Robert Leckie - Strong Men Armed

Their attack came at a point perhaps 2,000 yards south of Henderson Field, and a little less than five miles to the east or left of the newly fortified ridge where Sergeant Paige and his men sat.

The Japanese came by the thousands, so many of them rushing and shrieking that the soggy ground shook beneath their feet. They hit the barbed wire even as the Marine guns erupted, and some of them came through it, using the bodies of fallen comrades as ladders over and bridges through the wire.

These were soldiers of the 29th Regiment led by the shouts of their commander, Colonel Masajiro Furumiya, inspired by the dashing sight of the 7th Company—the color company streaking through a rent in the barbed wire and charging toward the line of American pits and holes.

A few feet behind that line Chesty Puller bellowed at his men, directing counterfire. He found one Marine lying in the tall grass. He stooped, seized him, booted him in the behind, and snarled: “Get the hell up theah, an’ doan lemme se youah shirttail touch youah ass until you do!” The Marine ran forward to fight—to fight and live to boast of how old Chesty gave him a good one right between the cheeks.

Now that gap in the wire was being closed as Marine riflemen and machine-gunners opened up in concert. Colonel Furumiya and the men of the color company were cut off between the wire and the Marine foxholes. The two guns under Sergeant John Basilone—Manila John they called him—were firing full trigger, piling up bodies as the bullets streaked out at a rate of 250 rounds a minute. Soon Basilone’s guns were out of ammunition. Manila John ducked out of his pit and ran to his left to get more belts. As he did, Furumiya’s men, drifting to the west, overran the section of guns at Basilone’s right. They stabbed two of the Marines to death and wounded three others, driving on farther to the rear after the American guns jammed when the Japanese tried to turn them on the Marines.

Basilone returned to his own pit just as a runner came up gasping: “They’ve got the guys on the right.” Basilone raced up the rightward trail. He blundered into a barefoot private named Evans—“Chicken” they called him because of his tender eighteen years—and the Chicken was firing his rifle and screaming at the enemy: “C’mon, you yellow bastards!” Basilone ran on, jumped into the silent pit, and found that the guns were jammed. He ran back to get one of his own guns.

At his own pit, Basilone seized a machine gun and spreadeagled it across his back. He shouted at half of his men to follow him and ran back up the trail to his right. The men ran after him, overtaking him just as he reached a bend in the trail. Around the bend were half a dozen Japanese infiltrators. The Marines killed them and ran on.

Now they were in the fallen pit and the men were firing the gun Basilone had brought, while Manila John himself lay in the mud working to unblock the jammed guns. The Japanese were forming again outside the wire, gliding through the rain in bunches. Now Basilone had the guns fixed. They were set up. The men were frantically scraping mud from machine-gun belts they had dragged uptrail. Then they were firing again, and Basilone was rolling from gun to gun, shooting up each successive belt as soon as it was fed into the breech and snicked into place.

Now it was half-past one in the morning and still the men of the Sendai were rushing, while their commanding general made a jubilant report of victory back to Hyakutate. And the Sendai were falling even as the naval liaison officer back at Kukumbona relayed the message to Admiral Yamamoto and the Combined Fleet in these words: “Banzai! Occupied airfield.”

During the next half-hour the Japanese began to falter under rising American fire. They still rushed at the wire, but when they reached that point where the bullets crisscrossed with an angry steady whispering, they began to peel off in groups, flitting through the rain-washed illumination of the shell flashes to throw themselves down in the darkness and crawl toward the Marine lines on their bellies. Sometimes Basilone and his men turned their pistols and rifles around to take on the infiltrators.

In that half-hour, it became clear to General Maruyama that his first two thrusts had failed and he had better regroup and try again. The earlier optimism must be toned down and he sent off a report to Hyakutate that the fighting was still going on. The naval officer transmitted the message to Yamamoto.

It was now a little after two in the morning and the firing had begun to die down.

At shortly after two in the morning, Sergeant Mitchell Paige and his men heard firing to their right. Unknown to them, a party of Colonel Oka’s men had slipped through a draw between their right and the left of the Third Battalion, Seventh, and had overwhelmed an observation post.

Paige crawled forward on the ridge. He heard low mumbling in the jungle below. There were Japanese down there. Paige decided to force them to attack before they could discover his position. He pulled the pin from a hand grenade. His men, hearing that snick, pulled their own pins. Paige threw. The men handed him their primed grenades and he threw these too. There were explosions, Hashes—screams.

Paige’s men scuttled back to their guns, bracing.

But no one came.

At half-past three in the morning the Sendai came rushing again at Lieutenant Colonel Puller’s line, and at that time also the men of the 164th Infantry went into battle with the Marines.

Led by Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hall, the regiment’s Third Battalion had marched from bivouac behind the Tenaru to Puller’s battlefront to the southwest. They came sloshing in through the darkness, guided by the yelling and jabbering and hammering of the fight. Lieutenant Colonel Hall quickly found Lieutenant Colonel Puller, who was brief.

“I’m in command here,” Chesty snapped, “and I’m feeding youah men in piecemeal whether you like it or not.”

Hall had heard of Puller and this was obviously not the moment to quibble over seniority.

“Go ahead,” Hall said, and the 3rd Battalion, 164th, went into line.

The soldiers went in by squads, moving in alongside squads of Marines, sometimes having to be led by hand, it was so dark, the ground was so slippery. They also held, helping to halt and shatter that third and final onslaught of the Japanese.

By seven o’clock in the morning the Sendai stopped coming, and Admiral Yamamoto’s aide had flashed the word that the airfield was still American. By then also the rain had stopped.

The sun was out, falling with ghastly illumination on the sodden heaps of lifeless flesh lying sprawled before Puller’s lines, warming the Marines and soldiers, setting the jungle steaming.

It was Dugout Sunday.

That thundering sabbath of the twenty-fifth of October, during which only stretcher-bearers, ammunition-carriers or airfield crews dared stay long erect, was set in motion by that prematurely jubilant «Banzai!“ which the naval officer at Kukumbona had flashed to Yamamoto at half-past one in the morning.

His subsequent messages were vague. Before he could send off the seven o’clock admission that the airfield was still American, the Japanese Combined Fleet had begun its end of the coordinated land-sea-air attack which was to crush the Americans.

Carriers flew off airplanes to obliterate remaining American air strength on Henderson Field and to sink whatever ships were found in Iron Bottom Bay. A cruiser-destroyer force made for a point behind Florida Island to enter the battle on call. Three big destroyers— Akatsuki, Ikazuchi and Shiratsuyo —sped down The Slot to shell the Guadalcanal shore and to attack shipping. And then, as the liaison officer began tempering his original jubilation, Yamamoto kept the remainder of the Combined Fleet sailing a circle 300 miles north of Guadalcanal. The situation had not only become unclear, the Japanese admiral had received reports indicating that American carrier and surface forces were coming up to Guadalcanal from southern bases.