My Father Was A
1st Division
Marine

It seems that every time I say something like that, heads turn.  What must it be like to be a legend?

Dad almost never talked about his experiences on "the Canal", or on Peleliu, or New Guinea, Cape Glouster, or a host of other places.  He DID talk about New Zealand and Australia - almost without end.  He loved those two places, for the most part they meant getting out of the line of fire for awhile.  Can't say as I blame him much for that.
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There's no memorial to the 1st Marine Division, "The First To Fight".  The Iwo Jima memorial commemorates all the Marines that fought and died in defense of the United States since 1775 - I guess that'll have to do.  Dad's actually buried in the shadow of a copy of that memorial, in Harford County, Maryland.  He was awful proud of the Marines.  As he always said, "once a Marine, always a Marine".  It held true to the end - he was laid to rest with a Marine honor guard and full military honors.
This picture above was him at camp Pendleton.  I've got a few pics of him during WWII, this is one of the better ones.

You're probably asking, so what?  What's the significance to anything of a single Marine?  Well, this single Marine fought in one of the bitterest battles in American military history - GUADALCANAL.  When I was young, the simple mention of that name was enough to bring on a malaria attack.  Apparently, he thought about "the Canal" a lot when I was young - I can remember him waking up in the middle of the night in absolute terror.  So, what did this to an American teenager, a breed that even today considers itself to be almost immortal?

Here's the dry facts:  The Guadalcanal campaign was fought between August 7, 1942 and February 8, 1943 against the forces of the Japanese Empire.  It was centered around a small, mountainous, jungle covered island in the Southern Solomon Islands.  It really didn't even involve the entire island, just a fairly small portion of it.  During the entire campaign, close to half of the 1st Division Marines were wounded or killed.  Dad was lucky, he got out of it with a Silver Star, Purple Heart and a lot of small bits of shrapnel scattered around inside him.  That shrapnel is key to one of the few stories he actually liked to tell.  It follows:
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The story behind the shrapnel

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There's quite a few mountains around Guadalcanal.  One of these was home to a particularly nasty bunch of Japanese snipers, and they were shooting Marines daily - with impunity, because nobody could get up at them to get them out of the caves.  Dad got together with a friend, Wade Brenneman, and the two of them gathered up all the satchel charges they could carry along with a length of rope - and headed for the mountain top.  Once there, they tied the rope around a tree, lit the first charge and, like crazy Marines everywhere, took on the Japanese snipers!  They jumped off the top of the mountain, swung across the face of the caves and threw the charges in.  This worked for quite a few caves, until Dad missed one particular jump - apparently rather badly - and didn't make it back to the top on his swing.  The charge was in the cave, along with the Japanese soldiers, and it went off just as Dad swung back across in front of the cave.  Somehow, he managed to hang onto the rope but the swing changed direction - instead of swinging across the cave face, he now looped out over the valley, up and over the face of the mountain and landed in the tree that the rope was tied to -- with something close to 50 bits of shrapnel from his own charge buried within him.

But, the mountain was now finally clear of snipers.  They both got the Silver Star for what they did, Dad never did get his Purple Heart actually awarded him.  I'm working on that at this time - even though he's gone, I think it should be awarded.

There's another, rather funny (now) story he told about his experiences.  This has to do with him and a B-17 Flying Fortress.

Also, I've collected another rather unusual story concerning Guadalcanal and a very lucky sailor from the USS Astoria, a heavy cruiser sunk in the fighting.
B-17 Flying Fortress
Dad's First Airplane Ride		 USS Astoria
Against All Odds
WAR MEMORIAL DIRECTORY
Title Page

 Introductions

 Attack On America!

 Vietnam Memorial

 USS Cole Memorial

 My Dad In WW2
(Some of Dad's "Adventures" On Guadalcanal)

 		USS Astoria - A Mother Reaches Out
(A Guadalcanal Story)

 Pledge of Allegiance by Red Skelton

 A Different Christmas Poem

 Why The Flag Is Folded 13 Times

 The Story Behind "Taps"

 Confederate States of America

 "Hanoi Jane" Fonda - TRAITOR


My Adopted POW/MIA's

John Wadsworth Consolvo Jr.
 Paul V. 'Skip' Jackson III