by James Brady
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.
5
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.”
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 bolt
ing 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.”
6
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.