Shots Fired in Anger

At 9:17 on the morning of January 22nd, 1943, Second Lieutenant John George lay crouched in the ruins of a captured Japanese bunker west of Point Cruz on Guadalcanal, watching a banyan tree through a rifle scope his fellow officers had mocked for six weeks.

The tree stood 240 yards away.

George was twenty-seven years old. An Illinois state shooting champion. Zero confirmed kills.

For the past seventy-two hours, Japanese snipers operating in the coastal groves west of the Matanikau River had killed fourteen men from the 132nd Infantry Regiment. Eleven snipers were believed to be active. They were methodical, patient, and deadly—climbing massive banyan trees before dawn and waiting all day for American movement below.

George’s commanding officer had called his rifle a toy. Other platoon leaders had called it his mail-order sweetheart.

The rifle was a Winchester Model 70, fitted with a Lyman Alaskan 2½-power scope on a Griffin & Howe mount. When George had unpacked it at Camp Forrest, Tennessee, the armorer had asked whether it was meant for deer or Germans.

George had answered honestly: it was meant for the Japanese.

The rifle arrived late. While the rest of his battalion trained with standard-issue M1 Garands, George crossed the Pacific knowing his own weapon sat in a warehouse in Illinois. He requested it through military mail. Six weeks later, in late December 1942, a supply sergeant handed him a wooden crate marked FRAGILE.

Inside was the rifle George had saved two years of National Guard pay to buy.

The Winchester weighed nine pounds. The scope added twelve ounces. The Garand issued to every other man in the battalion weighed nine and a half pounds—with no magnification. The Winchester was bolt-action, five rounds. The Garand was semi-automatic, eight.

Captain Morris ordered George to leave the sporting rifle behind and carry a real weapon.

George carried it anyway.

The 132nd Infantry relieved the Marines on Guadalcanal in late December. The Marines had been fighting since August. They had taken Henderson Field and held it, but they had not cleared Mount Austen or the coastal groves west of the river.

Mount Austen—1,514 feet tall—was held by roughly five hundred Japanese soldiers in forty-seven bunkers. The 132nd attacked on December 17th and fought for sixteen days. Thirty-four men were killed. Two hundred seventy-nine were wounded. The western slope fell on January 2nd.

By then, George had fired his Winchester exactly zero times in combat.

Point Cruz was different.

No bunkers. No fixed defenses. Just Japanese soldiers who had withdrawn west and dug into the massive trees. Some of them were snipers—trained, disciplined, equipped with scoped Arisaka rifles, and intimately familiar with the jungle.

On January 19th, a sniper killed Corporal Davis while he filled canteens at a creek.

On January 20th, two men from L Company were killed on patrol.

On January 21st, three more died. One was shot through the neck from a tree the patrol had already passed twice.

That night, the battalion commander summoned George.

The snipers were killing men faster than malaria.

He needed someone who could shoot.

He asked George whether the mail-order rifle could actually hit anything.

George listed his credentials: Illinois State Champion at 1,000 yards in 1939—the youngest winner in state history. Six-inch groups at 600 yards with iron sights. Five rounds inside four inches at 300 yards with the Lyman scope.

The commander gave him until morning to prove it.

At dawn on January 22nd, George moved into the ruins of a Japanese bunker overlooking the coconut groves west of Point Cruz. He brought no spotter. No radio. Just the rifle, a canteen, and sixty rounds of .30-06 ammunition in stripper clips.

The Lyman Alaskan offered modest magnification, but enough to reveal movement the naked eye missed. George glassed slowly—left to right, top to bottom—filtering jungle noise until movement stood out.

At 9:17, he saw it.

A branch moved. No wind. Eighty-seven feet up.

George watched. The shape resolved: a Japanese sniper wedged into a fork where three branches met, facing east toward an American supply trail.

George adjusted two clicks for wind. Controlled his breathing. The Winchester’s trigger broke cleanly.

The sniper fell ninety feet to the jungle floor.

George worked the bolt and stayed on the tree. Japanese snipers worked in pairs.

At 9:43, he found the second—sixty yards north, lower in the canopy. The man was descending, retreating.

George led him and fired.

Two shots. Two kills.

At 11:21, a bullet struck the sandbag six inches from George’s head. Dirt sprayed his face. He rolled, waited, then slowly glassed southwest.

At 11:38, he found the third sniper—still in the same tree.

George fired.

By noon, five Japanese snipers were dead.

Word spread. Mockery disappeared. George refused spectators.

The remaining snipers adapted. They stopped moving in daylight.

January 23rd opened with heavy rain. When visibility returned, George resumed work.

At 9:12, he killed the sixth sniper.

At 9:57, Japanese mortars bracketed his bunker. The third salvo obliterated it seconds after George fled.

He relocated.

At 14:23, he killed the seventh.

At 15:41, the eighth—ninety-four feet up, silhouetted by shifting light.

That night, George did the math.

Eleven snipers. Eight dead. Three left.

And they now knew him.

On January 24th, George chose a new position—rocks seventy yards south of his last hide.

At 8:17, he spotted a sniper low in a palm tree. Too obvious.

Bait.

He found the real shooter ninety-one feet up in a banyan, watching George’s old position.

George killed the decoy first.

Then the real sniper as he reacted.

Machine-gun fire shredded the rocks seconds later.

George relocated again.

Ten snipers dead.

The last one learned.

He stayed on the ground.

At 9:47, George saw movement—low, deliberate, crawling. The sniper was hunting him.

George waited submerged in a shell crater as the man searched his last known position. When the Japanese sniper turned his back, George rose and fired.

Then the supporting soldier.

Eleven snipers killed.

The jungle answered back.

Infantry voices. Six men at least.

George hid in water as they recovered bodies, then realized too late he’d left tracks.

At 10:31, a soldier appeared at the crater rim.

George fired from the water.

Three soldiers fell in seconds.

Then rifle fire.

George broke contact, moving north through undergrowth, bullets snapping past.

At 11:13, he reached American lines.

Captain Morris wanted numbers.

George gave them.

Eleven snipers killed in four days. Twelve rounds fired.

Three more infantry killed in the final engagement.

Two rounds remaining.

That afternoon, Colonel Ferry asked one question:

Could George train others?

George said yes—with time, optics, and men who could already shoot.

Division approved a sniper section.

George kept his Winchester.

The section operated twelve days.

Seventy-four confirmed kills.

Zero friendly casualties.

On February 7th, George was wounded by a rifleman near the Tanambogo River. The bullet passed cleanly through muscle.

The Japanese evacuated Guadalcanal two days later.

George went on to Burma with Merrill’s Marauders.

He modified the Winchester for weight.

He fired it seven times in three months.

Seven hits.

Then the war moved on.

George returned home, trained officers, wrote his experiences down—not as memoir, but as record.

The book was called Shots Fired in Anger.

It remains in print.

John George died on January 3rd, 2009.

His Winchester Model 70 sits today in a museum display case, indistinguishable from a hundred other hunting rifles.

Most visitors walk past it.

They do not know it cleared Point Cruz when an entire battalion could not.

They do not know it proved that individual skill still mattered—even in industrial war.

They do not know that for four days in 1943, a man with a civilian rifle rewrote what the U.S. Army thought a marksman could do.