Warriors In Their Own Words | First Person War Stories
Jul 16, 2026 · 54 min · 13 segments
During World War II, the United States Marines played a central role in the battle for the islands of the Pacific. Marine Corps veteran Bill Swanson was often in the first wave to hit the beach in…
When I first went on the Marine Corps as a private and going into the 3rd Marine Division where the first job I had was assistant BAR man.
BAR is the Squad Automatic Rifle and kind of one of the least envious jobs because you have to carry extra weight.
A rifleman would carry his own cartridge belt and rifle plus a bandolier of 12 magazines for the BAR.
I kept that job for about a year and then as the war went on I still stayed in the rifle platoon and did most of the jobs that are involved in there.
Mostly riflemen, B.A.R. men at times and you do scouting and various things of that nature but coming down to it basically a rifleman
was it.
The rifleman, actually, that's who takes the ground and gets down to the nitty-gritty of the fighting.
In the scheme of things, there's riflemen who do things and there's riflemen who do other things, and depending on the kind of fighting that you're in and the campaign and all, you might do a variety of things, but basically, It's getting out there with a rifle, just moving forward, trying to take whatever ground that you're assigned to take.
But if they didn't or whatever, then you have to do whatever you're called upon to do.
which might be moving into, say, a little pillbox or some kind of a fortification with grenades or, at worst, with a bayonet, something of that nature.
There were individual Japanese trying to do the same thing to you that you're trying to do to them, and they were hidden.
But the defenders are laying back, and in the jungles particularly, they were very hard to spot.
You could go for, and I'm sure many men that were riflemen in front-line outfits probably never saw a Japanese soldier because They just were so well hidden that you couldn't always spot them.
You might shoot into an area where you think they were and maybe you would get some, maybe you wouldn't.
They also used psychological warfare to the extent that they would pull their dead and their wounded back whenever possible so that you wouldn't know that you had succeeded.
You had taken ground, but did you really take care of any of the enemies? In the later campaigns, when we were dealing more with heavier concentrations of troops, then the attacking was done by little larger groups.
And it sometimes still came down to the old squad, which is basically who wins the wars.
When I first went on the Marine Corps as a private and going into the 3rd Marine Division where the first job I had was assistant BAR man.
BAR is the Squad Automatic Rifle and kind of one of the least envious jobs because you have to carry extra weight.
A rifleman would carry his own cartridge belt and rifle plus a bandolier of 12 magazines for the BAR.
I kept that job for about a year and then as the war went on I still stayed in the rifle platoon and did most of the jobs that are involved in there.
Mostly riflemen, B.A.R. men at times and you do scouting and various things of that nature but coming down to it basically a rifleman
was it.
The rifleman, actually, that's who takes the ground and gets down to the nitty-gritty of the fighting.
In the scheme of things, there's riflemen who do things and there's riflemen who do other things, and depending on the kind of fighting that you're in and the campaign and all, you might do a variety of things, but basically, It's getting out there with a rifle, just moving forward, trying to take whatever ground that you're assigned to take.
But if they didn't or whatever, then you have to do whatever you're called upon to do.
which might be moving into, say, a little pillbox or some kind of a fortification with grenades or, at worst, with a bayonet, something of that nature.
There were individual Japanese trying to do the same thing to you that you're trying to do to them, and they were hidden.
But the defenders are laying back, and in the jungles particularly, they were very hard to spot.
You could go for, and I'm sure many men that were riflemen in front-line outfits probably never saw a Japanese soldier because They just were so well hidden that you couldn't always spot them.
You might shoot into an area where you think they were and maybe you would get some, maybe you wouldn't.
They also used psychological warfare to the extent that they would pull their dead and their wounded back whenever possible so that you wouldn't know that you had succeeded.
You had taken ground, but did you really take care of any of the enemies? In the later campaigns, when we were dealing more with heavier concentrations of troops, then the attacking was done by little larger groups.
And it sometimes still came down to the old squad, which is basically who wins the wars.
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