Hero of the Pacific_ The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone - James Brady [13]
It was a clever tactical idea, but too complicated, and the relatively green 1st Battalion soon found itself cut off on the beach and, covered by gunfire from a convenient American destroyer, was forced to evacuate by sea (Puller himself having gone out in a small boat to the destroyer Ballard to make the arrangements and signal back to his men on the beach) and find its way back to the perimeter. The fighting was confused and uncoordinated, and along with the newly arrived 7th Marines (Basilone and his comrades), both the Raiders and the 5th Marines also were forced to pull back from the Matanikau. It was typical of combat at that stage on Guadalcanal that the three-day battle didn’t even rate a name. But all the to-ing and fro-ing gained no ground and cost sixty Marine dead and a hundred wounded. The newly arrived Marines were learning, and it was a painful schooling.
Welcome to the war, Manila John.
3
In September 1942, a month after the fight began, Manila John and the 7th Marines finally left Samoa, sailing in convoy to join up with the other two Marine regiments fighting on Guadalcanal. For Basilone’s arrival at the war we have to turn from the historian Henry Shaw to Basilone’s sister Phyllis Basilone Cutter’s serialized newspaper account, written well after the fact and by a civilian who didn’t seem to understand the difference between the 7th Marine Regiment, which was John’s outfit, and the 7th Marine Division, which never existed, then or now. Such criticism may seem trivial and somewhat hard on a family member, but since numerous articles, one monograph, and a hardcover book have been published that are to an extent reliant on Phyllis’s recollections, an analysis of her work is justified. Here then, caveats established, is how she describes, supposedly in her brother’s words, the time just before he reached the island: “The Japs were putting reinforcements in nightly and now the talk was maybe our boys would be driven off the island and into the sea. We could not understand where our Navy was. Why couldn’t they have stopped the Jap transports? We didn’t know our Navy had taken quite a beating, even though they won the sea battle, the losses were costly and the Japs were still pouring in.” If John here is referring to the battle of Savo Island, our Navy didn’t win the sea battle; it had been massacred, losing four heavy cruisers.
“Suddenly on Friday morning September 18, 1942, the loudspeakers blared,” Basilone recalled on the transport, “‘All Marines go to your debarkation stations!’ We climbed the narrow ladders to positions on the deck above the cargo nets draped over the side and heard the squeaking of the davits as they were swung out and landing craft lowered. The whole length of the ship was swarming with Marines scrambling down the nets into the boats. One by one the boats scooted off to the rendez-vous areas where they awaited, circling. Breaking out of the tight circles, wave after wave sped for the beach.
“Our landing was unopposed and we poured in.”
Marine Ops reports simply, “The reinforced 7th Marines unloaded its 4,262 men,” as three other transports, also peacefully, delivered aviation fuel, ammo, engineering equipment, and the like along the same tranquil stretch of coastline.
Phyllis’s account of her brother’s landing makes it sound dramatic, while the official account dismisses it as a mere “unloading.” Her newspaper series, with Basilone now ashore on the embattled island, then wanders into pulp magazine fiction, and it seems reasonable to suggest that some of the Basilone lore about his combat experiences from this point on derives from his sister’s fanciful journalism and not necessarily from the facts. If there are Marines and others who question any of Basilone’s feats of arms, they should consider that the man himself wasn’t making these absurd claims; it was his loving sister many years later who conjured up the theatricals.
A week