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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.”

Heavy machine guns are defensive weapons that don’t usually play much of a role in a probing patrol like this one in rough enemy country, but if this was Basilone’s first serious combat, it wasn’t dull. What had begun as a “probe” was becoming something else. The 1st Raider Battalion was now involved, and so was Colonel Red Mike Edson, the former Raider who now commanded the 5th Marine Regiment. Vandegrift on the twenty-seventh ordered Edson to take charge of the expanded force that included Puller’s fresh but inexperienced battalion. When faulty intelligence caused Red Mike to believe that one of his battalions was advancing when in actuality it had been stopped