Hero of the Pacific_ The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone - James Brady [16]
Thus was the situation in mid-October, the awful terrain and even the weather, with two powerful forces roughly in balance and about to clash, as summed up in the History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II, volume 1. The Japanese moved toward Henderson Field along the jungle track named, rather grandly, the “Maruyama Trail,” for their apparently vain new general, scratched out of the inhospitable bush by Japanese engineers. At the terminal of the trail Japanese troops would assemble for their assault on what would come to be known as Bloody (or Edson’s) Ridge, where Puller’s battalion and other Marine units would make their stand. From Marine Ops here is the situation from the enemy’s point of view: “Heavy rain fell almost every day. The van of the single-file advance often had completed its day’s march and bivouacked for the night before the rear elements were able to move. Troops weakened on their half-ration of rice. Heavy artillery pieces [vital to the siege tactics lying ahead] had to be abandoned along the route, and mortars also became too burdensome to manage. Frequently unsure of their exact location in the jungle, the Japanese by 19 October still had not crossed the upper Lunga, and Maruyama [their new commander] postponed his assault until the 22nd. Meanwhile, General Sumiyoshi’s fifteen ‘Pistol Petes’ [Japanese aircraft] pounded the Lunga perimeter, air attacks continued, and Imperial warships steamed brazenly into Sealark Channel almost every night to shell the airfield, beaches, and Marine positions.”
Now, from our side’s vantage point, according to Marine Ops: “The tempo of action was obviously building up for the counteroffensive, and Marines and soldiers worked constantly to improve their field fortifications and keep up an aggressive patrol schedule. Patrols did not go far enough afield however to discover Maruyama’s wide-swinging enveloping force, and recons to the east found no indications of a Japanese build-up on that flank. Thus General Vandegrift and his staff were aware only of Sumiyoshi’s threat along the coast from the west. There the first probe came on 20 October.”
It was in the Bloody Ridge area on the Lunga River line that the Japanese began testing the Marine lines and outposts, searching for soft spots and lack of security, with infantry patrols and a few tanks. An early probe on the west bank of the Matanikau turned back when one tank was hit by 37mm fire from the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines. For weeks General Hyakutake had tried but failed to take Henderson Field and so end the thing, and now a new general, Maseo Maruyama, who had flown in to command the 17th Japanese Army, was determined that this offensive would be successful. He was confident he would retake the airfield and swing the battle for Guadalcanal his way. He commanded a famous Japanese outfit, the crack Sendai Division freshly arrived from the big enemy base of Rabaul, to spearhead the effort, and at noon on October 24 he issued a battle order that contained an ominous, if somewhat grandiose, sentence: “In accordance with plans of my own, I intend to exterminate the enemy around the airfield in one blow.”
One of the units waiting for him, and for that menacing “one blow,” was Chesty Puller’s 1st Battalion of the 7th Marines.
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On the twenty-third, the Japanese attack on