Hero of the Pacific

by James Brady

  “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.

  Basilone’s account, via Cutter and Proser, goes on: “At the ammo depot I pried open ammo boxes and draped six of the fourteen pound ammo belts [about eighty pounds!] over my shoulders. I picked up another of the boxes and started moving out. Then I remembered the water. I was a fully loaded mule and couldn’t do much better than a fast walk with all the weight hanging on me. I passed the CP and called in for water. Someone came out and draped a few canteens on belts around my neck.”

  This is confusing. Puller’s CP was previously described as being nothing more than a field phone on the reverse slope of the ridgeline. What was the “out” someone came out of? There were no structures or caves on the ridge that we know of.

  Basilone does describe overhearing “Chesty . . . giving hell to someone over the phone.” This sounds about right. The Cutter and Proser book continues in Manila John’s voice: “I was back onto the trail in the darkness with my heavy coat of bullets banging against my knees, my hands full with the ammo box. I shuffled along as fast as I could. If I ran into Tojo in the dark, I’d have to drop the ammo box to reach my .45 on my hip. I ran behind the ridge crest but that didn’t stop sniper fire from whining past my head. They were behind our lines and by the amount of fire, there must have been quite a few of them. I thought, if they can’t hit a slow-moving target like me, that must mean my number isn’t up, at least not tonight. I soon couldn’t think about anything but about somehow making it a few more feet. The whole trip was about six hundred yards and I didn’t stop once for a breather. Every thought and scrap of strength I had, was focused on just making a few more feet down the trail. I slipped under the weight several times, covering the belts with mud.

  “I made it to the hole and made the call sign, ‘Yankee Clipper,’ as I came up from the rear so they wouldn’t shoot me thinking I was a Jap infiltrator. I dropped what I had, 1500 rounds, and jumped in behind it. Powell was out of ammo on his gun. He grabbed a belt and I took over his trigger just in time. The next wave was on its way up the ridge. With Garland and Evans covering our flanks with their rifles, Powell and I leap-frogged from one gun to the other. The water wasn’t nearly enough to fill the water jacket of even one of the guns, so I had to fire one of the guns while the other one cooled, and while Powell cleaned the next ammo belt and reloaded. We were able to keep a fairly constant rate of fire doing this and also make the Japs shift their targeting from our right gun to our left. It was hours after the first attack and they were still coming, wave after wave screaming ‘Banzai!’ and ‘Marine, you die!’ and we kept killing them. Evans and Garland threw grenades down the hill until they were barely able to lift their arms [it is unlikely there would have been that many grenades in a single machine-gun position]. The boys drank all the water in the canteens and when they could, pissed into the water jackets. Another wave of men ran up the ridge, broke and died in front of us. Some had gotten through. We could hear the firing to our rear. I wasn’t sure our guns would hold up under another attack.”

  As the night fight continued, Basilone is said to have made yet another run to the rear, a water run, this time to A Company on C Company’s flank. “Who the fuck are you?” someone demanded when he called out the password. Typical Marine response. But when Basilone returned to his own position and the guns, “Garland was dead. He was a big boy, a quiet type and brave.” Page 212 of Cutter and Proser’s account reports Garland’s death as a fact, but Doorly’s book lists Garland, with “Powell, Evans and La Pointe,” as having been ordered by Basilone the morning after the fight to return to Henderson Field while he remained behind “at his post in order to help the new men,” who must have been replacements, during the less severe fighting and mopping up that continued on October 25.

  At my request Bob Aquilina at Quantico looked up Garland’s “death.” He found seven or eight Marines named Garland who died during various Pacific campaigns, but none on Guadalcanal in October 1942. The “death” of Garland remains an enigma.

  Young Marine officers and NCOs are taught, “Don’t over-identify with your men. Know their military strengths and weaknesses, but not which guy has a kid, or an old gray-haired mother at home. When you send a man out on the point, the riskiest position, you send the best point man, the sharpest-eyed, canniest scout you have. Otherwise, you weren’t going to lose just him to enemy action, but maybe your own life.”

  There was also the inarguable truth that every death of one of your men, a “Garland,” tears a piece out of your own psychological hide, diminishes you as surely as one of John Donne’s clods: “If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.” Clearly, as his NCO, Basilone would mourn Marine Garland, his man, his machine gunner. You hear it in his words: “a big boy, a quiet type and brave.” We recall his assessment of the man, and the professional: “That night, when I told him to go down the hill, he hesitated just long enough to read my face. He looked to me just long enough to know I wasn’t kidding, then off he went.” But had Garland really died that night? It remains one of the narrative’s puzzles.

  Now, unexpectedly, on the twenty-fifth fighting erupted again with new massed Japanese assaults. This time it wasn’t Puller’s and Basilone’s turn but the 2nd Battalion of the same regiment, the 7th Marines, c
ommanded by Lieutenant Colonel Herman Henry Hanneken, that found itself grappling with the attacking Japanese infantry in lethal close combat, and it would be Mitchell Paige, another, and quite different, machine-gun sergeant whom Basilone actually knew, who would be at the heart of the most horrific fighting and would himself be nominated for a Congressional Medal of Honor. More on that later.

  About four on Sunday morning, the twenty-fifth, the Japanese punched another hole in the Marine lines between Basilone’s C Company and A Company, but that was the end to his hard fighting for the moment. Proser describes his getting the crackers and the jam, and quotes Basilone as saying of himself and his handful of hungry but surviving men, “We were all wounded.” I find no independent proof of this. Customarily, unless a wounded man is treated by a medic (a Navy corpsman) who notes the fact, no Purple Heart is awarded. Myriad cuts, burns (Basilone’s scorched arms, for example), and scratches are often ignored, overlooked by the Marine himself. Despite his words about being “wounded,” the records indicate he earned only the one Purple Heart for wounds, for those suffered at his death on Iwo Jima on February 19, 1945, some three years later. Nor does his citation for the Medal of Honor mention his being wounded on the ’Canal, which such carefully vetted citations customarily do.

  Marine Ops doesn’t break out daily USMC casualties for each night of the three-day battle of Bloody Ridge but says “sources” put the entire three-day cost to the 7th Marine Regiment at 182 dead. Basilone’s reference to C Company’s having been wiped out and his handful of men the only ones left is clearly an exaggeration. And his service record book notes that Basilone “joined Company D, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines May 29, 1941,” while Puller’s own written citation for the Medal of Honor calls Basilone a member not of C Company but of D Company. It seems to me axiomatic that Puller would know one of his rifle companies from another. And surely Basilone would have no such doubts about his own outfit. Blame confusion in battle, but family and other reminiscences are replete with such perplexing errors of fact.

  As for the Japanese, their losses at Basilone’s machine-gun position are put at thirty-eight dead by PFC Nash W. Phillips of Fayetteville, North Carolina, who was in Basilone’s company on the ’Canal. Total enemy losses on October 23-26 are recorded as 3,500 dead, including one general, Yumio Nasu, and his two regimental commanders. Puller’s citation for Basilone’s medal (countersigned by Chester Nimitz himself) refers to a thousand dead Japanese buried or left unburied in front of 1st Battalion’s position.

  7

  Basilone’s own terrible night was succeeded only hours later by the equally desperate nightlong fight by the 2nd Battalion in which Mitchell Paige distinguished himself and would be written up for a Congressional Medal by his own commanding officer, Colonel Herman Hanneken. In a 1975 book by then Colonel Paige titled A Marine Named Mitch, he recalled a temporary lull in the aftermath of the October fighting, including his own, on the Guadalcanal ridgelines: “The next day Chesty Puller came up to see me. He sat down next to me after we shook hands and he told me about the big attack they had down at the airport on the night of the 24th [Paige’s own battle was fought late on the twenty-fifth]. He also told me he had just seen Colonel Hanneken at the Division Command Post before he came to visit with me. He told me that he read a report that Colonel Hanneken was preparing, recommending me for a medal. ‘Chesty’ went on to tell me that that [sic] his sergeant was also a machine gunner and that our actions were similar. I said, ‘wonderful, is this sergeant someone I may know?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but his name is Basilone.’

  “I said, ‘Johnny Basilone?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ I had made platoon sergeant just before we left the States and I told Chesty that I had recently seen Johnny when we were moving positions and I had asked him when he expected to be made platoon sergeant, and he said soon he hoped. I told Chesty that I hoped this would help Johnny get promoted to platoon sergeant. I had met Johnny originally back in New River, North Carolina, just after he joined the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines. He told me he was better known as ‘Manila John,’ and then I said, ‘you must have been in the Philippines,’ and we had a lot to talk about as I told him I had been stationed in Cavite [the big U.S. naval base on Manila Bay] for some time. Johnny had been in the Army and was stationed in Manila, thus the name ‘Manila John.’ We had a friendly greeting when I would call him ‘Doggie Manila John,’ and he would jokingly call me ‘Cavite Mitch.’”

  There are suggestions that in the months between the time both sergeants were “written up” for decorations and the day months later when they actually received their awards (the Medal of Honor) in Australia, someone up the line of command in Washington decided these two enlisted men had legitimate “hero” potential. After all, two Medals of Honor for Guadalcanal heroics had already been awarded to senior officers, and wasn’t it time for enlisted men to be recognized for what the Marines had accomplished in handing the Japanese their first defeat since ground fighting began?

  John Basilone’s sister Phyllis takes up the story in her brother’s voice, recounting his telling of what happened on Guadalcanal and how Chesty Puller had recognized not only Paige’s but also Basilone’s own pivotal role:

  “As dawn came, the last frenzied attack, preceded by their now familiar cries, ‘Marines you die, Banzai, Marines you die!’ By now we were all light-headed as we sent back our songs of death . . . towards the end I had to stand up with my ‘chopper’ [the heavy Browning] cradled in my arms to fire out over the rising pile of dead. The attack was growing weaker and weaker and suddenly the last desperate charge petered out at the wire. I rested my head on the ledge of the emplacement, weary, tired and grateful the Lord had seen fit to spare me. Then I heard my name being called. Looking up I saw Lieutenant Colonel Puller, my commanding officer, standing with his arm outstretched. He shook hands with me and said, ‘I heard you came back for ammunition. Good work.’”

  There was considerable hard fighting left on Guadalcanal for Manila John’s outfit, but on the following night, a Sunday, the brunt of it would fall not on Puller but to the east, where Colonel Hanneken and his 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, fought off another all-night assault by the Japanese, and where Paige, though wounded, held his position as tenaciously as Basilone had.

  Basilone has his own, surprisingly modest, count of casualties on the night fight for which he will ever be remembered and on which he won the famous Medal of Honor. Compared to the earlier inflated estimate that C Company (of perhaps two hundred men) was “wiped out,” the Jerry Cutter and Jim Proser book once again contradicts itself. Here is their quote from Basilone: “In the whole 1/7 [1st Battalion, 7th Marines] we lost 19 boys that night. Another 30 were wounded and 12 were missing.” Then John says, “Twelve of my boys were dragged out of the mud that day, some of them in pieces. They were just about everybody I knew on the island.” Does this account, supposedly in his words, really make any sense? Nineteen Marines in the entire battalion dead and twelve of them were Basilone’s “boys,” his machine gunners? Out of the other eight hundred or thousand men in Puller’s 1st Battalion, there were only seven Marines killed who didn’t work with or for John Basilone? Despite the bloody setback those two nights, the Japanese had not quit.

  In postwar depositions in 1946, Japanese senior officers cavalierly swapped insults and blamed one another for the loss of Guadalcanal, for failures in strategy and tactics during the period of October 23-26, but no one, especially not the Americans, suggested the enemy couldn’t fight. October phased into November, when there was more bloody combat with both Puller’s 1st Battalion (Basilone included) and Hanneken’s 2nd (with Mitch Paige) again engaged in heavy fighting. At sea, the two fleets fought, usually out of sight of the other, trading heavy losses to air attacks. In one battle, seventy-four American planes and more than a hundred Japanese aircraft were lost, warships went down, and the coastal sharks feasted. On land, the fighting ebbed and flowed, men continued to die, and Henderson Field was bombed and shelled
and threatened again on the ground, but it never fell.

  Tokyo must at last have been having second thoughts about whether this one relatively insignificant island was worth the loss of so many ships, planes, and irreplaceable pilots, to say nothing of thousands of veteran infantry. Gradually as November ran its course, the Japanese brass stopped sending in reinforcements, no longer dispatched their capital ships in harm’s way, and in the end began to evacuate. The battle became one of hot pursuit, as the Americans, Marines and soldiers, chased and attempted to trap the remaining enemy infantry. Every Japanese soldier who died on the ’Canal would be one man they wouldn’t have to fight on some other hostile shore. There were fewer pitched battles, fewer banzais screamed.

  The American Army was in growing numbers taking over the Marine positions, and on December 7, the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor, elements of the 1st Marine Division began leaving the island. The last Japanese to quit Guadalcanal, harried and pursued by American GIs, were evacuated on the night of February 7-8, 1943. No one knows how many died, but sources say more than 14,000, with another 9,000 missing and presumed dead. And these were only the ground forces. Japanese naval and aviation casualties are not included.

  The official history of Marine Ops compiled the following casualty figures for the 1st Marine Division from the landing on August 7 to early December: 605 officers and men killed in action, 45 died of wounds, 31 MIA and presumed dead, 1,278 wounded in action. Another 8,580 “fell prey to malaria and other tropical diseases.” As is often the case in war, illness took more lives than combat.