Hero of the Pacific (4 page)

Clemens does not mention the big sharks, cruising just offshore and feeding on the bodies, American and Japanese, of sailors, soldiers, Marines, and airmen who fell, alive or dead, into the coastal waters. With about two dozen warships and other vessels of each side going down during the five-month battle, there was plenty for the thriving sharks.

It was the coast watchers who reported that the Japanese were building an airstrip there with Korean slaves, one that would endanger both Australia and New Zealand, our allies whose own forces were largely in action against the Germans half a world away, the famed ANZAC divisions fighting Rommel in North Africa. So they needed our help here on their own doorstep. The Japanese had northern Australia in their path, especially if enemy airpower and the Imperial Navy controlled the shipping routes and opened the way for their infantry.

The U.S. Navy had against all odds defeated the Japanese fleet at Midway, and now it was the turn of American Marines to do the job on land—
if
they were up to the challenge. On August 7 the 1st Marine Division landed by surprise and unopposed. Within a day it encountered and skirmished with Japanese infantry, igniting a terrible battle that would rage for the next five months on land, in the air, and on the surrounding sea.

Neither Lieutenant Colonel Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller nor Sergeant Basilone of his 1st Battalion of the 7th Marines had been on Guadalcanal when the 1st Marine Division invaded the island and began their grueling campaign. Fearful that the Japanese were still on the move elsewhere, perhaps against Fiji or the Samoan islands, elements of the 7th Marine Regiment, including Puller's battalion, were dispatched in late summer to defend Samoa against possible invasion. That was where Basilone and his mates groused about having missed the fun, if that's what it was, during those early weeks on the 'Canal.

Samoa wasn't bad duty, though entirely antithetic to the Marine culture of attack. The Marines in Samoa weren't anywhere near the enemy, nor were they about to launch a first offensive against the Japanese; their mission was strictly defensive. And why not? The Japanese were pitching a shutout in the western Pacific, taking one island, one battle after another, and why would they stop short now? No one in Washington or the Pacific knew just where the enemy would strike next. Samoa was certainly a potential target. So the Marines detached to defend it against a proximate invasion dug in and set up their gun emplacements, not only artillery and mortars but those heavy machine guns of Basilone's platoon. When and if the Japanese arrived at Western Samoa, the Marines would be ready to defend the islands, to hold the islands. They'd stacked arms and surrendered at Peking, gallantly lost Wake, burned their colors and asked for terms in the Philippines; they weren't going to lose Samoa without a fight.

Guadalcanal wasn't yet on anyone's charts. No intelligence had come in about the Solomon Islands. And the Japanese had not made up their own minds. They might not yet have recognized the strategic value of the 'Canal for an airstrip. In May when the Marine defense forces landed at Apia, Samoa, there were intelligent men both Japanese and American studying the situation, assessing the region, marshaling their forces, moving prudently closer to each other, but neither side knew precisely what was going to come next.

The Japanese moved first, landing on Bougainville, in the northern Solomons, and then on May 4 taking undefended and minuscule Tulagi, twenty miles across the water from Guadalcanal. In June, they finally made their decision: they would build that famous airstrip in the jungle.

Samoa knew nothing of this. Meanwhile, the Marine defense detachment's job had its fringe benefits. Samoa was “cake . . . a piece of cake,” as Marines of the time put it. Basilone, having seen duty in tropical outposts as a younger man while in the Army, would have a basis for comparison. According to his sister Phyllis's serialized newspaper account, Basilone remarked, “Compared to Tent City [in North Carolina], our five month stay in these beautiful islands was a luxury. Not that we didn't continue our training. We got it every day, only now it was real jungle warfare, camouflage, the works.” After all, “the Japs were coming, the Japs were coming.” Weren't they?

Well, yes, or they had been. Those had been the Japanese plans. But when American naval and air forces defeated the enemy at Midway, June 4-7, Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo scrapped plans to invade Midway, Fiji, New Caledonia,
and
Samoa. Meanwhile, on Samoa, which was now
not
being invaded, Basilone remarked, “There were some good times. The native women were eager to help the Americans and for months I don't think a single Marine had to do his laundry. Fresh eggs and butter were plentiful and for once the griping subsided.

“By this time I had been promoted to sergeant and my boys were the best damn machine gun outfit in the Division. All sorts of scuttlebutt was drifting into the boondocks and the men were getting restless. We all had thought we would see action first. One morning about the middle of August 1942 word trickled back that our buddies from Quantico and Tent City had already locked grips with the legendary and superhuman Japs.”

That last we can take as Basilone sarcasm, but the fact was that a week earlier, on August 7, elements of two Marine infantry regiments, the 1st and 5th Marines, and the 11th Marine artillery regiment, the 1st Marine Raider Battalion, and the Parachute Battalion had landed on the islands of Guadalcanal, Tulagi, and nearby Gavutu. While at Samoa and other backwaters and aboard transport ships, Basilone's own 7th Marine Regiment was scattered over miles of the Pacific and had not yet been committed to battle. Needless to say, the 7th Marines were not happy. When Basilone complained to a Captain Rodgers about his men's impatience, he was told, “For the next few days we are going to run the men ragged. I know they'll bitch and gripe but I still want to hear them gripe
after
their first action.”

The captain was true to his word. Said Basilone, “The next few days were hell. All day long we practiced storming caves, then were routed out in the middle of the night to repel imaginary Japs behind our lines. While the men complained bitterly, this practice paid off handsomely in the months to come. Instead of the confusion our buddies ran into, we profited by their misfortunes. I have no doubt many lives were saved with the series of codes and signals we adopted. We became so proficient that not a man of our outfit was shot at by one of his buddies as had been the case during the initial landings on the 'Canal.”

August wore on, yet for Manila John and his mates this was not yet even the overture to battle. Guadalcanal was still about twelve-hundred miles away to the west, three or four days by ship, and even there the war had scarcely begun, while on Samoa most of these young Marines were combat innocents. That included Sergeant Basilone, the crack machine gunner Manila John, the salty veteran of three years in the prewar American Army and a few skirmishes with bad men in the backcountry of the Philippines.

We tend to think today of the 1st Marine Division by its nickname, “the Old Breed,” salty, battle-tested vets, hard men who broke the Japanese in the Pacific, and later fought desperate battles in North Korea against Chinese regulars at the Chosin Reservoir. They would fight still later in Vietnam, and more recently in the Middle East. But in 1942 they were only kids, young Marines largely untried. In point of fact, the division had only been created in February 1941, eighteen months before it hit the beaches of Guadalcanal, with few of its 20,000 members blooded in actual combat, just some older officers and senior NCOs who had fought in France in 1918, and a few regulars who had chased bandits and fought rebels in Haiti or Nicaragua during the so-called Banana Wars of the later twenties and early thirties. Basilone himself must have been painfully aware of how little fighting had actually gone on outside the boxing ring during his U.S. Army tour in the 1930s in Manila.

Everything changed for John and his machine gunners on September 18, when, some five weeks late, the 7th Marine Regiment, plus some smaller units, went ashore on Guadalcanal to be greeted with the usual catcalls and derision from men who'd been there and fighting since early August. The 7th had been the first regiment of the division to go overseas but ironically the last to go into combat. Their arrival brought the Marine count on the island up to authorized strength, and the division's commander, General Alexander A. Vandegrift, wasted no time throwing these fresh troops into action. Historian Henry I. Shaw Jr. tells us in his monograph
First Offensive
“Vandegrift now had enough men ashore on Guadalcanal, 19,200, to expand his defensive scheme. He decided to seize a forward position along the east bank of the Matanikau River, in effect strongly out-posting his west flank defenses against the probability of strong enemy attacks from the area where most Japanese troops were landing, First, however, he was going to test the Japanese reaction with a strong probing force. He chose Puller's fresh 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, to move inland along the slopes of Mount Austen and patrol north towards the coast and the Japanese-held area.”

But what was all this about Vandegrift's being on the defensive? Hadn't he and his division landed against light or no opposition? How were the Japanese now holding much of the coastline of Guadalcanal? What had happened since August 7 when the invading Marines seemed to have gained the initiative?

Shaw, who wrote about those early days and weeks on the 'Canal, explains the situation. “On board the transports approaching the Solomons, the Marines were looking for a tough fight.” Estimates of Japanese strength ranged from 3,100 to just over 8,400. In actual count, there were only a total of 3,457, and of those 2,500 were mostly Korean laborers, not actual fighting men. Said Shaw, “The first landing craft carrying assault troops of the 5th Marines touched down at 0909 [9:09 a.m.] on Red Beach. To the men's surprise (and relief), no Japanese appeared to resist the landing. . . . The Japanese troops . . . had fled to the west, spooked by a week's B-17 bombardment, the pre-assault naval gunfire, and the sight of the ships offshore [those twenty-three transports and their escort vessels].” The U.S. assault troops were reported to have moved “off the beach and into the surrounding jungle, waded the steep-banked Ilu River, and headed for the enemy airfield.” That airfield was the point of the entire operation, and on their very first day ashore the U.S. troops were nearly there.

But the Japanese enemy was nothing if not resilient. Heavy combat raged on the small nearby island of Tulagi where the enemy consisted of the Japanese equivalent of Marines, what they called “special naval landing force sailors,” and those babies weren't running from anyone. On Tulagi that first day the Raider Battalion suffered ninety-nine casualties; a rifle battalion had fifty-six. When night fell on Gavutu, the enemy stayed in caves as the first wave of parachute Marines came ashore, and brisk fighting ensued as they emerged, with the Marines having to fall back for a time. On August 8, the airfield was taken, but more Japanese forces were on their way, by air and naval surface ships. On the several small islands near Guadalcanal in one day the Americans had suffered 144 dead and 194 wounded. On the second day Japanese airplanes sank the destroyer
Jarvis
, and in dogfights over the two days twenty-one Marine Wildcats were lost. Guadalcanal was not going to be a walkover. But there was worse to come, and swiftly.

On the night of the eighth an enemy cruiser-destroyer force off Savo Island proved themselves our superior at night fighting, sinking with no loss to themselves four Allied heavy cruisers, three American and one Australian, and knocking off the bow of a fifth heavy cruiser. About 1,300 U.S. and Aussie sailors died that night, with another 700 badly wounded or severely burned. These losses were such a shock that a panicky Admiral Jack Fletcher asked for and got permission to withdraw his carrier force. The supply and other amphibious support vessels were also pulled from the area, in effect leaving the Marines ashore on their own and without the heavy artillery that had been due to be landed, to follow the assault waves and reinforce the lighter field artillery already ashore. As for ammo and rations, the 1st Marine Division had only a four-day supply of ammunition for all weapons and, even counting captured Japanese food, only seventeen days' worth of chow.

All this as still half-filled supply ships steamed away from the beaches, fleeing the island and the enemy at flank speed. Their departure was so hasty that several small Marine units that should have been landed were still on board and didn't rejoin the division until October 29. Worse still, on August 12 a sizable Japanese force of reinforcements for Guadalcanal was massing at the huge Japanese base of Truk, only a thousand miles away in the Carolines. On Guadalcanal through August and into September there was heavy fighting, continued combat and recon patrolling, strongpoints and beachheads that changed hands several times over, nightly bombing, naval shelling by ships of both sides, and mounting Marine casualties, as well as the first cases of malaria. No wonder Vandegrift had gone over to the defensive before the 7th Marines, and Sergeant Basilone, even got to the 'Canal and the war.

On that first battalion-sized “probing” by Puller and his men on the 'Canal, what would be for many their first firefight, Marine historian Shaw gives us the details: “Puller's battalion ran into Japanese troops bivouacked on the slopes of [Mount] Austen on the 24th [of September] and in a sharp firefight had seven men killed and 25 wounded. Vandegrift sent the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, forward to reinforce Puller and help provide the men needed to carry the casualties out of the jungle. Now reinforced, Puller continued his advance, moving down the east bank of the Matanikau. He reached the coast on the 26th as planned, where he drew intense fire from enemy positions on the ridges west of the river. An attempt by the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, to cross was beaten back.”