The Civilian Rifle That Hunted the Hunters: John George and the Sniper War on Guadalcanal

On the morning of January 22, 1943, Second Lieutenant John George lay in the shattered remains of a Japanese bunker west of Point Cruz on Guadalcanal, his cheek pressed to the stock of a rifle that most of his fellow officers had dismissed as a curiosity.

Two hundred and forty yards away, the tall, tangled crown of a banyan tree filled his scope. Somewhere in that mass of branches, one of the most dangerous opponents in modern warfare—a trained sniper—was watching the trails where American soldiers moved.

George exhaled slowly, steadied the crosshairs, and squeezed the trigger.

The shot that followed was not just the opening of a personal tally. It was the moment a privately purchased hunting rifle with a “mail order scope” began to change how the U.S. Army looked at marksmanship, individual initiative, and the value of a single, well-placed round.

A Marksman in a Skeptical Army

John George did not arrive in the Pacific as a nobody with a fancy rifle and an inflated opinion of his skills. Before the war, he had been one of the best rifle shots in the United States.

In 1939, at the age of 23, he won the Illinois State Championship at 1,000 yards—the youngest shooter ever to do so. He was used to placing tight groups in distant targets, often firing with iron sights at distances that made most shooters uncomfortable.

But when America mobilized for war, the Army did not have a clear place for civilian marksmen with their own rifles. The standard infantry weapon was the semi-automatic M1 Garand. It was rugged, reliable, and suitable for the close to medium-range engagements the planners expected.

Precision shooting past 300 yards, using optics, was seen as niche at best and unnecessary at worst.

When George first opened the wooden crate containing his Winchester Model 70 at Camp Forrest, Tennessee, he was greeted with humor, not respect. The rifle, fitted with a Lyman Alaskan scope in Griffin & Howe mounts, looked like something from a deer camp, not a war zone.

“Is that for deer or Germans?” the armorer asked.

“For the Japanese,” George replied.

The rifle didn’t make the initial voyage with him. It lagged behind in a stateside warehouse while George and the 132nd Infantry Regiment sailed for Guadalcanal. By the time the crate finally reached him through military mail weeks later, the regiment had seen its first hard fighting.

And the Japanese snipers had begun their deadly work.

A New Kind of Threat in the Trees

By late December 1942, the Marines had handed off responsibility for Guadalcanal to Army units. They had seized Henderson Field and held it against repeated assaults, but the island was far from pacified.

The Japanese were masters of concealment and patience. In the coconut and banyan groves around Point Cruz and the Matanikau River, they had positioned a network of snipers—men armed with scoped Arisaka rifles, trained to wait motionless for hours for a single exposed target.

Between January 19 and 21, 1943, these snipers killed fourteen men from the 132nd Infantry Regiment. One soldier was struck while filling canteens at a creek. Others were hit mid-patrol. A man was killed with a clean shot to the neck from a tree that his patrol had passed twice.

There were no warning signs. No muzzle flashes visible from the ground. Just the sharp crack of a single shot, and another American down.

The losses were more than tragic—they were corrosive. Every rustle in the canopy became a threat. Every trip to refill a canteen carried a weight of dread. Morale began to sag.

The regimental commander knew something had to change. He needed someone who could see farther than the naked eye and think like the men in the trees.

He called for John George and asked him what that “toy rifle” of his could really do.

A Rifle and a Reputation on the Line

George answered with facts.

He described his competition record. His groups at 600 and 1,000 yards. His hours on the range at Camp Perry, fine-tuning the Winchester’s trigger and zeroing the scope. He explained the advantages of a bolt-action rifle with quality optics when the goal was a first-round hit rather than volume of fire.

The commander listened. Then he gave George a simple, stark assignment.

Prove it—by morning.

At dawn on January 22, George moved alone into a captured Japanese bunker that offered a view of the Point Cruz groves. No spotter. No radio. Just his rifle, sixty rounds of .30-06, and a clear mission: find the snipers who had been killing his men and eliminate them.

His chosen position was not glamorous. It was a shell-blasted relic of the enemy’s previous defensive line, a concrete and earth cavity that gave him protection and a stable firing platform.

Then came the real work: watching.

Sniper warfare is as much about patience as it is about aim. George spent the early morning slowly sweeping his scope across the trees. The jungle was alive with movement—branches swaying, birds flitting, shadows shifting.

Most of it was noise. He had to locate the signal.

At 9:17 a.m., he saw it.

Hunting the Hunters

The banyan was 240 yards away, a massive trunk with a complex crown of branches. At first, it was just a tiny, unnatural movement. A branch that shifted without wind.

George stayed on it, watching.

Then the shape resolved itself into the outline of a man perched in a fork in the tree, facing away, scanning the trails where American patrols moved.

George made minor windage corrections, controlled his breathing, and sent a single round downrange.

The Japanese sniper fell from his perch and tumbled through ninety feet of branches. One threat removed.

Experience—and common sense—told George that this man had not been working alone. Japanese snipers often operated in pairs: one shooter, one spotter.

He resumed his methodical search.

Within half an hour, he found the second man, lower in another tree nearby, trying to withdraw. Another shot, another fall. Two kills, two rounds, no return fire.

By noon, George had killed five snipers. Each engagement followed a similar pattern: a careful search, a single precise shot, and then immediate readiness for counteraction.

Word spread quickly through the regiment. The same officers who had mocked his rifle as a “mail order sweetheart” now wanted to know how he was doing it.

George declined spectators. The presence of other men, their shifting weight and curiosity, would only have drawn attention. He was not performing. He was solving a problem.

The enemy adapted.

After the fifth kill, the Japanese stopped moving during daylight. They climbed into position before dawn and stayed still. George spent hours staring at motionless trees, knowing that men were up there, but seeing nothing he could safely shoot at.

The next day, the contest escalated.

Mortars, Bait, and Lessons in Cunning

On January 23, rain hid everything. When visibility returned, George again hunted and found targets—but this time, the enemy answered with indirect fire.

Once they realized where his shots were coming from, Japanese mortar crews began dropping shells around his bunker.

The first rounds fell short. The next salvo walked closer. George did the math in his head. The third would land on his position.

He ran.

Seconds later, the bunker was turned into a cratered ruin. The hunter had narrowly avoided becoming a statistic.

When he reestablished his position behind a fallen tree and resumed firing, the snipers changed tactics again. They began to use decoys.

On January 24, George spotted what looked like an obvious sniper perch—a man low in a palm tree, only forty feet up, partially visible through the fronds. It was exactly the sort of position a novice might take and a veteran would avoid.

George’s instincts told him something was wrong. If that position was bait, then someone else would be watching, ready to shoot back at anyone who took the tempting shot.

So he used the bait against them.

He killed the man in the palm tree first, then immediately swung his rifle to a banyan tree nearby where, as he’d suspected, another sniper lurked in a perfectly concealed position. The second shot dropped the real threat out of the branches.

Two more snipers down. But his shot and subsequent relocation still attracted attention. Japanese machine gun fire hammered his last position moments after he vacated it.

The duel had turned into a chess match with live ammunition.

In the Water and Under Fire

By the fourth day, George had killed ten snipers across the groves around Point Cruz. He knew there had originally been eleven.

The last one, he reasoned, would be the most careful and the most dangerous.

That final contest was as much about movement and judgment as it was about shooting.

Realizing that the enemy had learned his previous positions, George chose a new hide: a water-filled shell crater. He submerged himself up to the chest, keeping his rifle above the surface to protect the barrel, and waited.

This last sniper didn’t take to the trees. He came on foot, moving low through the underbrush, sweeping along the likely escape routes George would have used. When the sniper took up a position in the rocks that George had previously occupied, it would have been easy to end it with a single shot to the back at forty yards.

But again, something felt wrong, too exposed, too obvious. George hesitated. This man had watched ten others die. He would not make simple mistakes.

Sure enough, a second figure appeared, positioned behind a fallen tree to cover the rocks. Two men working as a team, one as bait, one as overwatch.

George waited until both moved past his hidden crater, following the trail he was supposed to have taken. Only when they had placed themselves between him and the trees did he rise from the water, take the closer man, and then the second before they could react.

Eleven snipers, eleven confirmed kills across four days of work. Fourteen Americans now had someone to thank if they could have seen the overhead view of the battlefield.

George could not linger. A recovery patrol of Japanese infantry soon moved in to investigate the fallen snipers. They spotted his tracks and followed them to the water-filled crater he had recently occupied. A firefight followed in which George, now down to a handful of rounds, killed several more attackers before breaking contact and slipping back into American lines.

He returned with mud on his boots, a nearly empty rifle, and a problem solved.

The groves that had been death traps for days were suddenly quiet. The battalion could move again.

From Lone Marksman to Instructor

John George’s commander did not see a lone-wolf specialist. He saw a proof-of-concept.

If one man equipped with a proper rifle and training could neutralize such a concentrated sniper threat, what could a group of such men do across a broader front?

Division headquarters had inherited a small number of Springfield rifles with telescopic sights from departing Marine units. They also had dozens of soldiers who had qualified as expert marksmen in training.

They had never put those two facts together—until now.

George was ordered to establish and train a sniper section. Sixteen two-man teams attended his course: shooter and spotter, both trained to switch roles as needed, both carrying rifles and responsibilities.

On the makeshift range near Henderson Field, George turned competition-level fundamentals into combat-ready skills:

Using terrain and improvised supports to stabilize heavy rifles.

Reading wind in jungle conditions.

Firing one shot and immediately displacing to avoid return fire.

Working in pairs to increase observation and security.

Within twelve days of field operations, the new sniper section had killed seventy-four Japanese soldiers with no casualties of their own. They disrupted rearguard actions as Imperial forces evacuated Guadalcanal, targeting officers, machine gun crews, and groups covering withdrawals.

The effect was disproportionate to their numbers. Again and again, the pattern emerged: a single precise shot unraveling an enemy position or freezing movement long enough for American units to maneuver.

Beyond the Island: Burma and a Different War

George’s war did not end on Guadalcanal. After being wounded and recovering, he was assigned to one of the most demanding units of the Pacific campaign: Merrill’s Marauders, the 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional), tasked with long-range operations in Burma.

There, his beloved Winchester Model 70 came along in modified form—slightly lighter, with a different scope—but the nature of fighting had shifted. Burma’s jungle and mountains produced engagements at much closer ranges. Patrol actions often unfolded at 50 yards or less, and the main enemies were fatigue, disease, and terrain.

George used his rifle only a handful of times in three months, covering more than 700 miles through some of the harshest conditions any American unit endured. Each shot still counted—a machine gun neutralized, a Japanese officer silenced, a sniper outmatched—but the opportunities for long-range precision were rare.

This experience reinforced something George would later emphasize in his writings: equipment is only as useful as the environment allows it to be. A world-class rifle means little in dense jungle where visibility is measured in yards instead of hundreds of meters.

Yet, even in Burma, the underlying lesson from Guadalcanal held true. When conditions allowed, one well-trained marksman could shape an engagement far beyond the reach of his own boots.

A Rifle, a Book, and a Quiet Legacy

After the war, John George did not build a career around his exploits. He didn’t tour the country giving lectures or seek fame as a war hero.

He went home, studied at Princeton and later at Oxford, worked on African politics and foreign affairs, and eventually became a respected analyst and lecturer in Washington, DC.

But he did one thing that ensured his experience wouldn’t vanish when he did.

He wrote it down.

Published in 1947, his book “Shots Fired in Anger” is not a dramatic memoir in the usual sense. It is part personal narrative, part technical document, and part clear-eyed analysis of small-arms combat in the Pacific. It catalogs the weapons used by both sides, examines tactics in jungle fighting, and documents what actually worked when lives were at stake.

To this day, “Shots Fired in Anger” is regarded as one of the most insightful firsthand accounts of infantry small-arms use in World War II. For collectors, historians, and tacticians, it remains a touchstone.

The rifle that framed much of that story—the Winchester Model 70 with its understated scope—now sits in a museum display case in Virginia. Most visitors pass it without a second glance. To the untrained eye, it looks like an old hunting rifle from another era.

But its history is etched into every scratch on its stock.

That rifle proved that a state-champion marksman with a privately purchased “sporting gun” could outshoot trained military snipers. It turned a patch of jungle from a killing field into a place where American soldiers could move without fear of unseen eyes in the trees.

It nudged an institution toward understanding that, amid mass production and standardized training, there was still room—still a need—for individual skill and initiative.

Why John George Still Matters

In a century marked by industrial warfare, it’s easy to focus on the big numbers: divisions moved, tonnage dropped, kilometers gained.

But the story of John George reminds us that the outcome of battles can also hinge on a handful of quiet decisions made by individuals:

A lieutenant insisting on using a rifle no one else takes seriously.

A commander willing to test unconventional ideas when conventional tactics are failing.

A marksman lying in muddy craters for hours, willing to wait for the one clear shot that could save a dozen lives.

Guadalcanal is often remembered for its brutal island-wide struggle, its naval battles, and its significance as America’s first major offensive against Japan. But on a more human scale, it was also the place where one man with a rifle and the discipline to use it carefully turned the tide in a small, deadly corner of the battlefield.

And in modern conflicts—despite satellites, drones, and precision-guided munitions—the principle he demonstrated still applies: when everything else is chaos, the combination of skill, patience, and a single well-aimed shot can still make all the difference.