From the Naval Hospital in San Diego came an unforgettable story of valor on a bloody night on jungled Guadalcanal. On an iron hospital cot lay Marine Private Albert A. Schmid, 23, husky son of a Philadelphia brewery worker, who, on a moonlight night last August, manned a machine gun that almost singlehandedly cut off an enemy advance.
With two others (John Rivers of Philadelphia and Lee Diamond of New York), Schmid was lying mouse-quiet in a machine-gun nest on the bank of a sluggish river dividing the American-held beachhead from Jap territory. The long-expected attack came early in the morning....