Japanese INFANTRY Never Expected 12-Gauge American Shotguns in the Assault

It is a night in September of 1942 on the island of Guadalcanal on a narrow trail above the west bank of the Balesuna River and the men of the Japanese patrol moving through the dark are certain of one thing. They are certain that the night belongs to them. They have been told that the Americans cannot fight in the jungle, that the Americans are soft, loud, frightened of the dark, and that a determined rush with the bayonet will break them every time.

So, they come on the way they have been trained to come on, close together, fast, low, trusting the black wall of the trees to hide them until the last few steps. The rain has stopped. The air is thick enough to drink. Somewhere ahead a Marine officer named William Schwerin is lying in the mud with a handful of men and he has already told them what to listen for.

He has told them, “When you hear my shotgun, give them hell.” They hear it. Out of the dark comes a sound that is not the flat crack of a rifle, and not the hammering of a machine gun, but something heavier and wider, a deep coughing boom that seems to fill the whole trail at once. And with it comes a spreading fan of lead, not one bullet seeking one man, but nine heavy pellets from a single shell, and then nine more, and then nine more.

Each blast throwing a pattern of iron across the width of the path at the exact range where the Japanese have chosen to close. The lead column of the patrol does not fall one at a time. It goes down together. In the space of a few breaths, 15 men who were sure the night belonged to them are dead on the trail, and the men behind them are firing blind into the trees at an enemy who has just proven that the close fight, the very fight they wanted, is the last fight they should have picked.

I am Arthur Hinton and for 40 years I kept the records of war. I read the diaries and I sat with the last veterans before they passed. On this channel I tell the Second World War as it actually happened from the documents, not the myths. If that is your sort of thing, subscribe.

It is free and you can change your mind later. So, let me tell you about the weapon on that trail and why the men who walked into it never expected it because the whole story turns on a simple thing that the Japanese army never fully reckoned with. They had studied the American rifle. They had studied the American machine gun. They had built their entire close assault doctrine, the night rush, the trail ambush, the sudden charge from the brush around getting inside the range where a slow bolt rifle could only fire once before the bayonet came home. And

into that plan the Americans brought a pump action shotgun, a hunting gun, a farm gun, a 12-gauge loaded with heavy buckshot and at the exact distance where the Japanese wanted to fight it was the most murderous thing on the island. To understand why it was there, you have to go back a quarter of a century to another war and another mud because the American combat shotgun did not begin in the Pacific.

It began in the trenches of France in 1918. The gun at the center of it was the Winchester Model 1897, a pump action 12-gauge designed by John Moses Browning, the same man who gave the American soldier so many of the weapons he carried into both World Wars. In civilian life, the Model 1897 was a plain and common thing, a gun a farmer used on birds and a market hunter used to fill a wagon.

The army took that ordinary gun and made it into something for killing men at arms length. They cut the barrel down to 20 in. They bolted a perforated steel hand guard over the barrel, a heat shield, so a soldier could grip it after firing without burning his hand. They fitted a lug so it would take the long Model 1917 bayonet, the same blade that fit the service rifle.

They added sling swivels and they called it the trench gun. The name told you the job. The Western Front in 1918 was a war of trenches and clearing a trench was one of the ugliest tasks a man could be handed. You went down into a narrow ditch, walls of earth on both sides, corners every few yards, and behind any one of those corners could be an enemy with a rifle or a grenade or a bayonet.

All of it happening at a range of a few feet. A bolt-action rifle in that ditch was long, slow, and clumsy. What a man wanted down there was something that could be swung fast, fired fast, and would hit whatever was in front of it without needing careful aim. The Model 1897 answered every part of that. It held five shells in the magazine and one in the chamber, six shots ready.

Each shell was loaded with nine pellets of double-aught buckshot, and double-aught buckshot is not not small. Each pellet is roughly the size of a pistol ball. So, a single pull of the trigger threw nine pistol-size balls down the trench at once, and six pulls through 54. And the Model 1897 had one more trick, a thing that came from the way Browning built it, not from any plan of the army.

The gun had no trigger disconnector. What that means in plain terms is that a soldier could hold the trigger down and simply work the pump, and every time the action closed the gun fired with no need to release and pull the trigger again. They called it slam firing. A trained man slam firing a Model 1897 could empty all six shells in about 5 seconds.

Six deep booming blasts, 54 heavy pellets, all of it into the space of a trench corner faster than a man could think to duck. The American soldiers who cleared German trenches with these guns called the work sweeping and the gun a trench sweeper, and the name fit exactly what it did. The United States Marines carried these guns, too, and there is a good chance you have heard an echo of it without knowing.

In June of 1918 at a place called Belleau Wood, the Marines fought the Germans in close savage hand-to-hand woodland fighting, the kind of fighting where a shotgun earned its keep. It was after that battle that the Germans are said to have given the Marines the name that stuck to them for the rest of the century, Teufel Hunden, the devil dogs.

The shotguns first went to France that same month, June of 1918, sent over for field testing, and there were soon enough of them to hand 50 to each division, most of them going to the scout platoons of each regiment, the men most likely to meet the enemy face-to-face. By the time the war ended in November, the Ordnance Department had bought something on the order of 25,000 Model 1897s, about 20,000 of them in the full trench configuration with the heat shield and the bayonet, and another 5,000 or so ordinary sporting guns fitted out for

war with the same handguard, sling, and blade. The gun was never meant to reach out far. Its work was done inside 50 yards, and most of it much closer than that. But inside that distance, nothing the infantry carried put more lead into a man in less time. Now, here is the part of the old story that matters most, and I want to be careful to tell it exactly right because it gets muddled all the time.

The gun was so effective and so hated by the men on the receiving end that the enemy government made a formal complaint about it. And that enemy was Germany in the First World War, not Japan. This is the moment people mix up, so let me set it down plainly from the record. In the summer and autumn of 1918, the Germans captured a small number of American soldiers carrying these shotguns.

The first was taken on the 21st of July, 1918. A second was taken on the 11th of September, and on the 15th of September, 1918, the German government issued a formal diplomatic protest. Because the two countries were at war and had no direct diplomatic channel, the note came through the Swiss. And on the 19th of September, the Swiss representative laid the German cablegram before the American Secretary of State, Robert Lansing.

The German argument leaned on the laws of war. They pointed to the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, and in particular to Article 23, paragraph E, which forbade weapons calculated to cause what the treaty called unnecessary suffering. The shotgun, the Germans said, was such a weapon, and its use was therefore against the law of nations.

And then came the part that showed how much the gun frightened them. The German note declared that any American prisoner found to be carrying such a gun or the ammunition for it would forfeit his life. In plain words, they threatened to execute captured American shotgunners, and they gave the Americans until the 1st of October to promise to stop using the weapon.

The American answer was flat, and it was fast. Secretary Lansing held that the shotgun could not be the subject of any legitimate or reasonable protest, and he warned that if Germany carried out its threat to kill prisoners, the United States would make such reprisals as would best protect American forces. The Army’s own lawyers went further.

The Judge Advocate, a Brigadier General named Samuel Ansell, studied the German claim and wrote that the protest was without legal merit, that it was destitute of all good faith, and the Assistant Secretary of War, a man named Benedict Crowell, put the matter in words that no lawyer could soften. The killing of combatants, he wrote, is not only lawful, but one of the chief means of warfare.

The point was that a soldier’s job in a war is to defeat the enemy, and a weapon that does that quickly and at close range is doing exactly what a lawful weapon is meant to do. The Germans never carried out the threat. No American was executed for carrying a shotgun. And Germany, having been told plainly that reprisal would answer reprisal, let the matter drop.

No treaty then, and no treaty since, has ever banned the shotgun from war. Hold on to that history, because it is the reason the gun was ready and waiting when the Second World War came, and it is the reason the Japanese walked into something the Germans had already learned to fear. When the war in the Pacific began, the American military still had these guns, and it had improved on them.

The Model 1897 was joined, and largely replaced, by a newer Winchester, the Model 1912, known to everyone as the Model 12. The Model 12 did the same job with a cleaner, hammerless action, and it too was built in a trench gun version with the heat shield and the bayonet lug. It was the Model 12 that the Marines carried in the greatest numbers across the islands.

Though plenty of the older Model 1897S went to war a second time in the hands of both the Army and the Marines. In the Marine regiments, the shotgun was not a rare curiosity. By one accounting, each regiment was allotted around 100 of them, enough to put a shotgun where it was needed and then some.

And where it was needed was the jungle. Think about the ground these men fought on. Not open fields, not long clear lines of fire, but dense green tangle where you might not see 10 ft in front of you. Trails so narrow a file of men walked them single file. Undergrowth thick enough to hide a man until he was on top of you.

This was ground where the fight, when it came, came sudden and came close at ranges of a few yards in the half-light of dawn or the full black of night. And at those ranges a rifle, for all its power, gave a man one aim shot at a target he could barely see. The shotgun gave him a spreading pattern of nine heavy pellets that did not need careful aim, that filled the trail, that would find a man in the brush that a single bullet would have missed.

The Marines learned fast that on patrol in the foliage in the close green country of the Southwest Pacific, the shotgun had no equal. It was said among them that the only weapon better than the shotgun for breaking a Japanese rush was the water-cooled machine gun. And the machine gun could not go where one man with a shotgun could go.

The men who were handed these guns often already knew them. A great many American boys of that generation had grown up with a pump shotgun in the corner of the house, had hunted birds and rabbits with one, had learned as children the swing and the lead and the fast second shot. That skill did not have to be taught to them from nothing. The Marine Raiders, the elite patrol and raiding units, were issued shotguns liberally.

And among Carlson’s Raiders on Guadalcanal, on the long march they made across the island in the autumn of 1942, the men who carried them put them to hard use. I have already told you of Captain Schwerin on the Belle Souner and the 15 men who fell to his ambush. There was also a Marine Lieutenant named Robert Burnett who on Guadalcanal killed a Japanese soldier at a distance of 10 yards with his shotgun, which is to say at the range where the shotgun does its most terrible work, close enough to see the man’s face. The gun did the same

work in the enemy’s fortifications. The Japanese did not only attack, they dug in and they dug deep in bunkers of log and earth and in caves cut into coral and rooting them out was the bloodiest task of the island war. A man clearing a bunker was doing, in effect, exactly what the trench sweepers had done in France, going into a tight, dark space where the enemy waited at a range of feet.

For that job, the shotgun came back into its own. A wide, fast pattern of buckshot into the black mouth of a bunker, no aim required, and the same slam-fire trick on the older model 1897 that had swept the trenches of the last war. The shotgun did steady, unglamorous work away from the assault as well and the records are full of it.

It was the gun handed to the man standing watch on a supply dump or a beachhead at night, the man walking a perimeter, the man set to guard prisoners or an airstrip because in the dark, at close range, with a nervous finger and poor light, a spreading pattern of buckshot was worth more than a rifle a tired sentry might miss with.

It rode on jungle patrols as the point man’s gun, the first weapon into an ambush and the first weapon out. Much of a soldier’s war is not the charge, but the long waiting watch and for that watch, in that country, the shotgun earned a trust the men did not give lightly. It was not a perfect weapon and I will not pretend otherwise. The one real trouble the Marines had with it was the ammunition.

The buckshot shells of the day were built with paper hulls and paper in the wet heat of a Pacific island swelled and softened until the shells would no longer feed or chamber. Men found their shotguns jamming, not from any fault of the gun, but from cartridges going soft in the damp. The answer came from the same war that had given them the gun.

There were still stocks of all brass buckshot shells left over from 1918. Brass cases that did not swell, did not soften, did not care how thick the air was, and once those went out to the islands, the trouble largely ended. It is a small thing, a detail of supply, but it tells you how close the two wars really were. The same brass that had swept German trenches in 1918 was loaded into the same pattern of gun to break Japanese rushes a quarter century later.

And that is the reversal at the heart of this, the thing worth sitting with. The Japanese assault doctrine was built to win the close fight. Everything in it, the night approach, the silent creep down the trail, the sudden screaming charge, was designed to get past the American rifle and the American machine gun and into the killing distance of the bayonet where they believed their spirit and their training would carry the day.

They spent themselves getting to that distance, and at that distance, again and again, they met the one weapon their whole plan had not accounted for, a plain American hunting gun turned to war, throwing nine pellets at a time into the exact space they had fought so hard to reach. They walked into a war they did not know was there.

The very closeness they wanted was the thing that killed them. I want to keep the men in frame, though, on both sides of that trail, because it is easy to tell a story about a clever weapon and forget what it actually did. The fan of buckshot that filled a trail did not stop a diagram. It stopped men, young men, sons and brothers who had been told the night was theirs and found out in a few seconds that it was not.

And the man holding the shotgun was a young man, too, lying in the mud with his heart going, knowing that if the gun jammed or the pattern missed, he had 1 second and no more before the bayonet reached him. The gun did not make the work clean. It made it fast, and in that kind of fighting fast was the difference between the man who walked off the trail and the man who did not.

40 years of reading these accounts taught me that the weapons were never the whole of it. The whole of it was always the men who carried them and the men they were sent to kill and the price both paid on a strip of wet ground with no name that most of us will ever remember. So, that is the trench sweeper from the mud of France to the trails of Guadalcanal.

A hunting gun that two enemies in two wars came to fear more than almost anything else the Americans carried. I would like to know what stayed with you from all of this. Tell me in the comments the one detail you will remember. Whether it is the slam fire in the trench or the German threat to shoot captured shotgunners or Captain Schwerin waiting in the mud on the Bealsuna.

And then tell me who or what you would like me to cover next. A weapon, a unit, a battle, whatever you have been wanting to hear the true account of. If you would like more of the war told this way, from the record and with the human cost kept in view, then subscribe and stay a while. Thank you for sitting with me through it. Lest we forget the whole of it.