Word: guadal
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...Corps. He served with the "Horse Marines" at Peking, with the famed 4th Marines at Shanghai in the days of the Japanese occupation of China's metropolis. In World War II, he commanded a battalion and then a regiment of the ist Marine Division, fought from Guadal canal* to Peleliu, won two more Navy Crosses, was wounded seven times...
...Bunker Hill & Gettysburg. When they sailed from Norfolk, Va. the marines had never heard of Guadalcanal. Major General Alexander Archer Vandegrift, who had by then taken over the division, had been given almost no time for practice, planning and staging. On Aug. 7, 1942, the marines went ashore on Guadal, without meeting resistance. The only first-day casualty was a leatherneck who cut himself trying to open a coconut...
...Guadal, when some of the airmen were griping about the holes in the runway, Geiger walked down to an SBD (Douglas dive-bomber) spotted on the apron, climbed in. Without a single escorting fighter, the Old Man took the SBD off the flight strip, flew north to a village where the Japs were headquartered, dropped his 1,000-pounder, went home. His pilots got the idea...
...cargo ship when the Navy took her over before the war. Three times she ran supplies into the Solomons under the bomb bays of Jap planes. On the fourth trip the Alchiba got it. Loaded with aviation gasoline, ammunition and bombs, she was riding at anchor off Guadal when a sub's torpedo blasted her. Gasoline and ammunition started going up. Her captain, Commander James S. Freeman, decided to try to save her, ordered up anchor and full speed ahead. Listing 18°, the Alchiba crunched on to the beach...
...mine rifleman, Lou developed an accuracy famed in an outfit noted for its shooting, once he took up mortars. On Guadal he boasted he could lob a shell down a chimney, and did. When a Jap cruiser closed in to shore, Lou lobbed a few shells at it (like firing bee-bees at a bomber), explained, "I wanted to check my azimuth and it's just right." Many a mortar crew in the Solomons was Diamond-polished...