They Laughed at His “Toy” Rifle. Then He Killed 11 Snipers in 4 Days

The jungle is silent, but it’s a lie. Hidden in the massive banyan trees 90 ft above the ground are 11 Japanese snipers. They are the best of the best. In the last 72 hours, they have killed 14 American soldiers. They are invisible. They are deadly. And the US Army has no answer for them except for one man.

Medal of honor

Second Lieutenant John George is crouching in a foxhole holding a rifle that shouldn’t be there. It’s not a military weapon. It’s a  Winchester Model 70, a civilian deer hunting rifle he bought from a catalog and had mailed to the battlefield. His commanding officer called it a  toy. His platoon laughed at his mail order sweetheart. They asked if he was planning to hunt deer or fight a war.

But John George wasn’t there to fight a war. He was there to hunt. In the next 4 days, the man with the toy rifle would engage in the deadliest game of cat and mouse in the Pacific theater. He would face 11 enemy snipers alone with a weapon everyone mocked. And by the time he was done, nobody was laughing.

To understand why John George was so dangerous, you have to look at who he was before the war. He wasn’t just a soldier, he was a champion. In 1939, at age 23, he won the Illinois State Rifle Championship. He could put five rounds into a 4-in circle from 300 yd away. To him, shooting wasn’t combat. It was mathematics, windage, elevation, breathing.

When he was deployed to Guadal Canal, the Army [music] handed him a standardisssue M1 Garand. It was a good rifle, but the sights were crude iron posts. You couldn’t hit a hidden sniper at 300 yard with it. So, George did something unheard of. He wrote home and asked for his personal hunting rifle to be shipped to the war zone.

When the crate arrived marked fragile, his unit thought he was insane. The Winchester was boltaction. It held only five rounds. It was slow. But it had one thing the Army rifles didn’t. A 2.5 times hunting scope. January 22nd, 9:17 a.m. The battalion commander is desperate. His men are dropping like flies, shot by invisible enemies.

He tells George, “You have until morning to prove that toy works.” George moves into the ruins of an old bunker. He brings no spotter, no radio, just his rifle, a canteen, and his eyes. He scans the trees. The Japanese snipers are clever. They hide in the massive banyan trees, their bodies camouflaged against the dark bark.

Through his scope, George sees it. A tiny movement, a leaf shifting against the wind. 240 yd away, 87 ft up. He sees the shape of a man. The sniper is watching the American supply trail, waiting for a victim. George adjusts his scope. Two clicks for wind. He steadies his breathing. The trigger on his Winchester breaks like glass. Crack.

The sound of the hunting rifle is different. Sharper than a military gun. 240 yard away, the Japanese sniper tumbles from the tree, falling 90 ft to the jungle floor. One shot, one kill. George doesn’t celebrate. He knows how snipers work. They work in pairs. If he killed the shooter, the spotter is nearby. He scans 20 minutes later, he sees him.

Another tree. The spotter is climbing down, trying to escape. Crack! The second man falls. By noon, George has killed five snipers. Word spreads through the lines. The soldiers who laughed at him are now gathering to watch, but George waves them away. “Spects draw fire,” he says. The Japanese realize something is wrong.

Medal of honor

Their snipers are disappearing. They stop moving during the day. They realize they are being hunted by something they haven’t seen before. Day two, January 23rd. The Japanese fight back. At 9:57, mortar shells start landing around George’s bunker. They have triangulated his position.

George grabs his rifle and sprints into the jungle just as his bunker explodes. He relocates to a fallen tree. He is now playing a deadly game of hideand seek with the survivors. He kills his sixth sniper [music] at 290 yard, then his seventh, then his eighth. By the end of day two, the toy rifle has done more damage than an entire platoon of machine guns.

Day three, January 24th. There are three snipers left. These are the best ones, the survivors. They know George is out there. They know his tactics. At 8:17, George spots a sniper in a palm tree, but something is wrong. He’s too low, too exposed. It’s a trap. The Japanese are using a decoy. They want George to shoot the easy target so the real master sniper can spot his muzzle flash and kill him.

George lowers his rifle. He scans the trees around the decoy. 11 minutes later, he finds him. A sniper hidden deep in a banyan tree 80 yard away, watching the decoy. waiting for George to take the bait. George smiles. He decides to spring the trap on his own terms. He shoots the decoy first. Crack. Immediately, the master sniper turns, looking for the shot.

That movement gives him away. George cycles the bolt. Smooth, fast. He swings the crosshairs to the second tree. Crack. The master sniper falls, but the gunshot gives George [music] away. Japanese infantryare moving in. They aren’t snipers. They are a kill squad sent to find him. George is alone. He has a bolt-action rifle against men with machine guns.

He drops into a water-filled crater, submerging himself up to his neck, holding his rifle above the water. He hears voices. They are feet away. A Japanese soldier looks over the rim of the crater. Their eyes meet. George fires from the hip. The soldier falls. George scrambles out of the mud. Two more soldiers appear. He works the bolt.

Click, [music] clack, fires. Works it again. Click, clack, fires. He is out of ammo. He dives into the jungle, bullets shredding the leaves around him. He runs for 90 seconds, lungs burning, until he reaches the American lines. He reports to his commander. Sir, the grove is clear.

In four days, John George killed 11 snipers and three infantry men. He fired 17 shots. He missed zero times. The army stopped laughing. They realized that mass-produced weapons were good for armies, but for precision work, you needed a craftsman. They asked George to start a school. He took 40 men and taught them how to shoot like hunters.

He taught them windage. He taught them patience. He taught them that a rifle is only as good as the man holding it. John George survived the war. He went on to fight in Burma with the famous Merryill’s Marauders. He brought his  Winchester there, too. After the war, he wrote a book called Shots Fired in Anger.

It became a bible for military historians. He died in 2009 at the age of 90. His rifle, the mail order sweetheart, is now in the National Firearms Museum. It sits behind glass. It looks like an ordinary deer rifle, but if you look closely, you can see the scratches from the coral rock of Guadal Canal. You can see the wear on the bolt from those frantic 4 days in January.

It is a silent testament to a simple truth. It’s not the weapon that makes the [music] soldier. It’s the soldier that makes the weapon. And sometimes [music] the most dangerous thing on a battlefield isn’t a tank or a machine gun.