On August 7 th Pope and his “leathernecks” stormed the beach and surged inland to secure the island’s airfield, labeled Henderson Field in honor of Marine pilot Lofton Henderson who was killed in the June Battle of Midway. The campaign was designed to protect Allied forces in Australia. In June 1942 Lieutenant Everett Pope, leading a platoon in the 1 st Marine Regiment’s 1 st Battalion, boarded a troop ship bound for the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific as part of the U.S. With the outbreak of war, it was only a matter of time before Everett received orders to ship out for distant battlefields. He was still there when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, hurtling the United States into World War II. On November 1 st he was commissioned a second lieutenant and posted to Quantico, Virginia, and later the Marine base at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, for additional training. During basic training, he demonstrated such natural leadership that his superiors recommended him for Officer Candidate School.
Soon after, having been captivated by the presentation of a Marine recruiter he met on campus, Everett enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. He graduated magna cum laude and a member of the prestigious Phi Beta Kappa honor society in 1941. While there, Pope captained the championship tennis team and earned a degree in French. Chamberlain who won the Medal of Honor for his defense of Little Round Top. After high school, he attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, the alma mater of Gettysburg hero Joshua L. He was born in July 1919 in Milton, Massachusetts but later moved to the Boston suburb of North Quincy. This is the story of how his gallant assault and then defense of Hill 154 won him the Congressional Medal of Honor.Įven before the United States entered World War II, Everett Pope embarked on a career in the U.S.
He soon found himself in the battle of his life. He knew well the Japanese’s ferocity, for he had previously witnessed their determination to die rather than shame themselves, at least in their eyes, by surrendering. Among those who fought their way ashore before pushing inland was a U.S. troops landed on a six-mile coral and limestone landmass in the Palau Islands of the western Pacific known as Peleliu. Vicious fights had raged from the beginning, but some of the fiercest battles still lay ahead. counterattacked in 1942, and by the fall of 1944 American forces were within two thousand miles of Japan.
Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on the island nation during his celebrated “Day of Infamy” speech. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, President Franklin D. On December 8, 1941, the day after Imperial Japan launched a surprise attack on the U.S.
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