The 'Peashooter' They Mocked Became a Jungle Nightmare -

There is a photograph taken on the beach at Lunga Point in the autumn of 1942 that almost nobody looks at twice. It shows a stack of wooden crates half sunk in wet sand, stenciled with numbers that meant nothing to anyone except a supply clerk with a clipboard and a headache. Rain has darkened the wood. A pair of Marines walk past the stack without turning their heads because there was nothing in those boxes worth turning your head for. No rifles, no mortar bombs, no medical supplies—which were worth their weight in gold on that island by then. Just short, blunt, heavy shells for a gun that the United States Army had already decided was finished.

Within a few weeks, the contents of boxes exactly like those would kill more Japanese soldiers in six hours than most American battalions killed in a month. The gun they were made for was the 37mm M3 anti-tank gun. And to understand what happened on that ridge above Henderson Field, you first have to understand how completely everybody had given up on it. Not the enemy—us. Our own ordnance officers, our own tank destroyer schools, our own generals reading reports from North Africa with their jaws tight.

The 37 was not a mystery weapon that nobody had tested. It had been tested to death. That was the problem. The numbers were in, and the numbers said it was junk. Look at it and you can see why. The barrel is thin enough that a man can close his hand around it. The whole gun stands about waist high, sitting on two little rubber-tired wheels that would look at home under a hot dog cart. Painted olive drab and splayed out on its trail legs, it has the posture of something apologetic. It weighs a shade over 900 pounds, which sounds like a lot until you remember that 900 pounds of artillery is not much artillery at all.

When the gun was new in 1938, that was fine. In 1938, a tank was a lightly armored box with a two-man turret and skin about as thick as a good frying pan, and a 37mm armor-piercing shot would go through it like a nail through drywall. But armor is an arms race, and armor moves fast. By 1941, the Germans were bolting extra plate onto the fronts of their Panzer IIIs. By 1942, they were building tanks designed from the start around the assumption that somebody would be shooting a 37 at them.

American crews in Tunisia would put round after round into the front of a German tank and watch the shot skip off the glacis and go cartwheeling up into the blue, leaving a bright silver scar on the paint and nothing else. There are accounts of gunners firing until the barrel smoked, then standing there watching the tank they had just failed to kill turn its turret toward them with what must have felt like patience.

So the reports went back to Washington, and the reports were merciless. Inadequate penetration, insufficient hitting power against modern armor. Recommend replacement at the earliest opportunity. The 57mm was already coming, and behind it the 75, and behind that the towed 3-inch. The 37 was scheduled for the scrap heap. Somewhere in an office, on a chart, a line was drawn through it.

And that would have been the whole story except for one thing. The Marine Corps has never in its history had the luxury of throwing away a working weapon. When the First Marine Division loaded out for the Solomon Islands, they took what they had. And what they had was the leftovers of an army that had not finished arming itself yet. Springfield rifles instead of Garands in some units, World War I helmets, rations with dates on them that made men laugh out loud, and crate after crate of 37mm anti-tank guns—still shiny, still greased, still perfectly good at doing a job that no longer existed.

The men who got assigned to them knew exactly what that meant. In every battalion, there is a hierarchy of respect, and it is built almost entirely on what you carry. The machine gunners were at the top because everybody knows machine guns win firefights. The mortarmen had status because they could drop high explosive on a target they could not even see. The riflemen had numbers and attitude. And then there were the anti-tank crews hauling around a museum piece on a Pacific island where the Japanese had almost no tanks and no way to bring them ashore even if they had.

The nicknames started before the ships even reached the beach. The peashooter, the door knocker. Somebody called it the pop gun, and it stuck for a while. A crew would be dragging their gun up a track in the heat, and a rifle squad would go by and ask entirely straight-faced whether they were planning on hunting rabbits. Ask whether they wanted a hand carrying the toy. Ask if the Japanese knew to bring cardboard tanks.

It was the kind of relentless, cheerful, grinding mockery that men use on each other when they are frightened and exhausted and need somebody lower down the ladder than themselves. And there was no good comeback because the mockery was mostly correct.

I want to be honest about how bad the labor was, because it matters for what comes later. Guadalcanal was not a place that rewarded heavy equipment. The interior was rainforest so dense that a man could lose the person in front of him at 15 feet. The rivers were brown and deep and full of things that bit. The mud was not the kind of mud you scrape off your boots. It was a suction that pulled boots clean off ankles and then swallowed them. And the ridges—those long grassy spines that ran down from the mountains toward the sea—were steep enough that men climbed them on all fours.

You do not tow 900 pounds up that. You drag it. Crews rigged ropes and canvas straps and put them across their chests like plow horses. Six men on a gun, sometimes eight, hauling in 10-yard bursts and then stopping to breathe. And every yard of it done by men who were already sick, because everybody on that island was sick. Malaria came through the division like a rumor. Dysentery emptied men out until their belts had new holes punched in them. Jungle rot ate the skin between their toes and up the insides of their legs. They were on two-thirds rations, then half, then whatever the Japanese had left behind in the captured supply dumps, which mostly meant rice with weevils in it.

And through all of that, the gun crews kept dragging the guns—not because they believed in them, mostly out of stubbornness and the peculiar Marine logic that says, “You brought it ashore, so you are going to keep it.”

But a few of them, the ones who had been on the island since August, had a private reason to keep hauling. They had seen what the gun could do once already, and nobody outside their own gun pits seemed to have noticed.

Go back to the 21st of August, two months before the night this story is really about. A Japanese colonel named Ichiki had landed east of the perimeter with a little over 900 men, and he had been told the Americans on Guadalcanal were a demoralized rear guard of maybe 2,000. He decided to take the airfield with a night attack across the sandbar at the mouth of a creek the Marines had misnamed the Tenaru.

The sandbar was about 30 yards wide. Waiting on the far side, dug in behind wire, were riflemen, machine guns, and a section of 37mm guns from the Special Weapons Battalion that had been sited to cover the crossing because there was literally nothing else to point them at. Ichiki’s men came across that sandbar in a solid mass, shoulder-to-shoulder, screaming, and the 37s fired canister into them at less than 100 yards.

When the sun came up, the sandbar was not a sandbar anymore. It was a shelf of bodies—hundreds of them—lying in the shallow water at the edge of the surf where the tide moved them back and forth all morning. Ichiki’s force was effectively erased in a single night. He is generally believed to have burned his regimental colors and shot himself.

So the lesson was already there, written down, filed, available. The problem is that lessons in a war do not travel the way you would expect. They stay inside the units that learned them. The men who fed those guns at the Tenaru knew exactly what they had in their hands. But the replacements coming in, the new battalions arriving in September and October, the officers cycling through—they had heard the same thing everybody else had heard, which is that the 37 was a failed anti-tank gun. Nobody had written a new manual. Nobody had put out a bulletin saying, “By the way, this obsolete weapon is the single most effective infantry killer in the Pacific.”

The gun had already proved itself, and it was still a punchline. That gap is the whole story.

Here is what was actually in those crates, and it is worth slowing down for because the round is stranger than people assume. The standard anti-tank shell for the 37 was a pointed steel dart, machined and hardened, designed to concentrate every ounce of energy on a single square inch of enemy armor. Beautiful engineering, useless in a jungle. Fire one of those at a running man and you would probably hit him, and the shot would pass straight through and keep going for a mile.

The canister round, the M2, was the opposite of all that. Pull one out of the crate and it has no nose to speak of, just a flat-faced cylinder of thin sheet metal crimped onto a brass case. It looks unfinished. Inside that thin skin, packed in tight rows, are 122 steel balls, each about the size of a large pea. When you fire it, the skin comes apart within a few feet of the muzzle and the balls go on alone, spreading as they travel, a widening cone of steel moving at better than half a mile a second.

At 20 yards, that cone is a few feet across. At 100 yards, it is wide enough to cover a footpath and everything on either side of it. At 200, it is a moving wall. There is no explosive in it, no fuse, no timer, nothing to go wrong. It is the simplest and oldest idea in gunnery: if you cannot hit one man reliably, hit the space he is standing in and everything around him.

What it turned the 37 into was not an anti-tank gun at all. It turned it into a shotgun the size of a man on wheels, capable of deleting a squad. The crews on the ridge understood this by October, and they had started making changes that would have given an ordnance inspector a stroke. The first thing to go was the shield. In a tank fight, that shield is the difference between living and dying, because the danger comes from one direction and you know which one. In the jungle at night, the danger comes from everywhere.

So they took wrenches and stripped them, dropped the plates in the mud, and left them there. Now a single man could grab the trail and swing the whole weapon through an arc in about a second, and the gunner could look over the top of the barrel with both eyes open and see the tree line, all of it, the way you would look down a road. They cut aiming stakes and drove them into the ground at the edges of their arcs so they could find the limits of their traverse by feel in total darkness. They stacked canister in the pit so the loader could reach it without looking and without standing up. They rehearsed the loading drill blind, over and over, until it was in their hands rather than their heads.

They were not preparing for the fight the manual described. They were preparing for a knife fight with a cannon.

It is worth saying who these men actually were, because the answer is nobody in particular. A 37mm crew was five or six Marines, and the average one of them was 20 years old. Farm kids from the Midwest who had enlisted because there was no work at home. City boys from Chicago and Philadelphia. None of them had asked for the assignment. You did not volunteer for the anti-tank platoon. You got sent there, usually because somebody with a clipboard needed a body and yours was closest.

They had spent two months being the joke of the battalion, and they had gotten used to it the way you get used to weather.

Which brings us to the 24th of October 1942, and to a Japanese lieutenant general named Masao Maruyama, who had spent the previous week doing something genuinely remarkable and almost entirely pointless. Maruyama commanded the Sendai Division, and it was not a unit anybody dismissed. His plan was to avoid the coastal approaches where the Americans expected him and instead cut a track through the interior south of the airfield, coming at the perimeter from the jungle where nobody was looking.

The march took days longer than planned. His men cut the trail with hand tools as they went. They manhandled artillery up gradients so steep that guns had to be abandoned along the route, then abandoned the shells too, then in some units abandoned everything but rifles and what a man could carry. Rain fell on them the entire way. By the time the Sendai Division reached its jumping-off positions south of Henderson Field, thousands of the finest infantry in the Japanese army had walked themselves into a state that would have hospitalized most men.

They came anyway. That was the thing about them. They came anyway.

Facing them was a line that should not have held. Chesty Puller’s First Battalion, Seventh Marines, was stretched across roughly a mile and a half of ridge and jungle, a frontage meant for a regiment. Beside and behind them were pieces of other units, including a section from the Second Battalion under a sergeant named Mitchell Paige—a Pennsylvania kid whose name at birth had been Mihajlo Pavlovich, and who had enlisted in 1936 because he had read a magazine article about the Marines and could not think of anything better to do.

The Marines on that ridge had been on the island since August. They had been shelled by battleships in the night. Their uniforms had rotted at the seams and been sewn back together with whatever was to hand. Some of them were running fevers of 103 and had simply not reported it, because reporting it meant leaving the line, and leaving the line meant somebody else covering your sector. And spaced along that line, dug into pits with their shields lying in the mud somewhere behind them, sat the peashooters.

The Japanese knew about the guns. That is what gets me about this. They had reconnaissance. They had observers. When the 37s were mentioned in the briefings, the assessment was that they were anti-tank guns, which meant they were irrelevant, because the Sendai Division was not bringing any tanks up that trail. The guns were noted and set aside.

Correct identification. Catastrophic conclusion.

It started to rain hard around nine that evening, which on Guadalcanal meant water coming down in sheets you could lean into. The men in the pits sat in six inches of it. And every account of that night mentions the same detail, which is the sound. The rain on the kunai grass, the rain on helmets, the rain filling in everything else so that you could not hear a man moving 40 feet away. And then sometime after ten, the insects stopped.

Anyone who has spent nights in a jungle knows that sound—or rather knows the absence of it. The night noise of a rainforest is constant and enormous. When it cuts out, it is because something large is moving through. Along the ridge, men who had been half asleep sat up. Rifle bolts went forward. Nobody said anything.

The first Japanese who came were not the attack. They were a probe—small groups pushing up the slope to draw fire, because the fastest way to find a machine gun in the dark is to make it shoot at you. A gunner somewhere on the left flank obliged, and the ridge came apart into noise. Tracers went out flat and red into the rain. Japanese light machine guns answered from the tree line, their fire coming back a strange bluish-white. Mortar rounds started dropping behind the American line, walking back and forth, hunting.

And a group of maybe 20 men broke out of the grass to the front right and came up the slope at a dead run, going for a gap between two machine gun positions that they had evidently found and marked in daylight. They were doing everything correctly. They had located a seam and they were exploiting it fast, and the automatic weapons on either side could not traverse far enough to cover it. At 50 yards, they were still coming. At 40, they must have thought they had it.

The gunner on the nearest 37 did not use his sight, because his sight had gone into the mud along with the shield. He put his eye along the top of the barrel like a man aiming a garden hose, put his shoulder into the traverse bar, and swung the muzzle across until the running shapes were in front of it. The loader had a canister round in his hands before the order finished. The breech block came up and closed with a sound like a car door. Then the gunner stamped on the firing pedal.

The muzzle blast came out three feet long and lit the whole slope white for about a tenth of a second. In that flash, the Marines nearby saw the running men frozen midstride, close enough to see their faces. In the dark that followed, they were not there.

I have read a fair number of descriptions of that moment from men who were on that ridge, and none of them are quite able to say what they saw, because what they saw does not really have a vocabulary. A machine gun kills people one at a time in a line. You watch it happen. Canister does not do that. 122 steel balls arriving in the same fraction of a second across a cone 40 feet wide does not resemble shooting at all. It resembles subtraction. The grass in front of the gun was cut down to the dirt. The vines were gone. The men were gone. The brass case came out of the breech, hit the wheel rim, and rang.

Nobody on that ridge ever called it a peashooter again.

But the probe had done its work. The Japanese now knew where the guns were, because you cannot hide a three-foot muzzle flash. And Maruyama did not call anything off. He did the opposite. He pushed his heavy weapons forward with orders to find those flashes and put mortar rounds on top of them. And he committed his assault battalions.

The main attack came out of the tree line about 20 minutes later, and it did not sneak. It began with shouting, which grew until it was not shouting anymore but a single sound made by thousands of throats. Then they came out of the jungle in a body, officers in front with swords drawn, some of them carrying flags, moving up that muddy slope into fire that was already killing them. It is very easy 80 years later to talk about that kind of attack as though it were stupid. Standing in a hole at the top of the slope, watching it come toward you in the rain, nobody thought it was stupid. They thought they were about to die.

The American machine guns opened up all along the line, and the Japanese absorbed it and kept walking. Men fell and the men behind them came over the top of them without slowing down. 100 yards, 90, 80—and then every 37 on the ridge began to fire.

The rhythm of it is what the survivors remembered, not the individual shots. The rhythm. A crew in that state does not think. It cycles. The loader swings around into the breech and gets his hand clear. The block closes. The gunner has already found his target and his foot is already moving. The gun fires and jumps, and the case ejects hot into the mud, and the loader is coming back with the next round before the case has stopped moving. Ten seconds of that and you have put four cones of steel into the slope. Sixty seconds and you have put down 30 canister, cut lanes through the attack.

That is the word men kept using afterward—lanes—because the effect on a massed formation is geometric. Wherever a gun was pointed, the charge in front of it simply stopped existing, and the men on either side of that lane closed in toward the middle, which put them in front of the next gun.

But there were so many of them. This is the part that gets flattened in the retelling, the part where it stops being a demonstration of a clever weapon and starts being six hours of work. The guns were killing at a rate that should have broken any attack in the world, and the attack did not break. The Japanese came on and came on, and they started concentrating their own fire on the gun pits, because the muzzle flashes made them the easiest targets on the ridge to find. Without the shields, the crews had nothing between them and any of it.

A loader on one gun took a rifle round through the shoulder and went down into the water in the bottom of the pit, and a rifleman from the next hole came over the parapet to take his place, slipping on the loose brass that was now ankle-deep around the wheels. A grenade came in and went off against the trail leg and put fragments through two men. They kept feeding the gun. The barrels went from black to gray to a dull red that you could see in the dark. When a man’s forearm touched hot steel, the smell went through the whole pit, and nobody reacted, because there was no time to react.

The recoil system started to fail from the heat. Hydraulic fluid expands, and the guns began to buck instead of recoiling smoothly, hammering the wheels down into the mud until the crews were firing out of a hole they had dug with the weapon itself. Grease cooked off the breech blocks and left dry metal grinding on dry metal, and men opened the breeches with the heels of their boots because their gloves had gone through.

Then one of the guns stopped. A Japanese grenadier section had worked up a drainage cut on the flank, below the arc of the machine guns, close enough to throw. Three grenades came into the pit almost together. When the smoke cleared, the gun was canted over with a wheel gone and the barrel pointing up at nothing, and the crew were dead in the bottom of the hole.

The volume of fire on that stretch of line fell away, and the Japanese felt it immediately. They always did. They shifted toward the gap like water finding a crack, and they came through the wire.

This is the moment where lines break. Not when the casualties reach some percentage, but when a hole opens and the men on either side of it look at each other and understand that the thing holding them there is gone.

Mitchell Paige did not look at anybody. He picked up a 30-caliber machine gun—30-some pounds of it—and ran along the ridge toward the hole in his own line. By that point in the night his section had been chewed to pieces. He had been moving from gun to gun for hours, firing one weapon until it jammed or its crew was gone, then crossing open ground to the next. Now he set up on the lip of the silenced 37’s pit with no loader, no assistant, nobody to feed the belt or watch his flank, and started shooting into a mass of men who were already inside the wire and less than 30 feet away.

He could not fix the gun. He could feel the silence it left behind, and he understood that the silence was the actual danger. So he made noise. He swung that machine gun across the front of the position and burned the barrel out and swore at them the entire time. And for several minutes, one man occupied the space where a weapon crew had been.

Back at the guns that were still working, the loaders were reaching into the crates and finding wood. They had fired everything. Every canister round on that section of ridge, hundreds of them, gone in a few hours. The pits were filled with brass to the point where men could not stand without sliding. One loader went through three empty crates in a row, then went out of the pit on his hands and knees to search the crates in the next position, which were also empty.

The last round went into the breech. The gun fired. The block came open, and that was it. The Japanese heard it stop. Of course they heard it stop. The whole shape of the night had been built around that sound. And when the sound went away, they came forward against a position that had nothing left to answer with.

What happened next is my favorite thing in this entire story, because it is not brave exactly. It is just quick. A runner came up from the rear dump, sliding on his backside, dragging a crate. It was the wrong ammunition—armor-piercing, solid steel shot for killing tanks—and there were no tanks. Against men coming up a slope in the dark, a solid shot is close to useless, because it hits one man and buries itself in the hill behind him.

Somebody, and the accounts differ on who, told them to load it anyway. And then the gunner did something that is not in any manual. He did not aim at the Japanese. He depressed the barrel and aimed at the ground in front of them, at the bare volcanic rock and hard-packed dirt, maybe 20 yards short of the leading rank, and fired.

Two thousand feet per second of hardened steel hitting rock does not stop. It comes apart, and it takes the rock apart with it, and the whole impact point goes up in a spray of stone splinters and grit and shattered shot moving fast enough to do the same job as a shell. It is a pool player’s trick. Bank it off the ground. The front rank of that attack went down clutching their legs and faces shredded by pieces of the island they had walked a hundred miles to capture.

It was not as good as canister. It did not need to be as good as canister. It needed to buy minutes, and it bought them, one ugly improvised round at a time, until that crate was empty too and the gunner was standing up in the pit holding the ramrod like a spear.

Then the sky behind the ridge went from black to a bad shade of purple, and Maruyama ran out of night. He had one thing left, which was his reserve, and he threw it at the ridge in a final push as the light came up. The Marines met it with the last of everything. The reserve company that had been fighting its way up from behind the line finally arrived and went straight in. And the top of that ridge turned into a scrum of men hitting each other with rifle butts and entrenching tools and fists. Paige led a charge along the crest with the barrel of a hot machine gun in his hands. The 37 crews came out of their pits swinging wrenches and shovels and helmets, because there was nothing else, and because after six hours of feeding those guns, the idea of somebody taking them was not tolerable.

The Sendai Division stopped. Then it went backward. Then it was gone into the jungle it had come out of, leaving the slope behind, and the sun came up on what they had done.

The first thing men noticed was that the vegetation was missing. Out to a couple of hundred yards in front of the gun positions, the jungle had been mown—not burned, not blasted. Mown. The trees stripped white of bark and the kunai grass cut down to the mud as though a crew had gone through with scythes, because in a sense one had, 122 steel balls at a time.

The second thing they noticed was the ground. I am going to be careful here, because these were men and the numbers get quoted so often that they turn into statistics and stop meaning anything. Something on the order of 2,000 Japanese soldiers died in front of that line over those nights. They lay in the cut grass and in the gullies where the fire had funneled them, in places three and four deep. The closest of them had reached the wheels of the guns—not near the guns, the wheels. They had gotten close enough to put a hand on the barrel and had not gotten one step further, and you could stand in the gun pit in the morning light and see the exact line where the last shot had landed.

Officers came up the ridge that morning, including men who had argued in August about whether the 37s were worth the shipping space. They walked past crews who were sitting in the mud too spent to stand up, let alone salute. They looked at the number one gun, which was a wreck—its barrel burned white-gray where the paint had cooked off, its recoil springs seized, one tire shredded. Then they looked down and saw that they were standing on brass. Not a few cases. A carpet of it. Thousands glinting in the wet, shifting under their boots when they moved.

Nobody made a joke about the door knocker after that.

The part that always stays with me is what happened once the shooting stopped and the war turned into paper. Men walked that slope with notebooks, writing down what they found. Burial details worked all day. Somewhere a clerk typed an after-action report, and somewhere else a citation was drafted in careful official language, and letters went home to Pennsylvania and Iowa and Brooklyn saying almost nothing at all.

That paper is still out there. It is the reason I wrote a book called Find Your Grandfather’s War. If you have a name, a photograph, and a box of objects nobody ever explained to you, it will show you how to turn those things back into a service record. Because the reconstruction is possible far more often than families assume. Those men were counted, mustered, promoted, hospitalized, and written about by clerks who had no idea they were writing history. The trail is thin and it is scattered, but it exists.

What the trail shows in the case of the 37 is a reputation reversing itself almost overnight. Within days, the peashooter was the most wanted weapon on Guadalcanal. Company commanders who had complained about having a gun crew attached to them were now sending runners to ask for one. Riflemen offered to carry ammunition, which is the highest compliment an infantryman can pay, because ammunition is heavy and nobody carries somebody else’s for free. Supply officers went through the depots hunting canister and had it flown in. The order of precedence in the battalion—that invisible hierarchy of who is respected and who is tolerated—had rearranged itself in one night around a weapon that six months of official reports had described as obsolete.

Mitchell Paige received the Medal of Honor for that night. So did John Basilone, who had spent the same hours a little way along the line doing much the same thing with a pair of water-cooled machine guns, and whose name most people know better. Paige stayed in the Corps, took a commission, retired as a colonel, and spent a good part of his later life doing something slightly unexpected, which was hunting down men who were wearing medals they had not earned. He helped push the legislation that made falsely claiming the Medal of Honor a federal offense. He died in 2003. When people asked him about the ridge, he tended to steer the conversation toward the men who did not come back, the way that recipients almost always do.

And the gun itself got exactly what it had been promised. By 1944, the 37mm M3 was finished. The bazooka let any two men do the anti-tank job better. The 75 on a Sherman could throw high explosive that made canister look polite. Flamethrowers took over bunker clearing on the beaches of the central Pacific. The guns were pulled back, stripped for parts, left in the weeds at supply dumps, and eventually melted down and made into something else. There was no ceremony. There never is.

Which is the thing I keep circling back to. The 37 was not secretly a great weapon that everybody misjudged. The critics were right. As an anti-tank gun in 1942, it was genuinely obsolete, and every angry report about it was accurate. What the critics got wrong was smaller and more important. They assessed a weapon against one job, decided it failed, and stopped thinking. Nobody in that chain asked the second question, which is: What else does this thing do well, and where would that matter?

Six Marines with wrenches and a bad attitude asked it. They took the shield off, stacked the wrong ammunition where they could reach it in the dark, and turned a failed tank killer into the most effective close-range infantry weapon on the island. That is not a story about hardware. It is a story about the gap between what a tool was designed for and what it turns out to be good at, and about who gets to decide which one counts. The men who wrote the tables had access to better data than anybody in that gun pit. The men in the gun pit had the mud.

If you visit a museum with a 37mm M3 in it, you will almost certainly walk past it. It sits low, off to one side, near a wall, with a small card that mentions the anti-tank role and the year it was withdrawn. The tanks and the aircraft are in the middle of the room where the light is good. And that is fine. That is how museums work. But you know now that thin little barrel and those bicycle wheels held a ridge above an airfield on a rainy night in October 1942, when losing that airfield would have cost the Pacific War a year and God knows how many more men. It did it with ammunition designed for clearing brush, fired by crews who had thrown away the armor plate that was supposed to keep them alive.

So the next time somebody hands you the wrong tool for the job, or tells you that what you have is out of date and not worth bothering with, have a look at it first. Turn it over. Ask what it is actually good at instead of what it was supposed to be good at. The experts are not lying to you. They are just answering a different question than the one you are standing in front of.

Those crews stood on that ridge all night so somebody would still be there in the morning. Remembering them is not much to ask.

So tell me—which weapon do you think history wrote off too soon, and what would you have done with it in the mud?