Hero of the Pacific

by James Brady

  “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 wer
e 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.”

  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.

  4

  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 recognit
ion 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.”