Aaron Leslie Gelzer was the son of Russian immigrant Joseph Gelzer and Polish/Russian immigrant Pauline ______. He was born in New York but was raised and educated in New Jersey.

The 1940 U.S. Census Shows the family as living in Harrison, Hudson county, New Jersey. The following names are shown as living in the home at that time:
Head Joseph Gelzer M 48 Russia
Wife Pauline Gelzer F 44 Poland
Son Aaron Gelzer M 21 New York
Dau Mildred Gelzer F 16 New Jersey
Dau Ethel Gelzer F 8 New Jersey

Aaron was working as a grocery store clerk when he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps on August 16, 1940. After he completed boot camp he reported to the 5th Marine Regiment at Quantico, Virginia and soon departed to Guantanamo Bay with "L" Company. Aaron qualified as a specialist with the Browning Automatic Rifle.

The 5th Marines soon deployed to Wellington, New Zealand, for further training before they took the war to the Japanese. But not long after their arrival, the training time was greatly reduced and the Regiment was prepped for an amphibious landing at a place in the Solomon Islands named Guadalcanal. The intelligence information was sparse and, as Aaron and the intelligence men would learn, unreliable.

The landing on Guadalcanal went unopposed. The Japanese waited in the jungle for the coming battle with the Marines. The Intelligence Section set about gathering and analyzing information they gleaned from the area. On August 12th, a Marine patrol from the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, captured a Japanese soldier named Sakado, found in their area. The Marines learned that the Japanese west of the Matanikau River were a disorganized and demoralized group, short on food and in poor health. They could, Sakado thought, be induced to surrender given the proper conditions.

The commander of the Intelligence Section, Colonel Frank Bryan Goettge, had been annoyed by the rush job that intelligence had been forced into in New Zealand and the now apparent shortcomings in maps and other data were becoming more evident. Sakado was a godsend. Col. Goettge sent First Sergeant Custer to organize a patrol, which Goettge himself would lead. They would take an interpreter, a doctor, a good portion of the intelligence section and some riflemen for support, and boat across to a secluded beach where a white flag had reportedly been seen. They would convince the Japanese there to surrender and work their way back to Headquarters the next day, with Goettge presumably at the head of a cluster of happily surrendered Japanese.

First Sergeant Custer formulated a patrol and timetable for it to be launched but Col. Goettge made significant changes. The reorganization took hours, causing Custer's original timetable to be thrown off. Worried about the changes and the late start, Captain Wilfred H. "Bill" Ringer, the patrol's second in command found Captain Lyman Spurlock of L/3/5 and asked if he could send a relief patrol if something went wrong. Spurlock demurred, saying "It would be difficult at night."

The patrol, consisting of 25 men plus Sakado (who was led by a rope around his neck at different times by Custer and Platoon Sergeant Caltrider) set out from the camp at Kukum at about 1800 hours – a twelve hour delay caused by the numerous personnel changes. The men were traveling light, carrying enough food for one day, a canteen, a poncho, and only light weapons (Custer had wanted heavy machine-guns but Col. Goettge denied this request).

Due to tidal issues, the delay caused another problem – it was now too late to risk heading for the original landing site. Ignoring the warnings of Lieutenant Colonel Bill Whaling and the cries of Sakado, who begged them not to land there, the boat turned for shore and landed about 200 yards west of the Matanikau. The boat ran up on a sandbar, forcing the Marines to jump over the gun-whales and rock it free, creating quite a racket. They waded in to shore and, taking cover behind a line of banyan trees, held a quick council of war. All the noise they had made and now this pause gave the Japanese soldiers of the 2nd Platoon, 11th CU Security Force under Lt. Soichi Shindo, plenty of time to pick their targets. As Col. Goettge led an advance party into the treeline, two shots rang out. Col. Goettge fell dead with a shot to the head. Custer, who was at Gottege's side, was shot in the arm and fell seriously wounded across his Colonel's body. Two Marines who crawled forward to check on the men recovered Goettge's insignia and wristwatch. Command passed to Captain Ringer, who had dragged the mortally wounded Custer back to the perimeter as there was no cover on the beach, yelled an order to call back the boat. One of the corporals ran into the surf and fired wildly in the air at the still visible boat, but to no avail. The Marines were trapped. Soon, Captain Ringer himself was wounded. The regiment's interpreter, Lieutenant Cory, was down with an agonizing stomach wound. Regimental Surgeon Dr. Malcolm Pratt,USN, was shot while tending to a wounded man. Every few minutes, a Marine was hit. As more Marines dropped, killed or wounded, Captain Ringer called for Corporal William Bainbridge and ordered him to head back along the beach to the American perimeter to get help. Bainbridge set off at a run and disappeared into the darkness never to be seen alive again (Cpl. Bainbridge's bullet riddled body would be found by a Marine Patrol a week later, several hundred yards from where the Goettge Patrol was massacred. He was buried were he fell).

The survivors formed a defensive perimeter on the beach, and over the course of the night and following morning the Marines were gradually picked off by the Japanese defenders. By dawn, the patrol had been wiped out aside from three survivors who managed to swim back to friendly lines one at a time. They reported seeing Japanese swords "flashing in the sun" as they fell upon the wounded and dead.

The bodies of the Goettge Patrol were never recovered. There were accounts of knowing where they were and that they had been thrown into fighting trenches and covered up. There were at least three reports over the following weeks after the fight that the bodies were partially buried in the sand with limbs sticking out of the makeshift graves. One report, made by a Marine years later stated he was on patrol at the scene of the slaughter and personally saw the mutilated bodies of Goettge's patrol to include decapitated torsos and boots with limbs still attached. But no bodies were ever recovered. One of those torso's, still had on it's Herringbone twill combat shirt with the rank of First Sergeant stenciled to the sleeve. It is believed, this was the remains of First Sergeant Custer. Aaron Gelzer was one of those sets of remains.

Sometime during the skirmish, Aaron Leslie Gelzer was killed. His body, as well as the remains of the rest of the men who died with him, are lost to this day. Several recovery attempts over the past 70 years have found nothing and it is suspected now that building in the area and the change of the shoreline will result in the patrol's remains never being recovered.

At the time of his death, Aaron's parents were living at 300 North Third Street, Harrison, New Jersey.

Corporal Aaron Leslie Gelzer, Sn# 292230, earned the following badges/decorations for his service in the United States Marine Corps during World War II:
- Combat Action Ribbon
- Purple Heart Medal
- American Defense Service Medal
- Asiatic-Pacific Theater of Operations campaign Medal with one bronze battle/campaign star
- World War II Victory Medal
- Navy/Marine Corps Presidential Unit Citation Ribbon
- Marine Corps Rifle marksmanship badge
- Marine Corps Basic Qualification Badge with Automatic Rifle Bar, et. al.

**NOTE** - A large portion of this bio is based on information from the website missingmarines.com. They have done a fantastic job of researching approximately 3000 US Marines whose bodies were lost in the war. This writer wholeheartedly recommends their site for researchers or families of the missing. - Rick Lawrence, MSgt., USMC/USAFR {RET})