Hero of the Pacific_ The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone - James Brady [11]
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