Hugh Gilbert Strickland

The Second Battalion, 7th Marines began 9 October 1942 in a bivouac atop a ridge west of Guadalcanal’s Matanikau River. They were soaked and exhausted from the previous day’s hard march in the rain, and still smarting from a firefight that dealt their first combat casualties of the campaign. Fox Company took the brunt of the carnage and were particularly salty; they spotted eight Japanese troops setting up machine guns and allowed the enemy to finish their task before raking them with fire. “The light machine gun is in possession of this battalion,” noted the unit operations report; even better, “F Company did not suffer any casualties at this time.”

Despite this early success, there was a full day of combat ahead, and the Japanese had plenty of other machine guns. As they moved down a heavily wooded ravine, Fox Company scouts were pinned down by a rapid-firing emplacement, and a squad was sent around to flank the position. PFC Hugh Strickland, an eighteen-year-old Floridian, lost his life in this encounter.