They Called It “Suicide Point” — Until This Marine Shot Down 12 Japanese Bombers in One Day

The morning of July 4, 1943, did not feel like a celebration on Rendova Island. It felt like a countdown. Private First Class Evan Evans sat behind a wall of sandbags, his eyes scanning the broken clouds drifting over Blanche Channel. He was twenty-two years old, a native of Richmond, Indiana, and for the last three weeks, he had lived in a muddy purgatory that smelled of rotting vegetation and cordite. His position, located on the northern tip of the island, was known among the Marines as “Suicide Point.” It was a name earned in blood. Just forty-eight hours earlier, the Japanese had turned this beach into an abattoir.

On July 2, a massive air raid comprising eighteen bombers and 440 fighters had caught the Americans blind. The island’s radar sets had been non-functional, knocked offline by previous damage. There had been no early warning, no sirens, and no time to seek cover. The Japanese Mitsubishi G4M bombers came in low and fast, obliterating fuel dumps, ammunition caches, and the field hospital. Evans had watched helplessly from his gun position as fifty-nine Americans died and seventy-seven were wounded. He had fired thirty-two rounds that day and hit nothing. Without radar guidance, the high-speed bombers were simply ghosts that moved faster than human reflexes could track.

The 9th Defense Battalion had been humiliated. They had brought twelve massive 90mm M1 anti-aircraft guns to the island, weapons capable of hurling a twenty-four-pound shell nearly seven miles into the sky. But a gun is only as good as its eyes, and on July 2, the battalion had been blind. Lieutenant Colonel William Scheyer had gathered the crews that night and delivered a stark reality check: the Japanese would return, and if the Marines could not hit them, there would be no one left to bury the dead.

But the dawn of July 4 brought a technological resurrection. Mechanics and technicians had worked through the sodden, rain-swept night, cannibalizing parts and rewiring circuits. As the sun rose, the radar operators reported that the SCR-268 radar sets were back online. They weren’t perfect, but they were operational. The Sperry M4 mechanical gun directors—analog computers designed to calculate intercept trajectories—were synchronized with the radar data. Evans stood by his gun, Battery C, Gun 3. His crew moved through their dry-fire drills with the mechanical precision of factory machinery: loader, rammer, fuse setter, gunner. They were ready.

At 08:45, the electronic eyes of the battalion blinked open. The radar detected a large formation inbound from Rabaul, 120 miles out. It was a textbook raid: sixteen bombers escorted by 180 fighters, flying straight down “The Slot” toward Rendova. This time, there was no surprise. This time, the math would be different.

As the formation closed to fifty miles, the radar plot showed the bombers holding steady at roughly 10,000 feet. This altitude was a calculated insult; the Japanese pilots believed they were above the effective range of light anti-aircraft fire and that the heavy American guns were inaccurate. They were flying a tight V-formation, confident and disciplined. They did not know that the SCR-268 was feeding data directly to Evans’ gun director, updating elevation and azimuth in real-time.

At 30,000 yards, the order came to commence firing. The silence of the morning was shattered by the simultaneous roar of twelve 90mm guns. Evans settled into the violent rhythm of the work. The loader slammed a shell into the fuse setter, which automatically adjusted the variable-time fuse based on the director’s calculations. The shell was rammed into the breech. The block slammed shut. The gun fired. The empty brass casing clattered to the deck. The process took three seconds.

The sky ahead of the Japanese formation began to fill with black puffs of high-explosive smoke. At twenty miles out, the bursts were already close, shaking the air around the lead planes. The Japanese pilots, realizing they were flying into a math problem they couldn’t solve, made a fatal error: they tightened their formation rather than scattering.

At ten miles, the massacre began. Battery C’s director locked onto the lead bomber. Evans’ gun fired, sending a shell screaming upward at 2,800 feet per second. Eighteen seconds later, the shell detonated 200 meters ahead of the lead Betty. The bomber flew directly into the wall of shrapnel. The starboard engine disintegrated, and the wing folded back as if it were made of paper. The aircraft tumbled out of the sky, crashing into the ocean four miles offshore.

The precision was terrifying. The 90mm shells were equipped with variable time fuses, a secret American technology that allowed the shell to detonate when it sensed the proximity of the target, rather than relying on a preset timer or direct impact. As the remaining bombers opened their bomb bay doors, the sky around them erupted. Two more Betties took critical hits; one lost its entire tail section and spun violently into the sea, while the other began a shallow, smoking dive from which it would never recover.

Panic broke the Japanese discipline. The bombardiers, terrified by the accuracy of the flak, pickled their loads early. Thousands of pounds of high explosives, intended for the Marine positions, fell harmlessly into the open ocean, sending massive geysers of water into the air half a mile from the beach. Not a single bomb struck the island.

The Japanese pilots turned to run, splitting up to escape the kill zone. It didn’t matter. Evans and his crew were operating on pure adrenaline and muscle memory, firing a shell every three seconds. The gun barrel grew so hot that heat waves distorted the air around the muzzle, but the steel held. A bomber trying to escape over New Georgia was caught by a bracket of fire from Battery C. Shrapnel severed its elevator controls, and the machine went into a flat spin, crashing into the jungle.

Another pair of bombers tried to fly low, dropping to 5,000 feet to slip under the radar. The SCR-268 tracked them effortlessly. Battery C and Battery E engaged simultaneously. The lead bomber took a direct hit to the engine and inverted, plunging into Blanche Channel. The second aircraft disintegrated in mid-air seconds later.

By 09:30, the sky over Rendova was clear of enemy aircraft. The silence that followed the engagement was absolute, ringing in the ears of the deafened gun crews. Colonel Scheyer walked the line, tallying the results. They were mathematically impossible. The battalion had fired only 88 rounds of ammunition. In exchange for those 88 shells, they had destroyed twelve bombers. Four others had escaped, heavily damaged, likely to ditch in the ocean before reaching Rabaul.

The standard kill ratio for anti-aircraft fire in World War II was often thousands of rounds per aircraft destroyed. The 9th Defense Battalion had achieved a kill rate of nearly 14 percent. They had wiped out 75 percent of the attacking force in twenty-seven minutes without suffering a single casualty or taking a single hit to their facilities.

The strategic impact was immediate. Japanese commanders at Rabaul, reading the reports from the few surviving crews, realized that daylight raids against radar-directed 90mm guns were suicidal. They ceased large-scale daylight attacks on Rendova almost immediately, ceding the airspace to the Americans. This victory allowed the American “Long Tom” artillery pieces on Rendova to pound Japanese positions on New Georgia around the clock, paving the way for the capture of Munda airfield just weeks later.

Evan Evans survived the war, serving through the liberation of Guam and returning home to a quiet life in Indiana. For decades, the story of July 4, 1943, remained a memory shared only among the men who were there. It wasn’t until fifty years later that a researcher at the National Archives uncovered a photograph of Evans and his crew—Boone and Grembowski—standing proudly next to their gun. The caption detailed their record-breaking feat, immortalizing the day three young Marines and a nine-ton gun turned Suicide Point into a graveyard for the Imperial Japanese Navy.