Hero of the Pacific by James Brady

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    There was considerable hard fighting left on Guadalcanal for Manila John’s outfit, but on the following night, a Sunday, the brunt of it would fall not on Puller but to the east, where Colonel Hanneken and his 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, fought off another all-night assault by the Japanese, and where Paige, though wounded, held his position as tenaciously as Basilone had.
    Basilone has his own, surprisingly modest, count of casualties on the night fight for which he will ever be remembered and on which he won the famous Medal of Honor. Compared to the earlier inflated estimate that C Company (of perhaps two hundred men) was “wiped out,” the Jerry Cutter and Jim Proser book once again contradicts itself. Here is their quote from Basilone: “In the whole 1/7 [1st Battalion, 7th Marines] we lost 19 boys that night. Another 30 were wounded and 12 were missing.” Then John says, “Twelve of my boys were dragged out of the mud that day, some of them in pieces. They were just about everybody I knew on the island.” Does this account, supposedly in his words, really make any sense? Nineteen Marines in the entire battalion dead and twelve of them were Basilone’s “boys,” his machine gunners? Out of the other eight hundred or thousand men in Puller’s 1st Battalion, there were only seven Marines killed who didn’t work with or for John Basilone? Despite the bloody setback those two nights, the Japanese had not quit.
    In postwar depositions in 1946, Japanese senior officers cavalierly swapped insults and blamed one another for the loss of Guadalcanal, for failures in strategy and tactics during the period of October 23-26, but no one, especially not the Americans, suggested the enemy couldn’t fight. October phased into November, when there was more bloody combat with both Puller’s 1st Battalion (Basilone included) and Hanneken’s 2nd (with Mitch Paige) again engaged in heavy fighting. At sea, the two fleets fought, usually out of sight of the other, trading heavy losses to air attacks. In one battle, seventy-four American planes and more than a hundred Japanese aircraft were lost, warships went down, and the coastal sharks feasted. On land, the fighting ebbed and flowed, men continued to die, and Henderson Field was bombed and shelled and threatened again on the ground, but it never fell.
    Tokyo must at last have been having second thoughts about whether this one relatively insignificant island was worth the loss of so many ships, planes, and irreplaceable pilots, to say nothing of thousands of veteran infantry. Gradually as November ran its course, the Japanese brass stopped sending in reinforcements, no longer dispatched their capital ships in harm’s way, and in the end began to evacuate. The battle became one of hot pursuit, as the Americans, Marines and soldiers, chased and attempted to trap the remaining enemy infantry. Every Japanese soldier who died on the ’Canal would be one man they wouldn’t have to fight on some other hostile shore. There were fewer pitched battles, fewer banzais screamed.
    The American Army was in growing numbers taking over the Marine positions, and on December 7, the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor, elements of the 1st Marine Division began leaving the island. The last Japanese to quit Guadalcanal, harried and pursued by American GIs, were evacuated on the night of February 7-8, 1943. No one knows how many died, but sources say more than 14,000, with another 9,000 missing and presumed dead. And these were only the ground forces. Japanese naval and aviation casualties are not included.
    The official history of Marine Ops compiled the following casualty figures for the 1st Marine Division from the landing on August 7 to early December: 605 officers and men killed in action, 45 died of wounds, 31 MIA and presumed dead, 1,278 wounded in action. Another 8,580 “fell prey to malaria and other tropical