It was Kiyono Ichiki and Kiyotake Kawaguchi all over again, except that neither of these supremely self- confident men had ever dashed off such a masterpiece of vague bravado as “In accordance with plans of my own, I intend to exterminate the enemy… in one blow.” His private plans locked in his breast, Masao Maruyama followed his left wing toward the jump-off point.
And the monsoon came down in a torrent.
Rain fell with the rattle of rifle-fire. In a single sodden minute the jungle was a streaming, swishing, gurgling swamp and the Sendai Division was segmented. Companies were lost, platoons were lost, squads were lost. Communications went out. And as the rain came steadily down, it became apparent that there would be no five o’clock attack.
Colonel Oka was still not in position.
The commander who had attacked very timidly and very tardily at the Matanikau a month ago under General Kawaguchi, was again dragging his feet under General Hyakutake. He did not cross the Matanikau upriver to come down behind the American battle position. He explained his failure with the message: “The Regiment endeavored to accomplish this objective of diverting the enemy, but they seemed to be planning a firm defense of this region.”
It was not true. The Marine position in the west ended on Hill 67, where its left flank was refused, that is bent back and left dangling in the jungle. General Hyakutake knew this and could not accept Oka’s alibi. He came up to the front personally and ordered Oka to get moving.
He did, and he moved too far.
Marines on top of Hill 67 spotted Japanese soldiers moving across a lower ridge to their left. They reported it to headquarters.
Geiger quickly diverted Hanneken’s men then marching west toward the Matanikau, sending them south instead to organize undefended high ground about a thousand yards east of the refused left flank.
Before they swung left, these Marines passed through the headquarters area. With cots and tents and clean clothing, it seemed to them a lotus-eater’s land, a place where troops dined on Spam and powdered eggs and canned fruit and other dishes that were veritable delicacies compared to frontline fare. So they helped themselves to what they saw, having no faith in a chain-of-supply which begins with the cow at headquarters and ends with the tail at the front.
In the platoon of machine guns led by hard-jawed Sergeant Mitchell Paige a small can of Spam and a large can of peaches were thus “procured.”
Paige’s men trudged on, confident of “living it up” tonight, because for some of them, as they suspected, there would be no tomorrow.
Chesty Puller was spreading himself thin, trying to cover the entire 2500-yard sector which fell to him after the withdrawal of Hanneken’s battalion. Every man in Puller’s battalion except the mortarmen was put into line.
They seized strands of wire marking a jeep-road to their rear and strung it by winding it around trees, adorning it with cans filled with stones and grenades with half-pulled pins.
Throughout the morning and afternoon Puller roved his lines, chomping on his cold stump of pipe, removing it to bellow orders (“We don’t need no communications system,” his men boasted, “we got Chesty!”), or speaking through teeth clamped firmly around the stem. Puller’s manner was urgent because a young Marine who had fallen behind a patrol that morning had seen Japanese officers studying his position through field glasses. Puller urged his men to dig deeper, but when he came to one position he pulled his pipe from his mouth, pointed at the hole with it, and grunted, “Son, if you dig that hole any deeper Ah’ll have to charge you with desertion.”7
The Marine grinned, and Puller strode on, pleased to see that Manila John Basilone had fortified his pair of machine guns almost in the exact center of the line.
Colonel Puller returned to his “command post”—a field telephone hardly ten yards behind his lines—to repeat his request for permission to withdraw his outpost platoon. He was convinced that the enemy was coming, and he feared that the forty men on outpost would be needlessly sacrificed. But his arguments—generally couched in ungentle roars—were unavailing. The men stayed outside the line.
Finally, Puller had all of the field phones opened so that every company and platoon could hear every message.
And then the rains came down.
At seven o’clock that night the rains slackened. Sergeant Mitchell Paige crawled forward on the nose of the ridge which his section was to defend. It was dark. Paige felt about with his hands, hunting for a good position.
“Here,” he called softly. “Put the guns here.”
They moved with silent swiftness. Gunners with their 53-pound tripods, assistants with their 33-pound guns, ammunition carriers with 19-pound boxed belts in each hand, all burdened with their own weapons and equipment, they slipped forward without as much as the chink of gun pintle entering tripod socket.
“Chow time,” Paige whispered. “Where’s the chow?”8
The can of Spam was present but the can of peaches was absent without leave. Its bearer mumbled incoherently about its having slipped from his grasp to roll down the ridge. Paige hissed sharp guttural uncomplimentaries in the delinquent’s direction, and then he opened the Spam with his bayonet, tearing the thick soft meat into hunks and pressing it into outstretched hands.
They ate.
They sat hunched by their guns. It began to rain again. At midnight, the men on watch heard the sound of firing far to their left.
It was only about seven o’clock before General Maruyama’s commanders were able to bring any semblance of order out of the confusion caused by the rain. Over on the right wing, where Kawaguchi’s failure to cope with the terrain had cost him his command, Colonel Shoji, his successor, was also behind schedule. Shoji had also not reached his jump-off point.
Impatient, Maruyama ordered the left wing to attack.
Colonel Masajiro Furumiya took the 29th Infantry forward, and a few minutes later they were flowing around Colonel Puller’s outpost.
Sergeant Ralph Briggs and his men on outpost hugged the ground, while Briggs rang up Colonel Puller’s command post.
“Colonel,” he said softly, “there’s about three thousand Japs between you and me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive. They’ve been all around us, singing and smoking cigarettes, heading your way.”
“All right, Briggs, but make damned sure. Take your men to the left—understand me? Go down and pass through the lines near the sea. I’ll call ’em to let you in. Don’t fail, and don’t go in any other direction. I’ll hold my fire as long as I can.”
“Yes, sir,” Briggs said, and hung up.9
Then the sergeant and his men began crawling slowly on their bellies to the left. All but four of them, whom the Japanese caught and killed.
At eleven o’clock it began to rain heavily again, and the Japanese came hurtling against Puller’s Marines.
Once again they were screaming:
“Blood for the Emperor!”
“Marine, you die!”
Once again the foulmouthed raggedy-tailed defenders of democracy were bellowing:
“To hell with your goddamed Emperor! Blood for Franklin and Eleanor!”10
The Japanese were charging by the thousands, so many of them that the sodden ground shook beneath their
