When 54 Japanese Tried to EXECUTE One American — He Killed Them All in 7 Minutes

The 25th of October 1942, a low ridge of black mud south of Henderson Field on the island of Guadal Canal. It has been raining for hours, the sort of rain that fills a man’s boots and turns solid ground to soup. And out in the dark, past the coils of barbed wire, thousands of soldiers of the Japanese Sendai Division are getting to their feet.

They have been told that the Americans on this ridge are beaten men sick with fever, short of food, short of bullets, ready to break at the first hard push. Their officers expect to be eating breakfast inside the American lines by morning. They come at a run, screaming as they come, and the first ranks throw themselves flat across the wire so the men behind can cross over their backs like a bridge made of bodies.

Against all of that, on one narrow stretch of the line, there stands a single sergeant and a small knot of Marines behind two water-cooled machine guns. The sergeant is short and dark and grinning even now, a former army man who once solded in the Philippines and never quite lost the swagger of it. His name is John Basilon.

In the hours that follow, the men coming at him in the dark are going to learn that the half-st starved Americans on this ridge are not beaten at all, and that the man behind the guns has no intention of dying on anybody’s schedule but his own. By first light, the ground in front of his position will be so thickly covered with the fallen that the stretcher teams cannot walk a straight line through it.

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. I have read the field reports from that ridge many times and the citation and the accounts of the men who stood the line beside him.

And I will tell you plainly, there are stories that shrink when you look at the paperwork, and there are stories that grow. John Basselone is one of the ones that grows. The truth of that night is bigger than any poster ever made of him because the truth includes the cost and the cost was terrible and he paid a share of it himself a little over 2 years later on a black beach far to the north.

So let me take you back and tell it the way the documents tell it from the start. He was born on the 4th of November 1916 in Buffalo in the state of New York and he grew up in the town of Raritton in New Jersey, one of 10 children in a working family. He was not a scholar and never pretended to be.

As a young man, he joined the United States Army and served a hitch in the Philippines. And he was such a good boxer over there and talked about Manila so often once he came home that the nickname stuck to him for the rest of his short life, Manila John. When war came, he did not want the army again. He wanted the Marines.

He wanted, by his own account, to be where the fighting was hardest. And in the autumn of 1942, the Marines gave him exactly what he asked for. By October of that year, he was a sergeant in the first battalion of the seventh marines, part of the first marine division on Guadal Canal. If you do not know the name, understand that Guadal Canal was the first place in the whole Pacific War where the United States took ground from Japan and then had to hold it with its fingernails.

The prize was a single airfield the Marines had captured and named Henderson Field. Whoever held that field controlled the skies over a huge stretch of ocean. And so the Japanese wanted it back with an intensity that is difficult to describe. Night after night, their warships shelled it. Their aircraft bombed it.

And in the third week of October, they sent in their infantry to take it by storm. Baselone was in charge of two sections of heavy machine guns, the water-cooled 30 caliber Brownings, guns that could fire on and on all night if you fed them belts, and kept water in the jacket. His stretch of the line sat below the ridge in front of the airfield in ground that was half jungle and half swamp.

The battalion he belonged to was commanded by a lean growling officer named Lewis Puller, a man the Marines called Chesty, who was already becoming a legend in his own right. Puller had spread his men thin because there were not enough of them to do anything else. And Basilone’s guns were a hinge in the middle of that thin line.

If the hinge broke, the whole line folded. And if the line folded, the airfield fell. You have to understand the shape those Marines were in by that third week of October to see the night properly. They had been on the island since August with the sea often in enemy hands behind them, which meant supply was thin and the food was worse.

Men were living on captured Japanese rice and two skimpy meals a day. Malaria and dissentry ran through the ranks so hard that a good number of the men holding that line were running fevers even as they held it, shivering in the wet yellow with quinine. The Japanese command knew all this or thought it did, and it was a large part of why they were so certain the push would work.

On paper, the Americans on that ridge were sick, hungry, cut off, and outnumbered on the ground they had to defend. It was a reasonable thing to bet on. It simply turned out to be wrong. The plan that came at them was the work of a Japanese lieutenant general named Misau Mararyama who commanded the Sendai division and had marched the bulk of it for days through jungle so thick that his men arrived worn out and had to leave much of their heavy artillery behind.

His idea was a night assault in mass against the southern ridge in the belief that weight of numbers in the dark would carry the line where daylight and firepower could not. It was not a foolish plan for the war he thought he was fighting against dugin machine guns with good fields of fire and a man like Baselone behind them.

It was closer to a catastrophe waiting for a place to happen. On the night of the 24th of October, it began to rain. And it did not stop. Around 10:00 in the evening, the first waves of the Sendai division came out of the dark against the wire. There was something on the order of 3,000 of them committed against that sector over the course of the night, regiment after regiment, and they did not come cleverly.

They came in mass straight at the guns, trusting to numbers and to nerve. The Marines had strung barbed wire and cighted their weapons to cross their fire. And when the flares went up, the whole soaked hillside was full of running men. The machine guns opened up and cut lanes through them and still they came climbing over their own dead using the bodies on the wire as a road.

Let me tell you a little about the weapon itself because the weapon is half the story. The 30 caliber Browning of that day was a water cooled gun. The barrel sat inside a metal jacket and the jacket was filled with water because a barrel firing hundreds of rounds a minute for hours would otherwise glow and warp and fail.

It took a crew to work one properly. A gunner on the trigger, an assistant gunner feeding the cloth belts of ammunition in from the side, and more men behind them humping fresh belts and cans of water forward and carrying the wounded back. It was not a weapon for one man. And yet, across the worst of that night, as the crews around him were killed and hurt, Basilone kept finding himself doing the work of four and five men at once.

Gunner and loader and ammunition carrier and section leader. All of it in the dark. All of it in the rain. Now, here is where the story stops being a poster and becomes a real night of work. Because that is what it was. Brutal, exhausting, close work. The guns get hot, the belts run out, the water in the jackets boils away, and the barrels start to droop and jam.

Men are hit at the trigger and slump over, and someone has to drag them clear and take their place. At one point in the night, one of Basilone’s two gun sections was overrun and knocked out of action entirely. Its crews killed or wounded. And word came back that on that piece of the line only a couple of men were still standing and firing.

Basalone did not send someone to fix it. He went himself. He ran through the dark and the mud through ground the Japanese had already got in among to reach the silent guns. I want you to picture what that actually took. He fixed a jammed gun with his bare hands in the pitch black by feel the metal hot enough to scold with enemy soldiers close enough to hear.

He got it firing again. And when a gun could not be fixed in place, he picked the whole thing up, the receiver and the tripod together, better than 90 lbs of steel and scolding water, and he carried it in his arms to a new spot and set it down and fed it and fired it. He moved up and down that torn line all night doing this from one gun to the next, patching, hauling, laying his own fire.

And every time the Japanese thought they had found the gap, the gap had a machine gun in it again, and it was Basilone. The ammunition was the other war inside the war. You cannot fire these guns without belts. And the belts were back down the line, and the trail to them was cut with Japanese soldiers sitting on it in the dark.

Baselone went down that trail anyway. More than once through the night, he fought his way back along it, past enemy who had worked in behind his own position, carrying belts of ammunition draped over his shoulders and cradled in his arms to keep his gunners fed. He did it in his socks because the mud had sucked his boots off, and he had not the time to care. Think on that.

The man who held the center of the line at Guadal Canal did a good part of it barefoot, running ammunition through ground that was more enemy than friend. Toward the end, in the gray hour before dawn, the belts finally ran dry at his own gun, and the Japanese chose that same moment to rush the position one more time.

He had no more machine gun to give them. So he drew the pistol on his hip, and he took up a machete, and he met them there in the mud at arms length, and he held, “That is not a line from a film. that is in the record. When the heavy guns fell silent for want of ammunition, John Baselone kept his piece of Guadal Canal with a handgun and a blade until fresh belts could be brought up and the guns could speak again.

And then at last the light came up over the ridge, and the shooting fell away, and the Marines could see what the knight had made. In front of that thin line, the Sendai division lay in heaps. The attacking force had been, in the plain words of the reports, all but destroyed. On Basselon’s own frontage, the dead were piled so close together that the Marines had to drag bodies aside to clear fields of fire for the next assault because they fully expected another one to come.

Whole companies of the enemy had been fed into that sector and had simply ceased to exist. The airfield was still American. The line had held, and it was not one night. The citation that Basilone was later given names two days, the 24th and the 25th of October, because when darkness came again the following night, the Japanese gathered what was left of their strength and came on once more.

And once more, the guns were waiting for them, and the result was the same. Hundreds upon hundreds of the Sendai Division were counted dead in front of that battalion’s line when it was over. The division that had marched through the jungle, so sure of breakfast in the American mess, was broken as a fighting force on that ridge, and it never took Henderson Field, and it never would.

And it had held on the piece that mattered most, because of one sergeant who would not let his guns go quiet. Now, I promised you I would keep the whole of it in the frame, and so I must say the thing that the poster leaves out, this was not one man against a mob who all conveniently fell down. Baselone had marines beside him, and a great many of them did not live to see the dawn he saw.

His own gun crews were killed at their weapons. The men who fed the belts and carried the water and died doing it have mostly no names that anyone remembers now, and they were every bit as brave as he was. And on the other side of that wire were 3,000 young men, somebody’s sons, sent up a muddy hill by their own generals in a frontal attack that never had a real chance of working, and cut down there in the dark in numbers that are hard to hold in the mind.

There is no version of this night that is clean. There is only a line that held, and a fearful price paid on both sides of it to decide whether it would. For what he did on that ridge, John Basalone received the Medal of Honor. It was formally awarded to him on the 21st of May 1943 and it made him the first enlisted marine to earn that decoration in the whole of the Second World War.

A short while later he was promoted to platoon sergeant. Then the Marine Corps did the thing that famous men are always subjected to. They took him off the line and sent him home and they put him on a stage. He toured the United States selling war bonds, standing in front of enormous crowds who wanted to touch the hero of Guadal Canal, raising a fortune for the war effort.

Fetted in his hometown of Raritan by tens of thousands of people who lined the streets to see one of their own come back with the nation’s highest honor around his neck. He hated it, not the people, the safety. He asked again and again to be sent back to the war. The Marine Corps offered him a commission, an officer’s rank, an instructor’s post, any comfortable path he liked. He turned it all down.

He wanted his machine guns, and he wanted his Marines. And in the end, they let him have them. Before he shipped out again, he met a woman named Lena Mayigi, a sergeant in the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve. And in July of 1944, they married in a church in Oceanside in California. They had a little time together and then he went back to the Pacific to a new division and a new island and the island was called Ewoima.

On the 19th of February 1945, Gunnery Sergeant John Basalone went ashore in the first hours of the landing on that black volcanic beach into fire so heavy that men could not lift their heads. He did there exactly what he had done at Gda Canal. He got up and he moved. With the assault pinned down at the water’s edge, he worked his way forward and led a party against a Japanese strong point, a block house of concrete that was holding up the whole advance.

And he helped to destroy it and open the way inland for the Marines behind him. Then he moved on toward the airfield, still up, still leading, and a mortar round came down among them and killed him. He was 28 years old. For his conduct that morning he was awarded the Navy Cross and so he became the only enlisted Marine of the entire war to hold both the Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross, the two highest things his core could give a man.

His wife Lena never remarried. She lived on more than 50 years after him and when she died in 1999 they buried her still wearing her wedding ring. I find I cannot tell the story of the ridge without telling that as well because it is the other end of the same thread. The night on Guadal Canal was 7 months and a lifetime away from a mortar on a beach.

And both of them were away again from a widow keeping faith for half a century. That is what these decorations actually cost. Not medals. That sit with the records long enough and a different man comes up off the page than the one on the recruiting poster. Not a Superman. A short, tough, restless machine gunner from New Jersey who was very good at a terrible job.

Who ran ammunition barefoot through the enemy because his gunners needed it. who could have spent the whole war safe and famous and instead talked his way back into the worst place he could find and died there in the first hour leading from the front. The films make him a symbol. The documents make him a man and the man is better because the man was afraid and did it anyway and did not come home.

So that is the ridge above Henderson Field and the guns in the rain and the sergeant who would not let them fall silent. I have told it to you as the papers tell it, glory and cost together, because you cannot have the one honestly without the other. Let me ask you two things before you go. What is the moment in this story that will stay with you? The jammed gun fixed by feel in the dark, the belts carried barefoot through the enemy, or the pistol and the machete at the last? And whose story should I take up next? Which name from that ocean

war do you want me to bring up off the page and set straight? tell me down in the comments because I read them and the next film often starts with something one of you writes. If you would like to sit with more of these, the subscribe button is right there and it costs you nothing at all. Lest we forget the whole

When 54 Japanese Tried to EXECUTE One American — He Killed Them All in 7 Minutes

The 25th of October 1942, a low ridge of black mud south of Henderson Field on the island of Guadal Canal. It has been raining for hours, the sort of rain that fills a man’s boots and turns solid ground to soup. And out in the dark, past the coils of barbed wire, thousands of soldiers of the Japanese Sendai Division are getting to their feet.

They have been told that the Americans on this ridge are beaten men sick with fever, short of food, short of bullets, ready to break at the first hard push. Their officers expect to be eating breakfast inside the American lines by morning. They come at a run, screaming as they come, and the first ranks throw themselves flat across the wire so the men behind can cross over their backs like a bridge made of bodies.

Against all of that, on one narrow stretch of the line, there stands a single sergeant and a small knot of Marines behind two water-cooled machine guns. The sergeant is short and dark and grinning even now, a former army man who once solded in the Philippines and never quite lost the swagger of it. His name is John Basilon.

In the hours that follow, the men coming at him in the dark are going to learn that the half-st starved Americans on this ridge are not beaten at all, and that the man behind the guns has no intention of dying on anybody’s schedule but his own. By first light, the ground in front of his position will be so thickly covered with the fallen that the stretcher teams cannot walk a straight line through it.

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. I have read the field reports from that ridge many times and the citation and the accounts of the men who stood the line beside him.

And I will tell you plainly, there are stories that shrink when you look at the paperwork, and there are stories that grow. John Basselone is one of the ones that grows. The truth of that night is bigger than any poster ever made of him because the truth includes the cost and the cost was terrible and he paid a share of it himself a little over 2 years later on a black beach far to the north.

So let me take you back and tell it the way the documents tell it from the start. He was born on the 4th of November 1916 in Buffalo in the state of New York and he grew up in the town of Raritton in New Jersey, one of 10 children in a working family. He was not a scholar and never pretended to be.

As a young man, he joined the United States Army and served a hitch in the Philippines. And he was such a good boxer over there and talked about Manila so often once he came home that the nickname stuck to him for the rest of his short life, Manila John. When war came, he did not want the army again. He wanted the Marines.

He wanted, by his own account, to be where the fighting was hardest. And in the autumn of 1942, the Marines gave him exactly what he asked for. By October of that year, he was a sergeant in the first battalion of the seventh marines, part of the first marine division on Guadal Canal. If you do not know the name, understand that Guadal Canal was the first place in the whole Pacific War where the United States took ground from Japan and then had to hold it with its fingernails.

The prize was a single airfield the Marines had captured and named Henderson Field. Whoever held that field controlled the skies over a huge stretch of ocean. And so the Japanese wanted it back with an intensity that is difficult to describe. Night after night, their warships shelled it. Their aircraft bombed it.

And in the third week of October, they sent in their infantry to take it by storm. Baselone was in charge of two sections of heavy machine guns, the water-cooled 30 caliber Brownings, guns that could fire on and on all night if you fed them belts, and kept water in the jacket. His stretch of the line sat below the ridge in front of the airfield in ground that was half jungle and half swamp.

The battalion he belonged to was commanded by a lean growling officer named Lewis Puller, a man the Marines called Chesty, who was already becoming a legend in his own right. Puller had spread his men thin because there were not enough of them to do anything else. And Basilone’s guns were a hinge in the middle of that thin line.

If the hinge broke, the whole line folded. And if the line folded, the airfield fell. You have to understand the shape those Marines were in by that third week of October to see the night properly. They had been on the island since August with the sea often in enemy hands behind them, which meant supply was thin and the food was worse.

Men were living on captured Japanese rice and two skimpy meals a day. Malaria and dissentry ran through the ranks so hard that a good number of the men holding that line were running fevers even as they held it, shivering in the wet yellow with quinine. The Japanese command knew all this or thought it did, and it was a large part of why they were so certain the push would work.

On paper, the Americans on that ridge were sick, hungry, cut off, and outnumbered on the ground they had to defend. It was a reasonable thing to bet on. It simply turned out to be wrong. The plan that came at them was the work of a Japanese lieutenant general named Misau Mararyama who commanded the Sendai division and had marched the bulk of it for days through jungle so thick that his men arrived worn out and had to leave much of their heavy artillery behind.

His idea was a night assault in mass against the southern ridge in the belief that weight of numbers in the dark would carry the line where daylight and firepower could not. It was not a foolish plan for the war he thought he was fighting against dugin machine guns with good fields of fire and a man like Baselone behind them.

It was closer to a catastrophe waiting for a place to happen. On the night of the 24th of October, it began to rain. And it did not stop. Around 10:00 in the evening, the first waves of the Sendai division came out of the dark against the wire. There was something on the order of 3,000 of them committed against that sector over the course of the night, regiment after regiment, and they did not come cleverly.

They came in mass straight at the guns, trusting to numbers and to nerve. The Marines had strung barbed wire and cighted their weapons to cross their fire. And when the flares went up, the whole soaked hillside was full of running men. The machine guns opened up and cut lanes through them and still they came climbing over their own dead using the bodies on the wire as a road.

Let me tell you a little about the weapon itself because the weapon is half the story. The 30 caliber Browning of that day was a water cooled gun. The barrel sat inside a metal jacket and the jacket was filled with water because a barrel firing hundreds of rounds a minute for hours would otherwise glow and warp and fail.

It took a crew to work one properly. A gunner on the trigger, an assistant gunner feeding the cloth belts of ammunition in from the side, and more men behind them humping fresh belts and cans of water forward and carrying the wounded back. It was not a weapon for one man. And yet, across the worst of that night, as the crews around him were killed and hurt, Basilone kept finding himself doing the work of four and five men at once.

Gunner and loader and ammunition carrier and section leader. All of it in the dark. All of it in the rain. Now, here is where the story stops being a poster and becomes a real night of work. Because that is what it was. Brutal, exhausting, close work. The guns get hot, the belts run out, the water in the jackets boils away, and the barrels start to droop and jam.

Men are hit at the trigger and slump over, and someone has to drag them clear and take their place. At one point in the night, one of Basilone’s two gun sections was overrun and knocked out of action entirely. Its crews killed or wounded. And word came back that on that piece of the line only a couple of men were still standing and firing.

Basalone did not send someone to fix it. He went himself. He ran through the dark and the mud through ground the Japanese had already got in among to reach the silent guns. I want you to picture what that actually took. He fixed a jammed gun with his bare hands in the pitch black by feel the metal hot enough to scold with enemy soldiers close enough to hear.

He got it firing again. And when a gun could not be fixed in place, he picked the whole thing up, the receiver and the tripod together, better than 90 lbs of steel and scolding water, and he carried it in his arms to a new spot and set it down and fed it and fired it. He moved up and down that torn line all night doing this from one gun to the next, patching, hauling, laying his own fire.

And every time the Japanese thought they had found the gap, the gap had a machine gun in it again, and it was Basilone. The ammunition was the other war inside the war. You cannot fire these guns without belts. And the belts were back down the line, and the trail to them was cut with Japanese soldiers sitting on it in the dark.

Baselone went down that trail anyway. More than once through the night, he fought his way back along it, past enemy who had worked in behind his own position, carrying belts of ammunition draped over his shoulders and cradled in his arms to keep his gunners fed. He did it in his socks because the mud had sucked his boots off, and he had not the time to care. Think on that.

The man who held the center of the line at Guadal Canal did a good part of it barefoot, running ammunition through ground that was more enemy than friend. Toward the end, in the gray hour before dawn, the belts finally ran dry at his own gun, and the Japanese chose that same moment to rush the position one more time.

He had no more machine gun to give them. So he drew the pistol on his hip, and he took up a machete, and he met them there in the mud at arms length, and he held, “That is not a line from a film. that is in the record. When the heavy guns fell silent for want of ammunition, John Baselone kept his piece of Guadal Canal with a handgun and a blade until fresh belts could be brought up and the guns could speak again.

And then at last the light came up over the ridge, and the shooting fell away, and the Marines could see what the knight had made. In front of that thin line, the Sendai division lay in heaps. The attacking force had been, in the plain words of the reports, all but destroyed. On Basselon’s own frontage, the dead were piled so close together that the Marines had to drag bodies aside to clear fields of fire for the next assault because they fully expected another one to come.

Whole companies of the enemy had been fed into that sector and had simply ceased to exist. The airfield was still American. The line had held, and it was not one night. The citation that Basilone was later given names two days, the 24th and the 25th of October, because when darkness came again the following night, the Japanese gathered what was left of their strength and came on once more.

And once more, the guns were waiting for them, and the result was the same. Hundreds upon hundreds of the Sendai Division were counted dead in front of that battalion’s line when it was over. The division that had marched through the jungle, so sure of breakfast in the American mess, was broken as a fighting force on that ridge, and it never took Henderson Field, and it never would.

And it had held on the piece that mattered most, because of one sergeant who would not let his guns go quiet. Now, I promised you I would keep the whole of it in the frame, and so I must say the thing that the poster leaves out, this was not one man against a mob who all conveniently fell down. Baselone had marines beside him, and a great many of them did not live to see the dawn he saw.

His own gun crews were killed at their weapons. The men who fed the belts and carried the water and died doing it have mostly no names that anyone remembers now, and they were every bit as brave as he was. And on the other side of that wire were 3,000 young men, somebody’s sons, sent up a muddy hill by their own generals in a frontal attack that never had a real chance of working, and cut down there in the dark in numbers that are hard to hold in the mind.

There is no version of this night that is clean. There is only a line that held, and a fearful price paid on both sides of it to decide whether it would. For what he did on that ridge, John Basalone received the Medal of Honor. It was formally awarded to him on the 21st of May 1943 and it made him the first enlisted marine to earn that decoration in the whole of the Second World War.

A short while later he was promoted to platoon sergeant. Then the Marine Corps did the thing that famous men are always subjected to. They took him off the line and sent him home and they put him on a stage. He toured the United States selling war bonds, standing in front of enormous crowds who wanted to touch the hero of Guadal Canal, raising a fortune for the war effort.

Fetted in his hometown of Raritan by tens of thousands of people who lined the streets to see one of their own come back with the nation’s highest honor around his neck. He hated it, not the people, the safety. He asked again and again to be sent back to the war. The Marine Corps offered him a commission, an officer’s rank, an instructor’s post, any comfortable path he liked. He turned it all down.

He wanted his machine guns, and he wanted his Marines. And in the end, they let him have them. Before he shipped out again, he met a woman named Lena Mayigi, a sergeant in the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve. And in July of 1944, they married in a church in Oceanside in California. They had a little time together and then he went back to the Pacific to a new division and a new island and the island was called Ewoima.

On the 19th of February 1945, Gunnery Sergeant John Basalone went ashore in the first hours of the landing on that black volcanic beach into fire so heavy that men could not lift their heads. He did there exactly what he had done at Gda Canal. He got up and he moved. With the assault pinned down at the water’s edge, he worked his way forward and led a party against a Japanese strong point, a block house of concrete that was holding up the whole advance.

And he helped to destroy it and open the way inland for the Marines behind him. Then he moved on toward the airfield, still up, still leading, and a mortar round came down among them and killed him. He was 28 years old. For his conduct that morning he was awarded the Navy Cross and so he became the only enlisted Marine of the entire war to hold both the Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross, the two highest things his core could give a man.

His wife Lena never remarried. She lived on more than 50 years after him and when she died in 1999 they buried her still wearing her wedding ring. I find I cannot tell the story of the ridge without telling that as well because it is the other end of the same thread. The night on Guadal Canal was 7 months and a lifetime away from a mortar on a beach.

And both of them were away again from a widow keeping faith for half a century. That is what these decorations actually cost. Not medals. That sit with the records long enough and a different man comes up off the page than the one on the recruiting poster. Not a Superman. A short, tough, restless machine gunner from New Jersey who was very good at a terrible job.

Who ran ammunition barefoot through the enemy because his gunners needed it. who could have spent the whole war safe and famous and instead talked his way back into the worst place he could find and died there in the first hour leading from the front. The films make him a symbol. The documents make him a man and the man is better because the man was afraid and did it anyway and did not come home.

So that is the ridge above Henderson Field and the guns in the rain and the sergeant who would not let them fall silent. I have told it to you as the papers tell it, glory and cost together, because you cannot have the one honestly without the other. Let me ask you two things before you go. What is the moment in this story that will stay with you? The jammed gun fixed by feel in the dark, the belts carried barefoot through the enemy, or the pistol and the machete at the last? And whose story should I take up next? Which name from that ocean

war do you want me to bring up off the page and set straight? tell me down in the comments because I read them and the next film often starts with something one of you writes. If you would like to sit with more of these, the subscribe button is right there and it costs you nothing at all. Lest we forget the whole