Who Ordered The Heroic American Marines To Bait Japanese Troops They Killed 1000 in One Night!

[00:00:00]Add August 21st, 1,942.

[00:00:03]Add 4:00 in the morning. Add. A Japanese hand grenade sails through a wall of palm frrons and lands 1 foot from a young man's leg. Add. He cannot move.

[00:00:14]Add. There is no time to run. Add the blast tears steel into his hands, his arm, his shoulder, and then worst of all into both of his eyes. Add. In that single white flash, a 21-year-old steel worker from Philadelphia goes blind forever. Add. His name is Albert Schmid.

[00:00:30]Add. And here is the part nobody believes. Add. He does not stop firing.

[00:00:35]Add. He cannot see the sand. Add. He cannot see the enemy running toward him in the dark, but his hand stays on the trigger of that machine gun. And he keeps killing for another full hour.

[00:00:45]Add. If I sunrise, nearly 800 Japanese soldiers will lie dead in front of a single American line. Add. The kill ratio will be almost 20 to1. And it all happened because American officers gave an order so insane, so against every human instinct that men have misunderstood it for 80 years. They told their Marines to hold their fire. To let the enemy walk right up to the muzzles of their guns. This is the story of the night the Pacific War began to turn. To understand why that order was given, you have to understand how badly America was losing. For eight straight months after Pearl Harbor, the news was nothing but defeat. The Philippines fell, Singapore fell. Add Wakeake Island fell. Add Malaya Java. The whole map of the Pacific was turning red with the rising sun. British and American armies twice the size of the forces attacking them surrendered, were captured, were marched to death. Add a dangerous idea had taken root in Tokyo and quietly in Washington, too. Add. The idea that the Japanese soldier was simply better. Add.

[00:01:45]Unbeatable in the jungle. Add.

[00:01:47]Unstoppable in the dark. A natural night fighter who did not know how to lose.

[00:01:52]Add. and the Japanese had a name for the fever burning in their own officer corps. Add they called it victory disease. Add the belief that spirit conquered everything. Add that the bayonet always beat the machine gun. Add that numbers did not matter, terrain did not matter and intelligence failures did not matter because the will of the emperor's finest would carry them through any wall of lead a western army could put up. Add. Then came Guadal Canal. add a green scar of mountain and jungle in the Solomon Islands, a place most Americans had never heard of and could not find on a map. But Guadal Canal had one thing that made it the most important speck of land on Earth in the summer of 1,942.

[00:02:34]Add an airfield. If Japanese bombers flew from that strip, they could cut the sea lanes between America and Australia and strangle the entire South Pacific.

[00:02:44]Add. So on August 7th, add 1,000. Add 942. Add the first Marine Division came ashore. Add 11,000 young Americans average age 19. Add. Some were 17 and had lied to get in. Add. Almost none had ever fired a rifle at another living man. They seized the half-finished airfield in 36 hours. Ad named it Henderson Field. Add dug a rough oval perimeter around it. AD and waited. Ad.

[00:03:10]They did not wait long because everything was about to change and it was going to change because of men.

[00:03:16]Nobody in Tokyo bothered to count. At 2500 mi north, a 50-year-old Japanese colonel read a cable and smiled. And his name was Kano Ichiki. He had graduated the Imperial Military Academy in 1,916.

[00:03:31]Add. He had spent years as an instructor, drilling one uncompromising doctrine into an entire generation of officers. Add. Spirit defeats matter.

[00:03:40]Add. The Japanese soldier properly trained is worth 10 of any enemy alive.

[00:03:44]Add. and Diki had proof. Add. It was his battalion whose actions at the Marco Polo Bridge in 1,937 lit the fuse of the whole war with China. Add. Since then, he had watched his doctrine win everywhere. And now Tokyo handed him Guadal Canal. Add. His orders were simple. Add. Take 900 elite men, march to the airfield, and drive the Marines into the sea. Add. The cable included an intelligence estimate. Add.

[00:04:12]It said there were about 2,000 Americans on the island. That was the first fatal mistake. There were not 2,000 Americans on Guadal Canal. There were 110. A single reconnaissance plane had flown over at 10,000 ft, seen empty beaches and an empty air strip, and concluded the Marines had barely arrived. Add. But the Marines were not gone. They were in the jungle at invisible under a triple canopy digging. Add. Sighting their guns. Add. Laying wire. Add. And waiting. Add. Nobody at Imperial headquarters questioned the number. Add.

[00:04:45]The battle was already lost before Achi set foot on the sand. Add. And so on six destroyers, 916 of the finest light infantry in Asia sailed straight toward a killing zone they did not know existed. At now meet the man this story belongs to. Add. On the western bank of a stinking tidal creek, three young Marines were digging a hole. Add. The oldest was Corporal Lee Diamond, about 23, a Jew from Brooklyn. Sharp and steady. The gun commander add. The gunner was Private First Class Johnny Rivers, 22, a Native American from rural Pennsylvania, a quiet man who laughed easily and could strip a Browning machine gun blindfolded. Add. And the third was Private Albert Schmid. Add.

[00:05:27]Born in the Burome neighborhood of Philadelphia on October 20th, 1,920.

[00:05:33]Add. His mother died when he was young.

[00:05:36]Add. He worked as an apprentice steel burner at the Dodge Steel Company. a rough, cheerful, ordinary kid with grease under his fingernails. Add. He had a girlfriend named Ruth Hartley.

[00:05:46]Add. Everyone called her Babs. She worked the counter at Sears. On the morning of December 7th, add 1,000. Add.

[00:05:54]941. Add. Schmid was listening to the radio when the news of Pearl Harbor came through. Add. The very next day, he walked into a recruiting office and joined the Marines. Add. He told Babs he wanted to finish the war fast and come home to marry her. And now here he was, a steel worker who had never fired a shot at another human being, crouched in a hole with a man from Brooklyn and a man from Pennsylvania. Three strangers with faiths and different accents and nothing in common except the machine gun between them. And they finished the hole before sunset. And they covered it with palm frrons. Add. They laid the barrel of the water cooled browning on its tripod pointing east across the sandbar into the dark. What they did not know was this. At that exact moment, Colonel Ichiki was less than 15 mi away, marching his elite regiment straight toward their gun. In 24 hours, one of these three men would be dead. Add. One would be shot through the arm. Add. And one would be blind for the rest of his life. Add. Now, here is the idea that sounds insane. Add. The Marines on that creek were about to be told not to shoot. Add. The terrain made it possible. The creek was really a tidal lagoon cut off from the sea by a narrow sandbar barely 25 m across. That sandbar was the only way across. Anyone attacking had to funnel onto that strip of open sand with water on both sides.

[00:07:16]Add. So the marine set a trap of pure geometry. Add. They placed their heavy browning so that no gun fired straight ahead. Each gun fired diagonally across the front of the position beside it. So any man on the sandbar would be caught in the crossfire of two guns at once.

[00:07:31]one on his left, one on his right.

[00:07:33]Behind the machine guns, they set 37 mm anti-tank cannons and they loaded them with canister shot. Add, think of it as a giant shotgun shell. One round sprays 120 steel balls in a widening cone that at 50 m is wide enough to sweep an entire sandbar clean. Add behind that mortars. Add behind the mortars, 75 mm howitzers 2 mi inland already zeroed on the water itself. But the trap only worked if the Marines had the nerve to wait. Every instinct in a frightened 19-year-old screams to fire the instant he sees a shape in the dark. Add. Fire early and you shoot at shadows. You waste ammunition. You reveal your position and the enemy scatters into the trees. Add. The officers had learned the hardest lesson of the First World War.

[00:08:19]Add. Patience is not cowardice. Patience is arithmetic. Add. Every meter closer the enemy comes is one more meter he cannot escape. Add. So the order went down the line and it was brutal in its simplicity. Add. Do not shoot at the first sound. Add. Do not shoot at the first movement. Add. Let them come. Add.

[00:08:38]Let them walk to within 30 m of your muzzle. Add. And these were kids who had trained on paper targets in coconut groves a week earlier. Now they were being asked to sit motionless in the dark and let the finest infantry in the Imperial Army walk right up to their faces before pulling the trigger. Add.

[00:08:55]It went against everything. a terrified human being wants to do. Add it was the only thing that would save them. And there was one more piece. A warning came in the night before carried by a man who should have been dead. His name was Jacob Vuza, a 50-year-old retired policeman of Guadal Canal, a scout for the Marines. Add. On August 20th, a Japanese patrol caught him and found a small American flag folded against his skin. They tied him to a tree and demanded to know how many Americans were on the island, where the guns were, where the general slept. Vuza said nothing. Add. So they went to work with a bayonet into his arms. Add his shoulder. Add his face, his stomach.

[00:09:36]Finally, the blade went through his straight and filled his mouth with blood. Still he did not speak. Add. They left him for dead and marched on toward the marine line. Add. But Vuza did not die. Add. He chewed through the rope, binding his wrists, add soaking the fibers with his own blood to soften them, add. And when his hands came free, he dragged himself, add half blind, add.

[00:09:58]Unable to make a sound, add for miles through the jungle. Marines found him near their line and thought he was a corpse. Add. Then his eyes moved. Add.

[00:10:07]He refused the aid station. Add. He gestured toward the command post of Lieutenant Colonel Edwin Pollock. And there, unable to stand, bleeding from a hole in his neck, he forced out a report in broken English. Add. The Japanese were coming in strength. Add. From the east, add tonight. Add. Then he collapsed. Add. And because of an old policeman who refused to talk while they cut his throat, Pollock knew exactly what was coming and gave the order to hold fire and let them get close. Add.

[00:10:38]The first sound came at 1:30 in the morning. Add. Japanese mortars and machine guns raked the treeine, firing wildly, trying to make the Marines shoot back and reveal their positions. Add.

[00:10:49]Not a single marine fired. Add. They lay in their holes and listened. Then somewhere between 3 and 10 3, a green flare hissed up over the sandbar and burst. And in that sickly light, about 100 Japanese soldiers came pouring out of the trees at a dead run, screaming broken English into the night. Admarine, you die tonight. They came fast.

[00:11:10]Bayonets fixed, boots barely touching the sand. Add 60 m. Add 50. Add 40. Add.

[00:11:17]And still the American line stayed silent. Add. The waiting was almost unbearable. Add. Then at 30 m, the whole Western bank erupted at once. Add. Every Browning. Add. Every canister gun, every rifle. At the sandbar did not just fill with fire. Marines who were there said it seemed to disappear. swallowed in a low cloud of steam and dust with something dark churning inside it. When the dust thinned, the running men were no longer running. They were piled two and three deep where the canister shot had caught them midstride. Add in one gun pit 50 yards south of the sandbar.

[00:11:52]Three young men watched it all through a slit in the sandbags. Diamond Rivers and Schmid add Rivers was on the gun. When the flare went up, he opened fire, tracers arcing across the black water into the flank of the charging column.

[00:12:06]And he fired again and again, and then suddenly he stopped. Add. A single bullet no one has ever known from where struck him in the head. Add. Johnny Rivers was dead before his hand slipped from the grips. Schmid froze for one heartbeat. Add. Then he slid into the dead man's place behind the Browning.

[00:12:24]Add. He had never fired a machine gun in combat in his life. Add. He held the trigger down now. Belt after belt, 250 rounds at a time, the steel worker from Philadelphia poured fire across that sandbar while Diamond crouched above him, watching the flashes, slapping his shoulders to steer the barrel. Left shoulder, swing left, add, right shoulder, swing right, left, right, left, right. As the tracers came back through the fronds, they fought like that for hours. Add. A second wave formed and charged and vanished into the same guns. A Japanese bullet punched through the sandbags and hold the water jacket that kept the browning cool. Add.

[00:13:01]Boiling water spilled across Schmid's lap, and the barrel began to glow, dull red, then bright red. Add. A barrel that color is supposed to seize and jam and die. Schmid kept it alive by firing shorter and shorter bursts, praying it would hold for one more belt, one more wave. A bullet tore into Diamond's arm.

[00:13:18]Add. He did not leave. Add. He pinned his wounded arm to his chest and kept slapping with his good hand. Add. Left, right, left, right. Two men, one machine gun, holding a piece of the line no bigger than a backyard against the finest infantry in Asia. Add. And it was working. Out on that sandbar, the myth of the invincible Japanese soldier was drowning in its own blood, one wave at a time in front of a Brooklyn corporal and a blind kid who did not yet know he was about to lose his eyes. Add. By first light, the shape of the disaster was clear on the Japanese side. Add.

[00:13:52]Officers who came forward to see the sandbar were cut down before they took three steps. When a staff captain begged the assault commander to stop the frontal charge and cross the lagoon somewhere else, add. The commander insisted on seeing the sandbar himself.

[00:14:06]A walked into the open and died there beside his agitant. Add. The report reached Colonel Ichiki. He listened calm and asked one question. Add. How many enemy machine guns? No one could tell him. Add. And Ichiki, the believer, the man who had built his entire life on the idea that spirit beats steel, gave the only order his doctrine allowed.

[00:14:26]Continue the attack. Add. He was feeding his elite regiment into a meat grinder, and he would not turn it off. Add.

[00:14:33]Nearly 800 of his 916 men would never leave that creek. The kill ratio would end at almost 20 to1, the exact reverse of everything Tokyo believed about this war. Add. For eight months, America had lost everywhere. Add. On a nameless sandbar, at a creek the Marines had labeled with the wrong name. The tide was quietly turning in the dark. Add.

[00:14:55]But the night was not over. The grenade that would blind Al Schmid had not yet been thrown. Colonel Ichiki had one last desperate card left to play. A flanking move through the surf that would send his men waiting into water. The marine howitzers had already zeroed, and the sea itself was about to turn pink. And when the sun finally rose over the Go Coconut Grove and revealed what the Marines had done, they would learn a lesson so brutal it would change the way America fought every island for the next 3 years. So the question hanging over that bloody sandbar was simple. Add.

[00:15:27]Could a blind steel worker, a wounded Brooklyn corporal, and a line of teenagers who had held their fire keep holding it until dawn? Add. In part two, add. The trap slams shut. Add. The tanks roll into the grove. Add. and the myth of the Japanese Superman dies for good.

[00:15:43]August 20th, 1,942.

[00:15:46]We left three young men in a machine gun pit on the western bank of a stinking creek on Guadal Canal. A steel worker from Philadelphia named Al Schmid, a Brooklyn corporal named Lee Diamond, and a Native American gunner named Johnny Rivers, who was already dead. We left them holding one Browning against wave after wave of the finest infantry in the Imperial Japanese Army. Their barrel glowing red, their water boiling out through a bullet hole, the order still ringing in their ears. Add. Hold your fire. Add. Let them get close. Add. And it had worked. Add. Nearly the whole first assault lay piled on the sandbar.

[00:16:22]But here is the brutal truth about that night. Add. The trap had been sprung.

[00:16:26]The enemy had been shattered. And the killing was not over. Ad. Colonel Ichiki still had men. He still had a plan. Ad.

[00:16:33]and Alshmid still had both his eyes for a few more minutes because this is the moment everything got worse. Sometime near 4:00 in the morning, a single Japanese soldier crawled forward alone through the dark. He had watched two waves of his comrades die on that open sand and he was not going to charge across it. Instead, he wormed his way to within 15 m of Schmid's pit. Close enough to hear the browning working.

[00:16:57]Close enough to smell the gun oil and the cordite. In his hand was a type 97 fragmentation grenade. Add. Smaller than a baseball. Add. He struck the fuse against the butt of his rifle. Four seconds. Five. Add. He rose up and threw. The grenade came sailing through the palm frrons and dropped into the pit one foot from Almid's leg. Add. Diamond saw it fall. Add. There was no time to shout. Add. There was no time to move.

[00:17:24]The world went white. Add. Steel tore into Schmid's right hand. Add. into his forearm, into his shoulder and his face.

[00:17:32]Add and two fragments, two tiny pieces of jagged metal went into his eyes. The right eye was destroyed in that instant.

[00:17:38]Add. The left was ripped open and would never see light again. Al Schmid, 21 years old, a kid who had joined the Marines to finish the war fast and marry a girl named Babs, went bleed behind his machine gun at 4 in the morning on August 21st, 1,942.

[00:17:55]Add he would never see color again. Add.

[00:17:58]He would never see her face again. And here is the part that made him a legend.

[00:18:02]Add. He did not stop. Add. He could not see the sandbar. Add. He could not see the tracers or the men still coming through the dark, but he could still feel Diamond's hands slapping his shoulders. Left. Add. Right. Left. Add.

[00:18:17]Right. And he could still feel the trigger under his ruined fingers. Add.

[00:18:22]So he kept firing. Add. A blind man aiming by the touch of another wounded man's hand kept that gun alive for another full hour. Now understand what was happening in the Japanese rear at that same moment because this is where the story turns from a battle into a tragedy. A staff captain named Yoshimi Sawada had come forward during the second wave to see the sandbar for himself. What he saw broke something in add 200 of the emperor's finest walking into the same guns that had already devoured the first wave vanishing into the same cloud of dust. Add. He went looking for the battalion commander leading the charge. Major Kuramoto and he begged him. Ad stop the frontal attack. His voice was urgent. Ad. We cannot cross here. Ad find a place upstream. Add cross where they do not expect us. Kuramoto shook his head and I must see the sandbar myself. Sawada pleaded with him not to go. Ad Kuramoto went anyway. He walked out of the treeine onto the eastern edge of the open sand with his agitant beside him in the gray light of a dying flare. By now the marines had ranged every single meter of that strip with a browning. At Kuramoto did not take three steps. Add.

[00:19:30]Both men were cut down instantly. Add.

[00:19:33]Their bodies fell a foot apart and were still there when the sun came up. Add.

[00:19:37]Sawada turned and ran. Add. He found Colonel Ichiki at the command post deeper in the jungle and delivered his report. Breathless, desperate. Add. The frontal assault could not succeed. Add.

[00:19:48]The men were being annihilated. Add.

[00:19:51]Ichiki listened. Add. He was completely calm. Add. And he asked one question.

[00:19:57]The same question that reveals everything about the sickness in his mind. At how many enemy machine guns?

[00:20:02]Sawada did not know. Nobody knew. Ichi looked at him for a long moment. Then he gave the only order his entire life's doctrine would permit. Add continue the attack. Think about what that means. He had already lost hundreds of men. Add.

[00:20:16]His two senior assault officers were dead on the sand. And rather than admit that Steel had beaten Spirit, he chose to feed the rest of his regiment into the same meat grinder. Add. The victory disease was not just an idea anymore. It was killing his own men by the hundreds, and he could not turn it off. Add. But Ichi did have one card left. Add. his last gamble. Around 5 in the morning, he ordered a company of his surviving men to abandon the sandbar entirely. Add. He sent them into the surf. Add. Wade out into the shallow sea. Add. He told them add. Move west along the beach in the dark. Add. And hit the marine line from the flank where the sand met the ocean.

[00:20:54]Add. In the one place the crossfire could not reach. It was a clever move.

[00:20:58]Add. It might even have worked. Add.

[00:21:01]Except for one thing the Japanese did not know. Two miles inland, the 75mm howitzers of the 11th Marines had already been zeroed on that exact stretch of water hours earlier. Add. The flanking company waited out until they were waste deep. Add. And then the howitzers opened fire. A 75 mm shell bursting in shallow saltwater throws a column of foam 30 ft into the air and hurls shrapnel outward at 3,000 ft per second. Add. It kills every living thing within 20 m of the splash. Add. Shell after shell walked down that line of waiting men. Add Marines watching from the shore said the sea itself turned pink. One of them wrote a description of the tracers arcing over the water in those last minutes before dawn. He said they looked almost pretty delicate dancing on their toes in the darkness.

[00:21:49]And he called them sparkles. Sparkles gay with the mirth of hell. At by 6:00 in the morning it was finished. There were no more waves. There were only survivors, scattered and exhausted, running in twos and threes back toward the coconut grove on the eastern bank, praying to reach the jungle before the light exposed them. And the exhausted marines on the western bank, men who had been fighting for five straight hours, who had watched their friends die in the pits beside them, were content to let them go. Add let them run. Ad let them disappear into the trees. They had held the line. They had earned the right to stop killing. add. But that was not the decision that got made add. Because 3 mi to the west in a division command post, said a 55-year-old general named Alexander Vandergrift, and he was about to make the coldest, most ruthless choice of the entire battle. Add.

[00:22:42]Vandergrift had spent the whole night on a field telephone listening. Add. He had never commanded a division in combat before this campaign. Add. Neither had most of his officers. But he understood something that the tired men at the creek did not. A defeated enemy who is allowed to escape becomes an enemy you have to fight again tomorrow. Add. So in the first gray light when he could have called it a victory and stood down, Vandergrift instead gave the order to seal the trap. Add. He turned to Colonel Clifton Kates. Add. Commander of the First Marines. Add a hard veteran of Below Wood in 1,00 add. 918.

[00:23:18]Add. Take a battalion. He said swing wide around the southern edge of the enemy. Add. Cross the creek upstream.

[00:23:25]Come down the coast behind them. Add.

[00:23:27]Get in behind the survivors before they reached the jungle. Add. He was not defending the perimeter anymore. He was closing a door. Add. And the men of Ichiki's detachment. The ones who had lived through the sandbar. The ones running for the safety of the treeine were about to discover there was no safety left. Add. The marines were already there waiting. Add. The sun came up over Guadal Canal at 6:28 in the morning. Add. It rose the way the tropical sun always rises. A red disc pushing slowly through the humidity, throwing long yellow light across the sandbar. Add. And it revealed what the Marines had done in the dark. Add. They were not ready to see it. Add. The sandbar was no longer white. Add. It was black in places, red in others, and in the center it was completely covered.

[00:24:13]Add. Bodies lay two deep, three deep, four deep where the canister shot had caught whole clusters of men at once.

[00:24:20]Add. Some were still moving. add. Most were not. The tide had come in during the night and lifted the ones nearest the water. Add floating them slowly out into the lagoon. Add. Face down. Add their uniforms dark and heavy with sea water. Add. Marines stood up in their foxholes and simply stared. Add. Some of them did not speak for the rest of the day. Add. One. Young Marine wrote years later that the smell of that morning was the true smell of war, not gunpowder.

[00:24:48]Add. Not smoke. Add. The smell of what happens when hundreds of men die in a small space in tropical heat in a single night. Add. But the killing still was not finished. Add. At 7:00, four American light tanks began to move at M3 stos, small and fast, each with a 37 mm gun and two machine guns. Add. They had waited on the Western Bank all night for daylight. Add. Now they crossed the sandbar in single file, picking their way through the dead with a strange slow care, the way a man walks through a graveyard at dusk. Add. They did not fire on the sandbar. Add. There was nothing left alive to fire at. Add. They opened up when they reached the eastern bank and rolled into the coconut grove where the survivors had gone to ground.

[00:25:32]Add. The grove was about a mile deep, full of wounded and hiding men behind palm trunks and underfallen fronds. Add.

[00:25:39]The tanks went in among them. Add. They fired their machine guns into the fronds. They fired canister into anything that looked like a bunker. Add.

[00:25:47]And when they came upon a man on the ground, wounded, dying, add. Or already dead. Add. They did not stop and they did not go around. Add. They rolled straight over him. Add. An officer who walked that ground afterward described it in three words. Add. Like a meat grinder. There is no record of what the young Marines said to each other on the walk back. There is no record because most of them never spoke of it again.

[00:26:11]Add not to their wives, not to their children. Add not to anyone for the rest of their lives. Add. And then around 8 in the morning along the edge of that grove, the Marines learned a lesson that would follow them through every island for the next 3 years. They began to do what young men trained in field medicine do. Add. They approached the wounded Japanese soldiers to give them water, to bandage them, to take them prisoner. But some of those wounded men were still holding grenades. Add. Some were still holding pistols. Some had laying motionless, waiting for a marine to lean in close. A Navy corman, unarmed, knelt to help a man on the ground and died with him when the grenade went off between them. Another marine rolled a body over with his boot and the corpse raised a pistol and fired. By the end of that morning, a new understanding had spread down the entire line. Add not as an order. add. Not as written policy as the kind of knowledge Marines pass to Marines when the price of not knowing it is death. Add do not approach a wounded Japanese soldier. Do not accept a surrender until you are certain he is unarmed. Assume every man on the ground is still dangerous. Add it was never entered into the official history. But every marine who fought at Guadal Canal knew it. And every marine who came after them at Terawa, at Saipan, at Ewoima, at Okinawa learned some version of it too.

[00:27:31]add. It was born in blood in that coconut grove and it hardened into the way America fought the rest of the Pacific War. By 11:00, the shooting had mostly stopped. The Marines began to walk the grove and count the dead and the counting would take three full days.

[00:27:46]The final number, the number cabled back to Pearl Harbor and Washington and printed in newspapers across America, was between 774 and 800 Japanese soldiers killed in a single night. Add 15 more were taken prisoner and most of those 15 were unconscious when captured which was the only reason they had not managed to kill themselves. Add of Colonel Ichiki's original 916 men only about 128 escaped. Add. Now compare that to the other side of the ledger. Add.

[00:28:18]The Marines had lost 41 men killed and 71 wounded. Do the arithmetic. Add. It was a kill ratio of almost 20 to1 for 8 months since Pearl Harbor. The story of this war had run in exactly the opposite direction. Add on this sandbar at this creek. The numbers reversed and the myth of the invincible Japanese soldier died in the space of about 4 hours. The survivors fled east along the coastal trail back toward the point where six destroyers had landed them three nights before and they radioed their headquarters at Rabal. Add. Their message said the Ichi detachment had been almost annihilated short of the airfield. Add. And at Rabal, the officers of the 17th Army read those words and refused to believe them. They cabled back and asked for clarification.

[00:29:04]Add. They asked whether the message had been garbled in transmission. Add.

[00:29:08]Because a regiment of the Imperial Japanese Army simply could not be wiped out in one night by a defensive line of United States Marines. Add. That was not what happened in this war. Add. That had never happened in this war. Add. They asked again. Add. The survivors sent the same message again. It did not change.

[00:29:27]And Colonel Konowi Ichiki himself, he died sometime between 5 and 7 that morning. And to this day, no one can tell you exactly how. There are two accounts and both sit in the historical record. Add. The Japanese version says that when the flanking attack in the surf failed, Ichi finally understood that his mission was destroyed. Add. He gathered the men still with him. Add. He unwrapped the regimental colors of the 28th Infantry, the sacred banner of his unit, and he set them on fire. Add. He watched them burn. Add. Then he drew his tanto, the short blade an officer carried for exactly this purpose, and opened his own stomach in the ritual manner. Add. The American version is simpler. It says, "Ichi was cut down by machine gunfire near his forward observation post in the last hour of the battle, and his body was identified afterward by the documents in his tunic.

[00:30:18]Either could be true. Add, "Neither has ever been proven." add, "What is certain is this?" add. On the morning of August 21st, add 1,000. Add 942. Add the man who had lit the fuse of the entire war with China at the Marco Polo Bridge. Add the man who preached that spirit always beats steel. Add. The man who had actually asked whether he could also recapture the neighboring island of Tulagi with the same 900 men and was dead on the eastern bank of a creek.

[00:30:47]most Americans could not find on a map.

[00:30:49]Add he was 50 years old. He was buried 3 days later along with most of his regiment in a mass grave the Marines had to dig with a bulldozer. Add a bulldozer because there were far too many bodies to bury by hand. Add. So there it is.

[00:31:04]From a wrong name on a wrong map to the first clean American ground victory of the Pacific War. From an order that sounded suicidal. Add. Hold your fire.

[00:31:13]add. Let them get close and to a kill ratio of 20 to1. Add. The Marines had proven that the Japanese soldier could be beaten and beaten decisively on his own chosen ground in his own chosen darkness. Add. You would think that would settle it. Add. You would think the lesson was obvious. Add. But here is the terrible truth that turns this from a single victory into a 5-month nightmare. Add. The men who most needed to learn that lesson refused to learn it. Add. When Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo finally accepted what had happened at the creek, they did not change their doctrine. They did not question the belief that had just killed 800 of their best men. Add. They responded in the only way victory disease allowed. They sent more men.

[00:31:58]Add. 3 weeks later. Add. A fresh Japanese brigade under a general named Kawaguchi came at the marine perimeter again and this time from three sides at once. Add. had a piece of jungle high ground that would go down in history as Edson's Ridge and that was only the beginning. The Japanese Navy was already gathering. Add the transports were already loading. The struggle for Guadal Canal was about to explode from a single night's battle into one of the longest bloodiest campaigns of the entire war. A six-month brawl on land and sea that would swallow tens of thousands of lives. In part three add, the reinforcements land add. The ridge erupts in the dark. Add. And the men who held the creek discover that surviving one impossible night only bought them a ticket to the next one. And the real fight for Guadal Canal was just getting started. August 21st, 1,942.

[00:32:49]Add in a single night on a nameless sandbar. Add. A blind steel worker and a wounded corporal helped shatter an entire Japanese regiment. Add. 800 dead against 41 Marines lost at a kill ratio of 20 to1. Add. The order that did it sounded like suicide. Add. Hold your fire. Add. Let them get close. Add. And it worked so completely that when the survivors radioed Rabal, their own headquarters refused to believe them.

[00:33:16]But here is what those marines did not know as they counted the dead in the coconut grove. Their victory had just sent a shock wave up the entire Japanese command. And the reaction was not surrender. It was rage. At within days, Tokyo would decide that one wiped out regiment was simply not enough men. So they would send more and more add. And this was no longer a single desperate night. Add. This was about to become the longest, bloodiest campaign of the Pacific War. At Rabbal, the officers of the 17th Army finally accepted the impossible. Add. The Ichuki detachment was gone. Add. And their response reveals everything about the sickness in the Japanese high command. They did not ask what went wrong. They did not question the doctrine that spirit beats steel. They simply concluded that Colonel Ichiki had not brought enough men add. So they turned to a new commander add Major General Kiyotaki Kawaguchi add. And handed him a fresh brigade add. Roughly 6,000 men. Add. His mission was the same one Ichiki had died trying to complete. Take Henderson Field. Drive the Marines into the sea.

[00:34:20]Add. But Kawaguchi was smarter than Ichiki. Add. He had watched the frontal assault fail on that sandbar. Add. He would not repeat it. He decided to strike where the Marines least expected it. Not across the open beach, but through the jungle from the south at the soft underbelly of the perimeter.

[00:34:37]Meanwhile, the Japanese Navy began doing something the Marines would come to dread. Almost every night, fast destroyers raced down the slot of water between the islands, a route the Americans nicknamed the Tokyo Express.

[00:34:49]Add. They landed fresh troops. They shelled Henderson Field. They dropped hundreds of soldiers a few miles from the American line under cover of darkness, then vanished before dawn.

[00:35:00]Add. The numbers climbed fast. By early September, the Japanese had put thousands of new troops back onto Guadal Canal. Add. The airfield the Marines had captured so easily was now the single most fought over piece of ground in the entire Pacific. Add. Japanese bombers hit it by day. Add Japanese warships hit it by night. And the men who had held the creek now lived in a state of permanent siege. add. Sleeping in mud, add eating captured rice, add shaking with malaria, add and waiting for the next attack. Their victory had not ended the fight. It had marked them as the men standing between Japan and the airfield it must retake. Add. But the enemy outside the wire was not the only threat the Marines faced. The crisis was also inside the perimeter, and it was quieter and just as deadly. Add. The first marine division was starving. When the American fleet had been forced to withdraw after a naval disaster offso island, it took most of the Marines supplies with it. Add food ran short.

[00:35:57]Add men went down to two meals a day then to capture Japanese rations. Add ammunition had to be counted. Add. And then came the real killer worse than any bullet. Add disease. The mosquitoes of Guadal Canal carried malaria. And by the height of the campaign, the division was recording thousands of cases. At one point the medical officers estimated that a huge portion of the men on the line were running fevers. Shaking add hallucinating add and still expected to fight. Add dissentry tore through the ranks. Add tropical ulcers ate at their skin. Add. The jungle itself was killing them as surely as the Japanese. Add. And there was doubt at the very top. Back in the rear areas, some senior officers questioned whether Guadal Canal could be held at all. The Navy had lost four heavy cruisers in a single night at Tsavo. Ships were reluctant to risk the waters around the island. Add. Rumors reached the Marines that they might be written off, abandoned, left to fight and die on an island the high command was no longer sure was worth the cost.

[00:36:57]Add. General Vandergri heard those rumors. His men heard them too. Add. And still they dug in around the airfield because that airfield was the entire reason any of them were there. Add. If Henderson Field fell, the whole sacrifice at the creek meant nothing.

[00:37:13]But if it held, it could change the war.

[00:37:15]Everything now depended on whether a sick, hungry, outnumbered division could survive the blow that Kawaguchi was already marching through the jungle to deliver. Add that blow fell on the night of September 12th, 1,942 on a low greasy ridge about a mile south of Henderson Field. History would give it a name, Edson's Ridge. at Bloody Ridge. It was held by a battalion of Marine Raiders and paratroopers under a lean, cold-eyed officer named Colonel Merritt Edson, a man his own troops called Red Mike. And he had perhaps 800 men, many of them exhausted survivors of earlier fighting. Coming at them through the dark was the bulk of Kawaguchi's brigade. Thousands of fresh Japanese infantry who had hacked their way through miles of jungle to reach this spot. Edson looked at the ground, saw that it pointed like an arrow straight at the airfield and understood this was where they would come. Add. He pulled his men back onto the high ground and told them to dig. Add. The first night was a probe. Japanese infantry hit the flanks, cut off a few marine positions, and melted back into the jungle. Add. It was a warning of what was coming. Add.

[00:38:23]Edson pulled his line tighter back onto the last good hill before the airfield.

[00:38:28]He walked among his men in the daylight of September 13th and told them the truth. This was the night. Add. They would be hit hard. Add. There was nowhere left to fall back to. Add.

[00:38:38]Behind them was Henderson Field and behind that was the sea. Add. Nightfell.

[00:38:44]The Japanese came. Add. Red and green flares burst over the ridge. Japanese artillery and mortars pounded the marine positions. And then, screaming out of the dark, the infantry charged. Add.

[00:38:55]Wave after wave. They came in exactly the spirit Ichiki had preached. The bayonet, the banzai charge, the belief that ferocity would break the American line. Add. They hit the marines and in places they broke through. Add. The fighting fractured into a hundred small savage struggles across the ridge in total darkness. Add. Men fought with rifles, then with bayonets, then with fists and knives and entrenching tools.

[00:39:19]Add Marine positions were overrun. Add.

[00:39:22]Marines fell back, rallied, and counterattacked. Add. Edson stood in the open, calm, his uniform torn, walking his line and steadying his men, refusing to let them break. Add. Here is where the lesson of the creek paid off. Add the Marine artillery. 2 mi back. The 105 mm howitzers of the 11th Marines were laid and ready just as the 75s had been zeroed on the surf at the creek. Add.

[00:39:46]Marine observers on the ridge called the fire in danger close, sometimes right on top of their own forward positions. Add.

[00:39:53]Shells screamed overhead and burst among the charging Japanese. The howitzers fired for hours without stopping until the barrels were hot and the crews were deaf. Add that artillery was the great equalizer. Every time a Japanese wave mass to rush the ridge, it was torn apart by shellfire before it reached the crest. Add the banzai spirit met American arithmetic and the arithmetic one. Addi had asked how many machine guns. He should have asked how many howitzers. Add. Through the long hours of darkness, the line held by threads.

[00:40:24]Add. At one point, Edson's men were pushed back to a final null, a last low hump of ground perhaps a few hundred yards from the airfield. At if it fell, the Japanese would pour into Henderson Field itself. It did not fall. Add. The Marines dug in on that final rise and refused to move. At Red Mike Edson got on the radio and add, according to those who were there, add told his men there was no retreat. Add they would hold where they stood and they did. When the eastern sky finally began to lighten on September 14th, the Japanese charges faltered at Kawaguchi's brigade was spent. At his men had been fighting and dying against wire and artillery all night, and they were finished. As the sun rose, American Wildcat fighters took off from the very airfield the Japanese had been trying to seize and strafe the survivors as they retreated into the jungle. At the cost tells the story.

[00:41:15]Kawaguchi's force lost hundreds of men killed on and around that ridge in a single night with estimates running well over 800 dead and many more wounded who would dies in the jungle on the long retreat. Add Edson's raiders and paratroopers who had gone into the fight with fewer than 900 men lost around 60 killed and well over 200 wounded. Once again the ratio was brutally lopsided.

[00:41:40]Once again, the Japanese had thrown their finest against a dug in American line and been shattered. And this time, it was not a surprise ambush at a creek.

[00:41:48]Add. This was a deliberate plan. Add.

[00:41:50]Brigade-sized assault on the most important ground in the campaign. Add.

[00:41:54]And it had failed just as completely.

[00:41:56]Henderson field. The entire point of the battle remained in American hands.

[00:42:00]Colonel Edson would receive the Medal of Honor for that night. His name would stay on that ridge forever. The news of Bloody Ridge rippled outward and its meaning was even larger than the sandbar. Add because now a pattern was undeniable. Add twice. The Japanese had launched their most aggressive night attacks against the marine perimeter.

[00:42:20]Add twice they had been slaughtered.

[00:42:22]Add. The doctrine of spirit over matter had now failed not once but repeatedly in front of machine guns and massed artillery and the bodies were piling up in the same terrible ratios. Add. The Marines began to understand something that would carry them through every island still to come. Add. The Japanese soldier was brave beyond belief. But bravery charging into interlocking fire and pre-registered artillery was not a weapon. It was a way to die. Add. And the effects spread far beyond that one ridge. The successful defense of Henderson Field meant American planes kept flying from Guadal Canal and those planes made the waters around the island a graveyard for Japanese shipping. The Tokyo Express could only run at night now because by day the Cactus Air Force as the Henderson pulled themselves ruled the sky. Add every night the Japanese tried to land more troops. Every day American planes hunted their ships. The Japanese found themselves feeding men into Guadal Canal peace meal in small night packets unable to mass the overwhelming force they needed because they could not control the air over the island. add. The airfield the Marines had bled for was strangling the very enemy trying to take it. Add the strategic reversal was staggering when you stand back and look at it. For the first 8 months of the war, Japan had advanced in every direction, unstoppable, seizing an empire that stretched across the entire Western Pacific. At Guadal Canal was the place where that tide stopped and began to run the other way. At over the six-month campaign, Japan would pour in roughly 30 zero troops. More than 20,000 of them would die there of bullets, of shellfire, of starvation and disease in a jungle that killed as ruthlessly as any marine. The Japanese themselves would come to call Walcanal the island of death. Add they lost not just men but irreplaceable warships and hundreds of aircraft. And add, worst of all, add their veteran naval aviators. Add the highly trained pilots they could never replace at the rate they were dying.

[00:44:20]Add. The victory disease that had sent Ichiki charging across the sandbar had metastasized into a campaign that was bleeding the Japanese military to death.

[00:44:30]Add for the men on the ground. The tide showed in small concrete ways. At reinforcements finally arrived. Add. The starving first marine division racked with malaria was at last relieved after months on the line and pulled out to recover having done something no American force had done before them.

[00:44:48]Add. They had taken ground from the Japanese and held it against everything the enemy could throw. Add fresh army divisions came ashore. Add more artillery, more planes. The perimeter that had once been a desperate oval barely holding on became a springboard.

[00:45:03]Add. By February 1,943, the Japanese high command admitted what the men at the creek and the ridge had been proving for 6 months. Add Guadal Canal could not be retaken. They organized a skilled nighttime evacuation and pulled their surviving skeletal troops off the island. Add the Marines and soldiers who walked that ground afterward found the evidence of what the jungle and the siege had done. Emaciated bodies, abandoned equipment, the wreckage of an army that had believed spirit alone would carry it to victory.

[00:45:36]Add. Guadd canal was declared secure.

[00:45:38]Add. And its meaning was understood almost immediately on both sides of the ocean. Add. This was the first great American ground victory of the Pacific War and it was permanent. Add. The Japanese would never again be on the strategic offensive in the South Pacific. From this island forward for the next 3 years they would be retreating. Add island by bloody island.

[00:45:59]Add. The Americans would push toward Japan. Add. And it all traced back to a captured airirstrip that a hungry add.

[00:46:05]Malari ridden Marine division had refused to give up. The men who held the creek on that first night in August had been the tip of the spear. And behind them had come a campaign that broke the back of Japanese expansion. Add. So there it is. From a wrong name on a wrong map. From an order that sounded suicidal to the turning point of the entire Pacific War. Add. The blind steel worker. Add. The wounded corporal. Add.

[00:46:30]The tortured old scout. Add. The calm colonel on the ridge. Add. They had proven that the invincible enemy was not invincible after all. Add nearly 800 dead on a sandbar. Add over 800 more on a ridge. Add more than 20 zero on an island the Japanese came to call the place of death. The tide had turned and it would never turn back. But history has a strange way of remembering its heroes and forgetting them at the same time. What happened to the blind young Marine who kept firing after a grenade took his eyes? What became of the old policeman who chewed through a rope while bleeding from his throat? Add. Al Schmid did not know it as he lay in a hospital learning to live in permanent darkness. But a journalist was about to make him one of the most famous enlisted men in America. A book, a movie. Add his face on the cover of a magazine. And then in the way this country always does, they would forget him. Add. There was a final chapter to this story. Add.

[00:47:25]A chapter about what victory costs the men who win it. At about a hero America celebrated and then let slip quietly into the dark. Add. and about an old man who sat alone in a chair every single August for 40 years and would not speak until morning. Add that chapter, the one almost no one knows is where this story truly ends. Add for 8 months after Pearl Harbor. Add America lost everywhere. Add until a hungry add. Malari ridden Marine Division dug in around a captured air strip and gave an order that sounded like madness. Add hold your fire. Add let them get close. Add. On one sandbar, 800 dead Japanese against 41 Marines.

[00:48:04]Add. On one ridge, three weeks later, 800 more. On one island, over 20,000 enemy dead, and the entire tide of the Pacific War reversed for good. Add. The invincible enemy had been broken by teenagers with machine guns and the discipline to wait. Add. But this whole story began with one man, a blind steel worker from Philadelphia who kept firing after a grenade took his eyes. Add. And now comes the twist. Almost no one knows. Add. Because Al Schmid survived that night. He came home a national hero. His face on magazine covers. His life turned into a Hollywood movie. Add.

[00:48:38]And then this country did to him the crulest thing of all. It forgot him.

[00:48:42]Add. Because sometimes winning costs the winner everything. Add. Al Schmid was flown to a naval hospital in the autumn of 1,942.

[00:48:52]Add. The doctors examined what the grenade had done and confirmed what he had already been told on the beach at Guadal Canal. add. His eyes were beyond repair. Add he would never see again.

[00:49:03]Not the faces of his friends, not the color of the sky, not anything for the rest of his life. He was 22 years old.

[00:49:10]And back in Philadelphia, a young woman named Ruth Hartley, the girl everyone called Babs who worked the counter at Sears, was waiting for him. She had been waiting since December of 1,941 when he walked into a recruiting office the day after Pearl Harbor and promised to finish the war fast and come home to marry her. Now he had to write her a letter. And here is one of the most quietly devastating moments of the entire story. Ad al- Schmid add lying in a hospital bed. Unable to see the words, ad dictated a letter to a nurse ad. in it. He told Babs that he understood completely if she did not want to marry a blind man. Add he gave her a way out.

[00:49:50]Add he loved her enough to release her from the promise. When he was well enough to travel, they sent him home by train. Add and Babs was there on the platform. She had read his letter. She had made her decision. Add. She married him. Add. She married the blind Marine exactly as she had planned to marry the cited one and she spent the rest of her life at his side. Add. The country made him famous. Add. The Marine Corps awarded Al Schmid the Navy Cross, one of its highest honors for continuing to man his machine gun after he was blinded.

[00:50:22]Life magazine, the most widely read publication in America, put him on the cover. Add. A journalist named Roger Butterfield wrote a book about him and in add 945 ad. Warner Brothers turned his story into a major motion picture called Pride of the Marines ad with the star John Garfield playing Schmid and Eleanor Parker playing Ruth. For a few short years, Al Schmid was one of the most famous enlisted men in the United States. His courage was a symbol of everything the country wanted to believe about itself. And then the war ended at an America, as it always does, moved on.

[00:50:57]Add. The parade stopped. The magazine covers moved to new faces. Add. Al Schmid became what he had always been underneath the fame, an ordinary man trying to build an ordinary life in the dark. Add he and Ruth had a family. Add they moved to a small house on the northeast side of Philadelphia. He found work as a parts assembler for a metal stamping company, feeling the pieces with his hands because he he could not see them. Add. Later they moved to Florida. Add. He lived quietly out of the spotlight. One of millions of veterans carrying a war inside a body that would never let him forget it. Add.

[00:51:32]But his real legacy, it turned out, was never going to be the medal or the movie or the magazine cover. Because the true legacy of that night on the sandbar was not one man's fame. Add. It was a way of fighting that would save thousands of American lives across the next 3 years and shape the entire American march across the Pacific. Think about what those Marines proved at Alligator Creek and at Bloody Ridge. They proved that discipline beats fanaticism. Add that interlocking machine gun fire, pre-registered artillery, and the iron nerve to wait until the enemy was close could destroy even the most fearless assault troops in the world. Add. And that lesson did not stay on Guadal Canal. It became doctrine. Every island that came after the Marines applied what they had learned in that first campaign.

[00:52:18]at Terowa, add at Saipan, add at Pelu, add at Eojima, add at Okinawa, add.

[00:52:25]American commanders built their defenses around the same brutal arithmetic.

[00:52:30]Interlocking fields of fire so no attacker faced a single gun, but always at least two. Add. Artillery ranged in advance on the ground the enemy would have to cross. Fire discipline drilled into every rifleman so he would not waste ammunition or reveal his position too soon. The Japanese, for their part, never solved the problem. Again and again, right up to the final months of the war, they launched mass banzai charges into exactly this kind of defense. And again and again, they were annihilated. The most horrifying proof came on the island of Saipan in July of 1,944, nearly 2 years after Guadal Canal. Add there, the surviving officers of a doomed garrison organized the largest banzai charge of the entire war. Add on the morning of July 7th. Add 1,000. Add 944. Add roughly 4,000 Japanese soldiers. Add some of them wounded. Add some armed with nothing but bamboo spears had charged American lines in a final suicidal wave. Add. They achieved nothing but their own destruction. Add more than 40 of them died. The lesson of Alligator Creek add. The lesson that spirit cannot conquer prepared firepower add. Had been written in blood at that creek in 1,00 add. 942 add. And the Japanese high command never learned it.

[00:53:46]Add. Their refusal to learn it cost them hundreds of thousands of their own men.

[00:53:50]AD and the deeper principle outlived the war entirely. The idea that a defensive position should be built as a killing zone that you channel an attacker haul into ground where interlocking fire and pre-planned artillery can tear him apart became foundational to how modern armies defend. It was there in Korea where American and Allied units held against mass Chinese night attacks using exactly this logic of layered interlocking fire.

[00:54:15]It shaped defensive doctrine through the Cold War and beyond. Add the specific technology changed. The machine guns got lighter. The artillery got smarter. The fire control went from a corporal slapping a shoulder in the dark to computers. But the underlying idea that fire discipline and prepared fields of fire beat raw courage at is still taught in infantry schools today. Add. When you count it all up across the Pacific campaign alone, the disciplined defensive tactic tes proven on Guadal Canal helped shatter assault after assault that might otherwise have overrun American positions add and saved an incalculable number of American lives on a dozen islands still to come. But the biggest lesson of this whole story was never really about tactics at all.

[00:54:59]It was about people at about who actually wins wars and who gets remembered for it. Look again at the men at the center of this story. Add. Al Schmid was a steel burner from a Philadelphia factory. Add. Lee Diamond was a corporal from Brooklyn. Johnny Rivers was a quiet gunner from rural Pennsylvania. Add. Jacob Voza was a retired village policeman. Add. Not one of them was a general. Add. Not one of them designed a battle plan or moved armies on a map. Add. They were ordinary men in an extraordinary place. And the outcome of a battle that helped turn a world war hinged on what they did in the dark with their own hands. Add. That is the first lesson. The people who hold the line are almost never the people whose names go in the history books.

[00:55:42]Add. The second lesson is about institutions and it cuts the other way.

[00:55:46]The Japanese military was not defeated by superior numbers at that creek. It was defeated by its own arrogance by a doctrine so rigid it could not absorb evidence. Add. Ichiki was told there were 2,000 Americans when there were 11,000. And no one questioned it. He was told to attack and when the attack failed, his answer was to keep attacking. Add. When his whole regiment was destroyed, Tokyo's answer was to send more men into the same trap. Add.

[00:56:12]This is how institutions fail. Add. Not because they lack courage, but because they cannot admit they are wrong. Add.

[00:56:19]The victory disease was not a Japanese disease. Add. It is a human one and it has destroyed armies, companies, and empires throughout history whenever pride was allowed to override reality.

[00:56:30]And the third lesson is about the price of the third thing. The thing that made victory possible. Add fire discipline.

[00:56:37]The courage to wait. And it is easy to be brave by charging. It is far harder to be brave by holding still while the enemy walks towards you. Add. Trusting your officers. Add. Trusting the plan.

[00:56:48]Add. Trusting that the terrible arithmetic will pay off if you can just hold your nerve one more second. Add.

[00:56:55]The Marines who won at that creek did not win by being more aggressive than the Japanese. They won by being more disciplined. In a culture that celebrates the bold charge, this story is a monument to the harder, quieter courage of restraint. Add. History is full of moments like this where the decisive act was not a dramatic attack, but a disciplined refusal to break. Add.

[00:57:16]The Roman legions that held their formation. Add the thin defensive lines that stood when every instinct screamed to run. add. Waiting, it turns out, can be the bravest thing a soldier ever does. But there is one final detail in this story that almost no one knows and it may be the most remarkable of all.

[00:57:33]Add it is about the small American flag.

[00:57:35]Add remember Jacob Vuza, the old scout who was captured, tied to a tree, and tortured for hours with bayonets because the Japanese found a folded American flag hidden against his skin. That flag had been a gift given to him by a grateful Marine after Vuza guided a downed American pilot to safety. He had carried it folded in his loin cloth for 13 days. And it was that flag, that small piece of silk no bigger than a handkerchief that got him captured and nearly killed. Add. Here is the remarkable part. Add. Vuza never betrayed the men who gave it to him.

[00:58:07]Add. Through hours of bayonet wounds through a blade driven into his throat, he refused to speak a single word about American positions. Add. He chewed through the rope that bound him add.

[00:58:18]Dragged himself miles through the jungle. AD. and delivered the warning that helped save an entire battalion.

[00:58:24]AD, all because he would not give up the men behind that flag. Ad and Vuza lived.

[00:58:29]He received 16 pints of blood, an amount that is essentially a complete replacement of everything in a man's body. And 12 days later, he walked out of the hospital tent on his own feet.

[00:58:40]Add. General Vandergrift pinned the Silver Star on him personally. Add. But that was only the beginning of his honors. Add. The United States gave him the silver star in the Legion of Merit.

[00:58:51]Add. The British gave him the George Medal and made him a member of the Order of the British Empire. Add. Queen Elizabeth II herself later promoted him.

[00:59:00]Add. And in 1,00 add. 979. Add. When he was in his late 80s, add. She elevated him again. Add. This time to Knight Commander of the British Empire. The retired village policeman who had chewed through a rope with his throat cut became Sir Jacob Vuza. add. He was also made an honorary sergeant major of the United States Marine Corps. Add he died in his village on Guadal Canal in 1,984 at the approximate age of 92. And on the plaque at his memorial in the capital of the Solomon Islands, placed there by the Marines who never forgot him, there is a single line. It reads simply, "Friend of the Marines." add. A man tortured nearly to death for carrying an American flag was honored by two of the great nations on earth and remembered most tenderly of all by the ordinary Marines whose lives he saved. So let us stand back and see the whole of it. Add from a steel worker who had never fired a shot at a man to a blind hero who kept his gun firing in the dark. Add from an old policeman who would not talk while they cut his throat to a defensive line that shattered the myth of the invincible enemy. Add from a single night on a nameless sandbar to a turning point that reversed the entire Pacific War. Add nearly 800 dead on that first night. Add over 20,000 dead on that one island. Add and a lesson written in blood that discipline and courage in ordinary men can change the course of history. Add that is the power of the men who hold the line while the world sleeps. Al Schmid died on December 1st, 1,982 in Florida. add. He was 62 years old.

[01:00:37]And here is how you know the war never really left him. Every single year add on the night of August 20th add the anniversary of that battle. Add al- Schmid would sit down in a chair in his living room. Add. And he would not speak. Add. Not to his wife, not to his children, not to anyone until the sun came up the next morning. Add. 40 years after the grenade took his eyes. He was still sitting in the dark every August alone with the sound of men running toward him across the sand. His wife Ruth understood. Add. She let him have his night. Somewhere in your own family, there is probably a man like him. Add. A father, a grandfather, an uncle who came home from a war and sat in a chair and would not talk about it. Add. Now you know a little of what he might have been carrying. Add. If this story moved you, share it. Tell someone about Al Schmid.

[01:01:26]Add. About Jacob Vuza. Add. about Johnny Rivers, the quiet gunner who died first and is buried in a cemetery almost no one visits. Add. Because America wanted a living hero and the dead are so easily forgotten. Add. This is only one of a hundred such stories buried in the history of the Second World War.

[01:01:44]Ordinary men who did extraordinary things and then vanished back into ordinary lives. Subscribe and we will keep bringing them back into the light, one forgotten hero at a time. From a Philadelphia steel worker who never expected to fire a shot to the sandbar where the tide of a world war finally turned at they did not win because they were fearless. They won because they were disciplined enough to wait and brave enough to hold the line when every instinct told them to run. And somewhere tonight in an attic or a closet or the bottom drawer of a dresser, there is a folded flag or a faded ribbon or a photograph of a young man in uniform who did not come home. had that flag is what they bought with that night in the dark.