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Master Gunnery Sergeant Mercurio's 2d Platoon was spread thin covering the beach area, with many of his positions right on the water. "At high tide," recalled Corporal Edwin R. Franklin, "I could reach out and touch the water." The landing craft were only 100 yards away from the beach when Japanese flares lit up the night. The 2d Platoon began firing, but the Japanese were too close to halt the landing. A landing craft beached in front of Franklin's position and enemy troops began coming ashore. Mercurio, armed with only a pistol, killed a Japanese soldier "so close he could have touched him," as the Japanese overran the beach defenses. The fighting became particularly bloody, "with every man for himself," remembered Franklin. The Japanese 50mm heavy grenade dischargers or "knee mortars" were particularly effective at close range, and the overwhelming numbers of Japanese infantry forced Mercurio's men to pull back from the beach.

Corporal Joseph Q. Johnson, a 31st Infantry soldier attached to the 2d Platoon, remembered, "the gun next to me chattered, and glancing to my right, I saw its targets, small, fleeting, darting in the shadows." Johnson fired two belts of machine gun ammunition and was firing a third one when a grenade landed 20 yards away. A second grenade landed closer, and rifle fire also hit Johnson's position. When a third grenade landed only 10 yards from the gunpit, Johnson ran to the next machine gun position and found the two occupants dead. He kept moving, crawling along the beach with two other survivors of his platoon, toward Kindley Field.

Photograph courtesy of 61st Infantry Association