Maruyama, like Oka, was not moving against a gap. He was approaching the low-lying jungle to the east of Bloody Ridge, a point held by the battalion commanded by Chesty Puller.
The sun was down.
It was dusk of Saturday night, October 24.
A young Marine on patrol outside Puller’s line in the southern hills stopped dreaming of the delights of Saturday night back home and hurried to catch up with comrades who had left him behind. He paused. Behind him, just silhouetted on a low ridge, he could see a Japanese officer studying the line through field glasses. The officer disappeared. The Marine rushed on to report to his patrol leader.
Japanese south of the airfield?
Vandegrift was uneasy. He had just strengthened the Matanikau left with all he could spare from his reserve. What would he do if Puller got hit hard back there?
Probably, he thought, he would have to use the soldiers. There was a battalion of the 164th in bivouac behind the Tenaru.
The men of the U.S. 164th Infantry Regiment were sulking. They were sick and tired of being an orphan outfit, being pushed around. They had been squeezed out of their own division—the 41st—when the old National Guard “square” divisions were made “triangular,” that is, cut from four to three infantry regiments. They had been tossed into another orphan outfit with the bastard name of Americal Division—not even a number!—and been pushed around the Pacific. They had landed in dismal Noumea, which was bad enough, being an oversized hatrack for Navy brass, but which was also worse with those snooty French colonials frosting the doughfoots and the fact that if there was so much as a single native girl to go skylarking with she’d surely be found doing some shave-tail’s laundry.
Then they were detached again and handed over to the Marines!
They had been bombed and shelled and shot at and put on the Tenaru and then been made to suffer the indignity of having fresh-faced kids five and six years their junior tell them they should have been on Guadalcanal “when it was
The men of the 164th were sore, nor did they feel any better when they heard the rumor that they had been alerted to stand by for action in a battle expected that night.
At seven o’clock on that night of October 24, Platoon Sergeant Mitchell Paige crawled forward to the nose of the ridge position which was then being occupied to nail down the Matanikau left flank. Paige’s men had reached their position in darkness. Now the sergeant was feeling around him with his hands, searching for a good position for the guns. He felt the ridge fall away sharply to either side.
“Here,” he whispered to the men of his machine-gun platoon. “Put the guns here.”
They set them up, moving stealthily, careful not to stumble in the mud, careful to slip the gun pintles into tripod sockets without a telltale clink of metal.
“Chow time,” Paige whispered. “Where’s the chow?”
They had one can of Spam and also a can of peaches “borrowed” from a rear-echelon galley on their march south to the ridge. The man carrying the peaches mumbled that he had dropped the can and it had rolled down the ridge into the jungle. There were fierce coarse things hissed in the dark and it was well for the loser of the peaches that the night veiled his face. Paige opened the Spam, tore the soft meat in pieces and pressed them into outstretched hands. The men ate.
They took up watches on their guns. It began to rain. Suddenly, after midnight, from far to their left, they heard the sound of battle.
At half-past midnight Sunday morning, October 25, the rain was coming down in a torrent, and a torrent of Japanese soldiers was washing against the line held by Chesty Puller’s Marines.
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:
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
