On the morning of July 4th, 1943, the northern tip of Rendova Island was a place Marines called “Suicide Point.”

Two days earlier, the name had seemed horribly accurate. Japanese bombers had turned the beach into a furnace of burning fuel, exploding ammunition, and shattered bodies. Fuel dumps had gone up in towering pillars of flame. An aid station full of wounded men—who thought they were finally safe—had taken direct hits. Dozens lay dead, another seventy-seven wounded. Trucks had melted where they stood. Ammunition had cooked off for six straight hours.

Private First Class Evan Evans had watched it all from behind his 90 mm gun.

He and his crew had fired until their hands shook and their ears rang. Thirty-two rounds hurled into the sky at fast-moving specks that seemed to appear and disappear in seconds. Not one Japanese plane had gone down. That was the problem with “eyeball” gunnery against 270-mile-an-hour bombers: by the time you knew where they were, they were already gone.

The Marines’ big guns had looked impressive. They had not been effective.

Two days later, on July 4th, that changed—and with it, the way Japanese commanders thought about attacking American positions in the Solomons.

A Beachhead with a Target on Its Back

The 9th Defense Battalion of the United States Marine Corps had landed on Rendova on June 30th, 1943. Their job was both simple and brutal: protect the beachhead while Army artillery shelled Japanese positions on New Georgia across Blanche Channel.

Rendova itself was little more than a muddy island of jungle and coral. The northern tip, jutting out into Blanche Channel, was where everything happened. Every supply ship had to come past that point. Every fuel drum, every crate of ammunition, every wounded man waiting for evacuation—it all piled up under the eyes of the enemy.

The Japanese noticed quickly. From their major base at Rabaul, they could strike down “the Slot” with long-range bombers and fighters. On July 2nd, they sent their message: eighteen Mitsubishi G4M “Betty” bombers, escorted by hundreds of fighters, swept in low over water and tore the beach apart.

There was no early warning. Rendova’s radar sets had been knocked out in previous raids. Men were eating, unloading supplies, smoking, working on vehicles—and then the sky was full of bombers.

Evans could do nothing but fire and watch.

He was 22 years old, three weeks in the Solomons, assigned to Battery C of the 9th Defense Battalion. His weapon, the M1 90 mm anti-aircraft gun, was a nine-ton marvel of American engineering. On paper, it could throw a 24-pound shell up to 33,000 feet, with a maximum rate of 28 rounds per minute.

In practice, without radar, it was a blunt instrument.

Target direction came from men with binoculars and mechanical range finders. Time fuzes were set by hand. Shells detonated hundreds of yards away from fast-moving bombers. The beach burned. The guns looked to many men like loud, expensive decorations.

That night, while the medics still worked through the wounded and flames still burned ashore, Lieutenant Colonel William Shier gathered his 90 mm crews.

He did not give them a pep talk. He laid out reality.

The radar was down. The Japanese would almost certainly come again. And if Rendova couldn’t stop them, there might not be a beachhead left to defend.

Evans cleaned his gun until three in the morning.

Radar Comes Back to Life

July 3rd brought rain. Heavy, tropical rain that turned foxholes into bathtubs and trails into rivers. Men stood guard in water up to their knees. Supplies spoiled where they lay. But the rain brought one advantage: Japanese pilots did not like flying through it.

Bent over their sets under canvas covers, Marine and Army technicians used the breathing room to coax Rendova’s radar back from the dead.

By dawn on July 4th, the SCR-268 sets were working again—not perfectly, but well enough. The directors powered up. The Sperry M4 mechanical fire control computers, those whirring masses of gears and cams designed to predict where a moving target would be by the time a shell arrived, were tested and connected to the guns.

Communications lines between all twelve 90 mm positions were re-established. Ammunition was stacked where crews could reach it without thinking. Men went through their drills.

The battalion had something it hadn’t had on July 2nd: warning.

At 08:45, the radar screens showed what everyone expected. A large formation inbound from Rabaul. Distance: 120 miles. Bearing: 320 degrees. Altitude: 14,000 feet.

They were coming again.

The formation split as it approached. One group veered off toward New Georgia. The other—sixteen bombers with a thick escort of fighters—kept straight down the Slot.

Rendova was their target. Again.

Into the Kill Zone

The sirens began their eerie wail at 09:15. Men dropped shovels and crates and sprinted for cover. Medics grabbed their kits and scrambled toward pre-dug trenches. The beach emptied in seconds—except for the gun crews.

They stayed.

Evans checked his ready rack. High-explosive shells with variable time fuzes. At ten thousand feet, a shell would be in the air roughly eighteen seconds. If the fuze was off by even a second, the burst would be useless—too high, too low, too far ahead or behind. At 270 miles per hour, a bomber could move half a mile while a shell was on its way.

The SCR-268 radars tracked the incoming aircraft. Data flowed into the M4 directors, which in turn sent electrical signals to each gun mount. Elevation and bearing shifted continuously as the computer tried to lead the targets.

The usual integration problem remained: the Sperry directors had been designed to work with optical trackers, not radar. The alignment was never quite perfect. But on this day, the Marines would get close enough.

At just under thirty miles, Shier gave the order to open fire.

“Load, Ram, Set, Fire”

All twelve 90 mm guns spoke at once.

To be near even one of them when it fired was to feel the blast in your bones. To be near twelve was like being punched by the air. Dust leapt off sandbags. The concussion thudded through the chest.

Evans fell into the rhythm his crew knew by muscle memory:

Loader hoists a shell from the ready rack.

Rammer drives it into the open breech.

Fuse setter spins the nose timer to the specified interval.

Breech slams shut.

Gunner fires.

Spent casing ejects in a clanging, smoking arc.

Every three seconds, the cycle completed.

Above, black bursts began to appear in neat patterns ahead of the oncoming Bettys. At first, they were too far left, too far high. The Japanese adjusted course slightly, unperturbed. For eighteen months, they had flown into this kind of flak over Guadalcanal, New Georgia, and elsewhere. It was scary. It was noisy. It very rarely hit.

At twelve miles out, the lead bomber started its attack descent. The formation dropped to 8,000 feet—low enough to aim accurately, high enough to stay above most light fire.

On Rendova, the radar returns on that lead aircraft were particularly strong and clear. Battery C’s director locked solidly onto it.

The M4 made its best guess. The gun mount slewed. Elevation rose slightly. The barrel swung a few degrees left.

“Fire.”

One shell—one of Evans’—lifted into the sky, arced, and detonated eighteen seconds later.

This time, 200 meters ahead of the lead Betty’s nose.

The bomber flew directly into the expanding sphere of shrapnel.

Fragments tore through its right engine. In an instant, black smoke poured back across its wing. The pilot tried to stay in formation—the Japanese were drilled not to break ranks under fire—but the flames spread too quickly. The bomber peeled out of the V and tried to turn back. At 6,000 feet, its wing failed. The aircraft tumbled into Blanche Channel in a spray of water and fuel.

One down.

Within the next minute, two more bombers fell out of the group trailing smoke and fire. One lost its tail. One tried to limp away and didn’t get far.

Three Bettys were gone before a single Japanese bomb had left a bay.

The rest broke discipline.

Turning Suicide Point into a Killing Ground

The remaining bombers jettisoned their bombs early. Instead of pressing straight over the island, they released at about six miles out and turned hard away, trying to escape before the flak got any worse.

Massive columns of water erupted offshore as hundred-kilogram bombs plunged into empty ocean. None hit the beach. None hit fuel dumps. None hit hospitals.

Rendova, which had been helpless two days earlier, was now wrapped in a shell of steel timed to explode around anything that came near.

The gunners did not let up.

Once the bombers turned tail and began climbing, their situation got worse. Climbing meant slower speeds. Slower speeds meant the directors had an easier time predicting where they would be. The Japanese escort fighters—the Zeros—took one look at the storm of flak and chose survival. They did not stay to duel nonexistent fighters over an island ringed with heavy guns.

Battery C took another bomber as it banked west, trying to make for New Georgia. A shell burst just behind its tail; the elevators shredded, and it corkscrewed into the jungle across the channel.

Other batteries joined the tally.

By the time the ceasefire order came at 09:32, the result was astonishing. Of the sixteen bombers that had set out to destroy Rendova, only four were still flying. Kill credits were still being sorted, but the radar track and wreckage told the story clearly enough:

Twelve Bettys destroyed.

Zero bombs on target.

Zero American casualties in the engagement.

Eighty-eight 90 mm rounds expended.

A hit rate close to 14% in real combat—seven or eight times better than typical wartime anti-aircraft performance.

Suicide Point was no longer a one-sided proposition.

How One Morning Changed a Campaign

The practical effect of that single engagement was immediate and far-reaching.

With the air over Rendova effectively denied in daylight, Japanese planners adjusted. Subsequent raids came at night and from higher altitudes. Crews dropped their bombs blind through clouds from 20,000 feet. Accuracy was poor. Few, if any, strikes landed on meaningful targets.

That meant the American artillery batteries on Rendova—especially the 155 mm “Long Tom” guns—could operate with far less disruption. Day and night, they lobbed heavy shells across Blanche Channel onto Munda airfield and Japanese positions on New Georgia.

Those guns softened defenses, cratered runways, and made Japanese resupply increasingly difficult. Combined with infantry assaults and other air support, they enabled the rapid capture of Munda in early August 1943.

In broader terms, the techniques improvised and perfected on Rendova spread. Reports detailing how the 9th Defense Battalion had tied their SCR-268 radar to the Sperry directors, how they’d adjusted for mechanical lag, how they’d coordinated fire across multiple batteries, went up the chain of command. They landed on desks at XIV Corps, at South Pacific headquarters, and eventually at Pearl Harbor.

Other anti-aircraft units studied them. Training adapted. Radar-directed heavy flak became more common and more accurate across the theater.

By 1944, Japanese bomber crews were facing more and more Rendovas—American positions where daylight attacks meant climbing into a lethal equation of radar, computation, and well-drilled crews. Daylight raids declined. Losses mounted. The Imperial Japanese Navy’s bomber strength, already strained, never recovered.

None of that was visible to Evan Evans when he stood sweating beside his hot gun barrel on the afternoon of July 4th.

He knew only that he and his crew had finally hit something.

The Weight of Success

After-action reports recorded the numbers. Official histories later praised “one of the most successful anti-aircraft actions of the war.” The Marine Corps photographer snapped that one surviving image—Evans, Roy Boone, and John Gamberowski standing proudly next to their weapon.

What those reports don’t show is the quieter cost.

Twelve twin-engine bombers carry large crews. Each Betty typically had seven men aboard: flight crew, gunners, bombardier. That means more than eighty men likely died in those wrecks, perhaps well over a hundred when damaged aircraft that limped away eventually ditched.

Some of those men made it out of their burning planes. Some parachuted into the sea. Some bobbed in the water in life vests, watching the island that had just shot them down get smaller on the horizon as they drifted.

American doctrine at that stage of the Pacific War was ruthless. Ships did not break formation or loiter in dangerous waters to rescue enemy aircrew. The odds of those Japanese survivors being picked up were low.

For men like Evans, that reality sat uneasily beside the pride. They had done their job perfectly. They had saved their own. But they had also watched other human beings fall burning from the sky and vanish beneath the waves.

It was a paradox every effective gun crew, bomber pilot, and infantryman lived with: success meant death—for someone else.

Evans carried that with him.

Forgotten, Then Found

After Guam, after the war, the 9th Defense Battalion came home and dissolved. Its men melted back into American life. Three Pacific campaigns reduced to a discharge paper, a handful of ribbons, stories told (or not told) over the years.

Evans re-upped, fought through Korea, and eventually settled into civilian life as a machinist. Like so many veterans, he did not talk much about what he’d done. His children knew he’d been in the Marines. They did not know he had had one of the most lethal mornings of any anti-aircraft gunner in the Pacific.

In 1993—half a century after Rendova—a letter arrived at the U.S. National Archives from a retired sergeant in Indiana. Evans wanted a photograph of a 90 mm gun to show his grandchildren what “Grandpa’s cannon” had looked like.

Archivist Alan Walker could have sent him any generic image. Instead, a detail in the letter—Rendova, July 4, 1943—caught his attention. He dug deeper. In a series labeled 127-GW, he found it: three young Marines beside a 90 mm gun, captioned as the crew whose weapon “wiped out a Japanese bomber fleet of 12 planes in a single day.”

One of the names: Evan Evans.

Walker mailed the photograph.

For Evans, seeing that image at age 72—his 22-year-old self standing in tropical mud next to a gun that had once been the whole world—unlocked memories buried under decades. In his reply, he thanked Walker in simple words, but the meaning ran deeper. He wrote that he had carried Rendova with him every day, that he had assumed everyone else had forgotten, and that maybe now, finally, he could let some of it go.

He died in 2004. Boone and Gamberowski passed away around the same time. The men in the photograph are gone. The gun is gone. The sandbags have rotted. The jungle has reclaimed the positions.

But the story hasn’t disappeared.

Why It Matters

On paper, the Battle for New Georgia gets more attention than the anti-aircraft action at Rendova. Munda airfield, the Solomon Islands logistics, the broader strategy of isolating Rabaul—those are the big arrows on the map.

Yet none of that advance could have happened at the pace it did if Suicide Point had remained a one-way killing ground.

On July 4th, 1943, the 9th Defense Battalion proved something essential to the Pacific war: that with radar, discipline, and enough steel, American forces could make even a dangerous beachhead extraordinarily hard to hit. They changed Japanese calculations. They bought time and safety for the men on the ground. They contributed, shell by shell, to the slow strangling of Japan’s offensive power.

And they did it not with a grand maneuver or a famous general, but with a handful of Marines sweating behind a steel barrel in the rain.

That’s why stories like Evan Evans’s are worth pulling out of the archives. They remind us that wars are not won solely in famous battles or in headquarters. They’re also won in brief windows of time where small groups of people, overlooked by history, perform perfectly under impossible pressure.

For 27 minutes on Independence Day, 1943, at the edge of a muddy island few Americans could find on a map, three young Marines and a 90 mm gun seized the sky.

The bombers never made it through.

And the Pacific war, in ways they could not see at the time, turned a little more decisively in America’s favor.