Captain Louis H. Wilson Jr., the 24-year-old "skipper" of Company F, 2d Battalion, Ninth Marine Regiment, would some day become the 26th Commandant of the Marine Corps, but on 26 July 1944, he figured he'd be lucky just to see tomorrow.
He'd been wounded three times the previous day. But Wilson had stubborn tenacity embedded in his soul. There he was on a knoll called Fonte Hill somewhere in the Pacific Ocean with about 20,000 others wresting Guam, a 212-square-mile island in the Marianas chain, from more than 18,500 Japanese soldiers.
Two and a half years earlier on 10 Dec. 1941, Guam had become the first U.S. territory to fall when 5,500 Japanese forced the 337 members of the American garrison and Chamorro Insular Guard, after a brief but spirited fight, to surrender. The time had come to take Guam back.
The task fell to Major General Roy S. Geiger's III Amphibious Corps and, in particular, to the infantry and artillery regiments of the Third Marine Division and the leathernecks of 1st Provisional Marine Brigade. Most of the division Marines were combat veterans of Bougainville.
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