In 1942, Japan Banzai Charged U.S. Marines. Nobody Warned Them About the Canister Rounds.

On the night of August 21st, 1942, roughly 800 men of the Imperial Japanese Army came out of the jungle on Guadal Canal and charged straight into the dark. They screamed as they came. They believed the Marines dug in on the far side of a narrow sandbar were soft, poorly led men who would break and run the moment steel came at them in the night.

The men charging were not usually wrong about much. This was the Ichiki Detachment, some of the finest light infantry Japan had. What they did not know was what the Marines had dragged down to the water’s edge and buried in the sand. Two 37mm anti-tank guns loaded not with armor-piercing shot but with canister. Each round, a thin metal can packed with 122 steel balls.

At close range, those guns were not cannons anymore. They were the largest shotguns on the island, and they were aimed straight down the sandbar. By the time the sun came up, that strip of sand held the dead of nearly an entire regiment. This is how it happened. To understand that sandbar, you have to understand how badly the Japanese misread the men waiting on the other side of it.

2 weeks earlier on August 7th, the first marine division had landed on Guadal Canal and taken the half-finished airfield the Japanese were building near Lunga Point. The Marines named it Henderson Field. Then the Navy took a beating off Tsavo Island and pulled the transports out before the supplies were fully ashore.

That left roughly 11,000 Marines on a hostile island, low on food, stretched thin, dug in around the one airfield they could not afford to lose. The eastern edge of that perimeter ran up against a sluggish tidal lagoon. Most maps of this battle call it the Tenneroo River. That name is wrong, and the men who fought there knew it.

The real Tenneroo lay further east. This was the eloo and the marines called the lagoon Alligator Creek, though there were no alligators anywhere in the Solomons. Two mistakes stacked on top of each other, and history kept both. What mattered was the sandbar at its mouth. A strip of sand maybe 30 yards long, the one place a man could cross the water dry and keep his footing.

If the Japanese came from the east, they would have to come across it. They came from the east. Colonel Konao Ichiki landed near Tyu Point on the 19th of August with about 900 men. His orders were to scout the marine positions and wait for the rest of his regiment. He did not wait. Japanese command believed the Americans were beaten and half gone, and Ichiki believed it more than anyone.

He had led troops in China for years, and he held the Marines in open contempt. He would not need the rest of the regiment. 900 men and the bayonet would be enough. The Marines already knew he was coming. 2 days earlier, a patrol under Captain Charles Brush, Company A, First Battalion, First Marines, had run into a Japanese patrol near Kohley Point and killed most of them in a short, vicious fight in the grass.

On the bodies were officers in fresh uniforms carrying detailed maps of the Marine positions. Far too much rank for a simple scouting party. Brush understood what it meant. A large, freshly landed force was somewhere close, and it already knew exactly where the marine line was thin. The gun waiting on that sandbar was never designed for what it was about to do.

The 37 mm gun M3 was an anti-tank weapon. Light, low, quick, a flat little cannon on two rubber tired wheels that a crew of five could wrestle into position by hand. Against German armor in North Africa, it was already close to useless, outclassed, and dying. But in the Pacific in 1942, it still had a job and it could fire a round that had nothing to do with tanks at all.

The M2 canister round. Strip away the name and it was a thin metal can filled with 122 hardened steel balls a little over a/ third of an inch across set in resin. When the gun fired, the can ripped apart at the muzzle and threw those balls out in a spreading cone. Effective range about 250 yards. Beyond that, it lost its teeth.

Inside that range against men in the open, it did to a company of infantry what a shotgun does to a bird. Canister was not something the Marines had crates of. It was a specialized round, a small fraction of all the 37 mm ammunition ever made. Somebody on Guadal Canal made the decision to bring it forward and stack it beside the guns on that sandbar.

That decision would matter more than almost any other made that night. Holding that stretch of line was the second battalion, first marines under Lieutenant Colonel Edwin Pollock. Riflemen behind a single strand of barbed wire strung across the sand. Browning machine guns dug in and ranged. Mortars behind them and further back, the 75 mm pack howitzers of the 11th Marines already zeroed on the sandbar itself.

And then in the last hours before the attack, a man came out of the dark who should have been dead. His name was Jacob Vosza. a retired sergeant major of the Solomon Islands Police, a Melanesian scout working for the Coast Watchers. The Japanese had caught him when they found a small American flag hidden on him.

They tied him to a tree and went to work with bayonets. They ran the blades through his arms, his shoulder, his throat, and left him to die. He did not die. He worked himself loose. and he crawled and staggered back toward the marine line and he reached it in time to gasp out a warning that a large Japanese force was right behind him.

The core of that story is solid, even if the distances have grown in the retelling. He was captured, tortured, refused to talk, and warned the Marines anyway. Vuza lived. That alone is close to a miracle. But the warning is the thing that mattered. The Marines on that sandbar went to their guns knowing the storm was coming.

They did not have to wait long. Shortly after midnight, the first Japanese soldiers reached the far bank of the sandbar. Marine listening posts out in front heard them before they saw them. Voices, the clank of equipment, men moving without much care because the Ichuki detachment did not believe there was anything in front of them worth being careful about.

One marine remembered hearing them come up the beach, talking among themselves, not even bothering to push scouts out ahead. The listening posts pulled back across the sand. A green flare went up. Then they came. The first wave was around 100 men and they came at a dead run, screaming straight down the throat of the sandbar.

For a few seconds in the dark, it must have looked exactly like the thing the Japanese expected. A thin American line about to be swamped by shock and speed and noise. The line did not break. It opened fire. Everything the Marines had came down that sandbar at once. Rifle fire in sheets. The heavy Browning machine guns 30 caliber and 50 caliber hammering across open sand at men with nowhere to go.

And the 37mm guns firing canister point blank straight into the mass. There is no cover on a sandbar. There is no going to ground when the ground is a flat open strip. 30 yards wide with water on both sides. The canister caught the charge in the open and tore holes straight through it.

Robert Leki, a Marine machine gunner who was there and later wrote about it, said the canister sickled them to the sand. That is the whole picture in four words. Men cut down like wheat. A handful reached the wire. A few got through it and into the positions where the fighting dropped to bayonets and rifle butts and fists in the dark before a reserve platoon killed them.

But most of the first wave never made it across. They died on the sand, in the water, on the far bank. On that line was a 30 caliber Browning crewed by three men of the second battalion. Corporal Lee Diamond, Private First Class John Rivers, and Private Al Schmid. Rivers was on the gun when the charge hit, and he fired until a burst caught him in the face and killed him.

Schmid took the gun. Diamond took a round through the arm and kept feeding it. Then a grenade went off in front of the position and blew the sight out of Schmid’s eyes. Blinded, he stayed on the gun and Diamond, one arm wrecked, told him where to shoot. And Schmid swung the barrel and fired where he was told. Between them, that one crew is credited with killing close to 200 men.

All three received the Navy Cross. Rivers received his in death. Ichiki fed more men into it. A second push. 150 men or more came across behind the first and met the same wall. A Japanese machine gun team swam the lagoon, dragged their gun onto an abandoned amphibious tractor stuck in the sand, and poured fire into the flank of one of the 37 mm positions, killing most of that crew and knocking the gun out of the fight for hours.

It changed nothing about the outcome. Around 5 in the morning, the survivors tried to go around the whole problem, waiting into the surf to flank the marine line along the beach. The Marines swung machine guns to meet them and called down the 75mm howitzers already ranged on that exact ground.

The shells walked through them in the shallows. At first light, Japanese dead were rolling in the surf along the shoreline. If this is worth your time, take a second to subscribe. It helps the channel keep making these. By dawn, the sandbar was a killing ground and the charge was spent. But the battle was not over. And this is the part the story usually leaves out.

Breaking the charge on the sandbar had broken the Ichuki detachment. It had not destroyed it. Through the night, hundreds of Japanese survivors had gone to ground in the coconut grove on the far bank in the trees and brush along the water. The Marine commanders could have held the line and let them lie there. They chose not to.

They decided to cross the creek and finish it. At first light, the first battalion, first marines under Lieutenant Colonel Leonard Creswell crossed Alligator Creek upstream out of sight and swung wide to the east. Then they turned and came down through the Coconut Grove from behind, rolling the surviving Japanese up against the sea.

What had been a defense became an encirclement. The men who had crossed that sandbar to destroy the Marines were now pinned in a shrinking pocket with water at their backs and Marines closing from three sides. Wildcat fighters came off Henderson Field and strafed the beach where men tried to run. And in the afternoon, the tanks came.

Four M3 Stewart light tanks of the first tank battalion drove out across the sandbar over the bodies already there and into the grove, firing their own 37 mm canister and machine guns into the trees. One tank took a grenade and was disabled. The others closed around it, covered the crew, and pulled them out. General Vandergrift, watching what the tanks did in that grove, said afterward that the rear of the tanks looked like meat grinders.

By late afternoon, it was over. And then came the part that would shape the rest of the war in the Pacific. Marines walking out among the fallen to check the enemy dead found that many of them were not dead. Wounded Japanese soldiers waited until the Americans came close, then fired or triggered a grenade to kill themselves and the man leaning over them.

After that, the Marines stopped taking the chance. They shot or bayonetted the bodies that moved. It was ugly, and it was a lesson written into the first land battle of the campaign, and it did not fade. The fighting on these islands would be done from here on with very little mercy on either side. Of the roughly 900 men in Ichuki’s force, about 800 had made the attack.

When the counting was done, at least 777 Japanese laid dead on and around the sandbar. Only 128 of the original force lived. Almost no one was taken prisoner. A tiny handful, most of them too badly wounded, to resist, and a small group that escaped east to the rear guard. An elite regiment had ceased to exist in a single night and a single morning.

Marine dead numbered somewhere in the mid-30s to the mid-40s. The Japanese command could not accept it. When word reached 17th Army headquarters at Rabal that the detachment had been all but annihilated short of the airfield. The first reaction was that the report had to be false. It was not false.

And when they finally believed it, they understood two things they had refused to believe before. The Marines on Guad Canal were not gone and they were not soft. Every force Japan sent after that came larger. 3 weeks later, they came again in far greater strength at a ridge south of the airfield and came much closer to winning.

As for Ichi himself, the accounts do not agree on how he died. The official Japanese history says he burned his regiment’s colors and took his own life. Some of his own survivors insisted he was killed leading men forward toward the Marine line. There is no settling it now. And here is the honest part, the part a good story owes you.

The canister guns were the shock of that night, but they did not win the battle alone. The machine guns killed more. The wire held men in the open long enough to be killed. The artillery caught them in the surf. And the real destruction of the regiment came in daylight from the envelopment and the tanks, not from the guns on the sandbar. The canister was the most terrible single thing on that beach.

It was not the only thing. It never is. Jacob Voza survived his wounds. He went back to work, scouted for the Marine Raiders, and lived another 40 years. The Marines made him an honorary sergeant major. And decades later, he was buried in the uniform. He had counted the enemy while bleeding from a dozen bayonet wounds and then walked back to warn men he barely knew.

The men who charged that sandbar had been told the Americans would run. They believed it so completely that they marched straight across the one piece of open ground the Marines had ranged with every weapon they owned. They had traded their heavy guns for speed and surprise. And they met a pair of anti-tank cannons that a few Marines had thought to load with steel and drag down to the water.

The sandbar is still there at the mouth of the illoo that everyone still calls the Teneroo. It is a quiet strip of sand now. For one night in August of 1942, it was the most dangerous 30 yards in the Pacific. And 800 men learned that the soft, undisiplined Marines they had been promised did not exist.

There were only the guns and the sand and the dark.

In 1942, Japan Banzai Charged U.S. Marines. Nobody Warned Them About the Canister Rounds. – YouTube

Transcripts:

On the night of August 21st, 1942, roughly 800 men of the Imperial Japanese Army came out of the jungle on Guadal Canal and charged straight into the dark. They screamed as they came. They believed the Marines dug in on the far side of a narrow sandbar were soft, poorly led men who would break and run the moment steel came at them in the night.

The men charging were not usually wrong about much. This was the Ichiki Detachment, some of the finest light infantry Japan had. What they did not know was what the Marines had dragged down to the water’s edge and buried in the sand. Two 37mm anti-tank guns loaded not with armor-piercing shot but with canister. Each round, a thin metal can packed with 122 steel balls.

At close range, those guns were not cannons anymore. They were the largest shotguns on the island, and they were aimed straight down the sandbar. By the time the sun came up, that strip of sand held the dead of nearly an entire regiment. This is how it happened. To understand that sandbar, you have to understand how badly the Japanese misread the men waiting on the other side of it.

2 weeks earlier on August 7th, the first marine division had landed on Guadal Canal and taken the half-finished airfield the Japanese were building near Lunga Point. The Marines named it Henderson Field. Then the Navy took a beating off Tsavo Island and pulled the transports out before the supplies were fully ashore.

That left roughly 11,000 Marines on a hostile island, low on food, stretched thin, dug in around the one airfield they could not afford to lose. The eastern edge of that perimeter ran up against a sluggish tidal lagoon. Most maps of this battle call it the Tenneroo River. That name is wrong, and the men who fought there knew it.

The real Tenneroo lay further east. This was the eloo and the marines called the lagoon Alligator Creek, though there were no alligators anywhere in the Solomons. Two mistakes stacked on top of each other, and history kept both. What mattered was the sandbar at its mouth. A strip of sand maybe 30 yards long, the one place a man could cross the water dry and keep his footing.

If the Japanese came from the east, they would have to come across it. They came from the east. Colonel Konao Ichiki landed near Tyu Point on the 19th of August with about 900 men. His orders were to scout the marine positions and wait for the rest of his regiment. He did not wait. Japanese command believed the Americans were beaten and half gone, and Ichiki believed it more than anyone.

He had led troops in China for years, and he held the Marines in open contempt. He would not need the rest of the regiment. 900 men and the bayonet would be enough. The Marines already knew he was coming. 2 days earlier, a patrol under Captain Charles Brush, Company A, First Battalion, First Marines, had run into a Japanese patrol near Kohley Point and killed most of them in a short, vicious fight in the grass.

On the bodies were officers in fresh uniforms carrying detailed maps of the Marine positions. Far too much rank for a simple scouting party. Brush understood what it meant. A large, freshly landed force was somewhere close, and it already knew exactly where the marine line was thin. The gun waiting on that sandbar was never designed for what it was about to do.

The 37 mm gun M3 was an anti-tank weapon. Light, low, quick, a flat little cannon on two rubber tired wheels that a crew of five could wrestle into position by hand. Against German armor in North Africa, it was already close to useless, outclassed, and dying. But in the Pacific in 1942, it still had a job and it could fire a round that had nothing to do with tanks at all.

The M2 canister round. Strip away the name and it was a thin metal can filled with 122 hardened steel balls a little over a/ third of an inch across set in resin. When the gun fired, the can ripped apart at the muzzle and threw those balls out in a spreading cone. Effective range about 250 yards. Beyond that, it lost its teeth.

Inside that range against men in the open, it did to a company of infantry what a shotgun does to a bird. Canister was not something the Marines had crates of. It was a specialized round, a small fraction of all the 37 mm ammunition ever made. Somebody on Guadal Canal made the decision to bring it forward and stack it beside the guns on that sandbar.

That decision would matter more than almost any other made that night. Holding that stretch of line was the second battalion, first marines under Lieutenant Colonel Edwin Pollock. Riflemen behind a single strand of barbed wire strung across the sand. Browning machine guns dug in and ranged. Mortars behind them and further back, the 75 mm pack howitzers of the 11th Marines already zeroed on the sandbar itself.

And then in the last hours before the attack, a man came out of the dark who should have been dead. His name was Jacob Vosza. a retired sergeant major of the Solomon Islands Police, a Melanesian scout working for the Coast Watchers. The Japanese had caught him when they found a small American flag hidden on him.

They tied him to a tree and went to work with bayonets. They ran the blades through his arms, his shoulder, his throat, and left him to die. He did not die. He worked himself loose. and he crawled and staggered back toward the marine line and he reached it in time to gasp out a warning that a large Japanese force was right behind him.

The core of that story is solid, even if the distances have grown in the retelling. He was captured, tortured, refused to talk, and warned the Marines anyway. Vuza lived. That alone is close to a miracle. But the warning is the thing that mattered. The Marines on that sandbar went to their guns knowing the storm was coming.

They did not have to wait long. Shortly after midnight, the first Japanese soldiers reached the far bank of the sandbar. Marine listening posts out in front heard them before they saw them. Voices, the clank of equipment, men moving without much care because the Ichuki detachment did not believe there was anything in front of them worth being careful about.

One marine remembered hearing them come up the beach, talking among themselves, not even bothering to push scouts out ahead. The listening posts pulled back across the sand. A green flare went up. Then they came. The first wave was around 100 men and they came at a dead run, screaming straight down the throat of the sandbar.

For a few seconds in the dark, it must have looked exactly like the thing the Japanese expected. A thin American line about to be swamped by shock and speed and noise. The line did not break. It opened fire. Everything the Marines had came down that sandbar at once. Rifle fire in sheets. The heavy Browning machine guns 30 caliber and 50 caliber hammering across open sand at men with nowhere to go.

And the 37mm guns firing canister point blank straight into the mass. There is no cover on a sandbar. There is no going to ground when the ground is a flat open strip. 30 yards wide with water on both sides. The canister caught the charge in the open and tore holes straight through it.

Robert Leki, a Marine machine gunner who was there and later wrote about it, said the canister sickled them to the sand. That is the whole picture in four words. Men cut down like wheat. A handful reached the wire. A few got through it and into the positions where the fighting dropped to bayonets and rifle butts and fists in the dark before a reserve platoon killed them.

But most of the first wave never made it across. They died on the sand, in the water, on the far bank. On that line was a 30 caliber Browning crewed by three men of the second battalion. Corporal Lee Diamond, Private First Class John Rivers, and Private Al Schmid. Rivers was on the gun when the charge hit, and he fired until a burst caught him in the face and killed him.

Schmid took the gun. Diamond took a round through the arm and kept feeding it. Then a grenade went off in front of the position and blew the sight out of Schmid’s eyes. Blinded, he stayed on the gun and Diamond, one arm wrecked, told him where to shoot. And Schmid swung the barrel and fired where he was told. Between them, that one crew is credited with killing close to 200 men.

All three received the Navy Cross. Rivers received his in death. Ichiki fed more men into it. A second push. 150 men or more came across behind the first and met the same wall. A Japanese machine gun team swam the lagoon, dragged their gun onto an abandoned amphibious tractor stuck in the sand, and poured fire into the flank of one of the 37 mm positions, killing most of that crew and knocking the gun out of the fight for hours.

It changed nothing about the outcome. Around 5 in the morning, the survivors tried to go around the whole problem, waiting into the surf to flank the marine line along the beach. The Marines swung machine guns to meet them and called down the 75mm howitzers already ranged on that exact ground.

The shells walked through them in the shallows. At first light, Japanese dead were rolling in the surf along the shoreline. If this is worth your time, take a second to subscribe. It helps the channel keep making these. By dawn, the sandbar was a killing ground and the charge was spent. But the battle was not over. And this is the part the story usually leaves out.

Breaking the charge on the sandbar had broken the Ichuki detachment. It had not destroyed it. Through the night, hundreds of Japanese survivors had gone to ground in the coconut grove on the far bank in the trees and brush along the water. The Marine commanders could have held the line and let them lie there. They chose not to.

They decided to cross the creek and finish it. At first light, the first battalion, first marines under Lieutenant Colonel Leonard Creswell crossed Alligator Creek upstream out of sight and swung wide to the east. Then they turned and came down through the Coconut Grove from behind, rolling the surviving Japanese up against the sea.

What had been a defense became an encirclement. The men who had crossed that sandbar to destroy the Marines were now pinned in a shrinking pocket with water at their backs and Marines closing from three sides. Wildcat fighters came off Henderson Field and strafed the beach where men tried to run. And in the afternoon, the tanks came.

Four M3 Stewart light tanks of the first tank battalion drove out across the sandbar over the bodies already there and into the grove, firing their own 37 mm canister and machine guns into the trees. One tank took a grenade and was disabled. The others closed around it, covered the crew, and pulled them out. General Vandergrift, watching what the tanks did in that grove, said afterward that the rear of the tanks looked like meat grinders.

By late afternoon, it was over. And then came the part that would shape the rest of the war in the Pacific. Marines walking out among the fallen to check the enemy dead found that many of them were not dead. Wounded Japanese soldiers waited until the Americans came close, then fired or triggered a grenade to kill themselves and the man leaning over them.

After that, the Marines stopped taking the chance. They shot or bayonetted the bodies that moved. It was ugly, and it was a lesson written into the first land battle of the campaign, and it did not fade. The fighting on these islands would be done from here on with very little mercy on either side. Of the roughly 900 men in Ichuki’s force, about 800 had made the attack.

When the counting was done, at least 777 Japanese laid dead on and around the sandbar. Only 128 of the original force lived. Almost no one was taken prisoner. A tiny handful, most of them too badly wounded, to resist, and a small group that escaped east to the rear guard. An elite regiment had ceased to exist in a single night and a single morning.

Marine dead numbered somewhere in the mid-30s to the mid-40s. The Japanese command could not accept it. When word reached 17th Army headquarters at Rabal that the detachment had been all but annihilated short of the airfield. The first reaction was that the report had to be false. It was not false.

And when they finally believed it, they understood two things they had refused to believe before. The Marines on Guad Canal were not gone and they were not soft. Every force Japan sent after that came larger. 3 weeks later, they came again in far greater strength at a ridge south of the airfield and came much closer to winning.

As for Ichi himself, the accounts do not agree on how he died. The official Japanese history says he burned his regiment’s colors and took his own life. Some of his own survivors insisted he was killed leading men forward toward the Marine line. There is no settling it now. And here is the honest part, the part a good story owes you.

The canister guns were the shock of that night, but they did not win the battle alone. The machine guns killed more. The wire held men in the open long enough to be killed. The artillery caught them in the surf. And the real destruction of the regiment came in daylight from the envelopment and the tanks, not from the guns on the sandbar. The canister was the most terrible single thing on that beach.

It was not the only thing. It never is. Jacob Voza survived his wounds. He went back to work, scouted for the Marine Raiders, and lived another 40 years. The Marines made him an honorary sergeant major. And decades later, he was buried in the uniform. He had counted the enemy while bleeding from a dozen bayonet wounds and then walked back to warn men he barely knew.

The men who charged that sandbar had been told the Americans would run. They believed it so completely that they marched straight across the one piece of open ground the Marines had ranged with every weapon they owned. They had traded their heavy guns for speed and surprise. And they met a pair of anti-tank cannons that a few Marines had thought to load with steel and drag down to the water.

The sandbar is still there at the mouth of the illoo that everyone still calls the Teneroo. It is a quiet strip of sand now. For one night in August of 1942, it was the most dangerous 30 yards in the Pacific. And 800 men learned that the soft, undisiplined Marines they had been promised did not exist.

There were only the guns and the sand and the dark.