What Three Marines Did When Japan Said the Beach Was Locked

November 9th, 1943. A foxhole. Two men, an island in the Pacific most Americans have never heard of. The younger of the two was 21 years old, 3 days past his birthday. He’d been lying in that hole for hours, listening, not to anything in particular, to the dark, to the sound of grenades falling closer with each pass.

 At some point during the night, he said three words to the man beside him. I’ll take it. He wasn’t talking about a job. He wasn’t answering a question anyone had asked. He had looked at the weapons they were carrying, looked at the situation they were in, done the kind of math that most men spend their whole lives hoping they never have to do.

 And he had told the man beside him what he had already decided. I’ll take it. Nobody ordered him to say that. Nobody asked. He wasn’t the only one. 8 days before that conversation, on the same island, a man from South Carolina had stood up on a beach while a gun was killing the men around him and walked straight toward it.

 6 days after that, in the jungle a few miles inland, a man from West Virginia had thrown a grenade and hadn’t moved when it came back. Three men, 8 days. None of them knew the other two existed. This is their story. By the fall of 1943, the United States had been fighting Japan for nearly two years. Guadal Canal had been won at enormous cost.

 The Japanese had been pushed back one island at a time across the Solomon’s chain. The supply lines were shifting. The momentum was shifting, but rebel still stood. On the northeastern tip of New Britain, the Japanese had built the most powerful military base in the entire Pacific. A 100,000 troops, five airfields, a harbor deep enough for a fleet.

 From Rabbal, Japan could threaten everything south of New Guinea. Every American ship, every convoy, every transport that came within range did so at risk. The American commanders understood the problem clearly. Rabbal could not be taken by force, not without a cost in men and ships that nobody was willing to pay, and not with the resources available in late 1943.

A frontal assault was out of the question, but it could be strangled. If American aircraft could fly regular missions over Rabbal, hitting the airfields, mining the harbor, cutting the supply lines, the base would wither on its own. It wouldn’t need to be taken. It just needed to be made useless. To do that, the Americans needed an airfield within striking range.

 They needed flat ground. Somewhere in the islands to the south, somewhere engineers could pour concrete and carpenters could build a runway and fighter pilots could take off and be over Rabal before they ran low on fuel. They found it on Buganville. Bugganville is the largest island in the Solomon chain, 60 mi wide in places, covered almost entirely in jungle so dense that a man could get lost 20 yards from the trail he’d just left.

 The Japanese knew it mattered. They had 40,000 troops on the island. The bulk of those forces were concentrated at the northern and southern ends around Bukah in the north, around Buin in the south. The middle of the island, a stretch of swampy coastline along Empress Augusta Bay, was held by a much smaller garrison. That was the opening.

 Admiral Hally’s plan was straightforward in concept and brutal in the details. Land at Cape Tokina, right in the middle of the island’s western coast, where the Japanese were thinnest on the ground. Establish a beach head. Build an airfield as fast as possible. Then let the aircraft do the work. The resources were thin.

 There was one carrier group available for air cover, and it couldn’t stay indefinitely. Once the Marines were ashore, they would be largely on their own. Each man was issued one unit of fire, one combat load of ammunition, enough for one fight, not more. The men who would make that landing belonged to the Third Marine Division.

 They had been formed just over a year earlier in September 1942 at Camp Elliot outside San Diego. The division was built from scratch. Cadre officers, freshly trained enlisted men. A handful of veterans mixed in among thousands who had never heard a shot fired in anger. Most of the men in the division had never been in combat.

 They trained in New Zealand through the southern hemisphere winter of 1943, then moved to Guadal Canal to absorb what the veterans there had learned. What the Guadal Canal veterans had learned was not the kind of thing that transferred easily in a classroom. It was the kind of thing you either knew from being there or you didn’t know at all. They tried to pass it on anyway.

How to move through jungle without sound. How to read the ground when the ground was trying to kill you. How the Japanese fought at night. And what they did when they thought they had you surrounded and what they did when they didn’t. The third Marine Division listened and took notes and ran exercises in the heat and tried to be ready. Nobody was ever really ready.

 On the night of October 31st, the convoy moved through Empress Augusta Bay without running lights. The waters were calm. The men aboard the transports were awake long before dawn. Some ate. Most didn’t. The men who had been through this before, who had climbed into boats before, who had gone in on beaches before, sat quietly with whatever they had learned to do with the hours before something started.

 The men who hadn’t been through it sat quietly, too, because there was nothing useful to say, and they knew it, and because saying something just to fill the quiet felt wrong. On one ship, a sergeant from Spartanberg, South Carolina, sat with his tray in the dark, and didn’t have much to say. There was nothing left to say.

 Tomorrow was coming whether he talked about it or not. At 0500 on the morning of November 1st, the ship went to general quarters. At 0637, the destroyers began shelling the shoreline. At 0710, the ramps dropped. The men of the Third Marine Division stepped off into the water and the gun opened up. Nobody on those landing craft could see where it was coming from.

 What they could see was the result. A boat would be moving toward the beach and then it wouldn’t be. Landing craft went down. Others were torn up badly enough that they couldn’t make it back. The men in the water had nowhere to go. Rifle fire couldn’t reach the gun. Grenades fell short. The beach at Cape Tooka was narrow.

 Dense jungle pressing right to the waterline on both sides. No angle to flank. No ground to work with. The men who had reached the sand were flat in the black volcanic sand, heads down, the gun somewhere in the treeine, and nobody able to get eyes on it without drawing a burst. Every man who raised his head got shot at.

 The battalion commander, Major Mason, was moving forward, trying to push his men off the beach when he took a wound. Before they carried him back, he turned toward the men still pinned down in the sand. Get the hell in and fight. They carried him off the beach a few minutes later. The gun kept firing. Robert Allen Owens was born in Greenville, South Carolina in 1920.

 His family moved to Spartanberg when he was still small. He left school after his second year of high school, not because he had somewhere better to be, but because there were bills that needed paying, and he was old enough to help pay them. For 5 years after that, he worked the looms at a mill in one of the towns nearby.

 Early mornings, long shifts, the kind of work that doesn’t make the news. He enlisted in February 1942, a few weeks after Pearl Harbor. He went through boot camp at Paris Island, Infantry School at New River, North Carolina. Then the division shipped to New Zealand, then to Guadal Canal for training. not to fight, but to learn from men who had.

 By November 1943, Owens had been in uniform for nearly two years. He had never fired a shot at anyone. There was nothing in his service record that set him apart from the men around him. No combat experience, no special schools. He was a sergeant, 23 years old, and November 1st, 1943 was his first day in a fight.

 The gun that was killing his men was a 75mm artillery piece set into a bunker built from coconut logs and packed earth dug flush into the treeine at the edge of the beach. It had been positioned carefully on either side of the main gun. Smaller positions provided covering fire. Each one protecting the other, each one protecting the 75.

 Any approach from the left flank would walk into crossfire from the right. Any approach from the right would walk into crossfire from the left. The only open angle was directly in front. Straight down the barrel. For more than an hour, the Marines on that beach hadn’t moved. 40 yards of sand at most before the jungle started.

 Nowhere to maneuver. Nowhere to regroup. Those who had reached the sand were packed into that strip of ground face down, close enough to the gun to hear it fire, but unable to get close enough to do anything about it. Every attempt to suppress it with rifles fell short. Grenades couldn’t reach. Owens had been watching the muzzle flash for most of that hour.

 He had been thinking about what happened if nobody did anything. The rest of the landing force was still on those boats. The beach had to be cleared. The gun had to stop. And there was only one direction to go. Straight at it, through the open ground in front of the bunker. While the gun was still firing, he called for four volunteers.

He placed them on the flanks, two to each side, with orders to draw fire from the smaller positions, to keep those gunners occupied, to give him 30 seconds of their attention pointed somewhere other than straight ahead. Then he went for the main gun. himself. What happened next was put on record by the men who saw it.

Owens crossed the open ground in front of the bunker under fire. He didn’t sprint. The accounts say nothing about a sprint. He moved toward the imp placement across open sand under fire while the gun was still operating. He reached the bunker. He entered through the firing port. The narrow slot cut into the front face of the structure.

The same opening the crew used to aim and shoot. From the front, while the gun crew was still inside, inside a round already chambered. 150 rounds of high explosive ammunition stacked beside the crew. He drove the crew out through the rear exit. His men were waiting on the other side. The gun went silent.

 Owens came out through the rear after them and then he went down. He died of his wounds on the beach at Cape Tokina. He had been in uniform since February 1942. He had never fired a shot at anyone until that morning. General Alan Turnage, commanding the Third Marine Division, would write afterward that among all the acts of courage on that beach head, no single action saved more lives or contributed more to the success of the landing than what Robert Owens did on the morning of November 1st.

 The rest of the landing force came ashore. They crossed the beach he had cleared. Most of them never knew his name. He is buried at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines. He was a mill worker from Spartanberg, 23 years old. If you’ve never heard his name before today, hit subscribe because there are two more men on this island you need to know about and history forgot all three of them.

6 days later in land from the beach a few miles into the jungle the air smelled of wet rot and something burning. A football player from West Virginia was leading his men toward a Japanese machine gun. Herbert Joseph Thomas Jr. was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1918. His family moved to South Charleston, West Virginia when he was seven.

 He grew up there, went to the local schools, played halfback for South Charleston High, did well enough that after graduation, he spent a year at Greenbryer Military School before earning a full athletic scholarship to Virginia Tech. By his senior year, he led every college football player in the state of Virginia in scoring.

 His mother had died when he was 13. That is the kind of loss that either makes a person or doesn’t. For Thomas, it hadn’t stopped him. He had kept going, one thing at a time, until the one thing in front of him was a diploma two months away. He left before he got it. His friends were joining the Marines, and Herbert Thomas was not the kind of man who stayed behind while the people he cared about went somewhere dangerous.

 He went into the Army Airore first, spent several months there, then put in for a transfer to the Marines because that’s where his friends were, and that was reason enough. That transfer put him on Buganville on the morning of November 7th, 1943. But he had been on the island for 6 days before that morning.

 He came ashore on November 1st with the rest of the Third Marines in the same waves that were being torn apart by the 75mm gun at Cape Tokina. His unit landed east of the Cape. He made it up the beach. He dug in. For the first several days, the work was not combat. It was the grinding, unglamorous labor of turning a strip of sand and jungle into something that could hold.

His regiment pushed inland, cutting trails through growth so dense that the men in front were invisible to the men 10 yards behind. They built defensive positions. They ran patrols. They found Japanese stragglers and dealt with them. They learned the ground. On the night of November 6th, word came down through the lines that Japanese troops had landed to the south at Koramokina Lagoon, 6 mi from the perimeter.

 A counterattack was coming. Thomas and his men moved out before dawn. The jungle on Buganville was not like anything they had prepared for. Marines who had come through Guadal Canal said the terrain here was worse. The canopy was so thick that even at midday the ground below was in near darkness. The trees grew close enough together that a man could lose sight of the man beside him after 10 steps.

 The ground underfoot was either hard coral rock or ankle deep mud. sometimes one then the other within the same 20 yards. Sound traveled strangely. A machine gun firing 50 yards off could seem to come from any direction. Thomas moved through it anyway. He found the first Japanese machine gun position by watching for the muzzle flash through the undergrowth.

 He moved his man into position around it. Two to suppress from the left, two from the right, and went for it with grenades. It stopped firing. He found [clears throat] the second position dug into the root system of a large tree. The roots providing cover on three sides. It took him nearly 20 minutes to find an angle that wasn’t covered.

 He got close enough and used grenades again. That one went silent, too. He kept moving. The third position was in tighter ground. The machine gun sat behind a low rise with a creek bed dropping away on the left and a wall of wait a while vines on the right, the kind with small curved thorns that caught clothing and skin and wouldn’t let go.

 There was no clean approach from either flank. Thomas looked at it for a moment. His men were behind him, waiting in the cover. He had used the same tactic twice already that morning, and twice it had worked. Throw a grenade into the imp placement. Rush it the moment the grenade went off. It was the right call.

 There was no reason to think the terrain had changed enough to make it wrong. He pulled the grenade. He threw it. It hit a vine in the canopy and came straight back down into the middle of his men. There was no time to warn anyone. There was no time for anything. Thomas dropped onto the grenade. He was 25 years old. His men stood up.

 They went for the machine gun position exactly as Thomas had told them to, exactly as he had planned. They took it. The man who made the plan was gone. The plan had not gone with him. Herbert Thomas was the first man from West Virginia to receive the Medal of Honor in the Second World War. In 1945, his sister Audrey put her name to the christening of the destroyer USS Herbert J. Thomas.

 She broke the bottle herself. In 1946, the city of South Charleston opened a new hospital and named it after him. Virginia Tech named a dormatory in his honor. It stood for decades. He had been a halfback, a scholarship athlete, a man who transferred from one branch of the military to another because his friends were there, and he couldn’t think of a good reason to be anywhere else. He made a choice.

 Walked through a door. The door closed behind him. 2 days later, along the Pea Trail in the dark before dawn, two Marines shared a foxhole. Henry Girk was born on November 6th, 1922 in Nietcha, North Dakota. 1 mile north of Nichch is the Canadian border. The nearest city of any size is nearly 90 mi away.

 His parents, Julius and Halda, had come from Ukraine, passed through Winnipeg, and settled in the far northeast corner of North Dakota at a time when the land was still cheap and the work was hard. Julius Gork was a carpenter. He spoke German at home. Henry was the fifth of eight children. He enlisted in Minneapolis on April 15th, 1942 at the age of 19.

 Boot camp at San Diego, then the New Heis, then Guadal Canal, then Bugganville. On the night of November 9th, 1943, 3 days after his 21st birthday, he was lying in a twoman foxhole along the pea trail with a marine named Donald Probst. The Pivot Trail ran through the interior of the island south from the beach head. Whoever held it controlled the main approach to Cape Tokina from the south.

The Japanese 23rd Infantry Regiment had been pushing down it for days, trying to break through the Marine roadblock before the Americans could consolidate their position and bring up heavier weapons. The Marines holding that roadblock had been in contact since November 6th. 3 days of fighting in terrain that made movement almost impossible.

 The jungle on both sides of the trail too dense for units to stay in contact if they spread out more than a few yards. Reinforcement meaning single file down an exposed path. Resupply meaning the same. By the night of November 8th, the Japanese were probing more frequently. The grenades were coming in closer. Earlier that night, the two Marines in the foxhole directly beside Gorka and Props had been killed in the first minutes of one of those probes.

 Their position was empty. Gorka and Props were the only ones left holding that section of the line. If they gave way, the entire left flank of the roadblock opened up. They held. Donald Probst was from Seattle, Washington. He carried a BAR, a Browning automatic rifle, beltfed capable of sustained automatic fire that a submachine gun couldn’t match.

 In a two-man foxhole under grenade attack in the dark, the bar was the more valuable weapon by a wide margin. Girk had the submachine gun. During a lull in the firing, the two men talked. It was not a long conversation. They looked at their weapons and they looked at the situation and the situation was not complicated.

The Japanese were not going to stop. The grenades were going to keep coming closer. At some point, one was going to land in the hole. They agreed. If that happened, the bar needed to keep firing, which meant Prob needed to keep firing. Then Girk said something that a lieutenant positioned nearby would write down afterward.

 If a grenade drops into this hole, he told Probes, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll take it.” It was not a dramatic thing to say. There was nothing in his voice, as it was later described, that made it sound like anything other than what it was, a plan. The conversation ended. They went back to watching the dark. The night continued. The Japanese came again before dawn.

 The grenades came with them, more of them landing closer, probing for the position. One dropped straight into the foxhole. Girk shoved probes aside hard. no time to be gentle about it and covered the grenade with his body. Prob was wounded in the blast. He got back to his feet. He got back behind the bar. What happened in the minutes after that is what earned him the silver star.

 Not the act of surviving, but what he did with it. The position he and Girk had been holding was still the only thing standing between the Japanese and the left flank of the roadblock. The men who had been killed in the foxhole beside them were still dead. Nothing about the tactical situation had changed except that Gorka was gone.

 Prob kept firing. The Japanese came again, probing the position, trying to find the gap they expected to be there. Prob was alone now, bleeding, working the bar through what was left of the night. He kept them back. When other Marines finally reached the position at first light, they found him still there, still holding.

 He was later evacuated for his wounds. He was later awarded the Silver Star for what he did in the minutes and hours after Henry Girk died. Henry Girk is buried at Nichch Union Cemetery in Nichch, North Dakota, the town of 500 people one mile from the Canadian border where his father built things out of wood and spoke German at home.

 His mother Hula put her name to the christening of the destroyer USS Girk in 1945. He was 21 years old and 3 days when he died. He did not act because he had no time to think. He had thought it through the night before. He had made his decision in the quiet, and when the grenade fell, all he did was keep his word. Three men, 8 days, one island.

Robert Owens died on November 1st. Herbert Thomas died on November 7th. Henry Girk died on November 9th. They never crossed paths. They were operating in different parts of the same beach head in different units on different ground against different objectives. There was no meeting, no shared moment, no point at which their lives touched.

Each man made his decision alone with only the men immediately around him. The Japanese had a well- constructed plan for Buganville. General Imamura at Rabul had estimated the American landing force at somewhere between 5 and 10,000 men. Several hundred Japanese soldiers came ashore at Koramokina Lagoon on the night of November 6th.

 The first move of a counterattack designed to cut the beach head in half before the Americans could entrench. Vandergrift’s full landing force numbered over 14,000 men. and they were coming wave after wave regardless of what was waiting on that beach. But numbers were not why the Japanese failed at Cape Tokina. Their plan was reasonable. Their execution was serious.

They failed because the plan did not account for a mill worker who would enter a loaded artillery piece through the front, or a football player who would use his body to absorb a mistake, or a carpenter’s son who had already made up his mind. the night before. They kept trying. General Hayakutaka, commanding the Japanese 17th Army on Bugenville, spent the winter of 1943 to 1944 preparing, he moved artillery onto the ridges overlooking the American perimeter.

 piece by piece, dragged through jungle by hand, positioned to cover the air strips and the supply dumps. He concentrated 12,000 infantry from the sixth division, plus 3,000 reserves. He was methodical about it. He planned the attack for March when his forces would be ready, and the Americans he believed, would be complacent. He planned on accepting Griswald’s surrender at the Tokana airirstrip on March 17th.

 On March 9th, 1944, Hayakotake opened his assault. His artillery hit first. The heaviest concentration of Japanese field guns assembled in one place up to that point in the Pacific. The shells fell on the air strips and the supply dumps and the defensive perimeter. Then 15,000 Japanese infantry went forward on three axes, driving toward the center of the American lines. They fought hard.

The 37th Infantry Division and the American Division, Army units that had replaced the Marines on the perimeter, held, then counterattacked. Hill 700 fell and was retaken. Cannon Hill fell and was retaken. By the end of March, Hayakataka’s assault was broken. More than 5,000 Japanese soldiers were dead.

 It failed because by then the airfields were built. The CBS had started work on the fighter strip while Marines were still in contact on the perimeter. They worked in shifts around the clock in rain that turned the construction site into a mud flat under intermittent shelling from the hills to the east. They filled craters as fast as they appeared.

 They poured concrete for the taxiways with snipers still active in the tree line 200 yd out. On December 10th, 1943, 39 days after the landing, the first Corsair’s taxside onto the finished strip and took off. The pilots in those aircraft knew what was below them. They had been briefed on the landing, on the casualties, on what it had cost to hold the perimeter long enough to build the runway they had just rolled down.

 Some of them had flown air cover during the landings themselves, watching from above as the Higgins boats went down, and the men in the water had nowhere to go. Now they were flying north, over the beach at Cape Tokina, over the treeine where the 75 mm gun had sat. Over the ground where Robert Owens had crossed open sand with a loaded artillery piece waiting for him at the other end.

 Rabul was just over an hour away. A second air strip opened on Christmas Day. By January 1944, American bombers were running daily missions over Rabul. The airfields there were bombed and rebombed. The harbor was mined. The supply ship stopped coming. By March 1944, Rabul was finished as a fighting base.

 A 100,000 Japanese troops remained on the island, sitting, unable to move, unable to resupply, watching American aircraft fly over them for the rest of the war. Admiral Holsey sent a message to the Marines when the first airfield was complete. You have literally succeeded in setting up and opening for business a shop in the Japs front yard.

Three destroyers carried the names of three men who didn’t live to see any of it. USS Robert A. Owens launched 1946. She served the United States Navy for 36 years. USS Herbert J. Thomas launched 1945. His sister Audrey broke the bottle at the christristening. USS Girk launched 1945. His mother Hula broke the bottle.

 They sailed the same oceans for decades. They never sailed together. Owens Thomas Girk, a mill worker, a football player, a carpenter’s son, Spartanberg, South Charleston, Nesh. None of them were born to do what they did. None of them woke up that morning with anything in mind beyond getting through the day.

 Owen saw a gun that was killing the men around him and understood there was one way to stop it. Thomas threw a grenade and didn’t move when it came back. Girk made a decision the night before, told the man beside him what it was, and kept it. There is no formula for that. There is no training program that produces it on schedule, no background that guarantees it, no particular town or family or circumstance that explains it.

 They were ordinary Americans, the most ordinary kind this country has ever had until they weren’t. The men who came ashore after Owens, the men who moved through the jungle after Thomas and Girk, most of them never learned those names. That is how it works. You don’t stop to find out who cleared the ground you’re standing on. You move forward. You do the next thing.

You try to make it home. Some of them did. They came back to places like Spartanberg and South Charleston and small towns in North Dakota and Pennsylvania and Ohio. They came back to wives who had been working in factories and raising children and trying not to read too much into the telegrams that sometimes came.

 They came back to parents who had kept the photographs on the mantle and said prayers at night and tried not to think about what the casualty lists in the newspaper meant. Some of them came back changed in ways that didn’t have words yet. The words would come later, years later, decades later.

 But in 1945 and 1946, there were no words. There was just a man sitting at a dinner table who had been somewhere and seen something and done something and the family around him who loved him and didn’t ask too many questions because something in his face told them not to. Years passed. Some of them sat at those dinner tables for decades without saying much about any of it.

 Not because there was nothing to say, but because some things happened in a particular darkness on a particular piece of ground that lose something when you try to put them into words for someone who wasn’t there. You can say what happened. You can’t always say what it was. Their grandchildren grew up.

 They saw the photographs. They asked questions sometimes and got answers sometimes and sometimes got something else. A pause, a change of subject. a hand on a shoulder. These three men, this is what was on the other side of that. If your grandfather served in the Pacific, if he came home and sat at that table and you never quite knew what he’d seen, leave his name in the comments. where he served.