Marine earned Navy Cross despite faulty machine gun

[Vulture6]

Marine earned Navy Cross despite faulty machine gun

By Guido Colamarino - Special to the Times
Posted : October 08, 2007

Pfc. Edmund D’Orsogna huddled in the jungles of Guadalcanal in a 4-foot-deep foxhole with three other young Marines and a defective machine gun. He and his unit were charged that October 1942 with defending Henderson Airfield against the Japanese.

With no air support, little food or medical supplies and antiquated weapons, the Marines appeared doomed.

But there would be no surrender, according to Maj. Gen. Alexander Vandegrift, commander of 1st Marine Division. If all failed, the future Medal of Honor recipient and commandant said, they would “head for the hills and fight on as guerillas.”

D’Orsogna, then 24, hid among the shoulder-high, spiky grass of the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific. The terrain, with its almost impenetrable screens of twisted vines, gave the advantage to the enemy.

“It was scary,” D’Orsogna said at his home in Clifton, N.J., in 1996. “There were four gun units, each with four men. Ours was number three. The guys in number four ran away, leaving our right flank open.” To compensate, they lugged their machine gun and its tripod — 90 pounds of weaponry — out of the foxhole onto higher ground, for better visibility.

“Jack [Sugarman] thought he saw several crouched figures approaching,” he said, recalling his fellow Marines.

“The other guys [Cpl. Herman Bright and Pfc. William Conner] and I saw them, too.” Afraid they might be Marines, he told Sugarman to fire one shot over their heads and duck. “Lucky for him he did, because [the Japanese] returned his shot with a barrage of rifle fire that would’ve got him sure if he were standing.”

“Then, all hell broke loose,” he said, pursing his lips. “They kept coming all night with bombs … flares … everything. Men were getting shot, blown apart, all over the place. In the morning, reinforcements finally arrived, allowing us to rest. Other than the machine gun jamming a few times, we held our own.”

For repairing the defective machine gun on four occasions under heavy fire, D’Orsogna was one of 946 Marines in World War II awarded the Navy Cross, the nation’s second-highest honor for heroism in battle.

“I was told that we killed 165 enemy soldiers,” he said. “They even pinned a medal on me and called me a national hero. Even after 50 years, it still seems unreal.”

D’Orsogna died in his home state of New Jersey in 2004 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease.
The writer is Edmund D’Orsogna’s nephew.