Hero of the Pacific (6 page)

Now, from our side's vantage point, according to
Marine Ops
: “The tempo of action was obviously building up for the counteroffensive, and Marines and soldiers worked constantly to improve their field fortifications and keep up an aggressive patrol schedule. Patrols did not go far enough afield however to discover Maruyama's wide-swinging enveloping force, and recons to the east found no indications of a Japanese build-up on that flank. Thus General Vandegrift and his staff were aware only of Sumiyoshi's threat along the coast from the west. There the first probe came on 20 October.”

It was in the Bloody Ridge area on the Lunga River line that the Japanese began testing the Marine lines and outposts, searching for soft spots and lack of security, with infantry patrols and a few tanks. An early probe on the west bank of the Matanikau turned back when one tank was hit by 37mm fire from the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines. For weeks General Hyakutake had tried but failed to take Henderson Field and so end the thing, and now a new general, Maseo Maruyama, who had flown in to command the 17th Japanese Army, was determined that this offensive would be successful. He was confident he would retake the airfield and swing the battle for Guadalcanal his way. He commanded a famous Japanese outfit, the crack Sendai Division freshly arrived from the big enemy base of Rabaul, to spearhead the effort, and at noon on October 24 he issued a battle order that contained an ominous, if somewhat grandiose, sentence: “In accordance with plans of my own, I intend to exterminate the enemy around the airfield in one blow.”

One of the units waiting for him, and for that menacing “one blow,” was Chesty Puller's 1st Battalion of the 7th Marines.

On the twenty-third, the Japanese attack on the Matanikau River had been beaten back, the attackers cut to pieces. Ironically, 1st Marine Division commanding officer Alexander Vandegrift wasn't even on Guadalcanal during the crucial fighting of October 23-25. Instead, he was in Noumea for a meeting with Admiral “Bull” Halsey. In his stead, Major General Roy Geiger, though an aviator, but being senior man on board, was left in command. And Geiger knew that despite the enemy's appalling losses of the twenty-third, they would be coming back, however many times it took. That was how the Japanese operated and one reason they were so formidable. Everyone knew the little airfield was at stake, the battle was now in the balance and could swing either way—and with it might go the entire Guadalcanal campaign.

At sea the heavyweights were also squaring up. Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, having succeeded a dilatory commander (Robert Ghormley), was now running the overall Guadalcanal campaign, land and sea, and senior Marine officers who knew his hard-charging reputation were delighted. With Halsey on the case, the Navy and Washington itself would be paying attention to a distant front too often on short rations and a slim budget. Halsey and his fleet were now at sea following the parley at Noumea, steaming toward the Solomons with two carriers, two battleships, nine cruisers, and twenty-four destroyers. Arrayed against them, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Japan's top naval commander, had sailed with four carriers, five battleships, fourteen cruisers, and forty-four destroyers. Aircraft from both sides were up. Clearly some sort of major clash of arms was coming, on the island and in the air and sea above and around it.

Chesty Puller's 1st Battalion of the 7th Marines had a mile and a half of ridgeline front to defend. Such a long front held by a single Marine rifle battalion, a thousand men or so, was painfully stretched, with little depth. Out in front of the main line of resistance, the MLR, Chesty had a few outposts, and he was nervous about those. The 2nd Battalion of the regiment (my own outfit eight years later in North Korea), commanded on the 'Canal by Colonel Herman Hanneken, had been pulled out of the line guarding Henderson Field on the south and sent toward the Matanikau, which was why Puller was spread so thin. Hanneken, a former enlisted Marine, soft-spoken but dangerous, an officer who would himself pull a weapon (Mitchell Paige in his book reports that Hanneken once shot a sniper out of a tree with a single shot from a handgun), had previously fought side by side with Puller, the two men so very different in style and temperament but both of them fighters.

Robert Leckie in his
Challenge for the Pacific
, describes Puller's demeanor before the battle as he worked to get everyone in the battalion except the mortarmen up into the thin green line of his lightly held front: “In the morning and afternoon [of October 24] Puller roved his lines, chomping on his cold stump of pipe, removing it to bellow orders (‘We don't need no communications system,' his men boasted, ‘we got Chesty!'), or speaking through teeth clamped firmly around the stem. Puller's manner was urgent because a young Marine who had fallen behind a patrol that morning had seen Japanese officers studying his position through field glasses. Puller urged his men to dig deeper, but when he came to one position he pulled his pipe from his mouth, pointed at the hole with it, and grunted: ‘Son, if you dig that hole any deeper, Ah'll have to charge you with desertion.'” The Marine grinned, and Puller strode on, pleased to see that Manila John Basilone had fortified his “pair of machine guns almost in the exact center of the line.”

This is an interesting moment. Leckie, who fought on Guadalcanal and later wrote about it, may have recorded the first interaction of Puller, the legendary battalion commander, with Basilone, the machine-gun sergeant. Marine battalion commanders usually know, or know of, most of their men at least by sight, but such precise recognition by a colonel of a single sergeant on the eve of battle is hardly typical. Given that machine guns play such a crucial role in a battalion's tactics on defense, however, Puller would understandably take more than a casual interest in Basilone and the placement of his weapons. In any event, that is what Leckie reports happened early in the day of what would be, for Manila John, the climactic moment of his young life, and for the colonel, one of the epic combat commands of the war so far. And for anyone who questions just how professional a Marine Basilone had been, that perfect positioning of his guns is telling.

In the Marine Corps a battalion commander holding a defensive line is personally responsible for the location of all of his machine guns. No platoon commander or even company commander has that responsibility, and certainly no sergeant. But here we have the veteran Puller with all his combat savvy, his Navy Crosses, his experience in the “Banana Wars,” approving Basilone's placement of his machine guns at precisely the right spot. Where did Manila John pick up that much tactical know-how? Maybe the son of a peaceful Italian tailor in Raritan was just an instinctive warrior. Back home, at Gaburo's Laundry or the country club's caddy shack, who would have thought?

Unknown to the Americans, Japanese general Maruyama had issued orders for the attacking assault troops to jump off against the Marine line of resistance that afternoon at five p.m. Leckie continues reporting on Puller's behavior as the fight neared: “Colonel Puller returned to his ‘command post'—not much of a place but simply a field telephone hardly ten yards behind his line—to repeat his request for permission to withdraw his outpost platoon. He was convinced the enemy was coming, and he feared that the forty men on outpost would be needlessly sacrificed. But his argument—couched in ungentle roars—was unavailing. The men stayed outside the line. “Finally, Puller had all of the field phones opened so that every company and platoon could hear every message. And then the rain came down.”

To those of us who open umbrellas when the first drop falls, the sheer weight, volume, and shattering noise of a tropical rain squall is likely beyond our experience. The rain blurred vision and intensified the jungle gloom. Under its battering, men blinked and ducked, squinting as daylight turned to premature dusk, the ground beneath their feet becoming slippery and then viscous slime, and soon sucking, clotting mud. The rain fell that afternoon not only on the Marines but on the Japanese preparing their offensive. And the newly arrived General Maruyama had no conception of what the downpour might do to confuse and disconcert a large body of troops traveling by foot through hard country on their approach march to battle in dense jungle conditions and fading light.

Five o'clock came and went without the scheduled and anticipated attack. It's possible to imagine the thoughts of rain-soaked Marines as they waited for their rendezvous with the enemy and with their own fate. The 7th Marines knew the quality of the Japanese troops they were fighting, and were by now reasonably confident of their own abilities and resources; John Basilone's tactical placement of his guns was evidence of how Puller's battalion had matured to veteran status.

Combat soldiers can rarely agree on just what happened and when in a firefight. And consequently there exist different versions of just what Basilone and his machine gunners did and how they performed in the crucial battle about to commence.

Can a single night define a man's entire life? There are a half dozen accounts of just what John Basilone did that Saturday night on Guadalcanal on October 24, 1942, some conflicting, others confused and contradictory. Let's assess them all and pass our own judgments. But take in and remember what his battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller, believed he saw and to which he later attested in his recommendation for a medal. You may even choose to argue with Chesty, although few Marines would.

Here is the situation. Late in the afternoon the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, learned they were not only facing General Tadashi Sumiyoshi's command but another, and unexpected, flanking move by Maseo Maruyama, when an enemy officer was spotted on high ground south of the airport studying Bloody Ridge with field glasses, and then a scout-sniper report came in from that same quarter of “many rice fires” two miles south of Puller's extended line.
Marine Ops
acknowledges that at this moment, with the fight not yet begun, the Marines seemed to hold a significant advantage in heavy weapons. As noted, the Japanese had left behind, strewn along the difficult Maruyama Trail, all of their heavy artillery and had even discarded most of their mortars. While the entrenched Marines were supported by all of their own mortars and heavier guns, there was some early hope of moonlight to aid the gunners in zeroing in on enemy targets. But though the rains slackened briefly toward seven p.m. (according to Robert Leckie), heavy rains came again and full darkness settled in on the front. Yet it was then that Maruyama ordered his left-flank regiment, the 29th Infantry, forward toward the main line of resistance.

Leckie reports that Sergeant Ralph Briggs Jr. called in from the outpost and reached Puller. Speaking softly, Briggs said, “Colonel, there's about three thousand Japs between you and me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. They've been all around us, singing and smoking cigarettes, heading your way.”

“All right, Briggs, but make damned sure. Take your men to the left—understand me? Go down and pass through the lines near the sea. I'll call 'em to let you in. Don't fail, and don't go in any other direction. I'll hold my fire as long as I can.”

“Yes, sir,” Briggs said, and hung up. Crawling on their bellies to the left, he and most of his forty-six outpost men got out. The Japanese caught and killed four of them. This was about nine-thirty p.m. Soon the enemy had reached the tactical barbed wire in front of the 1st Battalion and began to cut lanes through it.

Toward eleven o'clock, still in heavy rain, the main body of the Japanese force attacked Puller's line amid the usual screaming of “Blood for the Emperor!” and “Marines, you die!”

The Marines responded with, “To hell with your goddamned emperor!” and, hilariously, “Blood for Franklin and Eleanor!”

Writing years later in New Jersey, Bruce Doorly provides us a first mention of Basilone that crucial night about ten o'clock: “The field phone rang. Having waited for days, they thought it must be just another outpost getting lonely. However, when John answered the phone he heard trouble. It was one of his men from a post closer to the front line. He screamed, ‘Sarge, the Japs are coming. ' In the background John could hear the sound of explosions and gun fire. ‘Thousands of them, my God! They just keep coming, Sarge, they just keep coming.' The phone went dead.”

This reputed exchange doesn't entirely make sense. Basilone headed a two-machine-gun section of perhaps six or eight men total. Why would he have an outpost of his own reporting to him? Wouldn't an outpost Marine with the enemy that close have whispered and not screamed?

Doorly then writes, “John Basilone took control. He turned to his men and said, ‘All right, you guys, don't forget your orders. The Japs are not going to get through to the field. I'm telling you that goes, no matter what!'”

Doorly cites battle descriptions by Basilone that “were often very descriptive and at times comical.” Doorly pictures the first assault wave this way: “They could soon hear the Japanese cutting the barbed wire. Unfortunately, they could not see the Japanese in the dark as they had hoped. Their first line of defense, the barbed wire, was already falling. Basilone set the strategy for his unit. He told his men to let the enemy get within fifty yards and then, ‘let them have it!' They fired at the first group of attacking Japanese, successfully wiping them out.” He quotes Basilone as saying, “The noise was terrific and I could see the Japs jumping as they were smacked by our bullets. Screaming, yelling, and dying all at the same time. Still they came, only to fall back, twisting and falling in all sorts of motions, as we dispatched them to their honorable ancestors.”

That first enemy charge was only the beginning of the overall attack. The enemy charged again. The dead began to pile up. “One thing you've got to give the Japanese, they were not afraid to die, and believe me, they did,” Basilone is quoted as saying. Grenades flew into the Marine lines and “one Japanese soldier got to within five feet of Basilone—here Basilone used his pistol, killing the attacker.”