Guadalcanal: 122 Musket Balls in One Shell

On the night of 24 October 1942, a Marine gun crew on the southern edge of the Henderson Field perimeter held a corridor called the Bowling Alley with a weapon that had already been written off. The M3 37mm earned its bad name in Tunisia, where its shot bounced off German armour and it was replaced by the 57mm. But the Japanese brought almost no tanks to Guadalcanal — they brought infantry, at night, in mass. So the crews fired canister: a tin cylinder packed with 122 steel balls that turned an anti-tank gun into a shotgun. This is that night from the second man on the gun — the loader, back to the enemy, working by touch, who never saw a single man fall in front of the shells he fed into the breech.