feet. They hit the barbed wire even as Marine guns erupted in a bedlam of firing.
Japanese fell on the wire, others hurled themselves upon it while their comrades used their bodies as bridges.
Colonel Furumiya was at the head of his troops, shouting and waving his saber. He led the color company— the 7th—through a break in the American wire and went racing with them toward the enemy’s guns.
Inspired by the breakthrough, willing to follow their colors into hell, the Japanese soldiers flowed toward the gap.
But the Marines closed it. Colonel Furumiya and the color company were cut off from the rest of the regiment.
Now the attack was veering toward dead center. The Japanese hordes were rushing at Manila John Basilone’s machine guns. They came tumbling down an incline, and Basilone’s gunners raked them at full-trigger. They were pouring out five hundred rounds a minute, the gun barrels were red and sizzling inside their water jackets—and the precious water was evaporating swiftly.
“Piss in ’em, piss in ’em!” Basilone yelled, and some of the men jumped up to refill the jackets with a different liquid.
The guns stuttered on, tumbling the onrushing Japanese down the incline, piling them up so high that by the time the first enemy flood had begun to ebb and flow back into the jungle, they had blocked Basilone’s field of fire. In the lull Manila John ordered his men out to push the bodies away and clear the fire lanes.
Then he ducked out of the pit to run for more ammunition. He ran barefooted, the mud squishing between his toes. He ran into Puller’s CP and ran back again burdened with spare barrels and half a dozen fourteen-pound belts slung over his shoulders.
As he did, Furumiya’s men drifted west. They overran the guns to Basilone’s right. They stabbed two Marines to death and wounded three others. They tried to swing the big Brownings on the Americans, but they only jammed them. They left the pit and drove farther to the rear.
Basilone returned to his pit just as a runner dashed up gasping:
“They’ve got the guys on the right.”
Basilone raced to his right. He ran past a barefoot private named Evans and called “Chicken” for his tender eighteen years. “C’mon, you yellow bastards!” Chicken screamed, firing and bolting his rifle, firing and reloading. Basilone ran on to the empty pit, jumped in, found the guns jammed, and sprinted back to his own pit.
Seizing a mounted machine gun, Basilone spread-eagled it across his back, shouted at half of his men to follow him—and was gone. A squad of men took off in pursuit. They caught Basilone at a bend in the trail, and blundered into a half-dozen Japanese soldiers. They killed them and ran on.
Then they were inside the silent pit, firing the gun which Basilone had brought, while Manila John lay on his back in the mud working frantically to free the jammed guns.
Beyond the wire in the covering jungle, the Sendai were massing for another charge.
Submarine
Inside her sausage-shaped belly were nine thousand gallons of aviation gasoline destined for Henderson Field tanks that were again nearly bone-dry. She also carried two hundred 100-pound bombs. She had departed Espiritu Santo more than two days ago, and now, sliding along at her top submerged speed, she expected to make Lunga Point by daybreak.
But then her orders were changed. From Guadalcanal came instructions to put in at Tulagi with her cargo. Henderson Field was under major attack, the issue was in doubt, and it would be foolish to make the enemy a gift of the gasoline.
Chesty Puller called Colonel del Valle to request all the artillery support possible.
“I’ll give you all you call for, Puller,” del Valle grunted. “But God knows what’ll happen when the ammo we have is gone.”
“If we don’t need it now, we’ll never need it. If they get through here tonight there won’t be a tomorrow.”
“She’s yours as long as she lasts.”11
Both men hung up and the Marine artillery began glowing red again.
“Colonel,” Captain Regan Fuller said over the telephone to Puller, “I’m just about running out of ammo. I’ve used almost three and a half units of fire.”
“You got bayonets, haven’t you?” Colonel Puller asked.
“Sure. Yes, sir.”
“All right, then. Hang on.”12
It was half past one in the morning and the Sendai were coming again, there was a white breath around the muzzles of the Marine 105s, and Manila John Basilone had his guns fixed.
Basilone rolled from gun to gun, firing, exhausting first one belt and then another, while his men worked wildly to scrape the mud from cartridges that had been dragged along soggy trails. And the Sendai rolled forward in even greater strength, with both wings charging, now, punching holes in the Marine lines, forcing General Geiger in the rear to counter with his reserve, and leading General Maruyama to radio the one signal that all Japan was waiting for:
General Hyakutake heard it with elation back in Kukumbona and he relayed it north to Admiral Gunichi Mikawa in Rabaul. Mikawa immediately ordered three large destroyers carrying the Koli Detachment to land these troops on eastern Guadalcanal as scheduled.
And Combined Fleet’s carriers turned south again.
Some time after two o’clock in the morning of Sunday, October 25, Sergeant Mitchell Paige and his men heard firing to their right.
A band of Colonel Oka’s soldiers had slipped through the draw between Paige and Hill 67 and had overwhelmed an outpost.
Paige slipped forward on his ridge. He heard mumbling below him. He pulled the pin of a hand grenade and heaved the bomb into the jungle. His men pulled their pins and handed Paige their grenades, and he threw these bombs, too.
There were flashes and screams.
But no one came.
At half past three General Maruyama hurled his third charge at the Americans—and this time his men heard for the first time the eight-round semiautomatic firing of Garand rifles in the hands of American soldiers.
The 164th Infantry was in action.
General Geiger had fed its Third Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hall into the battle. Hall’s soldiers marched from their bivouac behind the Tenaru to the front, sloshing through the streaming darkness guided by a Navy chaplain, Father Keough, the only man at headquarters who knew the way. Puller went to meet them.
“Here they are, Colonel,” Keough called, and Puller shook his hand, grunting: “Father, we can use ’em.” Then he turned to Hall: “Colonel, I’m glad to see you. I don’t know who’s senior to who right now, and I don’t give a damn. I’ll be in command until daylight, at least, because I know what’s going on here, and you don’t.”
“That’s fine with me,” Hall said, and Puller continued:
“I’m going to drop ’em off along this road, and send in a few to each platoon position. I want you to make it clear to your people that my men, even if they’re only sergeants, will command in those holes when your officers and men arrive.”
“I understand you,” Hall said. “Let’s go.”13
They went. The soldiers went into the fight, sometimes having to be guided in by hand, in that slippery darkness, and they too, held, when the Sendai came flowing toward its third futile attempt to annihilate the Americans.
