Hero of the Pacific_ The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone - James Brady [27]
In postwar depositions in 1946, Japanese senior officers cavalierly swapped insults and blamed one another for the loss of Guadalcanal, for failures in strategy and tactics during the period of October 23-26, but no one, especially not the Americans, suggested the enemy couldn’t fight. October phased into November, when there was more bloody combat with both Puller’s 1st Battalion (Basilone included) and Hanneken’s 2nd (with Mitch Paige) again engaged in heavy fighting. At sea, the two fleets fought, usually out of sight of the other, trading heavy losses to air attacks. In one battle, seventy-four American planes and more than a hundred Japanese aircraft were lost, warships went down, and the coastal sharks feasted. On land, the fighting ebbed and flowed, men continued to die, and Henderson Field was bombed and shelled and threatened again on the ground, but it never fell.
Tokyo must at last have been having second thoughts about whether this one relatively insignificant island was worth the loss of so many ships, planes, and irreplaceable pilots, to say nothing of thousands of veteran infantry. Gradually as November ran its course, the Japanese brass stopped sending in reinforcements, no longer dispatched their capital ships in harm’s way, and in the end began to evacuate. The battle became one of hot pursuit, as the Americans, Marines and soldiers, chased and attempted to trap the remaining enemy infantry. Every Japanese soldier who died on the ’Canal would be one man they wouldn’t have to fight on some other hostile shore. There were fewer pitched battles, fewer banzais screamed.
The American Army was in growing numbers taking over the Marine positions, and on December 7, the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor, elements of the 1st Marine Division began leaving the island. The last Japanese to quit Guadalcanal, harried and pursued by American GIs, were evacuated on the night of February 7-8, 1943. No one knows how many died, but sources say more than 14,000, with another 9,000 missing and presumed dead. And these were only the ground forces. Japanese naval and aviation casualties are not included.
The official history of Marine Ops compiled the following casualty figures for the 1st Marine Division from the landing on August 7 to early December: 605 officers and men killed in action, 45 died of wounds, 31 MIA and presumed dead, 1,278 wounded in action. Another 8,580 “fell prey to malaria and other tropical diseases.” As is often the case in war, illness took more lives than combat.
Speaking of which, as early as October General Alexander Vandegrift at the Noumea conference was already lobbying to get the 1st Marine Division “to a healthier climate” as soon as possible. The Japanese offensive of October 23 and the following days rendered consideration of that a purely academic exercise; the Marines couldn’t be spared. But now that the Army had arrived and the Japanese were trying to leave, where the division would go next had become a concern. Phyllis Basilone gives us some insight into her brother’s state of mind toward the end there on the ’Canal. Basilone, for all his heroics, was now having nightmares.
During the firefight on the long night of October 24, a lone Japanese soldier somehow broke through their position. Someone shouted, “Look out, Sarge,” and Basilone saw the man disemboweled by a Marine’s machete and Basilone and his gun were splattered with the man’s red blood “and blue guts.” Despite all he’d seen and experienced already, this particular incident seemed to have shaken Basilone. According to his sister, he threw up and was trembling uncontrollably. The machete killing was but a single event during a night of such horrors. But this one shocking moment among so many had its impact, coming back to haunt his dreams. The