At 10:30 p.m. on October 24th, 1942, Sergeant Mitchell Page crouched in a foxhole on the blackened ridge of Guadal Canal, running his hand over the cold steel breach of a weapon that half the United States Marine Corps considered a joke. It was raining, the kind of heavy tropical sheets of water that turned the jungle floor into a slurry of mud and rotting vegetation.
200 yards to the south, the jungle was alive. The snapping of twigs, the clinking of metal on wood, the whispered commands of thousands of men moving into position. The Japanese second division, the feared Saii, was out there in the dark. They were the finest jungle fighters in the emperor’s army, undefeated, battleh hardened, and thirsty for American blood.
They had marched through hundreds of miles of hell to reach this ridge, and their orders were simple. Break the marine [music] line. Seize the airfield. Push the Americans into the sea. Paige looked at the weapons sitting in the mud next to his machine guns. It was the 37 mm M3 anti-tank [music] gun. To a civilian, it might have looked like a cannon.
To a soldier, it looked like a toy. The barrel was absurdly thin, barely wider than a drain pipe. The wheels were small and spindly, looking more like they belonged on a farm cart than a weapon of war. It sat low to the ground, unassuming, unimpressive, and according to the experts, completely useless. The men in the rifle companies called it the peashooter.
They called it the door knocker. They made bets on whether a round from this gun could even penetrate a sheet of plywood, let alone the armor of a tank. On a battlefield dominated by heavy artillery and massive naval guns, the little M3 was a punchline. But on this night in the driving reign, Mitchell Paige did not treat it like a joke.
He treated it like the only thing standing between his men and a massacre. The reputation of the 37 mm gun had died long before it ever reached the jungle. In the deserts of North Africa and the fields of Europe, the war had evolved faster than the engineers could keep up. German tanks had grown thicker skin. Their steel armor plates had become impenetrable walls that shrugged off light caliber shells like rain off a windshield.
When American crews fired the 37 mm at German panzers, the shells simply bounced off. They would hit with a spark and ricochet into the sky, leaving nothing but a scratch on the paint and a very angry German tank crew. The reports coming back to Washington were brutal. The gun was obsolete. It was underpowered.
It was a waste of steel and shipping space. The high command had already begun phasing [music] it out, replacing it with bigger, heavier guns that could actually punch a hole in enemy armor. But the Marine Corps does not throw things away. When the First Marine Division packed their transport ships for the invasion of the Solomon Islands, they took every weapon they could get their hands on, including the despised M3.
The gun crews knew what the rest of the infantry thought of them. They heard the snickering when they unloaded the crates on the beach. They saw the looks of pity when they dragged the 900-lb guns [music] through the soft sand. It was an embarrassing weapon to be assigned to. It felt like being handed a slingshot to fight a bear.
The infantry guys carried rifles that worked. [music] The mortar teams dropped explosives that could level a house. The 37 mm crews were dragging around a piece of junk that couldn’t kill a tank and was too clumsy to kill a soldier. Or so they thought. The misery of the gun crews was compounded by the island itself.
Guadal Canal was not just a battlefield. [music] It was a biological weapon. The heat sat on the island like a wet wool blanket, suffocating anyone who tried to move. The mud was alive. A suction cup that grabbed boots and wheels and refused to let go. Moving a rifleman was hard. Moving a 900 lb cannon was torture.
The gun crews became pack mules. They strapped harnesses to their chests and dragged the guns through swamps that came up to their waists. They hauled them up ridge lines that were so steep they had to dig their fingernails into the dirt to keep from sliding back down. [music] And every step of the way, the infantry mocked them.
They asked why they were bothering. They asked if they plan to hunt squirrels with that thing. They asked why they didn’t just leave the dead weight on the [music] beach and carry extra ammunition for the real guns. The mockery wasn’t just mean-spirited. It was logical. The terrain of Guadal Canal was dense, tangled rainforest.
Visibility was often less than 20 ft. Trees grew so close together that a man had to turn his shoulders sideways to squeeze through. It was infantry country. It was knife and grenade country. It was no place for a cannon. You couldn’t tow a gun through the vines. You couldn’t find a line of sight to fire it.
And even if you could, there were no Japanese tanks to shoot at. The Japanese armor was stuck on theother side of the river, bogged down in the same mud that was killing the Marines. So the experts looked at the 37 mm guns sitting on the ridge and shook their heads. It was a textbook example of military stupidity, bringing the wrong weapon to the wrong fight.
But the experts had missed something. They were thinking about the 37 mm as an anti-tank gun. They were thinking about armor penetration tables and muzzle velocity and kinetic energy. They were thinking about mathematics. Sergeant Paige and the gun crews were not thinking about math. They were thinking about survival.
They knew that the Japanese tactic was not to sit back and duel with artillery. The Japanese tactic was the banzai, the human wave. They would gather thousands of men, fix bayonets, and sprint directly into the American machine guns. They didn’t care about casualties. They didn’t care about tactics.
They cared about overwhelming the line with sheer biological mass. It was a terrifying suicidal strategy that had broken Allied lines across the Pacific. Against a human wave, a rifle is too slow. A machine gun is good, but machine guns overheat. Barrels melt, belts jam, and when the enemy is 10 feet away and screaming, “You don’t need precision.
You need violence. You need something that can stop a dozen men in a heartbeat.” The gun crews looked at their useless little cannon and wondered if it could be repurposed. They wondered if the weapon that was too weak to kill a tank might be too strong for anything else. They looked at the crates of ammunition stacked in the mud.
There were the standard armor-piercing rounds, the solid steel slugs designed to punch through metal. Those were useless here. But buried in the manifest at the bottom of the stack was a different kind of shell. A shell that the manual said was for clearing brush and barbed wire. A shell that nobody ever used.
The sun went down on October 24th and the jungle turned pitch black. The Marines on the line were exhausted. They had been fighting for weeks. They were riddled with malaria, dysentery, and jungle [music] rot. They were starving, surviving on captured Japanese rice and wore chocolate. Their uniforms were rotting off their bodies.
They were outnumbered 10 [music] to one. Across the lines, the Sendai division was fresh. They had landed recently, bringing heavy mortars and fresh troops. They had studied the marine positions. They knew exactly where the weak points were. They knew that the line defending Henderson Field was thin, stretched to the breaking point.
They knew that if they punched hard enough, the Americans would [music] break. General Maryama, the Japanese commander, had written the date in his diary. This was the night the Americans would die. This was the night the emperor’s flag would fly over the airfield. He did not care about the marine machine guns.
He had enough men to absorb the bullets. He certainly did not care about the toy cannons the Americans had dragged up the hill. His intelligence officers had told him about the 37 mm guns. They had laughed about them, too. They told the general that the Americans were so desperate they were using training weapons. They believed the little guns would be overrun in the first 30 seconds of the charge.
They believed the crews would abandon them and run. Back in the foxhole, Sergeant Paige wiped the rain from his eyes. He checked the action on his machine gun. Then he looked over at the 37 mm gun crew. They were soaked to the bone, shivering in the darkness. They had stripped the heavy steel shield off the front of the gun to save weight, leaving themselves completely exposed.
If a firefight started, they would be standing naked in front of the enemy fire. It was a suicide configuration, but they hadn’t stripped the shield just to make the gun lighter. They had stripped it so they could traverse the barrel faster so they could swing the gun left and right instantly. They weren’t setting up to snipe a tank.
They were setting up for a brawl. The jungle went silent. The insects stopped chirping. The bird stopped calling. Every Marine knows that silence. It is the sound of a predator holding its breath before the pounce. Sergeant Paige racked the bolt on his weapon. He looked at the peashooter. The expert said it was garbage.
The infantry said it was a joke. The Japanese said it was irrelevant. In about five minutes, everyone was going to find out who was wrong. The secret to the 37 mm guns transformation lay inside a wooden crate that had been shoved to the back of the ammunition dump. The logistics officers had labeled it canister [music] M2. To the supply clerks, it was just another item on a manifest, something to be counted and stored.
But to the gun crews shivering in the mud, it was the difference between life and death. They pried the lids off the crates with bayonets, [music] revealing the rounds that would change history. They didn’t look like the sleek, pointed, armor-piercing shells that were supposedto kill tanks. They looked like flat-nosed industrial cylinders, ugly and blunt.
If you have ever held a shotgun shell, you know the principle. A shotgun shell is a plastic cup filled with small lead pellets. When you pull the trigger, the pellets fly out in a spreading cloud. It doesn’t need to be precise. It just needs to be pointed in the general direction of the target. Now, imagine that shotgun shell is the size of a man’s forearm.
Instead of plastic, the casing is made of thin metal. And instead of tiny birdshot, it is packed with 122 steel balls, each one nearly half an inch thick. This was the M2 canister round. It turned the precision anti-tank gun into a giant industrial-grade sawoff shotgun. The physics of the canister round were terrifyingly simple.
When the gun fired, the thin metal skin of the shell would disintegrate the moment it left the barrel. The 122 steel balls would instantly begin [music] to spread out, creating a cone of destruction. At 100 yards, that cone was wide enough to cover a jungle trail. At 200 yd, it was a wall of flying steel that nothing could survive.
There was no explosive charge, no fancy fuse, no timing mechanism. It was just kinetic energy and raw violence. It was a weapon designed to sweep a battlefield clean like a broom. But using it effectively required a decision that went against every safety regulation in the manual. The M3 gun came from the factory with a heavy steel shield bolted to the front.
The shield was there to protect the crew from sniper fire and shrapnel. It was a comforting piece of metal that made the gunners feel safe, but it also weighed hundreds of pounds and worse, it limited their vision. Looking through the shield was like looking through a male slot. You could see what was directly in front of you, but you were blind to the sides.
In a tank duel that was fine. The tank was in front of you. But in the jungle, the enemy was everywhere. The gun sergeant made the call. He ordered the crews to unbolt the shields. The men went to work with wrenches, stripping the armor off their weapons. When the heavy plates clanged to the ground, the guns looked naked. They looked fragile.
The crews were now completely exposed. If a Japanese soldier fired a rifle from the treeine, there was [music] nothing to stop the bullet. If a mortar landed nearby, there was no steel to catch the fragments. The crews were trading their safety for speed. Without the heavy shield, the gun was balanced perfectly on its wheels.
A single man could grab the trail and swing the barrel left [music] or right as fast as he could turn his body. They had turned a stationary artillery piece into a giant pistol that [music] they could aim by hand. They stacked the canister rounds in the mud next to the wheels. They cleaned the mud off the brereech blocks. They checked the recoil springs.
And then they waited. The rain [music] kept falling. The water filled the bottom of the foxholes, soaking their boots and rotting their socks. The waiting was always the worst part. Your mind starts to play tricks on you in the dark. A swaying branch looks like a soldier. A gust of wind sounds like a whisper.
The men gripped the cold steel of the gun trails, their knuckles white. They knew what was out there. The Sendai Division wasn’t just a mob of conscripts. They were veterans who had raped and pillaged their way across Asia. They didn’t surrender. They [music] didn’t retreat. And they were coming for the airfield.
At 11:00, the first probe hit. It wasn’t the main attack. It was a testing jab. A few squads of Japanese infantry moving silently up the slope to find the Marine machine guns. They wanted the Americans to open fire to reveal their positions so the Japanese mortars could destroy [music] them.
A machine gunner on the left flank saw movement and squeezed his trigger. The tracers zipped into the dark, illuminating the rain. The Japanese answered instantly. Rifles cracked from the jungle floor. A Namboo light machine gun opened up from a tree stump. The ridge line erupted into a chaotic exchange [music] of green and red tracers.
A group of Japanese soldiers broke cover, sprinting toward the line. They were screaming, bayonets fixed, moving fast across the slippery ground. They were heading straight for the gap between the machine gun nests, a blind spot that the automatic weapons couldn’t cover. [music] It was exactly what they had trained to do.
Exploit the gap, break the line, and flank the enemy. They were 50 yards away, then 40. They thought they had found the weak point. They thought they were safe. They were wrong. The gunner on the number 137 mm gun didn’t use a sight. He didn’t look through a scope. He just looked over the open barrel, grabbed the traverse wheel, and swung the naked gun toward the running shapes.
He shouted the command. The loader slammed a canister round into the brereech. The block slid home with a heavy metallic clack. The gunner stomped on the firingpedal. The sound was not the sharp crack of a rifle or the rhythmic thump of a machine gun. It was a roar, a sudden concussive blast that shook the water off the nearby leaves.
A 3-fft tongue of flame erupted from the barrel, and then the physics took over. The canister shell disintegrated. The 122 steel balls screamed into the dark at 2,000 ft per second. They didn’t hit a single target. They hit everything. The effect was immediate and horrifying. [music] The group of Japanese soldiers simply vanished.
One second, they were sprinting, screaming men. The next second, the air where they had been standing was filled with shredded vegetation and mist. The steel balls tore through the tall grass, cut through the vines, and ripped through the bodies. It was as if an invisible giant had swatted the squad with a flice water. The screaming stopped instantly.
The only sound left was the echo of the gun and the brass casing clanging against the gun’s wheel as it was ejected. The nearby Marines, the ones who had called the gun a peashooter, stared into the darkness. They had never seen anything like it. A machine gun kills men one by one. It stitches a line across a target.
But this this was a deletion. The gun had erased a section of the battlefield. [music] The mockery in the foxholes died right there. Nobody was laughing at the little cannon anymore. The infantrymen looked at the gun crew with wide eyes. The crew didn’t look back. They were already reloading. But the Japanese were not stupid.
The probe had done its job. They now knew where the guns were, and they knew that the Americans had brought something dangerous to the fight. General Maryama did not call off the attack. He intensified it. He ordered his heavy weapons teams to focus on the muzzle flashes of the 37 mm guns. He knew that the guns were the anchor of the defense.
If he could knock them out, the line would crumble. The real battle began 20 minutes later. This wasn’t a probe. This was the flood. From the edge of the jungle, a horn blew. It was a long mournful sound that cut through the rain. Then came the chanting, “Banzai! Banzai!” It started as a murmur and grew into a roar.
Thousands of voices screaming in unison. The ground actually vibrated. The Marines gripped their weapons. They knew the drill. They knew the Japanese would come in waves, climbing over their own dead to get to the foxholes. Then they appeared. A solid wall of brown uniforms emerged from the treeine. They weren’t sneaking anymore. They were charging.
Officers waved swords leading the way. Flags waved in the rain. It was a terrifying display of discipline and fanaticism. They ran straight into the teeth of the American fire. The Marine machine guns opened up, red tracers pouring down the slope. The Japanese soldiers fell, but more stepped over them. They were absorbing the bullets and keeping the momentum. They were getting closer.
100 yard, 80 yard. The 37 mm guns opened up in unison. The peashooters began to bark. Boom, clack, boom, clack. The crews worked with a frantic robotic rhythm. Load, fire, eject. Load, fire, eject. Each shot sent a swarm of steel balls into the mass of attackers. The canister rounds cut massive lanes through the Japanese formation.
It was like watching a sythe cut through wheat. Wherever the guns pointed, the charge collapsed. Men were thrown backward, lifted off their feet by the impact of multiple steel balls. But the Japanese kept coming, there were too many of them. For every 10 men the canister shot killed, 20 more appeared from the dark.
They began to focus their fire on the exposed gun crews. Bullets pinged off the wheels and the barrels. A loader on the number two gun took a round in the shoulder and collapsed into the mud. Another man jumped from a nearby foxhole to take his place, slipping on the wet brass [music] casings that were piling up around the wheels.
The suicide modification of stripping the shields was now exacting its price. The crews were bleeding. They were taking shrapnel from grenades that landed too close, but they couldn’t stop. The barrel of the number one gun began to smoke. The paint on the steel was bubbling from the heat. The recoil system was working so hard that the gun was digging itself deeper into the mud with every shot.
The gunner was screaming, his ears ringing so loud he couldn’t hear the orders. He just watched the tracers and the shapes in the dark. He saw a Japanese officer with a sword leading a group of men toward the right flank, trying to get around the cone of fire. The gunner slammed his shoulder into the traverse bar swinging the hot barrel right.
He didn’t wait for the loader to tap his helmet. He stomped the pedal. The gun roared. [music] The officer and his men disappeared in a spray of mud and steel. The supply of canister shells was dropping fast. The pile of fresh rounds was shrinking while the pile of empty brass grew into a mound that the crew was slipping on. Thegun sergeant looked at the crate.
[music] He saw the bottom. They were burning through ammo at a rate that wasn’t sustainable. And the Japanese were still coming. The screaming hadn’t stopped. The horn was still blowing. The enemy was closing the distance inch by bloody inch. The peashooters had held the [music] first wave, but the ocean was vast and the tide was rising.
By 2:00 a.m., the battle had stopped being a military engagement and had turned into a bar fight in a graveyard. The orderly lines on the map were gone. The clear fields of fire were gone. The Japanese Sendai Division had pushed so close that the Marines could smell them. The air was thick with the copper stench of blood and the sulfur [music] rod of gunpowder.
The jungle ridge, which had been pitch black 3 hours ago, was now lit by a flickering strobe light strobe of muzzle flashes and flares. And right in the center of that chaos, the 37 mm guns were screaming. The peashooters were now operating in a world they were never designed for. The manual said the maximum rate of fire was 25 rounds per minute.
The crews were firing 30, maybe 35. They were loading and firing so fast that the recoil mechanisms didn’t have time to reset. The guns were literally bouncing off the ground with every shot. The wheels slamming into the mud, splashing dirty water onto the red hot barrels. The water sizzled and turned to steam instantly, wrapping the gun crews in a fog that smelled like boiling oil.
The hydraulic fluid inside the recoil cylinders was so hot it was starting to expand, making the guns kick like angry mules. The gunners weren’t aiming anymore. There was no point. The targets weren’t individual soldiers. The target was the darkness itself. The Japanese were pouring out of the jungle like ants from a kicked hill.
They came in clusters of 10, 20, 50 men. They threw themselves at the guns, screaming, firing from the hip, throwing [music] grenades. The gun crews responded with the only thing they had left, raw speed. The loader would jam a canister shell in. The gunner would stomp [music] the pedal, and a cone of steel would erase everything in front of the muzzle.
It was industrial slaughter. At 50 yards, the canister shot didn’t just kill, it disassembled. It tore through the dense vegetation, shredding the vines and the trees until the jungle in front of the guns looked like it had been cleared by a bulldozer. But the guns were dying. The heat was the enemy now.
The steel barrels were glowing a dull cherry red in the night. The heat was so intense that if a loader’s skin touched the metal, it would sear the flesh instantly. The grease on the brereech blocks had cooked off hours ago, leaving dry metal grinding against dry metal. The crews had to kick the brereech handles open with their boots because they were too hot to touch with gloves.
They were pouring canteen water over the barrels to cool them down. But the water evaporated before it could do any good. They were running the guns into the ground, pushing the machinery past the breaking point because if the guns stopped, the line broke. And if the line broke, everybody died. Then the inevitable happened.
The Japanese found the gap. A suicide squad of grenaders managed to crawl through the drainage ditch on the left flank, slipping under the cones of machine gun fire. They popped up 20 yards from the number two gun. The crew never saw them. Three grenades landed in the mud pit around the wheels. The explosion silenced the gun instantly.
The crew [music] was gone. The gun itself was knocked off its axis. One wheel shattered. The barrel pointing uselessly at the sky. The line began to buckle. With one gun down, the volume of fire dropped by half. The Japanese sensed it immediately. They surged toward the gap where the number two gun had been.
They were screaming bands so loud it drowned out the roar of the engines from the airfield below. They were coming through the wire. They were inside the perimeter. This was the moment battles are lost. This was the moment when panic usually sets in. When men look at the overwhelming odds and decide to run.
Sergeant Mitchell Page [music] did not run. He watched the number two gun go down and something inside him snapped. He wasn’t just a sergeant anymore. He was a force of nature. He grabbed his machine gun and ran. He didn’t run away from the breach. He ran directly into it. He sprinted through the mud, dodging bullets, jumping over dead bodies, heading for the silenced gun position.
He reached the crater where his men had died. The gun was useless, but the position was critical. If the Japanese took this hole, they could roll up the entire marine line from the side. Paige realized he couldn’t fix the 37 mm gun, but he could feel the silence it left behind. He set up his machine gun on the edge of the foxhole.
He was alone, no loader, [music] no spotter, just a man and 30 lb of steel. He opened fire. The Japanese were 10 yards away, swarmingover the sandbags. Paige cut them down. He swung the gun left and right, sweeping the area, screaming insults into the dark. He was buying time. He was plugging the dam with his own body. [music] Back at the remaining 37 mm guns, the situation was desperate.
They were down to the last few crates of canister. The loaders were scraping the bottom of the boxes, pulling out shells that were covered in mud and grime. They wiped them on their shirts and shoved them into the britches. The guns were so hot that the rounds were in danger of cooking off, exploding simply from the heat of the chamber before the trigger was pulled.
The gunners had to time it perfectly. Load. Fire immediately. Do not let the shells sit in the chamber for a second. The Japanese changed tactics. They stopped charging the machine guns and focused everything on the last functional 37 mm gun. They knew it was the anchor. They could see the massive muzzle flash illuminating the ridge every 2 seconds. It was a beacon.
Mortar rounds started walking toward the position. Thump, crash, thump, crash. The explosions walked closer, throwing dirt and shrapnel over the crew. The gunshield was gone. Remember, they had stripped it off. There was nothing between the crew and the shrapnel, but their own luck. A mortar round landed 5 yd in front of the wheel.
The concussion lifted the 900 lb gun off the ground. The gunner was thrown backward, blood streaming from his ears. He shook his head, crawled back to the seat, and put his eye back on the target. He didn’t [music] check for wounds. He checked the gun. It was still working. He stomped the pedal. Boom.
Another cone of steel flew into the dark. The crew was operating on pure instinct now. They were zombies moving only because their muscle memory told them to. They were deaf, blind, and bleeding, but they kept the rhythm. Load. Fire. Load. Fire. Then the worst sound in the world. Click. [music] The loader reached into the crate and his hand hit wood. Empty.
He checked the next crate. Empty. He looked around the mud pit frantically. There were thousands of empty brass casings littering the ground, shining in the flare light like gold coins, but no live rounds. The peashooter had eaten everything. The gunner looked [music] at the loader. The loader shook his head. The gun fell silent.
The silence was louder than the noise. The Japanese heard it instantly. The rhythmic roar of the cannon was gone. [music] They knew what it meant. They surged forward. A tidal wave of brown uniforms rising from the grass. This was the final push. They were going to overrun the position. They were going to kill everyone.
But Mitchell Paige wasn’t done. He saw the gun crew falter. He saw the ammo was gone. He didn’t order a retreat. He ordered a scavenge hunt. He screamed at the men to check the other pits to check the dead to check the mud. “Find me something to shoot,” he yelled. “I don’t care if you have to throw rocks.” A runner came sprinting back from the rear supply dump, sliding into the pit like a baseball player stealing home.
He was carrying a crate. It wasn’t canister. It was armor-piercing the solid steel slugs designed for tanks. [music] The crew looked at the rounds with despair. You can’t stop a human wave with a solid slug. It’s like trying to stop a flood with a needle. The slug would hit one man, go right through him, and bury itself in a tree.
It wouldn’t stop the charge. Load it, Paige screamed. Load it now. The loader shoved the armor-piercing round into the brereech. The Japanese were 30 yards away. You could see their faces now, their teeth bared, their eyes wide. The gunner traversed the weapon. He didn’t aim at the men. He aimed at the ground in front of them.
He aimed at the rocky soil right at their feet. He fired. The solid steel slug hit the volcanic rock at 2,000 ft per second. It didn’t bury itself. [music] It shattered. The rock shattered. The impact turned the ground itself into shrapnel. A spray of stone splinters and jagged rock fragments exploded upward, acting exactly like a grenade.
It wasn’t as good as canister, but it was violent. The front row of the Japanese charge went down, screaming, clutching their legs and faces, shredded by the very island they were trying to conquer. Ricochet fire, the gunner [music] yelled. bank it off the ground. It was a desperation tactic, something you might do in a pool hall, not a war, but it worked.
The crew began firing the solid slugs into the hard ground in front of the enemy, creating localized explosions of rock and dirt. They were literally throwing the island at the Japanese. It was ugly. It was messy, but it kept the enemy heads down. It bought them seconds, and seconds were all they had left.
The sky to the east began to turn a bruised purple. Dawn was coming. The Japanese commander knew his time was running out. The darkness was his ally. The light was his enemy. Once the sun came up, the American planes wouldlaunch from the airfield. The wild cats and cobras would strafe his troops in the open. He had to take the ridge now.
He ordered the final reserve. The last fresh troops, the Imperial Guard. They came up the hill in a solid failank. They ignored the machine guns. They ignored the rock shrapnel. They marched over their own dead. They were coming for the gun. The gun crew fired their last armor-piercing [music] round. The breach clicked open. Empty.
truly empty this time. The Japanese were 20 feet away. The gunner stood up. He grabbed the ramrod, a heavy steel pole used for cleaning the barrel. The loader grabbed a shovel. They stood in front of their toy cannon. They weren’t going to let them touch it. And then the jungle exploded, but not from the Japanese side.
From the rear, a noise like a chainsaw ripping through canvas erupted. Fresh machine guns. The reserves, the infantry company that had been held in the rear had finally fought their way up the ridge. [music] They crashed into the line, filling the gaps, throwing grenades, firing rifles. It was a chaotic, swirling melee of hand-to-hand combat.
Marines swinging rifle butts, Japanese swinging swords, men wrestling in the mud. Paige was in [music] the middle of it, leading the counterattack. He wasn’t firing anymore. His gun was jammed. He was swinging the hot barrel like a club. The 37 mm gun crew joined the brawl, fighting with wrenches and helmets. It was the breaking point.
The Japanese momentum, which had been unstoppable for 6 hours, finally hit a wall it couldn’t smash. They wavered. They stopped. And then, for the first time in the battle, they took a step backward. The sun broke the horizon. The light hit the ridge. [music] And what it revealed stopped everyone cold. The sunrise on October 24th, 1942 did [music] not bring warmth.
It brought visibility. And with it, a horror that silence had mercifully hidden during the night. As the gray light filtered through the smoke, the Marines on the ridge stood up slowly. They were ghost white, covered in mud and drying blood, their eyes sunken deep into their skulls. They looked out over the field of fire where the 37 mm guns had done their work.
What they saw stopped the breath in their throats. The jungle was gone. The thick tangled rainforest that had stood yesterday was simply erased. In front of the gun positions for 200 yards, the trees had been stripped of their bark, their branches shredded into toothpicks. The tall kana grass had been mowed down to the mud.
It looked less like a battlefield and more like the aftermath of a category 5 hurricane, but it was the ground itself that told the story. The ridge was carpeted with the wreckage of the Sendai Division. The bodies were piled three and four deep in front of the gun muzzles. They were stacked like cordwood in the ravines. The official body count would later be staggering.
Over 2,000 Japanese soldiers laid dead in front of the thin marine line. But it wasn’t just the number, it was the proximity. The nearest bodies were found just feet from the wheels of the 37 mm guns. They had gotten close enough to touch the paint, but they hadn’t gotten past the canister shot. The peashooters hadn’t just held the line.
They had acted as a giant steel-tothed grinder that chewed up the finest infantry force in the Japanese Empire and spit it out into the mud. General Vandergrift and the senior officers arrived on the ridge later that morning. These were the men who had debated leaving the guns at the beach. These were the experts who had read the reports about the gun’s obsolescence.
They walked past the exhausted gun crews who were too tired to even salute. They walked up to the number one gun. It [music] was a wreck. The barrel was a brilliant burnt white gray. The paint completely seared off by the heat. [music] The recoil springs were fused shut. The tires were flat, shredded by shrapnel.
It looked like a piece of junk that had been pulled from a fire. But then the general looked at the ground [music] around it. He was standing on a carpet of brass. Thousands of empty shell casings glittered in the sun, a metallic ocean that crunched under his boots. [music] He looked at the empty canister crates stacked 6 ft high. And then he looked at the field of dead soldiers stretching into the jungle.
The mockery ended right there. The jokes about the door knocker evaporated. The officers realized that if these useless guns hadn’t been here, if these stubborn crews hadn’t dragged them through the mud, the Japanese would be standing on the airfield right now. The 37 mm gun hadn’t failed. The doctrine had failed.
The manual was wrong. The gun wasn’t a tank killer. It was a jungle broom. And in the hands of Marines who didn’t care about the rules, it was the deadliest weapon on the island. The vindication of the 37 mm crew was absolute. In the days following the battle, the gun became the most requested weapon in the division.
Every infantry commander wanted acanister gun on his flank. The supply depots were raided. [music] Every crate of canister shot in the Pacific theater was rushed to the front lines. The gun crews, once the outcasts of the battalion, were now the rock stars. Infantrymen offered to carry their ammo. They offered to dig their foxholes.
They offered them the best rations. They had seen what the giant shotgun could do, and they wanted it on their side. The weapon that was supposed to be left on the beach became the backbone of the Marine defense for the rest of the Guadal Canal campaign. Sergeant Mitchell Page was the center of this storm. He sat on a crate cleaning the mud off his jammed machine gun while officers slapped him on the back and photographers snapped pictures.
He would eventually be awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions that night. The citation would speak of his courage, his leadership, and his refusal to retreat. But Paige knew the truth. It wasn’t just one man. It was a system of violence. It was the machine gunners who protected the flanks, the riflemen who filled the gaps, and the 37 mm crews [music] who turned the jungle into a slaughterhouse.
It was the MacGyver spirit of the American soldier, the ability to take a broken, obsolete [music] tool and use it to hammer the enemy into submission. But the story of the 37 mm gun is also a tragedy of technology. The war moved fast. By 1944, the fighting had moved to different islands with different terrain.
The Sherman tank arrived in force, bringing 75mm guns that could do everything the Little 37 could do, but better. The bazooka gave every infantryman the power to kill a tank. The flamethrower became the new king of bunker clearing. The peashooter was quietly retired. It was towed to the rear, stripped for parts, or left rusting in supply dumps.
The guns that had saved Guadal Canal were melted down to make new weapons for a new kind of war. They were tools that had a specific moment in time, a specific night where they were [music] the most important object on Earth, and then they were gone. Mitchell Page survived the war. He returned home to a country that celebrated the atomic bomb and the jet engine.
The gritty close quarters desperate fighting of 1942 felt like ancient history. Paige lived a long life, passing away in 2003. He wrote books, gave speeches, and wore his Medal of Honor with pride. But in his quiet moments, he always went back to that ridge. He went back to the rain and the smell of cordite. He remembered the sound of the canister shells tearing through the darkness.
He remembered the faces of the gun crews, kids from Iowa and Brooklyn who stood behind a toy cannon and held back the tide. We tell this story because it is easy to forget the hardware that didn’t make the cover of the magazines. [music] We remember the B29 Superfortress. We remember the aircraft carriers.
[music] We remember the atomic bomb, but we forget the 37 mm M3. We forget the peashooter. It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t high-tech. It was an underdog weapon for an underdog fight. But on one rainy night in the Solomon Islands, it was the difference between victory and defeat. It proved that in war, there is no such thing as a useless [music] weapon, only a lack of imagination.
It proved that experts sitting in air conditioned offices don’t always know what works in the mud. And it proved that when you back a marine into a corner and take away his options, he will figure out a way to kill [music] you with whatever he has left. If you go to a military museum today, you might see a 37 mm gun sitting in the corner.
It looks small. The wheels look flimsy. The barrel looks too thin to be dangerous. Most people walk right past it to look at the big tanks or the fighter jets. But now you know better. Now you know that this little piece of steel once held the fate of the Pacific War on its axle. You know that it earned its place in [music] history not by doing what it was designed to do, but by doing what it had to do.
So the next time someone tells you that a tool is obsolete or that a plan is stupid or that you don’t have the right equipment to succeed, remember Mitchell Page. Remember the gun crews of the Seventh Marines. Remember the peashooter that wiped out a regiment? Sometimes the experts [music] are wrong. Sometimes the old ways are the best ways.
And sometimes all you need to win is a little cannon, a crate of shotgun shells, [music] and the courage to stand your ground when the whole world is screaming at you to run. We are dedicated to rescuing these stories from the archives. We are digging through the afteraction reports and the forgotten memoirs to find the moments where ingenuity saved the day.
If you believe these men deserve to be remembered, if you believe that history is more than just dates [music] and maps, then do us a favor. Hit that like button. It helps us find more stories like this. Subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss the next deep dive. And tell us inthe comments what is another useless weapon that proved the critics wrong.
We read every single comment. [music] Thank you for watching and thank you for helping us keep the memory of the 37 mm gun crews alive. They stood the line for us. The least we can do is remember
