Read Online Hero of the Pacific by James Brady - Free Book Online Page B

the Maruyama Trail and unable to keep moving under the load. If that was luck, it was what infantrymen pray for, who know the damage good artillery and big mortars can do to men in trenches or foxholes open to the sky and vulnerable to the vertical fall of high-trajectory weapons.
    â€œGarland got back in the hole. I was out of ammo. The boys all needed water as well as the guns. Powell was back on duty sighting down the ridge [with machine guns the most effective killing fire is not straight ahead but across the front, along the ridgeline, hitting the enfiladed attackers on their flanks]. The latest wave had retreated. I had to make another run for ammo, and this time for water, too. Down the ridge, there was movement. The Japs had almost the same idea I did. They crept up to the piles of their dead comrades and pulled them on top of each other like sandbags. They had a machine gun up behind the human barricade.
    â€œâ€˜Move out,’ I ordered. We scraped our weapons out of the mud and hopped out to the left to get an angle on the new advance position of the enemy. Within a few minutes, they had our hole cross-haired and landed mortars on the bulls-eye, but we weren’t there anymore [so the Japanese had gotten a few mortars up the Maruyama Trail after all]. We concentrated fire on the new position and wiped out the gunners. There was no fire coming from Bullard’s hole over to the left, and I led what was left of my squad over there. When we got there, all my boys were dead. We pulled Bullard and the rest out and took up firing positions in the new hole. The field phone was still open to the CP and I called in our situation—no water, no ammo, the position to our right flank was now out of the fight. We were all that remained of C Company.” This surely is an exaggeration, as along the length of an extended company front of perhaps eight hundred yards, no one machine gunner would know his entire company was gone. And according to post-battle casualty reports, the assertion that C Company had been wiped out is false.
    â€œI told Powell, ‘If I ain’t back in ten minutes, put an ad in the paper for me.’ I left the three in the new hole and took off again toward the rear.
    â€œSniper and mortar fire was constant now and half the time I couldn’t tell if the shadows across my path were enemy or not [ what shadows at night in heavy rain?]. I just kept running. A grenade or mortar knocked me to the ground but didn’t knock any more holes in me that I could tell. I was bleeding from several places but none seemed too serious. I got up again and kept moving.”
    Again there are contradictions here. As for his being hit several times and “bleeding from several places,” other accounts marvel that Basilone came out of the fight surprisingly unscathed. Bruce Doorly writes that when Basilone and his remaining men left the field next day to rest, Basilone “realized he had not eaten for 72 hours” and at Henderson Field wolfed down what they had, crackers and jam, and ate them “like it was Thanksgiving dinner.” There is no mention of seeking out a corpsman and having his “wounds” treated. The records show no Purple Heart being awarded Basilone. Mitch Paige, in contrast, was awarded both decorations in the continuing fight the next night.
    Basilone’s account, via Cutter and Proser, goes on: “At the ammo depot I pried open ammo boxes and draped six of the fourteen pound ammo belts [about eighty pounds!] over my shoulders. I picked up another of the boxes and started moving out. Then I remembered the water. I was a fully loaded mule and couldn’t do much better than a fast walk with all the weight hanging on me. I passed the CP and called in for water. Someone came out and draped a few canteens on belts around my neck.”
    This is confusing. Puller’s CP was previously described as being nothing more than a field phone on the