Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu by Bill Sloan, Jim McEnery

just mud holes. In reality, the points where the Tenaru and Alligator Creek empty into the sea are more than a mile apart, and their wandering courses never take them much less than 1,000 yards from one another.
    What’s more important, though, is what happened in the area between the Tenaru and the Alligator on the night of August 20–21, 1942.
    During the day on August 20, Lieutenant Colonel Edwin Pollock’s Second Battalion, First Marines set up on the west bank of Alligator Creek. Their lines ran north from about 1,000 yards inland to a large sandspit where Alligator met the sea.
    The Marines had put together a strong defensive position with well-dug-in machine guns covering the sandspit and a point of land beyond it on the east bank. They had a 37-millimeter gun loaded with canister shot that could rip closely packed infantry troops to shreds, and it was positioned to rake the same area. They also strung a barbed wire barrier across the sandspit near the west bank.
    After dark that evening, the Marines farthest to the east got reports of Japanese patrols and gunfire on the east side of the stream, and they started falling back toward the sandspit. The reports worried Colonel Pollock, and he went east on his own to investigate. But a runner caught him before he got to the scene of the trouble and told him about a badly wounded native who’d stumbled into Marine lines claiming he’d seen “maybe 500 Japs” off to the east.
    “By this time, I knew something was up,” Pollock said. He called division headquarters to get help for the wounded native, and while he was on the phone, firing broke out along the Alligator. A few minutes later, at about 1:30 AM on August 21, a green flare lit the sky above the east bank of the stream, and about 200 Japs came charging across the sandspit.
    Colonel Ichiki didn’t seem the least bit concerned about the Marines’ well-prepared defenses. I guess he expected his charging troops to slash through the American lines like a hot knife through butter—just like they’d always done before.
    Man, was he ever wrong!
    When the Japs reached the barbed wire, they stopped, just as machine gun, small-arms, and 37-millimeter canister fire from the Marines tore into them. Dozens of Nips were killed before they could cut their way through the wire.
    A Marine lieutenant later described the scene like this: “Theywaved their arms wildly and shrieked and jabbered like monkeys, but they kept coming.”
    A few Japs got through and jumped into the Marines’ foxholes, where our guys rose up to meet them in hand-to-hand fighting. This was the first organized, large-scale enemy assault on Guadalcanal. It was also the Marines’ first chance for some real payback—for Pearl Harbor, Wake Island, Bataan, Corregidor, the Goettge patrol, and all the rest. What happened over the next few minutes answered forever the question of whether the Japs were invincible supermen and whether American troops could stand up to them toe-to-toe.
    One young Marine, Corporal Dean Wilson, mowed down Japs with his BAR until the weapon jammed. Then he grabbed a machete and hacked three more onrushing enemy soldiers to pieces.
    Just as Corporal John Shea jumped into an adjacent foxhole to try to clear his tommy gun, he was jabbed twice in the leg by an enemy soldier’s bayonet. His response was to jam his right foot into the Jap’s belly, throw him against the wall of the foxhole, and give him five shots in the chest with the tommy.
    Private John Rivers, a machine gunner, poured hundreds of rounds into the closely packed enemy ranks until he was fatally wounded by a bullet that struck him square in the face. Even then, according to eyewitnesses, his dying fingers squeezed off another 200 rounds to keep killing Japs.
    Private Al Schmid took over Rivers’s machine gun and kept it firing until fragments from an exploding grenade blinded him in both eyes and hurled him away from the gun. Then he drew his pistol and emptied it