THE NIGHT THE JUNGLE EXPLODED: How a 42-Pound ‘Toy’ Weapon Turned 3,000 Japanese Soldiers Into Shadows on Guadalcanal

 

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When Japan’s elite Sendai Division launched a moonless Banzai assault against Chesty Puller’s exhausted Marines, the mathematics of war predicted slaughter. But a French artist’s forgotten invention—no larger than a steel tube—rewrote everything in fire and blood.

October 24th, 1942. Guadalcanal’s Henderson Field lay silent beneath a low Pacific moon, the air so thick with humidity it seemed to press down on the Marines dug into the jungle ridge. The night smelled of wet soil and cordite, of sweat and metal and the vague sweetness of rot that never left the island. Somewhere beyond the tree line, thousands of unseen men were moving—men trained to die rather than surrender, men whose doctrine measured victory in the number of bodies left behind.

Lieutenant Colonel Lewis “Chesty” Puller stood over the map lit by a single red-shaded lamp inside his command dugout. His hand traced the ridgeline like a man memorizing the pulse of the land. To his left, the radio crackled faintly with reports—mostly rumors, some confirmed, all grim. The Japanese had been silent for days, too silent. Now scouts reported movement south of the perimeter. Not patrols. An army.

He looked up at the ceiling of the dugout where moisture dripped in steady rhythm from the timber beams. “They’re coming,” he said simply, his voice flat, steady, and cold. The younger officers around him shifted in their seats. Everyone knew what that meant. Chesty Puller never guessed.

Out on the ridge, the men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines waited. They had no illusions. They were outnumbered nearly five to one, half-starved, and sick from weeks of malaria and rain-soaked rations. The mud clung to their boots like glue. Rifles rusted overnight. The jungle hummed with invisible life—crickets, frogs, something bigger sometimes. And now, beneath it all, another sound had joined in—the faint, rhythmic whisper of hundreds of boots moving through leaves.

The Japanese 17th Army, commanded by Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake, had chosen this night to erase the American foothold from the Solomons. Major General Masao Maruyama’s Second (Sendai) Division—elite troops hardened in China and Malaya—had spent three days cutting through impassable jungle to strike the ridge south of Henderson Field. The plan was textbook Imperial doctrine: attack by night, close quickly, overwhelm with bayonet and spirit. Victory through will.

But what awaited them was not a textbook defense. It was a geometry lesson in steel and fire.

Puller’s men weren’t protected by heavy guns or tanks—they had none. The artillery had been reduced to a handful of pieces firing from the airfield. But nestled behind their rifle pits, half-buried in mud and sandbags, sat nine stubby tubes of painted steel—the M2 60mm mortars. To the Japanese, they were invisible, misunderstood. To the Marines, they were lifelines.

Those mortars were the children of a French artist named Edgar Brandt—an art deco metalworker who had once forged elegant railings for the Louvre and embassies along the Seine. But war had twisted his creativity into something deadlier. After the Great War’s carnage, he had watched his countrymen fall by the thousands between trenches, slaughtered because their own artillery couldn’t follow them forward. He decided to fix it with the simplest design he could imagine: a steel tube, a base plate, and a bipod. No recoil system, no breach, no moving parts—just gravity and physics. Drop the round, let it fall, let the earth shatter.

The French had called it the Mortier Brandt modèle 1927. The Americans bought the rights in 1932 and made it their own. The Army called it the M2 60mm mortar. To bureaucrats, it was “light infantry support.” To the men who would use it, it was hope.

That hope now lay hidden in the mud of Guadalcanal.

Sergeant Ralph Briggs crouched low in his forward observation post, listening. He could hear them now—branches breaking, the faint click of metal on metal. The jungle around him seemed alive with movement. He lifted his field telephone and whispered, “About three thousand of them between you and me.” Then he hung up and stayed where he was. Orders were orders. His job was to see, not to run.

Puller didn’t hesitate. He never did. “Wake the mortars,” he told his radio operator. “They’re coming in tonight.”

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October 24th, 1942. Henderson Field, Guadalcanal. 3,000 Japanese soldiers moving through jungle darkness toward a single battalion of Marines dug into a muddy ridge line. The mathematics of warfare said this would be a slaughter. 3:1 odds. Elite troops who had conquered China and Malaya against exhausted defenders who had been eating halfrations for 2 months.

 Every military textbook said the same thing. When attacking infantry closes to hand-tohand range, the advantage shifts to whoever brings more bayonets. The Japanese commanders had 3,000 bayonets. Chesty Puller had 700 marines. But buried in the mud between those marines were weapons that would rewrite every assumption about how infantry fights. Not the heavy machine guns, not artillery shells fired from miles away.

Something else. tubes so small a single man could carry one. So simple they had no moving parts except the shell sliding down the barrel. Weapons that Japanese intelligence dismissed as support equipment barely worth mentioning in pre- battle assessments. The assault would begin in 4 hours.

 And in that darkness, Edgar Brandt’s 19-year-old idea about how to keep soldiers alive was about to collide with Imperial Japan’s 2,000-year-old code of how soldiers should die. The story of how a French artist saved an American airfield begins 23 years earlier in a city that had nothing to do with either. Paris, 1919.

The Treaty of Versailles was being negotiated in gilded halls while Edgar Brandt walked through his metalwork shop on the Rude de la Fonten or past rod iron gates destined for embassies and ornamental grill work meant for the Louvre. He was 39 years old, an art deco metalsmith whose peacetime reputation rested on his ability to make iron flow like water, creating curves and patterns that seemed impossible in such an unforgiving material. But for 4 years he had not been making art.

 For 4 years he had been making weapons. The Great War had taught Brandt something that most artists never learned and most generals refused to accept. He had watched French infantry die by the thousands in attacks across open ground, cut down before they could close with German positions.

 He had seen his country lose an entire generation of young men because they could not bring artillery fire close enough to their own advancing troops without killing themselves. The problem was not courage. French soldiers had died bravely. The problem was geometry. Artillery fired from miles behind the front lines in flat trajectories that could not drop shells into trenches without also hitting the men assaulting those trenches.

 Heavy mortars could fire in high arcs, dropping shells almost vertically, but they weighed hundreds of pounds and could not move forward with attacking infantry. Machine guns could advance with the troops, but they could not reach enemies hiding in trenches and shell holes. There was a gap, a terrible killing gap between what infantry carried and what artillery could safely deliver.

 That gap had cost France more than a million dead. Brandt saw the gap differently than military officers did. Officers thought in terms of existing weapons and how to use them better. Brandt thought in terms of metal and physics and what shapes could do what work. He was an artist who understood that form followed function and an engineer who understood that the best design was the simplest design.

 The weapon he imagined would not replace artillery. It would give every infantry company its own artillery. Small enough that two men could carry it. Simple enough that soldiers could operate it without artillery training. Accurate enough to drop shells within meters of their own position. Light enough to move forward as the attack advanced.

 He envisioned a tube, a base plate, and a bipod. nothing more. No breach mechanism, no recoil system, no complex sighting equipment, just a smooth steel tube that used gravity and propellant to throw small shells in high arcs. Drop the shell down the tube, let the firing pin at the bottom trigger the propellant, and let physics do the rest. He called it a mortar, using an old word for an ancient weapon, but there was nothing ancient about what he designed.

The French army tested his prototype in 1919 and found it almost embarrassingly simple. 60 mm across, 42 lb total weight. A 19-year-old conscript could be trained to operate it in an afternoon. It could fire 15 rounds per minute, dropping 3 lb high explosive shells up to 1,700 m away.

 More importantly, it could drop those shells almost straight down, which meant it could hit targets in trenches, behind walls, in gullies, anywhere infantry needed fire support, but could not get artillery without danger to themselves. The effective radius was small. The explosive charge was modest. But the weapon could go everywhere infantry went, and that changed everything.

 The French army designated it the Mortier Brandt Modell, 1927, began production, and watched other armies take notice. The United States Army observed French exercises with the Brandt mortar in 1931 and recognized immediately what it was seeing. American infantry doctrine had been written by men who fought in the Great War, men who remembered what it meant to attack without close fire support. The army sent a team to evaluate the weapon. They test fired it at Aberdine proving ground in Maryland.

They took it apart and examined every component. They measured, weighed, timed, and calculated. Then they did something that would change the Pacific War 6 years before that war began. They bought the production rights, not just a license to manufacture under French supervision, but complete technical documentation and the right to modify the design as American industry saw fit.

 In data 1932, the United States Army adopted the weapon as the M2 mortar 60 mm. The designation was bureaucratic and forgettable. The impact would be anything but. American industry did what American industry did best. They simplified Brandt’s already simple design even further. The French version had weighed 42 lb. The American version weighed 42 lb.

 The French version could fire 15 rounds per minute. The American version could fire 18 rounds per minute with a well-trained crew. The French version required careful maintenance of its sighting equipment. The American version had sighting equipment so robust it could be dropped from a truck and still function. But the real American contribution was not engineering.

 It was production scale. By 1940, the United States had manufactured more M2 mortars than France had produced in a decade. By 1941, every American rifle company had a weapons platoon that included a mortar section with three M2 mortars. By 1942, when the First Marine Division landed on Guadal Canal, those mortars were as standard as rifles.

 The Marines carried them ashore the same way they carried ammunition and water. Just another piece of equipment, just another tool. Nobody thought they would decide the campaign. Edgar Brandt never visited Guadal Canal. He never met Chesty Puller or John Basselone or any of the Marines who would use his weapon.

 He remained in Paris through the German occupation, protecting his workshops. And after the war, he returned to creating ornamental iron work for museums and government buildings. He died in 1960 at age 79, a celebrated artist whose weapons work was a footnote in his obituaries. But on October 24th, 1942, his 19-year-old idea about infantry fire support was already dug into the mud on a jungle ridge line 7,000 mi from Paris, and it was about to be tested against 3,000 men who believed that courage and cold steel could overcome industrial firepower. The Japanese 17th Army headquarters at Rabolmhad been planning the October offensive since September, and everything in those plans assumed that Henderson Field could be taken by infantry assault. Lieutenant General Haruki Hiakutake commanded what amounted to a core level force spread across the Solomon Islands, and he had built his reputation on logistics and coordination rather than tactical brilliance.

 He was competent, methodical, and entirely conventional in his thinking. When he looked at Guadal Canal, he saw a problem that could be solved with enough soldiers attacking in the right place at the right time. The Americans had perhaps 10,000 men on the island. Intelligence estimated their defenses were thinly spread around the airfield perimeter.

 Therefore, concentrated assault by elite troops at the weakest point would break through. It was textbook doctrine. It had worked in China and Malaya. There was no reason to think it would not work on Guadal Canal. Hayakutake assigned the main assault to Major General Masau Maruyama and the Second Infantry Division known as the Sendai Division for the city where it had been formed. These were not garrison troops or hastily trained conscripts.

 They were veterans who had fought through China and helped conquer Singapore. Their officers had trained at the Imperial Japanese Army Academy. Their enlisted men had been taught that death in battle was the highest honor a soldier could achieve. Maruyama himself was exactly the kind of leader Japanese doctrine valued most.

 Personally brave, willing to lead from the front, capable of inspiring his men to accept orders that amounted to suicide missions. He had marched his division through terrain the Americans considered impassible, moving through dense jungle at night to achieve surprise. His tactical planning was aggressive to the point of recklessness.

 But recklessness had worked before. The British had thought Singapore was impregnable. Mararyyama’s division had taken it in 70 days. The plan for Guadal Canal followed the same principles that had won at Singapore. Approach through jungle the enemy thinks is impassible. Attack at night when American firepower would be less effective.

 Strike the weakest point in the perimeter with overwhelming force. Break through in the first rush and exploit the breakthrough before the Americans could organize a defense. speed and shock and the willingness to accept casualties would overcome any American advantage in firepower.

 The specific target was a ridge line south of Henderson Field where Marine positions appeared thin. Intelligence reported that the ridge was held by approximately one battalion, perhaps 7 or 800 men. Maruyama would attack with three infantry regiments, more than 6,000 soldiers. The first wave would breach the wire and overrun the forward positions. The second wave would exploit the breakthrough and push to the airfield itself.

By dawn on October 25th, Japanese flags would fly over Henderson Field and American air power in the Solomons would be finished. What Japanese intelligence had not reported because Japanese intelligence did not understand it was what those 700 Marines were carrying. The reconnaissance teams that had observed the marine positions had seen machine gun imp placements, rifle positions, and what appeared to be some small artillery pieces. They had counted weapons and estimated firing positions.

They had noted fields of fire and likely avenues of approach, but they had not understood what those small tubes behind the marine lines actually were. The reports described them as light support weapons and estimated they might complicate the assault, but would not prevent it.

 Japanese doctrine had no equivalent to the M2 mortar. And what you have no equivalent for, you tend to underestimate. The Japanese army had battalion mortars and regimental mortars, heavy weapons positioned far behind the front lines and fired by specialized artillery crews. The idea that every rifle company might have its own mortars operated by infantrymen and positioned close enough to hit targets within meters of friendly troops was outside the Japanese tactical framework. It did not fit their model of how infantry fought. Therefore, it did

not feature prominently in their planning. The second division began its approach march on October 23rd, moving through jungles so thick that men could barely see 10 m ahead. They carried 4 days of rations, which was already less than doctrine required, but all they could manage through the terrain.

 Each soldier carried his rifle, ammunition, grenades, and his personal equipment. The division’s own mortars and artillery pieces had been left behind because they could not be moved through the jungle fast enough. This was an infantry assault in the purest sense. Men with rifles and bayonets and machine guns, attacking with courage and discipline, and the expectation that those qualities would be sufficient.

Maryama led from the front, setting the pace, demonstrating the endurance he expected from his soldiers. They moved in near silence, maintaining noise discipline that would have impressed any professional army. When they stopped to rest, they rested in place without talking.

 When they ate, they ate cold rice because fires would reveal their position. They were good at this. They had done it before. Every man in the division believed they would succeed because their training, their experience, and their doctrine all said they would succeed. By the evening of October 24th, the second division had reached its assault positions approximately 3,000 m south of the Marine perimeter. The men were exhausted from the march, but ready.

 Officers synchronized watches and reviewed the assault plan one final time. The attack would begin at approximately 2300 hours. First wave companies would advance to contact, breach the barbed wire with Bangalore torpedoes, and overrun the forward positions with bayonet charges.

 Second wave companies would follow at intervals, exploiting whatever gaps the first wave created. Speed was critical. Hesitation was death. Once the assault began, there would be no stopping until they reached Henderson Field or died trying. Those were the orders. Those had always been the orders. Japanese infantry doctrine did not include contingency plans for failure because planning for failure suggested that failure was acceptable. It was not acceptable.

 victory or death, nothing in between. What Maryama and his officers did not know, could not know from their position in the jungle was that their approach had already been detected. At 21:30 hours, Sergeant Ralph Briggs, positioned in an observation post 3,000 m forward of the marine lines, had heard movement in the jungle.

 A lot of movement, the kind of sound that thousands of men make, even when they are trying to be silent. He waited, listening, estimating numbers based on the duration and intensity of the noise. Then he picked up his field telephone and called Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Puller’s command post. The message was brief and professional. About 3,000 Japanese between you and me. Then he settled back into his position to wait for what came next.

 Behind him in the marine lines, mortarmen began checking their equipment and stacking ammunition. Lewis Burwell Puller had been a Marine for 24 years by October 1942. And in that time, he had developed an almost supernatural sense for where the enemy would attack. He was already a legend in the core, a man who had earned two Navy crosses in Nicaragua, fighting guerrillas in jungle terrain, not unlike Guadal Canal.

 His men called him chesty for his barrel chest, and the way he walked with it thrust forward like he was daring someone to take a shot. He had a reputation for being exactly where the fighting was heaviest, not because he sought glory, but because he understood that officers led from the front or they did not lead at all.

 When he received Briggs’s report at 2130, he did not question the estimate or ask for confirmation. If Briggs said 3,000, it was 3,000. Puller’s first battalion of the Seventh Marine Regiment held approximately 1,000 m of the southern perimeter. and in four hours that sector was going to become the most dangerous piece of real estate in the Pacific.

 His defensive position was a low ridge line running roughly east to west, thick with jungle growth and featuring terrain that channeled attacking forces into predictable kill zones. Puller had spent two months improving these positions, and he had positioned his weapons with the precision of a man who understood that firepower properly placed was worth 10 times the same firepower scattered randomly.

 His machine guns were cighted to create interlocking fields of fire across the approaches. His rifle companies were dug into positions with overhead cover and clear firing lanes. And behind the rifle line, positioned at carefully calculated distances and angles, were the weapons that would decide the battle. Nine M2 mortars in three sections of three tubes each, 42 pounds per tube.

 Simple enough that a corporal could command a section. deadly enough to break an infantry assault before it reached the wire. The M2 had been in Marine Corps service for 10 years, but Guadal Canal was the first time it would be tested against a major enemy offensive. The weapon specifications were modest compared to artillery.

 The shell weighed just over 3 lb with roughly half a pound of composition B explosive. Maximum range was 1,700 m, effective range closer to a,000. Rate of fire with a trained crew was 18 rounds per minute, though that pace could not be sustained for long without overheating the tube. The killing radius against troops in the open was approximately 30 m, less if the enemy was dug in or undercover.

 On paper, these numbers did not look particularly impressive. Three-pound shells against 3,000 attacking soldiers seemed like bringing a pocketk knife to a sword fight. But the specifications missed what made the weapon revolutionary. It was not about the size of the explosion.

 It was about where the explosion happened and how fast you could make it happen again. The M2’s genius was in its simplicity and its geometry. The tube was a smooth boore with no rifling, which meant less accuracy at long range, but also meant the weapon could not jam and required almost no maintenance. The firing mechanism was a fixed pin at the bottom of the tube. Drop the shell.

 It falls onto the pin. The pin triggers the propellant and the shell launches. No trigger to pull, no breach to close, no complex mechanical systems to break. The bipod and base plate gave it stability. And the site was simple enough that a minimally trained marine could be dropping shells on target within minutes of setting up. But the real advantage was the trajectory.

 Artillery fired in relatively flat arcs because it had to clear friendly troops between the gun and the target. The M2 fired almost straight up and the shell came almost straight down. That meant it could hit targets in deflated positions, trenches, ravines, the reverse slopes of hills that artillery could not reach.

 More importantly, it meant mortars could be positioned close behind the front line and could fire danger close missions that would have been suicidal with artillery. Puller had positioned his mortar sections approximately 200 m behind his forward rifle positions, close enough that they could see the terrain they were firing over and adjust fire based on what they observed.

 Each three mortar section had a commander, usually a sergeant or corporal, who controlled where the tubes aimed and when they fired. The crews were young Marines, most of them teenagers who had been trained on the M2 at Camp Leune or Camp Pendleton before shipping overseas. They knew the manual procedures, how to set the sight, how to calculate range based on the angle of the tube, how to adjust fire based on where the last shell landed.

 But manual procedures in actual combat were different things, and most of these kids had never fired a mortar at human beings who were trying to kill them. Tonight would be their education. The ammunition was prepositioned in neat stacks near each mortar. High explosive shells with impact fuses that would detonate on contact with the ground or any solid object.

 Each shell was stored in a cylindrical container that kept it dry and protected. The crews had spent the afternoon checking fuses, wiping down propellant increments, and arranging the ammunition so that in darkness they beep could find what they needed by feel. This was not glamorous work.

 It was the kind of tedious preparation that separated units that survived from units that died stupidly. Puller walked the mortar positions twice before dark, checking fields of fire and making sure the section commanders understood the plan. When the Japanese attacked, the mortars would fire pre-plotted concentrations on likely assembly areas.

 If the assault reached the wire, they would shift to direct support of the rifle companies, dropping shells within 50 m of friendly positions. If the line was breached, they would fire directly into the breach until they ran out of ammunition or the Japanese stopped coming. There was no plan for withdrawal because there was nowhere to withdraw to.

 Henderson Field was 400 m behind them. If Puller’s line broke, the airfield was lost and the entire Guadal Canal campaign was lost with it. The Marines dug in along the ridge line understood this without being told. They had been on the island since August 7th, fighting a campaign that most of them did not fully understand, but knew was desperately important.

 They were exhausted, underfed, and sick with malaria and dysentery. Their uniforms were rotting off their bodies in the tropical climate. They had not received mail in weeks, and did not know if anyone back home even knew where they were. But they were Marines, which meant they would hold their positions until ordered otherwise, or until they were dead.

 Between them and 3,000 attacking Japanese soldiers were barbed wire, machine guns, rifles, grenades, and nine small mortars that weighed 42 lbs each. In 4 hours, they would find out if that was enough. The assault began at 2300 hours with artillery fire from Japanese guns positioned several kilome south of the Marine perimeter.

 The shells were mostly small caliber, 75 mm and smaller, but they made noise and kept marine heads down while the infantry moved forward. Puller listened to the incoming fire and knew immediately it was preparatory bombardment, not a sustained barrage. The Japanese did not have enough artillery on the island for a proper preparation. This was just noise to cover movement.

 He passed the word to his company commanders, “Stand by, they are coming.” In the Japanese assault positions, officers synchronized their final movements. Captain Jiro Katsumatada commanded the 11th company of the third battalion, second infantry division. 200 men who had been selected for this assault because they had demonstrated absolute willingness to die.

Katsumato was 28 years old, a career officer who had graduated from the Imperial Army Academy and served in China, where he had learned that aggressive leadership meant leading charges personally with his sword drawn. His men worshiped him because he asked nothing of them that he would not do himself.

 Tonight’s mission was simple in concept and nearly impossible in execution. His company would be in the first assault wave. They would advance through the jungle to the barbed wire perimeter. They would breach the wire with Bangalore torpedoes. They would charge the marine positions with bayonets and grenades. They would break through or die trying.

 Every man in the company understood these orders and had accepted them. Death was not a possibility to be avoided. Death was the expected outcome. The only question was whether they would die after accomplishing their mission or before. At 2330 hours, the Japanese artillery ceased and the infantry began moving forward.

 They advanced in company formations, maintaining intervals, moving as quietly as possible through jungle that channeled them toward the marine positions exactly as Puller had anticipated. The leading companies could see nothing through the darkness and dense vegetation. They navigated by compass and by following the officers who led them.

 Every few minutes they stopped, listened, and continued. The Marines were close now, perhaps 500 m, perhaps less. Sound carried strangely in the jungle, and it was impossible to judge distances accurately. Katsumatada could hear his own breathing and the breathing of the men around him. He could smell their sweat and the jungle rot that infected everyone on the island.

 He could feel the weight of his sword and the expectation of what came next. At midnight, the first Japanese troops reached the barbed wire at the base of the ridge line. The wire had been strung in multiple belts, anchored to palm logs, and reinforced with tin cans filled with pebbles that would rattle if disturbed.

 The Marines had built this obstacle over 2 months, layer by layer, until it formed a barrier 4 m deep in some places. The Japanese engineers moved forward with Bangalore torpedoes, long metal tubes packed with explosives that could be pushed under the wire and detonated to blast a path through.

 The first explosion came at 0015 hours, a sharp crack that lit the jungle for an instant and left a gap in the wire approximately 2 meters wide. Immediately, marine machine guns opened fire from positions up the slope. Tracers cut through the darkness in long red arcs. The sound was overwhelming, a continuous hammering that echoed off the ridge line and through the jungle.

 The Japanese engineers who had detonated the Bangalore were dead before the echoes faded, but the gap was open. Katsuma led his company toward the gap at a run. His sword was drawn, and he was shouting encouragement to his men, though he could barely hear his own voice over the machine gun fire.

 Around him, soldiers were falling, cut down by fire they could not see from positions they could not identify. The Marines were shooting at sound and movement, firing blindly into the darkness. But there were so many Japanese advancing that blindfire was finding targets. Katsuma reached the wire, pushed through the gap, and started up the slope. Behind him, his company was being shredded by machine gun fire, but enough men were getting through that the assault still had momentum.

 If they could reach the marine positions, if they could get close enough for bayonets and grenades, the close quarters fighting would favor Japanese infantry training. They just had to close the distance. 50 m, 40 m, 30 m. Then the mortars opened fire. The first volley landed in the gap in the wire at 0020 hours. Nine shells arriving within seconds of each other. 3 lb high explosive rounds with impact fuses that detonated instantly on contact.

 The explosions were not particularly large, nothing like artillery shells, but they were perfectly placed. The mortar crews had pre-registered that exact spot during daylight, calculating the range and deflection to within meters. Now they were simply dropping shells down tubes as fast as they could load them, 18 rounds per minute per tube, more than a shell every 3 seconds from the entire section. The impact area became a continuous eruption of explosions, dirt, and shrapnel.

 Japanese soldiers who had been moving toward the gap were blown apart or driven to ground. The Bangalore gap which had been the focus of the assault became a killing zone where nothing could survive. Katsumato was already through the gap when the mortars started firing but the men behind him were not.

 He looked back and saw the explosions walking through his company, methodical and precise, destroying his unit piece by piece. He had perhaps 30 men with him on the marine side of the wire. 200 men had started the assault 15 minutes ago. He turned back toward the marine positions and continued climbing. There was nothing else to do. The mission was to break through.

 He would break through or die trying. On the marine line, Sergeant John Basselone was commanding two machine gun sections positioned to cover the primary avenue of approach up the ridge line. He had four Browning M1917 machine guns, water cooled 30 caliber weapons that could sustain fire longer than air cooled guns.

 His crews were feeding ammunition belts into the guns as fast as the weapons would accept them, firing short bursts at anything that moved in the darkness below. Baselone moved between the guns, checking for jams, ensuring the water jackets were not overheating, directing fire toward sounds and movement.

 He could see the mortar rounds impacting down the slope, bright flashes that illuminated Japanese soldiers for an instant before they disappeared back into darkness. The mortars were doing exactly what they were supposed to do, breaking up the assault before it could mass for a final rush. But some Japanese were still coming. He could hear them shouting, could see individual figures silhouetted against the mortar flashes, climbing toward his position with bayonets fixed behind Basilon’s position.

 Second, Lieutenant Joseph Turzy commanded the weapons platoon for K Company, Third Battalion, First Marine Regiment. His three M2 mortars had been firing since 0020 and would continue firing until the Japanese stopped coming or the ammunition ran out. His crews were working in smooth rhythm now, the initial nervousness burned away by repetition and necessity.

 Hang the shell over the tube, drop, fire, adjust, repeat. The tubes were getting hot, but not dangerously so. They had plenty of ammunition, and every shell they dropped was landing in darkness on targets they could not see, destroying men who had never imagined this was possible.

 Captain Katsumata reached the Marine Wire with 23 men still alive behind him. The rest of his 200 company was scattered down the slope, dead or wounded or pinned down by fire, they could not escape. He had his sword in one hand and a grenade in the other. The marine positions were 10 meters ahead. Firing positions dug into the rgeline with interlocking fields of fire that made advance nearly suicidal.

 But nearly suicidal was not the same as impossible. And Katsuma had not come this far to stop. He threw the grenade toward the nearest machine gun position, waited for the explosion, and charged forward, screaming encouragement to his men. Some of them followed. Most did not make it three steps.

 The Browning machine gun that Katsuma had targeted with his grenade had been damaged, but not destroyed. The crew had taken cover during the explosion and now returned to their weapon. The gunner saw movement, traversed the barrel, and fired a burst that caught Katsumatada in the chest and throat.

 The Japanese captain went down, still holding his sword, dead before he understood what had killed him. The men behind him continued forward for another few seconds until marine rifle fire cut them down one by one. By 00035 hours, every man from Katsumatada’s company who had reached the marine wire was dead. The assault that was supposed to break through Puller’s line had been stopped 15 m short of the forward positions. But the Japanese were not done.

 General Yumi Nasu commanded the 29th Infantry Regiment attacking from the south and his troops were now reaching the wire in multiple locations along Puller’s front. These were not wild bonsai charges. These were coordinated company assaults by professional soldiers who understood fire and movement and how to suppress defensive positions.

 They used terrain effectively, advancing through draws and gullies that provided some cover from direct fire. They brought forward machine guns of their own and used them to suppress marine positions while assault troops moved closer. They were good, but they were advancing into a defense designed by a man who had spent 24 years learning how to kill people efficiently. And that defense was supported by weapons their doctrine had never accounted for.

 The M2 mortars shifted fire as the assault developed, walking shells along the base of the ridge line, wherever Japanese troops were massing. The mortar section commanders could not see their targets in the darkness, but they did not need to.

 The machine gunners and riflemen on the forward line could see exactly where the Japanese were assembling, and they passed that information back by shouting ranges and directions. The mortar crews adjusted fire accordingly, dropping shells 50 m in front of friendly positions, sometimes closer. This was danger close fire by any standard, close enough that a short round would kill Marines.

 But Puller had trained his men to accept that risk because the alternative was being overrun. The mortars fired continuously, methodically, creating a zone of destruction that extended from the marine wire down the slope into the jungle where Japanese reserves were trying to move forward. At 0 hours, Nasu committed his second wave companies, sending another thousand men forward to exploit whatever gaps the first wave had created.

 But there were no gaps. There were only dead men and wounded men and a few isolated groups that had penetrated the wire only to be destroyed by rifle fire before they could exploit their success. The second wave advanced into the same machine gun fire and the same mortar fire that had destroyed the first wave.

 They were brave and disciplined and completely unable to overcome the fundamental mathematics of the situation. They were attacking uphill through obstacles against defenders who could see them silhouetted against mortar flashes and who had more firepower than Japanese intelligence had believed possible. Courage was not enough. Discipline was not enough. The will to die was not enough.

 Nasu himself was moving forward with his command group, trying to maintain control of a battle that was disintegrating into chaos. He could hear the machine gun fire and the explosions, but could not see what was happening to his units. Communications had broken down almost immediately. Runners sent forward did not return.

 He had committed more than half his regiment, and as far as he could tell, they had achieved nothing. The marine line was supposed to have broken by now. His troops were supposed to be advancing toward Henderson Field. Instead, they were dying in the wire and in the kill zones beyond the wire, destroyed by weapons that appeared to be everywhere at once.

At 0130 hours, a marine mortar shell landed directly on Nasu’s command post. The general was hit by shrapnel in the chest and abdomen. He would die of his wound sometime in the next few hours, though accounts disagree on whether he died immediately or lived until the following day.

 His death effectively ended coordinated Japanese command of the southern assault. Without central command, the Japanese attacks continued, but became increasingly disorganized. Individual company commanders continued leading their men forward because those were there. Orders and Japanese doctrine did not allow for independent decisions to withdraw.

 They attacked the same positions that had already repulsed multiple assaults. They died in the same wire that had killed their comrades. By 0200 hours, the assault had become a series of isolated company actions. Each one destroyed in turn by the same combination of machine gun fire and mortar fire that had destroyed all the others. The Marines were not winning through superior courage or better training.

 They were winning through superior firepower, properly positioned and employed. Every Japanese soldier who reached the wire was killed before he could breach the defenses. Every Japanese unit that masked for assault was broken up by mortar fire before it could coordinate its attack.

 The weapon Edgar Brandt had designed in Paris 23 years earlier was doing exactly what he had intended. It was keeping infantry alive by destroying enemy infantry before they could close to hand-to-hand range. At 0300 hours, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hall received orders to move his Third Battalion, 164th Infantry Regiment forward to reinforce Puller’s position.

 Paul commanded Army troops, North Dakota and South Dakota National Guard soldiers who had trained alongside Marines but had never fought in combat before tonight. Some Marines had questioned whether National Guard troops could handle a real fight. Paul’s battalion was about to answer that question. They moved forward through the darkness carrying their own M2 mortars and ammunition and took up positions on Puller’s flanks. The Japanese would test them within the hour.

 Maryama, commanding the second division from his headquarters position several kilometers south, had no accurate information about what was happening to his assault troops. He knew the attack had begun. He knew casualties were heavy. He did not know that his assault had already failed.

 Japanese doctrine required continuation of attacks until success was achieved or the unit was destroyed. He sent orders forward committing his reserve regiment to the assault. Those orders reached scattered company commanders who continued leading men forward into machine gun fire and mortar fire that never seemed to slacken. By 0400 hours, the second division had suffered more than 2,000 casualties and had not advanced more than 30 m beyond the wire at any point along Puller’s front. The assault would continue for several more hours, but it had already been decided. Edgar Brandt’s weapon had

changed infantry warfare, and 3,000 Japanese soldiers had discovered that change, the hardest way possible.