The assault against Puller’s lines had gone on all night, but it had produced not a single penetration. It ended at dawn with Japanese losses in proportion to the fury of their charge. It was the most savage assault, it became the most stunning defeat.
The Sendai could not fight again as a unit on Guadalcanal.
Sergeant Paige got to the gun first….
He dove for the trigger, got it, squeezed it—and killed the crawling Japanese. A rain of enemy fire came down on Paige. Bullets spattered off the ridge shale, spurting, squealing away in richochet. Paige kept firing. Three men ran to him with ammunition belts—Stat, Reilly and Jonjeck. Stat went down with a bullet in the belly. Reilly reached the gun, took a bullet in the groin, and went down kicking—nearly knocking Paige off balance. Jonjeck came in with a belt and a bullet in the shoulder. As he stooped to feed the gun, Paige saw a piece of flesh go flying off Jonjeck’s neck.
“Get the hell back!” Paige yelled.
Jonjeck refused. Paige hit him on the jaw. Jonjeck obeyed.
It was full light now, and Paige was scurrying back and forth, moving his gun to avoid the inevitable rain of grenades greeting each burst. In the tall grass below the ridge some 30 Japanese sprang erect. One of them put field glasses to his eyes. He signaled a charge.
Paige triggered a long searing, sweeping burst and the Japanese vanished from sight like puppets pulled on a string. Then Sergeant Mitchell Paige charged himself. He called to his riflemen. He slung two belts of ammunition crisscross over his shoulders. He unclamped the gun, yanked it from its cradle and cradled the burning-hot water jacket across his left arm.
“Let’s go!” he yelled.
Straight downhill they charged, screaming their rebel yells —“Ya-hoo! Yaaaa-hoo!”—firing from the hip as they went, obliterating all before them while Paige aimed a disemboweling burst at the enemy officer who had popped up out of the grass. And then they were in the jungle and it was strangely quiet.
It was the hush that comes upon the end of battle, as eerie as that long white snakelike blister that ran from the fingertips to the forearm of Platoon Sergeant Mitchell Paige.
15
On October 26, while land fighting sputtered out on Guadalcanal, the naval battle which Admiral Yamamoto expected was fought in waters roughly 300 miles to the east.
Yamamoto, who had always sought a major engagement with the American fleet, hurled his forces into the fight as eagerly as Bull Halsey, who sent Rear Admiral Thomas Kincaid into action with the signal: “Attack! Repeat—Attackl”
But the air-sea engagement known as the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands fell short of a clear-cut decision. The Americans lost the carrier
Santa Cruz was a disappointment to both sides, but neither side allowed the stand-off to weaken its resolve to fight on for Guadalcanal.
Already, in the final days of October, while the surviving ships of both nations steamed north to Truk and south to Noumea, the Americans were sending more ships to the South Pacific area and Marine and Army units were under orders for movement to the island.
Up in Rabaul, Lieutenant General Hyakutate was taking the last shot from his locker. He was calling on the 17th Army’s reserve division, the 38th. Hyakutate had already fed in the Ichiki Detachment, the Kawaguchi Brigade, the Sendai Division, and a handful of lesser units. Now he would send roughly 15,000 troops down The Slot, the bulk of that 38th or Nagoya Division commanded by Lieutenant General Tadayoshi Sano.
On Guadalcanal itself in the final days of October, the broken remnants of the Sendai Division, together with the survivors of all those other units which had come to the island since early August, were streaming westward through the jungle. They were disorganized, starving, wounded and sick. Some 5,000 Japanese died beneath Marine guns in those attacks which began on October 21, and which, after Maruyama’s main thrust was shattered on October 24-26, erupted sporadically in small local actions or jungle skirmishes until the month ended.
Among these dead was Colonel Furumiya. He and his staff officer had not been able to find their way back to the jungle south of the American lines. They had not eaten for days. They had barely enough strength to tear the 29th’s colors into bits and grind them into the mud with their feet. They had not burned the flag because the smoke might give them away. Then Colonel Furumiya wrote a letter which the staff officer was to deliver to Maruyama, although it would actually be taken from the officer’s dead body by the Marines who killed him. Furumiya wrote:
…I do not know what excuse to give…
I am sorry I have lost many troops uselessly and for this result which has come unexpectedly. We must not overlook firepower. When there is firepower the troops become active and full of spirit. But when firepower ceases they become inactive. Spirit exists eternally.
I feel sleepy because of exhaustion for several days.
I am going to return my borrowed life today with short interest.
Colonel Furumiya straightened. He placed a pistol to his head. He bowed in the direction of Tokyo and the Emperor, and the staff officer pulled the trigger.
Chesty Puller was also writing a letter, composing it mentally while he lay on a hospital cot with seven pieces of shrapnel in his legs.
Puller had been helping wiremen repair communications wire in a patrol to the east of the Tenaru when an enemy shell burst among them, wounding Puller. A Navy corpsman quickly gave him aid and began to write out an evacuation tag.
Chesty tore it from the corpsman’s hand and flung it at him. “Go label a bottle with that goddam tag!” he roared.
But Puller had been forced to accept hospital treatment. Now he lay on his cot, thinking. He had had a close call with the corpsman. He could have been evacuated and sent Stateside, out of the war. Automatically, the words of a request to Headquarters began forming in his mind: “… therefore I respectfully request… duty overseas with a combat unit… for the duration of the war…”
He would write it as soon as he returned to his men, with all but one of the shrapnel pieces pried from his legs, which would be at the end of that dreadful black month of November.
16
It was in November that the Marines of Major General Alexander Vandegrift came close to losing their minds.
A bitter aching fatigue had come upon them. They had met the enemy on the beaches, in caves, atop the hills, down in the jungle swamps—and they had defeated him. They had been battered by every weapon in the arsenal of modern war. They had been blown from their holes or been buried in them. They had not slept. They had been ravaged by malaria, weakened by dysentery, nagged by tropical ulcers and jungle rot, scorched by the sun or drenched by the rain. They had met each ordeal with the hope of victory, and had survived only to prepare for
