Hero of the Pacific_ The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone - James Brady [15]
Wrote Doorly, “On the way back to camp two of his men got sick. This was everyone’s first taste of war. They were very fortunate . . . they suffered no casualties.”
While Doorly’s version of that first real firefight is more controlled than that of sister Phyllis, there appears to be a need here among Basilone chroniclers, fans if you will, to make him even from the very start somewhat larger than life, bigger, braver, deadlier. But neither account of a first Guadalcanal firefight by Basilone rings true.
Manila John needed none of this tarting up. He was an authentic hero, the real goods. He was a warrior who fought with an extraordinary courage and resolve, with strength and an instinctive canniness far beyond what might be expected of a man of his background and age (he was twenty-five at Guadalcanal), killing a lot of seasoned enemy troops, and he would be rewarded by a nation with medals and gratitude. But people apparently felt they had to create a Basilone of their own, to concoct and exaggerate, regardless of the hard reality, however difficult it was to ascertain entirely who John really was. And phony yarns gained currency, when really there was no need, only this compulsion to inflate and imagine. It may be that units of Puller’s battalion, possibly including John and some of his gunners under Captain Rodgers, did actually stumble across some Japanese carelessly eating lunch without any perimeter security and wiped them out with machine-gun fire, but it borders on the fantastic to accept that the action came about when a machine-gun unit was sent on a combat patrol unaccompanied by riflemen, or that one of Puller’s captains would breach the chain of command, asking support from another regiment. And in a machine-gun platoon, their sergeant doesn’t have “his” machine gun. He directs the fire of others. But here Basilone does most of the firing himself. In that far-fetched “first fight,” if it ever happened, the legend of Manila John began to emerge.
He and his gunners were certainly part of that very real and quite bloody “probe” by Puller’s battalion in which the Marines took 160 casualties. But with versions of the incident surfacing here and there that have the Japanese caught at lunch, you have to consider the possibility that Basilone had gotten through at least one efficient if rather one-sided firefight before Puller’s battalion completed its somewhat screwed-up first probe.
Battle, especially for green troops, is always confused, chaotic, frightening, and few men remember its details in precisely the same way. Quite possibly not even Manila John, still new to combat, could tell you precisely what happened in his first firefight and when. The problem is simply that the vision of Basilone wielding a fifty-pound heavy machine gun delivering the coup de grâce to wounded enemy soldiers, firing bursts into their prone bodies, is patently absurd. No Marine with any combat experience will fail to recognize gaps in the narrative. And there is no mention of the incident in Shaw or Marine Ops.
There would be more heavy fighting for the lately arrived Marines on October 9 when they crossed the Matanikau River and attacked north. In a three-day fight Puller’s battalion (with Basilone) and other units were credited with killing or wounding 799 members of the Japanese 4th Infantry. General Alexander Vandegrift knew the Japanese were building up for a major offensive—reinforcements were being landed on the ’Canal almost every night under cover of darkness—yet another attempt to retake Henderson Field, as the Marines had named their captured Japanese airfield (to honor Marine pilot Captain Lofton R. Henderson, killed flying against the Japanese fleet at Midway).
As has long been Marine infantry philosophy, Vandegrift intended to use constant aggressive combat patrols, raids, and probes in force to upset Japanese plans, unbalance the enemy, render it more difficult for them to build up and attack in great force. Of Basilone’s regiment,