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By Root 412 0

on the twenty-fifth]. He also told me he had just seen Colonel Hanneken at the Division Command Post before he came to visit with me. He told me that he read a report that Colonel Hanneken was preparing, recommending me for a medal. ‘Chesty’ went on to tell me that that [sic] his sergeant was also a machine gunner and that our actions were similar. I said, ‘wonderful, is this sergeant someone I may know?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but his name is Basilone.’

“I said, ‘Johnny Basilone?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ I had made platoon sergeant just before we left the States and I told Chesty that I had recently seen Johnny when we were moving positions and I had asked him when he expected to be made platoon sergeant, and he said soon he hoped. I told Chesty that I hoped this would help Johnny get promoted to platoon sergeant. I had met Johnny originally back in New River, North Carolina, just after he joined the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines. He told me he was better known as ‘Manila John,’ and then I said, ‘you must have been in the Philippines,’ and we had a lot to talk about as I told him I had been stationed in Cavite [the big U.S. naval base on Manila Bay] for some time. Johnny had been in the Army and was stationed in Manila, thus the name ‘Manila John.’ We had a friendly greeting when I would call him ‘Doggie Manila John,’ and he would jokingly call me ‘Cavite Mitch.’”

There are suggestions that in the months between the time both sergeants were “written up” for decorations and the day months later when they actually received their awards (the Medal of Honor) in Australia, someone up the line of command in Washington decided these two enlisted men had legitimate “hero” potential. After all, two Medals of Honor for Guadalcanal heroics had already been awarded to senior officers, and wasn’t it time for enlisted men to be recognized for what the Marines had accomplished in handing the Japanese their first defeat since ground fighting began?

John Basilone’s sister Phyllis takes up the story in her brother’s voice, recounting his telling of what happened on Guadalcanal and how Chesty Puller had recognized not only Paige’s but also Basilone’s own pivotal role:

“As dawn came, the last frenzied attack, preceded by their now familiar cries, ‘Marines you die, Banzai, Marines you die!’ By now we were all light-headed as we sent back our songs of death . . . towards the end I had to stand up with my ‘chopper’ [the heavy Browning] cradled in my arms to fire out over the rising pile of dead. The attack was growing weaker and weaker and suddenly the last desperate charge petered out at the wire. I rested my head on the ledge of the emplacement, weary, tired and grateful the Lord had seen fit to spare me. Then I heard my name being called. Looking up I saw Lieutenant Colonel Puller, my commanding officer, standing with his arm outstretched. He shook hands with me and said, ‘I heard you came back for ammunition. Good work.’”

There was considerable hard fighting left on Guadalcanal for Manila John’s outfit, but on the following night, a Sunday, the brunt of it would fall not on Puller but to the east, where Colonel Hanneken and his 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, fought off another all-night assault by the Japanese, and where Paige, though wounded, held his position as tenaciously as Basilone had.

Basilone has his own, surprisingly modest, count of casualties on the night fight for which he will ever be remembered and on which he won the famous Medal of Honor. Compared to the earlier inflated estimate that C Company (of perhaps two hundred men) was “wiped out,” the Jerry Cutter and Jim Proser book once again contradicts itself. Here is their quote from Basilone: “In the whole 1/7 [1st Battalion, 7th Marines] we lost 19 boys that night. Another 30 were wounded and 12 were missing.” Then John says, “Twelve of my boys were dragged out of the mud that day, some of them in pieces. They were just about everybody I knew on the island.” Does this account, supposedly in his words, really make any sense? Nineteen Marines in the entire battalion dead and