The following is a lenghty story of WWII:

IT CAME DOWN TO ONE MARINE

On Nov. 15, 2003, an 85-year-old retired Marine
Corps colonel died of congestive heart failure
at his home in La Quinta, Calif., southeast of Palm Springs.
He was a combat veteran of World War II. Reason
enough to honor him. But this Marine was a
little different. This Marine was Mitchell Paige.
It's hard today to envision -- or, for the
dwindling few, to remember -- what the world looked like on Oct. 26, 1942.
The U.S. Navy was not the most powerful fighting
force in the Pacific. Not by a long shot. So the
Navy basically dumped a few thousand lonely
American Marines on the beach on Guadalcanal and high-tailed it out of there.
You Navy guys can hold those letters. Of course
Nimitz, Fletcher and Halsey had to ration what
few ships they had. I've written separately
about the way Bull Halsey rolled the dice on the
night of Nov. 13, 1942, violating the stern War
College edict against committing capital ships
in restricted waters and instead dispatching
into the Slot his last two remaining fast
battleships, the South Dakota and the
Washington, escorted by the only four destroyers
with enough fuel in their bunkers to get them there and back.
Those American destroyer captains need not have
worried about carrying enough fuel to get home.
By 11 p.m., outnumbered better than three-
to-one by a massive Japanese task force driving
down from the northwest, every one of those four
American destroyers had been shot up, sunk, or
set aflame. And while the South Dakota -- known
throughout the fleet as a jinx ship -- had
damaged some lesser Japanese vessels, she
continued to be plagued with electrical and fire control problems.
"Washington was now the only intact ship left in
the force," writes naval histori an David
Lippman. "In fact, at that moment Washington was
the entire U.S. Pacific Fleet. She was the only
barrier between (Admiral) Kondo's ships and
Guadalcanal. If this one ship did not stop 14
Japanese ships right then and there, America might lose the war. ..."
On Washington's bridge, Lieutenant Ray Hunter
had the conn. He had just seen the destroyers
Walke and Preston "blown sky high.." Dead ahead
lay their burning wreckage. Hundreds of men were
swimming in the water and the Japanese ships racing in.
"Hunter had to do something. The course he took
now could decide the war," Lippman writes.
"'Come left,' he said. ... Washington's rudder
change put the burning destroyers between her
and the enemy, preventing her from being silhouetted by their fires.
"The move made the Japanese momentarily cease
fire. Lacking radar, they could not spot
Washington behind the fires. ..." Washington
raced through burning seas. Dozens of destroyer
men were in the water clinging to floating
wreckage. "Get after them, Washington!" one shouted.
Sacrificing their ships by maneuvering into the
path of torpedoes intended for the Washington,
the captains of the American destroyers had given China Lee one final chance.
Blinded by the smoke and flames, the Japanese
battleship Kirishima turned on her searchlights,
illuminating the helpless South Dakota, and
opened fire. Finally, as her own muzzle blasts
illuminated her in the darkness, Admiral Lee and
Captain Glenn Davis could positively identify an enemy target.
The Washington's main batteries opened fire at
12 midnight precisely. Her radar fire control
system functioned perfectly. During the first
seven minutes of Nov. 14, 1942, the "last ship
in the U.S. Pacific Fleet" fired 75 of her
16-inch shells at the battleship Kirishima.
A board Kirishima, it rained steel. At 3:25 a.m.,
her burning hulk officially became the first
enemy sunk by an American battleship since the
Spanish-American War. Stunned, the Japanese
withdrew. Within days, Japanese commander
Isoroku Yamamoto recommended the unthinkable to
the emperor -- withdrawal from Guadalcanal.
But that was still weeks in the future. We were
still with Mitchell Paige back on the
Godforsakenmalarial jungle island of
Guadalcanal, placed like a speed bump at the end
of the long blue-water slot between New Guinea
and the Bismarck Archipelago ... the very route
the Japanese Navy would have to take to reach Australia.
On Guadalcanal the Marines struggled to complete
an airfield. Yamamoto knew what that meant. No
effort would be spared to dislodge these upstart
Yanks from a position that could endanger his
ships. Before long, relentless Japanese
counterattacks had driven s upporting U..S. Navy
from inshore waters. The Marines were on their own.
As Platoon Sgt. Mitchell Paige and his 33
riflemen set about carefully emplacing their
four water-cooled .30-caliber Brownings, manning
their section of the thin khaki line which was
expected to defend Henderson Field against the
assault of the night of Oct. 25, 1942, it's
unlikely anyone thought they were about to
provide the definitive answer to that most
desperate of questions: How many able-bodied
U.S. Marines does it take to hold a hill against
2,000 desperate and motivated attackers?
Nor did the commanders of the mighty Japanese
Army, who had swept all before them for decades,
expect their advance to be halted on some God-
forsaken jungle ridge manned by one thin line of
Yanks in khaki in October of 1942.
But by the time the night was over, "The 29th
(Japanese) Infantry Regiment has lost 553 killed or missing and 479 wounded among its 2,554 men,"
historian Lippman reports. "The 16th (Japanese)
giment's losses are uncounted, but the 164th's
burial parties handled 975 Japanese bodies. ....
The American estimate of 2,200 Japanese dead is probably too low."
You've already figured out where the Japanese
focused their attack, haven't you? Among the 90
American dead and seriously wounded that night
were all the men in Mitchell Paige's platoon.
Every one. As the night of endless attacks wore
on, Paige moved up and down his line, pulling
his dead and wounded comrades back into their
foxholes and firing a few bursts from each of
the four Brownings in turn, convincing the
Japanese forces down the hill that the positions were still manned.
The citation for Paige's Congressional Medal of
Honor picks up the tale: "When the enemy broke
through the line directly in front of his
position, P/Sgt. Paig e, commanding a machinegun
section with fearless determination, continued
to direct the fire of his gunners until all his
men were either killed or wounded. Alone,
against the deadly hail of Japanese shells, he
fought with his gun and when it was destroyed,
took over another, moving from gun to gun, never ceasing his withering fire."
In the end, Sgt. Paige picked up the last of the
40-pound, belt-fed Brownings -- the same design
which John Moses Browning famously fired for a
continuous 25 minutes until it ran out of
ammunition, glowing cherry red, at its first
U.S. Army trial -- and did something for which
the weapon was never designed. Sgt. Paige walked
down the hill toward the place where he could
hear the last Japanese survivors rallying to
move around his flank, the belt-fed gun cradled
under his arm, firing as he went.
And the weapon did not fail.
Coming up at dawn, battal ion executive officer
Major Odell M. Conoley was first to discover the
answer to our question: How many able-bodied
Marines does it take to hold a hill against two
regiments of motivated, combat-hardened
infantrymen who have never known defeat?
On a hill where the bodies were piled like
cordwood, Mitchell Paige alone sat upright
behind his 30-caliber Browning, waiting to see what the dawn would bring.
One hill: one Marine.
But "In the early morning light, the enemy could
be seen a few yards off, and vapor from the
barrels of their machine guns was clearly
visible," reports historian Lippman. "It was
decided to try to rush the position."
For the task, Major Conoley gathered together
"three enlisted communication personnel, several
riflemen, a few company runners who were at the
point, together with a cook and a few messmen
who had brought food to the position the eveni ng before."
Joined by Paige, this ad hoc force of 17 Marines
counterattacked at 5:40 a.m., discovering that
"the extremely short range allowed the optimum
use of grenades." They cleared the ridge.
And that's where the unstoppable wave of
Japanese conquest finally crested, broke, and
began to recede. On an unnamed jungle ridge on
an insignificant island no one had ever heard of, called Guadalcanal.
But who remembers, today, how close-run a thing
it was -- the ridge held by a single Marine, in the autumn of 1942?
When the Hasbro Toy Co. called some years back,
asking permission to put the retired colonel's
face on some kid's doll, Mitchell Paige thought they must be joking.
But they weren't. That's his mug, on the little Marine they call "G.I. Joe."

And now you know.