Hero of the Pacific_ The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone - James Brady [10]
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.