Two incidents afforded comic relief... One incident involved the 200-300 head of cattle, with the wire removed from their fences (NOTE: Marines had "appropriated" the barbed wire to reinforce their positions), they roamed the perimeter as a kind of mobile food dump. Inevitably a Japanese bomb started a stampede. Respecters of neither rank nor dignity, the terrified bovines crashed straight through the command post of the 1st Marines, leaving a wake of destruction. It was one of the most bizarre episodes of the war in the South Pacific.

In another, the Marines held as an article of faith that no Japanese soldier could get his tongue around an English L. Thus passwords ran to the likes of"polyglot," "Lilliputian," and "bilious." A few nights after the landing a small party of Japanese, or perhaps some starving laborers or overactive imaginations, provoked a good deal of indiscriminate firing near the airstrip. While it was not a unique episode in these first anxious nights ashore, the Marines remembered it because fervent cries of the password by endangered leathernecks filled the night. It became ever afterward known as "Hallelujah Night."

--GUADALCANAL: THE DEFINITIVE ACCOUNT by Richard B. Frank