Hero of the Pacific (5 page)

Heavy machine guns are defensive weapons that don't usually play much of a role in a probing patrol like this one in rough enemy country, but if this was Basilone's first serious combat, it wasn't dull. What had begun as a “probe” was becoming something else. The 1st Raider Battalion was now involved, and so was Colonel Red Mike Edson, the former Raider who now commanded the 5th Marine Regiment. Vandegrift on the twenty-seventh ordered Edson to take charge of the expanded force that included Puller's fresh but inexperienced battalion. When faulty intelligence caused Red Mike to believe that one of his battalions was advancing when in actuality it had been stopped by Japanese who crossed the river by night, he ordered Puller to take his men by small boats around the enemy flank to land and move inland.

It was a clever tactical idea, but too complicated, and the relatively green 1st Battalion soon found itself cut off on the beach and, covered by gunfire from a convenient American destroyer, was forced to evacuate by sea (Puller himself having gone out in a small boat to the destroyer
Ballard
to make the arrangements and signal back to his men on the beach) and find its way back to the perimeter. The fighting was confused and uncoordinated, and along with the newly arrived 7th Marines (Basilone and his comrades), both the Raiders and the 5th Marines also were forced to pull back from the Matanikau. It was typical of combat at that stage on Guadalcanal that the three-day battle didn't even rate a name. But all the to-ing and fro-ing gained no ground and cost sixty Marine dead and a hundred wounded. The newly arrived Marines were learning, and it was a painful schooling.

Welcome to the war, Manila John.

In September 1942, a month after the fight began, Manila John and the 7th Marines finally left Samoa, sailing in convoy to join up with the other two Marine regiments fighting on Guadalcanal. For Basilone's arrival at the war we have to turn from the historian Henry Shaw to Basilone's sister Phyllis Basilone Cutter's serialized newspaper account, written well after the fact and by a civilian who didn't seem to understand the difference between the 7th Marine Regiment, which was John's outfit, and the 7th Marine Division, which never existed, then or now. Such criticism may seem trivial and somewhat hard on a family member, but since numerous articles, one monograph, and a hardcover book have been published that are to an extent reliant on Phyllis's recollections, an analysis of her work is justified. Here then, caveats established, is how she describes, supposedly in her brother's words, the time just before he reached the island: “The Japs were putting reinforcements in nightly and now the talk was maybe our boys would be driven off the island and into the sea. We could not understand where our Navy was. Why couldn't they have stopped the Jap transports? We didn't know our Navy had taken quite a beating, even though they won the sea battle, the losses were costly and the Japs were still pouring in.” If John here is referring to the battle of Savo Island, our Navy didn't win the sea battle; it had been massacred, losing four heavy cruisers.

“Suddenly on Friday morning September 18, 1942, the loudspeakers blared,” Basilone recalled on the transport, “‘All Marines go to your debarkation stations!' We climbed the narrow ladders to positions on the deck above the cargo nets draped over the side and heard the squeaking of the davits as they were swung out and landing craft lowered. The whole length of the ship was swarming with Marines scrambling down the nets into the boats. One by one the boats scooted off to the rendez-vous areas where they awaited, circling. Breaking out of the tight circles, wave after wave sped for the beach.

“Our landing was unopposed and we poured in.”

Marine Ops
reports simply, “The reinforced 7th Marines unloaded its 4,262 men,” as three other transports, also peacefully, delivered aviation fuel, ammo, engineering equipment, and the like along the same tranquil stretch of coastline.

Phyllis's account of her brother's landing makes it sound dramatic, while the official account dismisses it as a mere “unloading.” Her newspaper series, with Basilone now ashore on the embattled island, then wanders into pulp magazine fiction, and it seems reasonable to suggest that some of the Basilone lore about his combat experiences from this point on derives from his sister's fanciful journalism and not necessarily from the facts. If there are Marines and others who question any of Basilone's feats of arms, they should consider that the man himself wasn't making these absurd claims; it was his loving sister many years later who conjured up the theatricals.

A week would pass before the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, was sent into concerted action (on September 24), in the so-called probe by Chesty Puller, as recounted by Shaw. With so many men involved and in rough country, there surely must have been a few earlier skirmishes and spontaneous firefights and shelling. But Phyllis has young Johnny Basilone, new to battle, starting to take over the war. Still quoting her brother: “This was the morning of the 24th [a week or so after their landing] and after about five hours of the toughest trail-breaking imaginable, we halted for a breather. Our advance scouts sent word back that a heavy patrol of Japs was on the trail ahead. We had not expected to encounter the enemy this side of the Matanikau River.”

Here is where the writing really takes glorious flight: “Captain Rodgers [the company commander, it appears] felt we could try to entrap this patrol by encircling them with a ring of machine gun fire. At the same time being fully aware of the enemy's reputation for trickery, he decided he would call on the 2nd Marines for help. Calling me to his side, the Captain said, ‘Sergeant, take three machine gun crews up to try and clean up that nest of Japs.'”

This entire passage is ridiculous. Marine company commanders issue their orders through their lieutenants, not their machine-gun sergeants, unless in extreme circumstances. Why would a Marine officer send out three heavily burdened machine-gun crews in thick jungle country to encircle or ambush anybody, especially a number of enemy troops described as “a heavy patrol”? They would send lighter-burdened, faster-moving riflemen, possibly a four-man fire team or squad, depending on the situation. Once the riflemen located the enemy, the machine guns could be brought up or sited on high ground to support an assault on the enemy with overhead fire. To use heavily laden machine-gun crews as scouts far out ahead of the swifter riflemen goes against reason.

And no Marine captain would confide to a sergeant that he was about to go outside the chain of command and his own battalion commander to ask yet another regiment, the 2nd Marines, to back him up—especially not with a battalion commander as fearsome as the terrible-tempered Puller.

The rest of Phyllis's account has Basilone wiping out enemy soldiers right and left. He had been a week on the island, and already “all the newness was worn off by now. We were dirty, tired and mean.” The generally sensible Bruce W. Doorly, in his monograph about Basilone, the privately published
Raritan's Hero
, seems to have bought into the Phyllis Cutter version in his own variation on the incident:

“A U.S. patrol had spotted a small group of Japanese on a scouting mission. John was told to bring three machine gun crews and wipe out the enemy, hopefully leaving no survivors that would bring information back to enemy headquarters. Guadalcanal was jungle with low visibility. John and his group snaked their way quietly [dragging those heavy guns?] toward the location where the U.S. patrol had seen the Japanese. Luckily the Marines spotted them undetected. Basilone led the group, moving in closest to observe that the Japanese had stopped to eat, obviously unaware of his presence. Moving back toward his men, John instructed them to set up in a half-circle around the unsuspecting enemy. He cleared his forehead, wiped his eyes. Then started firing his machine gun. The rest of his group also opened fire. John observed the Japanese reacting as they were shot. He later said, ‘They seemed to be dancing up and down. I forgot to realize the impact of heavy bullets was jerking them into all sorts of crazy contortions.'”

The new-to-combat Marines had been warned about treachery and enemy tricks, playing dead, for one. “John decided to take no chances. He walked around, finishing off the enemy, making sure they were dead by firing a short burst from his machine gun. One of John's men, Bob Powell, said, ‘Jesus, Sarge, what the hell are you doing? Why waste ammo on dead ones?' Just as Bob finished his words, a supposedly dead Japanese soldier jumped up with his gun in hand. Another of John's men quickly shot him down.”

Wrote Doorly, “On the way back to camp two of his men got sick. This was everyone's first taste of war. They were very fortunate . . . they suffered no casualties.”

While Doorly's version of that first real firefight is more controlled than that of sister Phyllis, there appears to be a need here among Basilone chroniclers, fans if you will, to make him even from the very start somewhat larger than life, bigger, braver, deadlier. But neither account of a first Guadalcanal firefight by Basilone rings true.

Manila John needed none of this tarting up. He was an authentic hero, the real goods. He was a warrior who fought with an extraordinary courage and resolve, with strength and an instinctive canniness far beyond what might be expected of a man of his background and age (he was twenty-five at Guadalcanal), killing a lot of seasoned enemy troops, and he would be rewarded by a nation with medals and gratitude. But people apparently felt they had to create a Basilone of their own, to concoct and exaggerate, regardless of the hard reality, however difficult it was to ascertain entirely who John really was. And phony yarns gained currency, when really there was no need, only this compulsion to inflate and imagine. It may be that units of Puller's battalion, possibly including John and some of his gunners under Captain Rodgers, did actually stumble across some Japanese carelessly eating lunch without any perimeter security and wiped them out with machine-gun fire, but it borders on the fantastic to accept that the action came about when a machine-gun unit was sent on a combat patrol unaccompanied by riflemen, or that one of Puller's captains would breach the chain of command, asking support from another regiment. And in a machine-gun platoon, their sergeant doesn't have “his” machine gun. He directs the fire of others. But here Basilone does most of the firing himself. In that far-fetched “first fight,” if it ever happened, the legend of Manila John began to emerge.

He and his gunners were certainly part of that very real and quite bloody “probe” by Puller's battalion in which the Marines took 160 casualties. But with versions of the incident surfacing here and there that have the Japanese caught at lunch, you have to consider the possibility that Basilone had gotten through at least one efficient if rather one-sided firefight
before
Puller's battalion completed its somewhat screwed-up first probe.

Battle, especially for green troops, is always confused, chaotic, frightening, and few men remember its details in precisely the same way. Quite possibly not even Manila John, still new to combat, could tell you precisely what happened in his first firefight and when. The problem is simply that the vision of Basilone wielding a fifty-pound heavy machine gun delivering the coup de grâce to wounded enemy soldiers, firing bursts into their prone bodies, is patently absurd. No Marine with any combat experience will fail to recognize gaps in the narrative. And there is no mention of the incident in Shaw or
Marine Ops
.

There would be more heavy fighting for the lately arrived Marines on October 9 when they crossed the Matanikau River and attacked north. In a three-day fight Puller's battalion (with Basilone) and other units were credited with killing or wounding 799 members of the Japanese 4th Infantry. General Alexander Vandegrift knew the Japanese were building up for a major offensive—reinforcements were being landed on the 'Canal almost every night under cover of darkness—yet another attempt to retake Henderson Field, as the Marines had named their captured Japanese airfield (to honor Marine pilot Captain Lofton R. Henderson, killed flying against the Japanese fleet at Midway).

As has long been Marine infantry philosophy, Vandegrift intended to use constant aggressive combat patrols, raids, and probes in force to upset Japanese plans, unbalance the enemy, render it more difficult for them to build up and attack in great force. Of Basilone's regiment, the official USMC operations history notes, “In the short time that men of the 7th Marines had been ashore on the island, they had earned a right to identification as veteran troops. So with a complete combat-wise Marine Division of three infantry regiments, the 1st, 5th, and 7th by now on hand, plus an artillery regiment, the 11th—and Army reinforcements on the way [their good 164th Infantry commanded by Colonel Robert Hall was already on the island and being gradually fed into the line]—Vandegrift and his staff made plans to meet the strong Japanese attack that was bearing down on them.” It would likely be a defensive battle with General Vandegrift and his officers relying on heavy machine guns, such as those of Basilone's platoon.

Thus was the situation in mid-October, the awful terrain and even the weather, with two powerful forces roughly in balance and about to clash, as summed up in the
History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II
, volume 1. The Japanese moved toward Henderson Field along the jungle track named, rather grandly, the “Maruyama Trail,” for their apparently vain new general, scratched out of the inhospitable bush by Japanese engineers. At the terminal of the trail Japanese troops would assemble for their assault on what would come to be known as Bloody (or Edson's) Ridge, where Puller's battalion and other Marine units would make their stand. From
Marine Ops
here is the situation from the enemy's point of view: “Heavy rain fell almost every day. The van of the single-file advance often had completed its day's march and bivouacked for the night before the rear elements were able to move. Troops weakened on their half-ration of rice. Heavy artillery pieces [vital to the siege tactics lying ahead] had to be abandoned along the route, and mortars also became too burdensome to manage. Frequently unsure of their exact location in the jungle, the Japanese by 19 October still had not crossed the upper Lunga, and Maruyama [their new commander] postponed his assault until the 22nd. Meanwhile, General Sumiyoshi's fifteen ‘Pistol Petes' [Japanese aircraft] pounded the Lunga perimeter, air attacks continued, and Imperial warships steamed brazenly into Sealark Channel almost every night to shell the airfield, beaches, and Marine positions.”