Guadal Canal digging a hole for a water cooled Browning M1917 machine gun with a Jew from Brooklyn and a Native American from Pennsylvania. And he had never in his life fired a shot at another human being. The three of them had almost nothing in common. They had different faiths, different origins, different accents, different families, different futures.

In 24 hours, one of them would be dead. One of them would be permanently blinded. One of them would be shot through the arm. But right now, on the afternoon of August 19th, 1942, they were just three young men in a hole, arguing about who had the harder job, the gunner, the loader, or the man who had to carry the water cans.

They finished the hole before sunset. They covered it with palm frrons. They laid the barrel of the Browning on its tripod, pointing east across the creek, across the sand, into the darkness. They did not know that Colonel Kona Ichiki at that exact moment was less than 15 mi away, walking toward them through the jungle.

That night, the night of August 19th, something began to change along the eastern edge of the marine perimeter. Reconnaissance patrols reported movement in the treeine. A native scout came in and said he had seen strange men on the coastal trail. He could not say how many. He could not say how far. He could only say they were not Marines.

Lieutenant Colonel Edwin Pollock, commander of the second battalion, first Marines, 42 years old, calm, professional, a career officer who did not startle easily, walked the length of his line and spoke quietly to his company commanders. He told them to double the watch. He told them to keep the men off the skyline.

He told them to be ready. He returned to his command post and waited. He had a bad feeling. He would spend the next day trying to understand what exactly was coming toward him. He would not understand it, not really, until a man staggered into his command post late on the night of August 20th with his throat cut and his arm sliced open and his mouth full of blood. The man was not an American.

The man was a 50-year-old retired policeman from Guadal Canal who had that same morning been captured by soldiers of the Ichiki detachment. They had tortured him for hours. They had bayonetted him multiple times. They had left him for dead. And somehow somehow he had gotten free and made his way through the darkness to the American line.

His name was Jacob Vusa and he was bringing the warning that would help save the First Marine Division. He was about 50 years old. He had been born around the year 1892 in a small village on the northern coast of Guadal Canal. He had been educated by missionaries. He had joined the armed native constabularary of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate in 1916.

The same year Kona Ichiki graduated from the Imperial Military Academy in Tokyo. He had served as a policeman for 25 years. He had risen to the rank of sergeant major. He had retired in 1941 at the age of 49 to spend the rest of his life fishing and farming and watching his grandchildren grow up. The war had not permitted this.

When the Japanese had come to the Solomons in the spring of 1942, Voza had volunteered his services to a young Scottish officer of the Coast Watchers, a man named Martin Clemens, 27 years old, a former district officer of the British colonial administration. Clemens had been hiding in the hills, watching Japanese ship movements, radioing intelligence to Australia.

He needed men who knew the jungle. Voza knew every path on the island. On August 7th, the day the Marines had landed, Vuza had found an American Navy pilot from the aircraft carrier USS Wasp lying in the brush behind Japanese lines. The pilot had been shot down. Voza had guided him for 2 days through enemy territory back to the American perimeter.

When they arrived, one of the Marines had given Voza a gift. The gift was a small American flag. It was made of silk. It was about the size of a handkerchief. It could be folded four times. Voza folded it and kept it in his loin cloth. He carried that flag for the next 13 days. He was wearing it, folded against his skin when the Japanese found him. It was the morning of August 20th.

Vuza was returning from a scouting mission east of the American perimeter. He was moving alone on foot through jungle he had known for 50 years. He was doing what he had done for the Marines a dozen times already. Counting soldiers, marking positions, memorizing paths. A Japanese patrol saw him first.

They stopped him. They searched him. They found the flag. He was taken to a clearing near a coconut grove. He was tied to a tree with his hands behind his back and his ankles bound together. A Japanese officer began to ask him questions. How many Americans on the island? Where were the machine gun positions? Where were the artillery batteries? Where was General Vandergri’s headquarters? Vuza did not answer.

He did not answer the first time. He did not answer the second time. He did not answer for the next several hours. The officer became angry. He drew his sword. He did not use the sword on Vuza. Not yet. Instead, he ordered one of his soldiers to use a bayonet. The bayonet went into Vuza’s arms. He did not speak.

It went into his shoulder. He did not speak. It went into his face, tearing through the skin below his eye. He did not speak. It went into his stomach. He did not speak. Finally, the blade went into his throat. Blood filled his mouth. Blood filled his airway. He could no longer have spoken if he had wanted to.

The Japanese officer waited. He watched. He listened. Vuza made no sound. Finally, satisfied that the old man was dying, the officer gave an order. The patrol gathered their equipment and moved off toward the west, toward the American perimeter, toward the position where the rest of Ichiki’s detachment was assembling for the night attack.

They left Jacob Vuza tied to the tree. They assumed he would be dead within the hour. They were wrong. Va was 50 years old. He weighed perhaps 140 lbs. He had multiple bayonet wounds. He had lost, by later medical estimates, close to half the blood in his body. He could not close his throat.

He could barely see out of his right eye. His left arm was almost useless, but his hands were still tied behind him, and his mouth still worked. And the rope binding his wrists was made of ordinary jute, thick, coarse, tough, but not impossible. He worked at the rope with his teeth. He twisted his head against the bark of the tree.

He worked saliva and blood into the fibers to soften them. Could not see the rope. He could only feel it. At some point, no one has ever recorded exactly when, the rope parted, his hands came free, he fell forward onto the jungle floor. He did not stand. He could not stand. So, he began to move, crawling, half walking, dragging himself through the darkness in the direction of the American lines.

Somewhere in the late hours of the night of August 20th, he heard American voices. He tried to call out. He could not. His throat would not make a sound. He dragged himself into the open until Marines from the second battalion found him. They thought at first that he was already dead. Then his eyes moved.

They tried to take him to the aid station. He refused. He gestured toward the front, toward the command post of Lieutenant Colonel Edwin Pollock. He shook his head at every attempt to redirect him. He mouthed words no one could understand. They carried him to Pollock. Martin Clemens was there when they brought Vuza in. He would later write that he could hardly bear to look at his old friend.

Vuza’s throat had a hole in it big enough to see the inside of. His face was a mask of dried blood. His arms hung wrong. His stomach was seeping. They laid him on the ground behind a jeep. Pollock knelt beside him. And Vuza, a man who had just endured hours of torture and dragged himself through jungle to reach this moment, did not ask for water.

He did not ask for morphine. He did not ask for a doctor. He gave his report. He forced the words out through the wreckage of his voice box in the pigeon English he had learned as a young policeman 40 years earlier. Japanese soldiers were coming. They were coming in strength. They were coming from the east and the attack would come that night.

Then he collapsed. They rushed him to the surgical tent. He would receive 16 pints of blood in the following 12 days. He would live. But that is another story. Because in that moment when Vuza finished his report and lost consciousness, Lieutenant Colonel Pollock understood for the first time what was coming toward his line.

Pollock did what an experienced infantry officer does when he knows an attack is imminent and he has already dug in on good ground with well-sighted weapons. He ordered his men to hold their fire. Do not shoot at the first sound. Do not shoot at the first movement. Wait. Let them come closer.

Close enough that the interlocking Brownings and the canister rounds from the 37 millimeter guns would tear them apart. This was not a trick. This was not deception. This was fire discipline. The oldest and hardest lesson of the First World War taught to every American infantry officer since 1918.

Every soldier’s instinct is to shoot the moment he sees an enemy. Every officer’s job is to make him wait. The Marines on the eastern perimeter that night would have to wait for men to walk up to their guns. Some of the men in those machine gun pits were 19 years old. Some of them had never fired a Browning at anything but a paper target.

They were about to fire it into the faces of the finest light infantry regiment in the Imperial Japanese Army. The terrain worked in their favor. Alligator Creek was not in fact an Alligator Creek. There are no alligators in the Solomon Islands. There are saltwater crocodiles which the Marines had never seen before and could not identify.

The creek itself was not really a creek. It was a tidal lagoon, brackish and slowmoving, cut off from the sea by a narrow sandbar that ran at low tide, no more than 25 to 30 m across. That sandbar was the only way across. The Japanese had to funnel through it. On the western bank, dug in behind sandbags and palm logs, the Marines had placed their heavy Browning M9917 water cooled machine guns in a pattern the army called interlocking fire.

Each gun did not shoot straight forward. Each gun shot diagonally across the front of the position next to it so that any enemy on the sandbar would be caught in the crossfire of two guns at once. One on his left, one on his right. Behind the machine gun stood the 37 mm anti-tank guns of the regiment. These were small wheeled cannons designed to punch holes in armored vehicles.

But the Marines had loaded them with a special kind of ammunition, canister shot. A canister round is essentially a giant shotgun shell. When it leaves the barrel of a 37 mm gun, it sprays roughly 120 steel balls in a widening cone. At 50 m, that cone is wide enough to sweep an entire sandbar.

Behind the canister guns were 81 mm mortars. Behind the mortars, dug in 2 mi to the west were the 75 mm howitzers of the 11th Marines. Behind the howitzers was Henderson Field, and on Henderson Field were the Wildcats and the Dauntlesses that would take off at first light. The Marines were not defending a beach.

They were defending a killing zone. and Ichiki was about to walk his men straight into the middle of it. The first sound came at 1:30 in the morning. It was mortar fire. Japanese fire dropped on the western bank of the creek mixed with bursts from Japanese machine guns firing wildly into the trees.

The purpose of this fire was not to kill Marines. The purpose was to make the Marines shoot back, to get them to reveal their positions, to expose their machine guns, to draw them out. The Marines did not shoot back. They lay in their holes. They listened. They waited. Then at some minute between 3:00 and 3:10, a green flare rose over the sandbar and burst.

And in that sickly green light, roughly 100 Japanese soldiers came running out of the trees on the eastern bank, screaming. They were screaming in English or trying to, “Marine, you die. Marine, you die tonight.” They came at a full run in a mass with their rifles held forward and their bayonets fixed.

They crossed the sandbar in less than a minute. They crossed 60 m. They crossed 50 m. They crossed 40 m. At 30 m, the marine line opened up. Every machine gun on the Western Bank fired at once. Every canister gun fired at once. Every rifleman with a clear shot fired at once. The sandbar disappeared. That is not a figure of speech.

Marines who were there described it exactly that way. One moment there was a strip of white sand full of running men, and the next moment there was a low cloud of steam and dust, and something dark churning in the middle of it. And when the dust settled, the running men were no longer running. They were piled, layered, one on top of another, three and four deep in some places where the canister shot had caught them. But not all of them fell.

A small group, perhaps a dozen, perhaps 15, made it across. They came into the marine line. They came into the first row of foxholes, and for the next 20 minutes, in a stretch of jungle no bigger than a suburban backyard, the Marines and the men who had made it across the creek fought each other with bayonets, with entrenching tools, with rifle butts, with fists.

Some of the Marines in those foxholes were 19 years old. The defense almost failed in the first 15 minutes. Almost. By the time the last of the Japanese in the perimeter had been killed with an entrenching tool to the base of the skull, the second wave was already forming on the eastern bank. There would be more waves before the sun came up.

In a machine gun position on the western bank, roughly 50 yd south of the sandbar, three young men were watching all of this through a slit in a wall of sandbags. Corporal Loy Diamond, Private First Class Johnny Rivers, Private Almid Rivers was on the gun. He had been on the gun since midnight.

He was crouched behind the Browning, his cheek against the wooden grip, his hands on the traversing wheels. Schmid, to his right, was on the ammunition, feeding 250 round belts of 30 caliber cartridges into the receiver, keeping the linked brass smooth so it would not jam. Diamond above them both was on his knees, watching the sandbar, watching the tracers, calling out targets.

When the green flare went up, rivers opened fire. His first burst went into the flank of the running Japanese column. Schmid could see the tracers arcing across the water and into the mass of men on the sandbar. He could see men falling. He could see men not falling. He could see men still coming.

Rivers fired again and again. Then rivers stopped firing. A single bullet, no one has ever known who fired it or from where, had come across the water and hit him in the head. He was dead before his hands left the grips. Schmid stared for a moment, then he slid into Rivers’s place behind the gun.

He had never fired a Browning in combat. He had trained on it at Paris Island. He had practiced with it in the Coconut Groves the week before. He had never held down the trigger of a machine gun while men ran toward him screaming. He held it down now. The Browning fired at roughly 500 rounds a minute. In short bursts, 3 seconds, 4 seconds, Schmid poured belt after belt of ammunition across the sandbar and into the water beyond it.

Diamond above him would slap him on the arm to redirect the fire. Left shoulder for a target to the left, right shoulder for a target to the right. Schmid would swing the barrel. Diamond would slap. Schmid would swing. They fired that way for more than an hour. At some point during the second wave, a Japanese bullet came through the sandbags at an angle and punched a hole in the water jacket of the Browning.

The jacket was what kept the barrel cool. It was a metal sleeve full of water that surrounded the barrel and absorbed heat. When the water leaked out, warm at first, then boiling onto Smid’s lap and thighs. The barrel began to glow. It glowed dull red, then bright red. Machine gun barrels, when they glow like that, are supposed to seize.

The rifling wears away. The mechanism jams. The gun stops firing. The Browning did not stop firing. Schmid kept it under control by firing in shorter and shorter bursts, letting the barrel cool between them, praying it would hold together for one more minute, one more belt, one more wave.

Diamond above him was hit in the arm. He did not leave the pit. He crouched lower, held his wounded arm against his chest with his good hand, and kept slapping Schmid’s shoulders. Left, right, left, right, as the tracers came in through the palm frrons, and the water sprayed and the barrel glowed. They fought like that for 4 hours.

Two men, 21 and 23 years old, one machine gun. Behind the Japanese line in a rear position half a mile to the east, a captain named Yoshimi Sawada was trying to change his colonel’s mind. Suada was a staff officer. He had come forward in the middle of the second wave to see what was happening on the sandbar.

He had seen had shaken him. He had seen the second wave perhaps 200 men walk into the same guns that had destroyed the first and disappear in the same cloud of dust. He had gone looking for Major Nouo Kuramoto, the battalion commander leading the assault, to plead for a change of tactics.

He had found Kuramoto and told him what he had seen. He had told Kuramoto to stop the frontal attack, to find a place upstream, to cross the lagoon somewhere the Marines were not expecting. Kuramoto refused. Kuramoto said he needed to see the sandbar himself. Sawada begged him not to go. Kuramoto went. He walked forward with his agitant out of the treeine onto the eastern edge of the sandbar in the pale gray light of a flare that had just gone up.

The Marines had by now ranged every meter of that sandbar with a browning. Kuramoto and his agitant did not take three steps before both of them were killed. Their bodies fell within a foot of each other and were still there when the sun came up. Sawada turned and ran to the he found Colonel Ichiki in a command post further back in the jungle.

He gave his report. He said the frontal assault could not succeed. He said the men were being annihilated. Ichiki listened. He was calm. He asked one question. How many enemy machine guns? Sada did not know. Ichiki looked at him. Then Ichiki gave his order. Continue the attack.

Sometime near 4:00 in the morning, a Japanese soldier who had crawled forward alone reached a point about 15 m from the machine gunpit where Al Schmid and Laroy Diamond were still firing. He was carrying a hand grenade. The Japanese type 97 fragmentation grenade was small, smaller than an American baseball.

To arm it, the user pulled a pin and struck the fuse against a hard surface. The fuse burned for four to 5 seconds. Then it detonated. The soldier struck the fuse against the buttstock of his rifle. He waited. He threw. The grenade came through the palm frrons and landed inside the machine gun pit about a foot from Al Schmid’s leg.

Diamond saw it. There was no time to move. There was no time to shout. The grenade exploded. Fragments went into Schmid’s right hand. Fragments went into his right forearm. Fragments went into his right shoulder. Fragments went into his face. Two fragments went into his eyes.

His right eye was destroyed instantly. His left eye was torn open and would never see again. Al Schmid, 21 years old, a steel worker from Philadelphia, a boy who had joined the Marine Corps to be done with the war and married to a girl named Babs, went blind in a Japanese hand grenade explosion at approximately 4:00 in the morning on August 21st, 1942. He was 21 years old.

He would never see the color of anything again. He did not leave the gun. He could not see the sandbar. He could not see the tracers. He could not see the Japanese soldiers who were still coming, but he could still feel Diamond’s hand on his shoulder. Left, right, left, right.

And he could still feel the trigger under his finger, and he could still hear the sound of the men running toward him. He kept firing. He kept firing for another hour. At 5 in the morning, Ichiki committed his last card. He ordered a company of his surviving men to leave the sandbar. He ordered them into the surf.

He ordered them to wade out into the shallow water of the sea and to move west along the beach and to attack the marine line from the flank where the sand met the ocean where the machine guns could not reach. The men waited out. They did not know that the 75 mm howitzers of the 11th Marines 2 mi inland had already been zeroed on the water.

The howitzers opened fire when the flanking company was waist deep. A 75mm shell exploding in shallow saltwater sends a column of foam 30 feet into the air and hurls fragments of shrapnel outward at 3,000 ft per second. It kills every living thing within 20 m of the impact point. The Marines who watched from the shore later said the sea itself turned pink.

One of them wrote a description of that morning of the tracers arcing across the water in the last minutes before dawn. He wrote that the tracers looked like sparks, pretty, almost delicate, dancing on their toes in the darkness. He called them sparkles. He called them sparkles gay with the mirth of hell.

By 6:00, the Japanese assault had broken. There were no more waves. There were only survivors, scattered, exhausted, running in twos and threes back into the coconut grove on the eastern bank, hoping to reach the jungle before the sun came up. The Marines let them run. They were tired.

They had been fighting for five hours. They had watched their friends die in the pits beside them. Some of them had used up every belt of ammunition they had. They were content in that first gray light to let the last of the Japanese slip back into the trees and disappear. That was when the order came down from General Vandergrift.

Vandergrift had spent the entire battle at his division command post, three miles to the west, listening on the field telephone as Pollock’s battalion held its line. He had received reports throughout the night. He had approved the fire missions. He had held back the reserves.

Now, in the early hours of full daylight, he made the coldest decision of the battle. He gave the order to seal off the retreat. He directed Colonel Clifton Kates, commander of the First Marines, 48 years old, a veteran of Below Wood in 1918, to move the first battalion of the First Marines around the southern edge of the enemy position, cross the creek upstream, and swing east along the coast.

He wanted Kates in behind the survivors before they could reach the jungle. He was not defending the perimeter anymore. He was closing a trap. The men of the Ichiki detachment, the ones who had survived the frontal assaults, the ones who had watched their officers die on the sandbar, the ones who had turned and run for the tree line at first light, were about to discover that there was no tree line to run to.

The Marines were already there. The killing had not ended. It was about to enter its final phase. The sun came up over Guadal Canal at 6:28 on the morning of August 21st, 1942. It came up slowly in the way the sun comes up in the tropics. A red disc pushing through the humidity, throwing long yellow light across the coconut grove on the eastern bank of Alligator Creek, illuminating what the Marines had done in the darkness.

They were not ready to see it. The sandbar was no longer white. It was black in some places, red in others, and in the center it was covered, completely covered by the bodies of men. The bodies were piled two deep, three deep in places. Some of them were still moving. Most of them were not.

The tide, which had come in during the night, had lifted the ones nearest the water and floated them a few meters into the lagoon, where they now drifted slowly with the current face down, their uniforms dark with seawater. The Marines on the western bank stood up in their foxholes and looked. Some of them did not speak for the rest of the day.

One young marine from a machine gun position further south would write years later that he had believed for the rest of his life that the smell of that morning was the true smell of war. Not gunpowder, not smoke. The smell of what happens when several hundred men die in a small space in tropical heat over the course of a single night.

That smell would still be in that coconut grove 3 days later when the burial details finished their work. But the killing was not finished. Not yet. At 7:00, four American light tanks began to move. They were M3 Stewarts, small, fast, thinly armored vehicles, each carrying a 37 mm gun and two machine guns.

They had been held in reserve during the night on the western side of the creek, waiting for daylight. Now they crossed the sandbar in single file. They picked their way through the bodies with a strange, careful slowness, the way a man walks through a graveyard at dusk. They did not fire on the sandbar.

There was nothing left to high fire at on the sandbar. They fired when they reached the eastern bank and rolled into the coconut grove where the survivors of the Ichiki detachment had gone to ground. The coconut grove was about a mile deep. It was full of Japanese soldiers who had reached the treeine during the night and were now hiding behind palm trunks in shallow depressions under fallen fronds.

Most of them were wounded. Some were out of ammunition. Some were unconscious. A few were still trying to organize a resistance. The tanks went in among them. They fired their machine guns into the fronds. They fired their 37 mm guns into anything that looked like a bunker. And when they came upon a man on the ground, wounded or dying or already dead, they did not stop.

They did not go around. They rolled forward at 3 or 4 m an hour, and the treads pressed the man into the sand. One officer who walked the ground behind the tanks that morning later described it as looking like a meat grinder had passed over the sand. That was the phrase he used, a meat grinder.

There is no record of what the young Marines said to each other on the walk back to their positions that morning. There is no record because for most of them they never spoke about it again. Not to their wives, not to their children, not to anyone. Around 8:00 in the morning along the edge of the coconut grove, the Marines began to learn something they would carry with them for the rest of the war.

They approached wounded Japanese soldiers to give them water, to bandage their wounds, to take them prisoner. It was what young men trained in field medicine did. It was what Americans did. Some of the wounded men were still holding grenades. Some of them were still holding pistols. Some of them had waited, motionless, for a marine to lean close.

A Navy corman, unarmed, kneeling to help a man on the ground, died with him when the grenade went off between them. Another Marine was killed when he rolled a body over with his boot, and the officer beneath him raised a pistol and fired. At the end of the morning, a new understanding had spread down the line, not as an order, not as policy, but as the kind of knowledge that Marines pass to Marines when the price of not knowing is death.

Do not approach a wounded Japanese soldier. Do not accept a surrender without first making sure he is unarmed. Assume everybody on the ground is still dangerous. It was not written down. It was never entered into the official history of the campaign. But every Marine who fought at Guadal Canal knew it.

And every Marine who fought at Terawa and Saipon and Euoima and Okinawa learned some version of it too. The lesson of the coconut grove at Alligator Creek was learned in blood on the morning of August 21st, 1942, and it hardened over the years that followed into the way American forces fought the rest of the Pacific War.

By 11:00, the shooting in the Coconut Grove had mostly stopped. The Marines began to walk through the trees, counting the dead. The count would take 3 days. The number they finally arrived at, the number that was cabled back to Pearl Harbor and to Washington and eventually printed in newspapers across America, was between 774 and 800 Japanese soldiers killed in the space of a single night.

15 more had been taken prisoner. Most of those 15 were unconscious when they were captured, which was why they had not managed to kill themselves. Of Colonel Ichiki’s original 916 men, only about 128 had escaped. They fled east, back along the coastal trail, back toward Tyvu Point, where the six destroyers had put them ashore three nights before.

When they reached the beach, they radioed Rabal. Their message, in the words that reached the headquarters of the 17th Army, was that the Ichi detachment had been almost annihilated at a point short of the airfield. At Rabbal, the officers of the 17th Army read the message and refused to believe it. They cabled back.

They asked for clarification. They asked whether the message had been garbled in transmission. A regiment of the Imperial Japanese Army could not be almost annihilated in a single night by a defensive line of the United States Marines. That was not what happened in this war. That had never happened in this war. They asked again.

The survivors radioed again. The message did not change. The Marines had lost 41 men killed and 71 wounded. The exchange rate was almost 20 to1. Colonel Konowo Ichiki died sometime between 5 and 7:00 on the morning of August 21st. The exact time is not known. The exact cause is not known.

There are two accounts and both are in the historical record and no one can tell you which one is true. The first account is Japanese. According to the Japanese account, Ichiki understood sometime after the failure of the flanking attempt in the surf that his mission had failed. He gathered the men still with him at his rear command post.

He unwrapped the regimental colors of the 28th Infantry Regiment. He set the colors on fire. He watched them burn. Then he drew his tanto, the shortblade an officer of the Imperial Army carried for exactly this purpose, and he opened his stomach in the ritual manner. The second account is American.

According to the American account, Ichiki was killed in the fighting sometime during the last hour of the battle when a bullet from a marine machine gun found him near his forward observation post. His body, according to this account, was later identified by documents in his tunic. Either version is possible.

Neither has ever been definitively proven. What is certain is this. On the morning of August 21st, 1942, Colonel Konowo Ichiki, the man who had escalated the Marco Polo Bridge incident, the man who had believed in the primacy of spirit over matter, the man who had asked whether he could also take back Tulagi with 900 men, was dead on the eastern bank of Alligator Creek.

He was 50 years old. He was buried along with most of his regiment in a mass grave that the Marines dug 3 days later with a bulldozer. The bulldozer was needed because there were too many bodies to bury by hand. The Japanese Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo took several days to accept what had happened.

When they finally did accept it, they responded in the only way the doctrine allowed them to respond. They sent more men. Three weeks later, at a piece of jungle high ground south of Henderson Field, a fresh Japanese brigade under a general named Kiotake Kawaguchi launched another night attack against the Marine perimeter.

This attack was better planned than Ichiki’s. It came from three sides. It came with more men. It came with more artillery. It failed, too. That battle was called Edson’s Ridge. Hundreds of Japanese soldiers died there. A year and a half later, on the island of Saipan in the Marana Islands, the last surviving officers of a doomed garrison would organize the largest banzai charge of the entire war.

4,311 Japanese soldiers would die on the morning of July 7th, 1944, running at American machine guns with bayonets and in some cases with bamboo spears. The lesson of Alligator Creek was never learned by the men who needed to learn it. That understanding of how deep the will to die ran on the other side, of what it would take to end this war was one of the reasons the war ended the way it ended.

On the morning of August 21st, 1942, somewhere in the row houses of Philadelphia, a young woman named Ruth Hartley, Babs to her friends, was getting ready for another day at work. She was in her early 20s. She worked behind a counter at Sears. She had a photograph of a young marine in a frame beside her bed. She did not yet know that on an island she had never heard of 6,000 mi away across the widest ocean on Earth, the young man in that photograph had just gone blind.

The telegram would come in time. She would read it. She would go inside. She would sit down. And when he came home, carried off a train by two Navy corman, his face still bandaged, his hands feeling for the platform, he could not see, she would be there. she would marry him. The men who had fought that night at Alligator Creek scattered as the men of every war eventually do into the rest of their lives.

Jacob Vuza spent 12 days in the surgical tent behind the marine perimeter. He received 16 pints of blood, an amount that in a man his size is essentially a complete replacement. Somehow he lived. 12 days after he had reached Pollock’s command post with his throat opened, he walked out of the hospital tent on his own feet. General Vandergri presented him with the Silver Star personally. Voza went back to work.

He served as the chief scout for the second Marine Raider Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson on the long patrol behind Japanese lines. That November, 30 days in the jungle, hundreds of Japanese soldiers killed, a handful of Marines lost. Vuza came out of the jungle at the end of it, thinner and quieter, and reported for further duty. The war ended.

He went home to his village. He returned to his family. The Americans gave him the Silver Star and the Legion of Merit. The British gave him the George Medal and made him a member of the Order of the British Empire. Queen Elizabeth II later promoted him to officer of the Order of the British Empire.

In 1979, when he was in his late 80s, she promoted him again, this time to knight commander of the British Empire and he became formerly Sir Jacob Vuza. He was also made an honorary sergeant- major of the United States Marine Corps. He died on March 15th, 1984 in his village on Guadal Canal at the approximate age of 92.

His memorial stands today in front of the police headquarters building in Honara, the capital of the Solomon Islands. The plaque placed there by the Marine Raider Association many years after the war ends with a single line. We dedicate to Sergeant Major Vuza, friend of the Marines.

Al Schmid was flown to a naval hospital in the fall of 1942. His eyes were beyond repair. The Navy doctors examined him and told him what he had already been told at the aid station on Guadal Canal that he would not see again ever. He was 22 years old. He was engaged to a woman named Ruth Hartley back in Philadelphia who had been waiting for him since the previous December.

When he was well enough to travel, he was sent home. He wrote her a letter first dictating it to a nurse in which he told her that he understood completely if she did not want to marry a blind man. She met him at the train station. She married him. The Marine Corps awarded him the Navy Cross for his conduct at Alligator Creek.

The citation described how he had continued to man his machine gun after being blinded by a grenade. Life magazine put him on the cover. A journalist named Roger Butterfield wrote a book about him. Warner Brothers made a movie about him in 1945, Pride of the Marines, starring John Garfield as Schmid and Elellanar Parker as Ruth.

For a few years after the war, Al Schmid was one of the most famous enlisted men in America. Then he was forgotten in the way America forgets its wars. He and Ruth had a family. They moved to a small house on the northeast side of Philadelphia. He worked as a parts assembler for a metal stamping company.

Later, they moved to Florida where he lived out the rest of his life. Every year on the night of August 20th, he would sit in a chair in his living room and not speak to anyone until the next morning. His wife Ruth understood. He died on December 1st, 1982 in Florida. He was 62 years old. Corporal Loy Diamond survived the war.

He returned to Brooklyn. He lived a long, quiet, mostly private life. He did not seek out publicity. He did not give many interviews. He was one of the men who had been there in the dark at the machine gun, and he chose to carry it quietly. Private First Class Johnny Rivers is buried in a military cemetery.

His grave is quiet. His name does not appear in most books about the Battle of the Teneru. There is no film about him. There is no monument. He was 22 years old when a Japanese bullet came across the water and killed him before he could take his hands off the grips of the Browning.

One of the Marines who had been in a nearby position wrote decades later about that night. He wrote about Schmid who had lived and gone home to marry Babs and been played by John Garfield in the movies. And then he wrote about Rivers. He wrote a single sentence and it has stayed in the historical record ever since. America wanted a hero fast, a live one.

The Indian was dead. Lieutenant Colonel Edwin Pollock finished the war as a colonel. He went on to serve in later campaigns. He retired eventually as a lieutenant general. Colonel Clifton Kates who had commanded the encirclement force on the morning of August 21st went on to command the fourth marine division at Tinian and Ewima.

In 1948 he became the 19th commandant of the Marine Corps. Alexander Vandergrift was awarded the Medal of Honor for his conduct of the entire Guadal Canal campaign. the six months of grinding, brutal, back andforth fighting that finally ended in February 1943 with the last Japanese troops evacuated from the island.

He rose to four stars. He served as the 18th commandant of the Marine Corps from 1944 to 1947. He died in 1973. His memoirs are still in print. Martin Clemens, the young Scottish coast watcher who had walked to Pollock’s command post beside Voza’s stretcher on the night of August 20th, returned to civilian life after the war.

He wrote a book about his years in the Solomon Islands. He remained a friend of Vuzas until Vuza’s death and outlived him by several years. He was one of the last men alive who had been there, who had seen the moment Voza gave the report that helped save a battalion, and he died with the memory of it still clear.

The battle that took place on the sandbar at the mouth of Alligator Creek in the pre-dawn hours of August 21st, 1942 was at the time a small event. Guadal Canal itself would go on for another 5 months. Tens of thousands of men would eventually be listed as dead, wounded, or missing on both sides before the island was declared secure in February of 1943.

The Marines who survived that morning at the creek would be pushed back into the line again and again, and many of them them would die in later engagements at Bloody Ridge, at the Matanakau, at the airfield perimeter during the great Japanese offensive of October. But the battle of the Tinaru, the wrong name for a battle at the wrong creek, was the first one.

It was the first time in the eight months since Pearl Harbor that an American ground force had faced a Japanese ground force in a set engagement and won a clear victory. Not delayed the Japanese, not slowed the Japanese, not held the Japanese won. Killed 20 of them for every one American lost.

The myth of the Japanese Superman, the invincible warrior, the natural night fighter, the soldier who did not know how to be defeated, died on that sandbar. He died in the space of about 4 hours between 3:10 and 7:00 in the morning in front of a machine gun manned by a blind kid from Philadelphia and a wounded Jew from Brooklyn.

The Japanese Imperial General Headquarters spent the rest of the war refusing to admit this. The American Marine Corps spent the rest of the war acting on it. Kona Ichiki died for his emperor. Jacob Ruza lived because he refused to speak. Johnny Rivers died first and was forgotten and lies in a quiet cemetery no one visits.

Al Schmid lived and married the girl he had gone to war to come home to and spent 40 years sitting alone in a chair every August in the dark. and the young Marines who had held their fire on the western bank of that creek. The boys of 19 and 20 and 21 who had let the enemy walk to within 30 m of their machine guns before pulling the trigger did not do it because they were confident.

They did not do it because they were fearless. They did not do it because they had a trick. They did it because their officers had taught them what patience cost and what it bought. that at that range on that sandbar with those guns in the dark, waiting was the only way the line would hold.

Waiting was the only way they would live to see the sun come up. Waiting was the only way to win. The United States Marines let the Japanese get too close on the night of August 20th, 1942. Because at that distance, since only at that distance, the killing would be certain. They were right.

Nearly 800 men died in front of them before dawn. And a war that had been going badly for eight months on every front from Pearl Harbor to Wake Island to the Philippines to the beaches of Java began on the sandbar at Alligator Creek slowly, quietly in the pre-dawn dark of a Friday morning in the South Pacific to turn. If you are watching this today in a country that has forgotten most of its wars, remember one thing.

Nearly 800 men died in front of a machine gun line on a sandbar in the South Pacific on a Friday morning in August of 1942 and thousands more would die on the islands that came after before a war that began at Pearl Harbor could end 3 years later on the deck of a battleship in Tokyo Bay. The blind marine from Philadelphia lived until 1982.

The old policeman from Guadal Canal lived until 1984. And somewhere in America tonight, in an attic or a hall closet or the bottom drawer of a bedroom dresser, there is probably a folded flag or a service ribbon in a small box or a photograph of a young man in a Marine uniform who did not come home. That flag, that ribbon, that photograph, this is what they