No American Unit Had Beaten the Japanese Army Until That Night
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He wrote down the date he would enjoy his victory. Then he marched 800 men at a sandbar thirty yards long.
August 20th, 1942. In the jungle east of the Marine lines on Guadalcanal, a fifty year old Solomon Islands police sergeant named Jacob Vouza is tied to a tree. The Japanese soldiers who caught him found a small American flag in his loincloth. They have asked him where the Marines are. He has not answered, so they beat him, cut him and leave him for dead. Around him, in the trees, Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki's detachment is moving west.
Ichiki had been told at Truk to expect as many as ten thousand Americans, to avoid frontal attacks, and to wait for the rest of his regiment. He chose to believe there were two thousand and that they would run. That night he sent his men straight across the sandbar at the mouth of Alligator Creek, into water cooled machine guns and two anti tank guns loaded with canister. When the first wave died on the sand, he sent the second over the bodies. At dawn he sent a third through the surf.
By five in the afternoon the Marines counted 777 Japanese dead and took fifteen prisoners. Of the 917 men who had landed two days earlier, about thirty walked back out of the jungle. It was the first time in the war that an American ground force had beaten a Japanese Army unit in a stand up fight, and the Marines learned on that sandbar a lesson that shaped the next three years of the Pacific war.
This is the full story of that night: the scout who chewed through his ropes and reached the Marine line minutes before the attack, the blinded machine gunner who kept firing while his corporal told him where to aim, the tanks that went into the coconut grove in the afternoon, why Rabaul refused to believe the report, and what became of Jacob Vouza, Al Schmid and the colonel who never came out of the grove.
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Sources and archival material: US Marine Corps Historical Monograph The Guadalcanal Campaign (Zimmerman, 1949), Naval History and Heritage Command, National Archives (NARA) Marine Corps and Naval Photographic Center film collections, United News and Universal newsreels, captured Japanese newsreel footage held by NARA, Wikimedia Commons, Library of Congress, and the memoirs of Martin Clemens, Richard Tregaskis and Robert Leckie.
Present day photograph of the Japanese memorial on Mount Austen: Stefan Krasowski, CC BY 2.0. Battlefield maps in this video are illustrations built over generated terrain, with unit positions drawn from the Marine Corps monograph; they are guides to the ground, not archival documents.
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No American Unit Had Beaten the Japanese Army Until That Night
Filed under fire
256,868 views
He wrote down the date he would enjoy his victory. Then he marched 800 men at a sandbar thirty yards long.
August 20th, 1942. In the jungle east of the Marine lines on Guadalcanal, a fifty year old Solomon Islands police sergeant named Jacob Vouza is tied to a tree. The Japanese soldiers who caught him found a small American flag in his loincloth. They have asked him where the Marines are. He has not answered, so they beat him, cut him and leave him for dead. Around him, in the trees, Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki's detachment is moving west.
Ichiki had been told at Truk to expect as many as ten thousand Americans, to avoid frontal attacks, and to wait for the rest of his regiment. He chose to believe there were two thousand and that they would run. That night he sent his men straight across the sandbar at the mouth of Alligator Creek, into water cooled machine guns and two anti tank guns loaded with canister. When the first wave died on the sand, he sent the second over the bodies. At dawn he sent a third through the surf.
By five in the afternoon the Marines counted 777 Japanese dead and took fifteen prisoners. Of the 917 men who had landed two days earlier, about thirty walked back out of the jungle. It was the first time in the war that an American ground force had beaten a Japanese Army unit in a stand up fight, and the Marines learned on that sandbar a lesson that shaped the next three years of the Pacific war.
This is the full story of that night: the scout who chewed through his ropes and reached the Marine line minutes before the attack, the blinded machine gunner who kept firing while his corporal told him where to aim, the tanks that went into the coconut grove in the afternoon, why Rabaul refused to believe the report, and what became of Jacob Vouza, Al Schmid and the colonel who never came out of the grove.
If you want more real WW2 stories like this one, subscribe, it helps more than you'd think. If this one hit different, leave a like. And let me know in the comments, where are you watching from?
Sources and archival material: US Marine Corps Historical Monograph The Guadalcanal Campaign (Zimmerman, 1949), Naval History and Heritage Command, National Archives (NARA) Marine Corps and Naval Photographic Center film collections, United News and Universal newsreels, captured Japanese newsreel footage held by NARA, Wikimedia Commons, Library of Congress, and the memoirs of Martin Clemens, Richard Tregaskis and Robert Leckie.
Present day photograph of the Japanese memorial on Mount Austen: Stefan Krasowski, CC BY 2.0. Battlefield maps in this video are illustrations built over generated terrain, with unit positions drawn from the Marine Corps monograph; they are guides to the ground, not archival documents.