The Mail-Order Rifleman

How a state-champion civilian with a sporting rifle walked alone into Point Cruz—and outshot the Japanese Army’s best snipers.

A Rifle No One Wanted

At 9:17 a.m., January 22, 1943, Second Lieutenant John George crouched inside the wet, broken ribs of a Japanese bunker west of Point Cruz, staring through the glass of a scope everyone else had mocked for six weeks.

Twenty-seven years old.
Illinois state champion.
Zero kills.
A bolt-action “hunting gun” in a war of machine guns.

Around him, Point Cruz’s banyan groves hid killers—eleven Japanese snipers who had taken fourteen American lives in three days.

His commanding officer had called his Winchester Model 70 a toy.
Other platoon leaders called it his mail-order sweetheart.
The armorer had asked whether the Lyman Alaskan scope was meant for deer or Germans.

George had simply said:
“For the Japanese.”

The Army shipped out before his rifle arrived.
It spent six weeks buried in a warehouse in Illinois while he crossed the Pacific.
He arrived on Guadalcanal watching men clean their Garands while his own rifle sat in transit somewhere between home and hell.

Late December, a supply sergeant finally handed him a crate marked FRAGILE.

Inside was the rifle he had saved two years of National Guard pay to buy.

Nine pounds of steel and walnut.
Another twelve ounces of magnifying glass.
Five rounds in the magazine.
Everything stacked against him.

He carried it anyway.

The Island That Killed Quietly

The 132nd Infantry had relieved the Marines in late December.
The Marines had been fighting since August—Henderson Field, the Matanikau, Mount Austen. They’d bled the island dry, but the Japanese hadn’t abandoned the groves west of Point Cruz.

They’d dug into banyan trees as thick as bunker walls.
Some trunks eight feet across, branches ninety feet high.

Snipers waited there.
Men with Arisaka rifles and jungle patience.
Invisible—until someone died.

On January 19, one killed Corporal Davis at a creek.
January 20, two more men went down.
January 21, three more—one shot neatly through the throat from a tree his patrol had passed twice without ever seeing the shooter.

The battalion commander called George in that night.

He didn’t want explanations.
He wanted proof.

George told him about Illinois 1939—
six-inch groups at a thousand yards,
iron-sight precision at six hundred,
five shots inside four inches at three hundred with the very scope sitting in George’s hands.

The commander gave him one night to show whether the rifle could do what the Army said it couldn’t.

The First Shot

Dawn on January 22.
George slid into the broken bunker. No spotter. No radioman. Just 60 rounds and the rifle everyone doubted.

The jungle hissed and buzzed and whispered.
He filtered out the noise, let his breathing settle, let his eyes become patient.

At 9:17, a branch 240 yards away twitched.

No wind.
No reason.

Then another movement—a shape in the fork of a massive banyan tree, eighty-seven feet off the jungle floor.

The Japanese sniper was facing east, toward the supply trail, rifle ready for the morning’s next victim.

George dialed two clicks of windage.
Exhaled.
Squeezed.

Crack.

The body pinwheeled through branches and hit the ground ninety feet below with a dull, distant thud.

One shot.
One ghost cut loose from the treeline.

He chambered another round.

There would be a spotter.
There was always a spotter.

He found the second man twenty minutes later, sixty yards north, climbing down to escape.

George led the movement, squeezed again, and watched the man fall backward into green nothingness.

Two shots.
Two kills.
The grove was suddenly very, very still.

The Deadliest Game in the Jungle

A shot snapped past his head at 11:21, blowing sand and dirt into his face.

He rolled left.
Pressed flat.

The third sniper had seen his muzzle flash.

It took him seventeen minutes to find the man—third tree in a cluster of five banyans, seventy-three feet up, hiding in shadows so dark they looked carved from stone.

George fired.
The figure collapsed without a sound.

By noon, he had five kills.

Men who’d mocked the “toy rifle” now wanted to watch him work. George refused.

Spectators attracted fire.
Fire killed men.

The Japanese learned.
They stopped moving in daylight.

The jungle held its breath.

Rain, Mortars, and the Next Day

January 23rd opened with a sheet of tropical rain.
He waited it out inside the bunker until visibility returned.

At 9:12, he made his sixth kill—290 yards, a sniper who had climbed during the rain so no one would hear.

Five minutes later, the Japanese answered.

Mortars.

The first salvo hit forty yards short.
The second, twenty.

The third would erase the bunker.

George sprinted out as the world behind him blew apart in a white fountain of mud, fire, and sandbags.

Hunting the Hunters

He relocated to a fallen tree north of the blast crater.

He killed his seventh sniper at 14:23.
His eighth at 15:41, a man who had climbed too high and silhouetted himself against the sky.

After nine hours, he returned to Captain Morris.

Eight confirmed kills.
Four misses.

Only three Japanese snipers remained in the Point Cruz groves.

Those three would be the best.

Using Their Own Trick Against Them

January 24.

Rain again.
He moved early—new position, new angles, new odds.

At 8:17, he spotted a Japanese sniper in a palm tree only forty feet up—a strange, sloppy position for a veteran.

It felt wrong.
Too obvious.

Bait.

He scanned the treeline for the real killer—and found him, ninety-one feet up in a banyan, watching George’s old position, waiting for the man with the strange American rifle to reappear.

Two snipers.
One trap.

George aimed at the decoy and fired—
knocking the palm-tree sniper from his perch.

As expected, the real sniper twitched toward the sound.

George swung, fired, and dropped him before the man could disappear.

Two shots.
Two bodies.

But the forest erupted—machine-gun fire tearing through the rocks he’d just abandoned.

He’d been expected.

He ran.
Rolled into a drainage ditch.
Then another crater.
Then another position.

This was no longer sniping.

This was survival.

The Last Two

At 9:47, George realized the eleventh sniper wasn’t in the trees.

He was on the ground—
crawling toward the rocks, tracking George’s movements with the patience of a man who’d outlived ten others.

And he wasn’t alone.

A second soldier covered him from behind a fallen log.

Two men sweeping.
Two rifles.
One American with a bolt-action rifle and five rounds.

George sank into a water-filled crater until only his eyes and the scope’s black rim showed above the surface.

At 10:13, the Japanese team drifted past him—
backs turned, weapons ready, hunting him along the wrong trail.

George rose from the water like a ghost.

Shot the first.

Bolted.
Shot the second.

Eleven shots.
Eleven snipers dead.

Point Cruz was finally quiet.

The Wrong Tracks

Then he heard voices.

A half-dozen Japanese infantrymen, moving through the trees, closing on the very crater where he’d left tracks in the mud.

They found the bodies.
Then his bootprints.

George had two rounds left.

He submerged again as a Japanese soldier leaned over the crater, peering directly into George’s eyes.

George fired from the water.
The man fell backward.

Two more soldiers appeared.
George fired, bolted, fired again.

Three rounds left.
Chaos in the trees.
Shouts closing in.

He sprinted north, dove into another crater, and finally slipped back through the jungle toward American lines.

By 11:13, he was safe.

He reported to Morris:
11 snipers killed over four days.
12 rounds used.
11 hits.
3 additional infantry kills in the firefight.

The groves were cleared.

The Instructor

Division headquarters summoned him the next day.

Colonel Ferry asked if he could train others to do what he had done.

George said yes—if he had the time, the rifles, and shooters who already knew how to think behind a trigger.

Ferry handed him fourteen Springfield rifles with Unertl scopes—Marine sniper rifles left behind on the island—and forty expert marksmen.

On January 27, George started training them east of Henderson Field.

Breathing.
Wind.
Trigger discipline.
Field-expedient rests.
Jungle shooting positions.
Spotter-shooter coordination.

Sixteen two-man teams.

On February 1, they went into the groves.

By February 9, they had killed 74 Japanese soldiers—without a single American casualty.

Guadalcanal was being evacuated.
The Japanese were leaving.

George had changed the mathematics of the jungle.

Burma, Merrill’s Marauders, and a Rifle That Stayed True

A Japanese bullet tore through George’s shoulder on February 7, 1943.
He survived.
Recovered.
Volunteered for another mission.

Burma.

He arrived in India in April 1943.
Joined a unit with no official name yet—just a dangerous reputation in the making.

Merrill’s Marauders.

Long-range penetration.
Jungle marches.
Eight hundred miles on foot.
Mountains.
Rain.
Malaria.
Dysentery.
Combat at fifty feet.

George used his Winchester sparingly—seven shots in three months.
Seven kills.

Modern war had changed.
Dense jungle favored close-range ambushes, not long-range marksmanship.
But his skill saved patrols when it mattered.

When Mitkina fell in May 1944, the Marauders were shadows of themselves.
More dead from disease than bullets.
Exhausted.
Spent.

George made it out.

The Winchester did too.

A Peaceful War

He returned to the U.S. in July 1944.
Promoted to captain.
Assigned to Fort Benning to teach young officers about marksmanship, jungle movement, and calm reasoning under unthinkable pressure.

He kept his Winchester in a footlocker.

The war moved on.
Garands replaced Springfields.
Semi-autos displaced bolt-actions.
Sniping became a formal specialty, not a side-skill of a stubborn lieutenant with a mail-order rifle.

George left the Army in 1947.
Went to Princeton.
Graduated with highest honors.
Then to Oxford.
Then to East Africa, studying political systems.

He entered a quieter life—
consulting, analysis, diplomacy.

In 1947 he wrote down what happened on Guadalcanal and Burma.
Not for glory.
For accuracy.

Shots Fired in Anger became a classic—still used, still read, still cited.

He lived long enough to see sniping reborn in Korea, reinvented in Vietnam, and refined afterward.

George died on January 3, 2009, ninety years old.