Hero of the Pacific_ The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone - James Brady [14]
Here is where the writing really takes glorious flight: “Captain Rodgers [the company commander, it appears] felt we could try to entrap this patrol by encircling them with a ring of machine gun fire. At the same time being fully aware of the enemy’s reputation for trickery, he decided he would call on the 2nd Marines for help. Calling me to his side, the Captain said, ‘Sergeant, take three machine gun crews up to try and clean up that nest of Japs.’”
This entire passage is ridiculous. Marine company commanders issue their orders through their lieutenants, not their machine-gun sergeants, unless in extreme circumstances. Why would a Marine officer send out three heavily burdened machine-gun crews in thick jungle country to encircle or ambush anybody, especially a number of enemy troops described as “a heavy patrol”? They would send lighter-burdened, faster-moving riflemen, possibly a four-man fire team or squad, depending on the situation. Once the riflemen located the enemy, the machine guns could be brought up or sited on high ground to support an assault on the enemy with overhead fire. To use heavily laden machine-gun crews as scouts far out ahead of the swifter riflemen goes against reason.
And no Marine captain would confide to a sergeant that he was about to go outside the chain of command and his own battalion commander to ask yet another regiment, the 2nd Marines, to back him up—especially not with a battalion commander as fearsome as the terrible-tempered Puller.
The rest of Phyllis’s account has Basilone wiping out enemy soldiers right and left. He had been a week on the island, and already “all the newness was worn off by now. We were dirty, tired and mean.” The generally sensible Bruce W. Doorly, in his monograph about Basilone, the privately published Raritan’s Hero, seems to have bought into the Phyllis Cutter version in his own variation on the incident:
“A U.S. patrol had spotted a small group of Japanese on a scouting mission. John was told to bring three machine gun crews and wipe out the enemy, hopefully leaving no survivors that would bring information back to enemy headquarters. Guadalcanal was jungle with low visibility. John and his group snaked their way quietly [dragging those heavy guns?] toward the location where the U.S. patrol had seen the Japanese. Luckily the Marines spotted them undetected. Basilone led the group, moving in closest to observe that the Japanese had stopped to eat, obviously unaware of his presence. Moving back toward his men, John instructed them to set up in a half-circle around the unsuspecting enemy. He cleared his forehead, wiped his eyes. Then started firing his machine gun. The rest of his group also opened fire. John observed the Japanese reacting as they were shot. He later said, ‘They seemed to be dancing up and down. I forgot to realize the impact of heavy bullets was jerking them into all sorts of crazy contortions.’”
The new-to-combat Marines had been warned about treachery and enemy tricks, playing dead, for one. “John decided to take no chances. He walked around, finishing off the enemy, making sure they were dead by firing a short burst from his machine gun. One of John’s men, Bob Powell, said, ‘Jesus, Sarge, what the hell are you doing? Why waste ammo on dead ones?’ Just as Bob finished his words, a supposedly dead Japanese