Hero of the Pacific (7 page)

Leckie picks up Basilone's fight:

“Now the attack was veering toward dead center. The Japanese hordes were rushing at Manila John Basilone's machine guns. They came tumbling down an incline and Basilone's gunners raked them at full-trigger. They were pouring out five hundred rounds a minute. The gun barrels were red and sizzling inside their water jackets—and the precious cooling water was evaporating swiftly. ‘Piss in 'em. Piss in 'em!' Basilone yelled and some of the men got up to refill the jackets with a different liquid.

“The guns stuttered on, tumbling the onrushing Japanese down the incline, piling them up so high that by the time the first enemy flood had begun to ebb and flow back into the jungle, they had blocked Basilone's field of fire. In the lull Manila John ordered his men out to push the bodies away and clear the fire lanes. Then he ducked out of the pit to run for more ammunition. He ran barefoot, the mud squishing between his toes. He ran into Puller's CP and ran back again, burdened with spare barrels and half a dozen 14-pound belts slung over his shoulders.”

By now, the enemy was drifting west, overrunning the guns to Basilone's right. “They stabbed two Marines to death and wounded three others. They tried to swing the big Brownings on the Americans but they only jammed them. They left the [gun] pit and drove further to the rear. Basilone returned to his pit just as a runner dashed up gasping. ‘They've got the guys on the right.' Basilone raced to his right. He ran past a barefoot private named Evans and called ‘Chicken ' for his tender eighteen years. ‘C'mon you yellow bastards!' Chicken screamed, firing and bolting his rifle, firing and reloading. Basilone ran on to the empty pit, jumped in, found the guns jammed and sprinted back to his own pit. Seizing a mounted machine gun, Basilone spread-eagled it across his back, shouted at half of his men to follow him—and was gone.”

It must be noted here that a “mounted machine gun,” the gun and tripod mount, exclusive of ammo, weighs 49.75 pounds—the gun 31 pounds, the tripod, pintle, traversing, and elevating mechanisms the rest—not including the 14-pound belts of ammo, and Manila John was running around in the rain and mud lugging this thing on his bare back. As Basilone and his squad ran they blundered into a half dozen Japanese and killed them all. Then, at the pit, Basilone dropped one gun and lay flat on his back trying to unjam the other guns and get them working again. It isn't clear here (via Leckie) just how many machine guns he had by now, two or three.

By one-thirty in the morning Basilone had the guns fixed. And by now the Sendai Division was attacking once more. Puller phoned the artilleryman Colonel Pedro del Valle for support and was told the big guns were running short of ammo and when what they had was fired there would be no more shells for tomorrow. Puller informed the artilleryman coldly, an infantryman chiding a gunner, “If they get through here tonight, there won't be a tomorrow.” And when a Captain Regan Fuller told Puller he was running out of small-arms ammo, Puller responded, “You've got bayonets, haven't you?” “Sure, yes, sir.” “All right then, hang on.”

The fight went on all night despite the staggering loss of life, especially on the attackers. Bit by bit American Army soldiers were fed into the cauldron as reinforcements for the Marines, firing the new eight-shot semiautomatic Garand rifles the Marines had not yet been issued (they were still armed with the five-cartridge-clip, bolt-action World War I '03 Springfield). There was a wonderful exchange between Puller and his Army counterpart Colonel Robert Hall, who arrived at Puller's post, guided through the darkness by a Navy chaplain named Father Keough who was ministering to his Marines. Puller thanked the cleric for his assistance and then turned to Colonel Hall. Leckie gives us this dialogue: “Colonel, I'm glad to see you. I don't know who's senior to who right now, and I don't give a damn. I'll be in command until daylight, at least, because I know what's going on here and you don't.”

Said the sensible Hall, “That's fine with me.”

Fresh troops were arriving, but the deadly night was decidedly not yet finished, and Manila John Basilone was still fighting. Using the heavy machine gun cradled in his arms, apparently still attached to the tripod, he killed several infiltrating Japanese, the hot barrel burning him as he did so. At another point some enemy infantry were wriggling toward him on their bellies through the long grass. To get lower and in a more effective firing position, Basilone took the big heavy off its tripod and steadied it in his arms, his own belly flat to the ground, and from that prone position fired bursts as low as he could to chop down the Japanese snaking toward him. As he later remarked, he had “mowed down the crawlers.” At the same time the professional machine gunner who knew the gun better than most, in the dark, in the rain, and in combat, continued coolly to instruct his men on using the other guns, finding a jammed gun and reminding them, almost pedantically, “the head spacing is out of line.” This is pretty cool stuff under fire, as the Japanese mounted yet another charge, shouting their banzais as they came. One Marine, perhaps not yet a true believer, asked Basilone as the long, exhausting night wore on, increasingly lethal, “Sarge, how long can we keep this up?”

According to Bruce Doorly, Basilone himself was wondering the same thing. And ironically, considering the downpours, they were short of drinking water, some canteens holed by shrapnel, with Marines running dry.

“The attacks kept coming, even in the heavy rain. John told two of his uninjured soldiers, Powell and Evans, to keep the heavy machine guns loaded. He would roll to one machine gun and fire until it was empty, then roll over to the other one that had been loaded while he was firing the first one. When that one was empty he went back to the first one which had now been reloaded. The tactic was used against the remaining Japanese attacks. Just when the Marines could not keep up the pace any longer, the Japanese would retreat to regroup. The enemy would then predictably charge again, in groups of 15 or 20, Basilone letting them get close and then mowing them down. As they were hit, screams filled the night.

“Another Japanese soldier managed to sneak up to their position and jumped right at them with a knife. Again, John got him with his pistol [it must have been a .45, the standard-issue sidearm for a machine-gun sergeant]. The pistol would see more action through the night, as it was the best weapon for those who crept in close by crawling. Some grenades exploded close to John and his fellow Marines, but none hit them. It was a long night and some of the early kills started to decompose. It brought on a nasty stench.”

This sounds to me like rather rapid decomposition, but it was, after all, the tropics and these were the dead.

“Later in the night, Basilone saw an incredible sight. The Japanese had taken their dead and piled them up high in front of them to form a wall to protect the living Japanese soldiers who set up their machine guns behind the pile of their dead comrades. To counter the new enemy ‘wall,' John decided to move his position to get a better angle. Later, in a break in the fighting, John sent one of his men to push over the wall of dead bodies.”

It's worth noting that Bob Leckie has the Japanese bodies piling like a wall in the course of action, while Doorly has them being piled up deliberately. According to Robert V. Aquilina, head of the Marine Corps History Division reference branch at Quantico, and Colonel Walt Ford of
Leatherneck
magazine, there is ample historical precedent, going back to antiquity, for the former, and the piles would have included dying as well as dead enemy soldiers. As for the latter, yes, it could well have happened, but Colonel Ford suggests that it's “more the sort of detail that somebody only knows from having been there.” Such variations are illustrative of the challange inherent in accurately reporting accounts of battle—the so-called “fog of war.”

By three a.m. the Marines were once more running short of ammo. And the Japanese kept coming. Here is what Basilone's nephew Jerry Cutter and writer Jim Proser have to say about what Basilone did that night, the genuine heroism he displayed, the losses of men close to him that he suffered. While much of their book is inaccurate and somewhat misleading, it does convey something of the chaos and has its moments: “Evans fed the ammo and tried to keep mud off the belts. He also kept an eye on the rear of our position where we turned our .45s on the Japs coming up behind us. A hail of TNT and grenades fell all around us and our ears rang from the explosions so we couldn't hear ourselves yelling from inches away. The concussion was like getting socked in the head by a heavyweight and made it hard to keep your vision clear.”

Basilone knew about being “socked,” having boxed, often against harder-hitting men. Proser wrote, quoting Basilone, “We were seeing double, and things were moving around. So that we couldn't draw a clear bead on a target. The dead piled up in front of us obscuring the firing lanes. Both guns jammed. I tore mine open and cleared the receiver of mud. Powell did the same. In the process, Evans yelled just in time and we shot two more Japs coming at us from behind. Garland was frantically trying to clean the mud off the belts but it was tough work. We were getting low again on ammo and were out of water completely. The water jackets were smoking again which meant they were low or out of water too. If we didn't get water for the guns the barrels would burn out and never last the night. I got mine firing again but I was hitting only corpses piled high in front of us and others hanging on the wire further back.”

“Hanging on the wire.” The lethal phrase may sound innocent, meaningless, but men “hanging on the wire” are usually dead attackers, shot to pieces by the machine guns of the defense. The war doesn't matter—the trenches of Flanders in the Great War, so many other infantry battles in World War II. Maybe Grant's and Lee's men had to clear the dead as well. The first dead men I ever saw in combat, five or six North Koreans, were “hanging on the wire” of snow-covered Hill 749 in November 1951. Basilone's and Powell's and Evans's and Garland's dead happened to be Japanese of the Sendai Division. And when there are too many of them obscuring your aim, it is the gunners who have just killed them who are forced to do the undertaking as well, the tidying up of corpses. Listen to what are said to be Basilone's words:

“I ordered Garland to go down and clear the firing lanes. He looked at me and I looked back at him. It could easily be a suicide mission. The latest assault backed off. I didn't have to tell Garland twice. He was up and out of the hole. Evans and I covered him in bursts of fire that kept the field clear on either side of him. He slid down the hill on his butt and pushed the piles of bodies over with his feet, keeping his head below the pile. That did the trick. He slid over to another pile and did the same maneuver. We had a clear field of fire again. He slithered back up the hill while we sent streams of bullets a few inches over his head. For the life of me I didn't know why we hadn't been cross-haired by artillery and concentrated mortar fire by now, but I guess that's where luck comes into it.”

Obviously John wasn't aware of all those heavier weapons discarded by the enemy struggling through the jungle along the Maruyama Trail and unable to keep moving under the load. If that was luck, it was what infantrymen pray for, who know the damage good artillery and big mortars can do to men in trenches or foxholes open to the sky and vulnerable to the vertical fall of high-trajectory weapons.

“Garland got back in the hole. I was out of ammo. The boys all needed water as well as the guns. Powell was back on duty sighting down the ridge [with machine guns the most effective killing fire is not straight ahead but across the front,
along
the ridgeline, hitting the enfiladed attackers on their flanks]. The latest wave had retreated. I had to make another run for ammo, and this time for water, too. Down the ridge, there was movement. The Japs had almost the same idea I did. They crept up to the piles of their dead comrades and pulled them on top of each other like sandbags. They had a machine gun up behind the human barricade.

“‘Move out,' I ordered. We scraped our weapons out of the mud and hopped out to the left to get an angle on the new advance position of the enemy. Within a few minutes, they had our hole cross-haired and landed mortars on the bulls-eye, but we weren't there anymore [so the Japanese had gotten a few mortars up the Maruyama Trail after all]. We concentrated fire on the new position and wiped out the gunners. There was no fire coming from Bullard's hole over to the left, and I led what was left of my squad over there. When we got there, all my boys were dead. We pulled Bullard and the rest out and took up firing positions in the new hole. The field phone was still open to the CP and I called in our situation—no water, no ammo, the position to our right flank was now out of the fight. We were all that remained of C Company.” This surely is an exaggeration, as along the length of an extended company front of perhaps eight hundred yards, no one machine gunner would know his entire company was gone. And according to post-battle casualty reports, the assertion that C Company had been wiped out is false.

“I told Powell, ‘If I ain't back in ten minutes, put an ad in the paper for me.' I left the three in the new hole and took off again toward the rear.

“Sniper and mortar fire was constant now and half the time I couldn't tell if the shadows across my path were enemy or not [
what
shadows at night in heavy rain?]. I just kept running. A grenade or mortar knocked me to the ground but didn't knock any more holes in me that I could tell. I was bleeding from several places but none seemed too serious. I got up again and kept moving.”

Again there are contradictions here. As for his being hit several times and “bleeding from several places,” other accounts marvel that Basilone came out of the fight surprisingly unscathed. Bruce Doorly writes that when Basilone and his remaining men left the field next day to rest, Basilone “realized he had not eaten for 72 hours” and at Henderson Field wolfed down what they had, crackers and jam, and ate them “like it was Thanksgiving dinner.” There is no mention of seeking out a corpsman and having his “wounds” treated. The records show no Purple Heart being awarded Basilone. Mitch Paige, in contrast, was awarded both decorations in the continuing fight the next night.