Henderson Field, 1942

The airstrip on Guadalcanal was still unfinished when the 1st Marine Division took it on August 7, 1942. The Marines named it Henderson Field, after a squadron commander killed at Midway, and dug in around it. The Japanese wanted it back, and for four months they came for it at night.

Night was the enemy's time. Destroyers and cruisers came down the Slot to shell the field, and on the night of October 13 two battleships put more than 900 fourteen-inch shells into it. Infantry attacks came through the rain and jungle at the Tenaru in August, at Edson's Ridge in September, and along the Matanikau and the southern perimeter in late October.

The Marines held every time. Japan gave up the island in February 1943, and the road to Tokyo ran the other way from then on.

The line runs diagonally from the lower left, a row of helmets behind sandbags with a machine gun at its center and tracers going out across the open ground. Rain slants through the whole scene. The only warm light is muzzle flash and the flares bursting over the far tree line, reflected in the mud in front of the position. The faces are lit from the gun, not the sky. No one is standing.