A thank you to all who have served- a story about one marine

[DICKX]

This is a good read, a little long and this forum may not be the place for it, but I know that many of you guy's were in the service, and I THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE.
Celebrating the 237th Birthday of our Nation's USMC Nodvember 10th.

DOWN TO ONE MARINE

On Nov. 15, 2003, an 85-year-old retired Marine Corps colonel died of
congestive heart failure at his home in La Quinta, Calif., southeast
of Palm Springs.

He was a combat veteran of World War II. Reason enough to honor him.
But this Marine was a little different. This Marine was Mitchell
Paige.

It's hard today to envision -- or, for the dwindling few, to remember
-- what the world looked like on 26 Oct 1942.

The U.S. Navy was not the most powerful fighting force in the Pacific.
Not by a long shot. So the Navy basically dumped a few thousand lonely
American Marines on the beach at Guadalcanal and high-tailed it out of
there.

Nimitz, Fletcher and Halsey had to ration what few ships they had.
I've written separately about the way Bull Halsey rolled the dice on
the night of Nov. 13, 1942, violating the stern War College edict
against committing capital ships in restricted waters and instead
dispatching into the Slot his last two remaining fast battleships, the
South Dakota and the Washington, escorted by the only four destroyers
with enough fuel in their bunkers to get them there and back.

Those American destroyer captains need not have worried about carrying
enough fuel to get home. By 11 p.m., outnumbered better than three-
to-one by a massive Japanese task force driving down from the
northwest, every one of those four American destroyers had been shot
up, sunk, or set aflame. And while the South Dakota -- known
throughout the fleet as a jinx ship -- had damaged some lesser
Japanese vessels, she continued to be plagued with electrical and fire
control problems.

"Washington was now the only intact ship left in the force," writes
naval historian David Lippman. "In fact, at that moment Washington was
the entire U.S. Pacific Fleet. She was the only barrier between
Admiral Kondo's ships and Guadalcanal. If this one ship did not stop
14 Japanese ships right then and there, America might lose the Pacific
war. .."

On Washington's bridge, Lieutenant Ray Hunter had the conn. He had
just seen the destroyers Walker and Preston blown sky high. Dead ahead
lay their burning wreckage. Hundreds of men were swimming in the water
and the Japanese ships racing in.

Hunter had to do something. The course he took now could decide the
war, Lippman writes. ''Come left, he said. ...
Washington's rudder change put the
burning destroyers between Washington and the enemy, thus preventing
her from being silhouetted by their fires.

The move made the Japanese momentarily cease fire. Lacking radar, they
could not spot Washington behind the fires. ... Washington raced
through burning seas. Dozens of destroyer men were in the water
clinging to floating wreckage. Get after them, Washington! one shouted

Sacrificing their ships by maneuvering into the path of torpedoes
intended for the Washington, the captains of the American destroyers
had given [ADM] China" Lee one final chance.

Blinded by the smoke and flames, the Japanese battleship Kirishima
turned on her searchlights, illuminating the helpless South Dakota,
and opened fire.
Finally, as her own muzzle blasts illuminated her in the darkness,
Admiral Lee and Captain Glenn Davis could positively identify an enemy
target.

The Washington's main batteries opened fire at 12 midnight precisely.
Her radar fire control system functioned perfectly. During the first
seven minutes of 14 Nov 1942, the "last ship in the U.S.
Pacific Fleet" fired 75
of her 16-inch shells at the battleship Kirishima. Aboard Kirishima,
it rained steel. At 3:25 a.m., her burning hulk officially became the
first enemy sunk by an American battleship since the Spanish-American
War. Stunned the Japanese withdrew. Within days, Japanese commander
Istook Yamamoto recommended the unthinkable to the Emperor --
withdrawal from Guadalcanal.

But that was still weeks in the future. We are still with Mitchell
Paige back on the malaria jungle island of Guadalcanal, placed like a
speed bump at the end of the long blue-water slot between New Guinea
and the Bismarck Archipelago ... the very route the Japanese Navy
would have to take to reach Australia.

On Guadalcanal the Marines struggled to complete an airfield. Yamamoto
knew what that meant. No effort would be spared to dislodge these
upstart Yanks from a position that could endanger his ships. Before
long, relentless Japanese counterattacks had driven supporting U.S.br /> Navy from inshore waters.
The Marines were on their own.

As Platoon Sgt. Mitchell Paige and his 33 riflemen set about carefully
emplacing their four water-cooled .30-caliber Brownings, manning their
section of the thin khaki line which was expected to defend Henderson
Field against the assault of the night of 25 Oct 1942, it's unlikely
anyone thought they were about to provide the definitive answer to
that most desperate of questions: How many able-bodied U.S. Marines
does it take to hold a hill against 2,000 desperate and motivated
Japanese attackers?

Nor did the commanders of the mighty Japanese Army, who had swept all
before them for decades, expect their advance to be halted on some
jungle ridge manned by one thin line of Yanks in khaki in October of
1942

But by the time the night was over, The Japanese 29th Infantry
Regiment had lost 553 killed or missing and 479 wounded among its
2,554 men, historian Lippman reports. The Japanese 16th Regiment's
losses are uncounted, but the [US] 164th's burial parties handled 975
Japanese bodies. ... The American estimate of 2,200 Japanese dead is
probably too low.

You've already figured out where the Japanese focused their attack,
haven't you? Among the 90 American dead and seriously wounded that
night were all the men in Mitchell Paige's platoon; every one. As the
night of endless attacks wore on, Paige moved up and down his line,
pulling his dead and wounded comrades back into their foxholes and
firing a few bursts from each of the four Brownings in turn,
convincing the Japanese forces down the hill that the positions were
still manned.

The citation for Paige's Congressional Medal of Honor picks up the
tale:
When the enemy broke through the line directly in front of his
position, P/Sgt. Paige, commanding a machinegun section with fearless
determination, continued to direct the fire of his gunners until all
his men were either killed or wounded. Alone, against the deadly hail
of Japanese shells, he fought with his gun and when it was destroyed,
took over another, moving from gun to gun, never ceasing his withering
fire."

In the end, Sgt. Paige picked up the last of the 40-pound, belt-fed
Brownings -- the same design which John Moses Browning famously fired
for a continuous 25 minutes until it ran out of ammunition, glowing
cherry red, at its first U.S. Army trial -- and did something for
which the weapon was never designed. Sgt. Paige walked down the hill
toward the place where he could hear the last Japanese survivors
rallying to move around his flank, the belt-fed gun cradled under his
arm, firing as he went.

And the weapon did not fail.

Coming up at dawn, battalion executive officer Major Odell M. Conoley
was first to discover the answer to our question: How many able-bodied
Marines does it take to hold a hill against two regiments of
motivated, combat-hardened infantrymen who have never known defeat?

On a hill where the bodies were piled like cordwood, Mitchell Paige
alone sat upright behind his 30-caliber Browning, waiting to see what
the dawn would bring.

One hill: one Marine.

But "In the early morning light, the enemy could be seen a few yards
off, and vapor from the barrels of their machine guns was clearly
visible,"
reports historian Lippman. "It was decided to try to rush the
position."

For the task, Major Conoley gathered together "three enlisted
communication personnel, several riflemen, a few company runners who
were at the point, together with a cook and a few mess men who had
brought food to the position the evening before."

Joined by Paige, this ad hoc force of 17 Marines counterattacked at
5:40 a.m , discovering that this extremely short range allowed the
optimum use of grenades. They cleared the ridge.

And that's where the unstoppable wave of Japanese conquest finally
crested, broke, and began to recede. On an unnamed jungle ridge on an
insignificant island no one had ever heard of, called Guadalcanal.

But who remembers, today, how close-run a thing it was -- the ridge
held by a single Marine, in the autumn of 1942?

When the Hasbro Toy Co. telephoned some years back, asking permission
to put the retired Colonel's face on some kid's doll, Mitchell Paige
thought they must be joking.

But they weren't. That's his face on the little Marine they call "G.I.
Joe."

And you probably thought that was an ARMY Doll....!!!

It was a good read for me.

Dick

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