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for many their first firefight, Marine historian Shaw gives us the details: “Puller’s battalion ran into Japanese troops bivouacked on the slopes of [Mount] Austen on the 24th [of September] and in a sharp firefight had seven men killed and 25 wounded. Vandegrift sent the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, forward to reinforce Puller and help provide the men needed to carry the casualties out of the jungle. Now reinforced, Puller continued his advance, moving down the east bank of the Matanikau. He reached the coast on the 26th as planned, where he drew intense fire from enemy positions on the ridges west of the river. An attempt by the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, to cross was beaten back.”
    Heavy machine guns are defensive weapons that don’t usually play much of a role in a probing patrol like this one in rough enemy country, but if this was Basilone’s first serious combat, it wasn’t dull. What had begun as a “probe” was becoming something else. The 1st Raider Battalion was now involved, and so was Colonel Red Mike Edson, the former Raider who now commanded the 5th Marine Regiment. Vandegrift on the twenty-seventh ordered Edson to take charge of the expanded force that included Puller’s fresh but inexperienced battalion. When faulty intelligence caused Red Mike to believe that one of his battalions was advancing when in actuality it had been stopped by Japanese who crossed the river by night, he ordered Puller to take his men by small boats around the enemy flank to land and move inland.
    It was a clever tactical idea, but too complicated, and the relatively green 1st Battalion soon found itself cut off on the beach and, covered by gunfire from a convenient American destroyer, was forced to evacuate by sea (Puller himself having gone out in a small boat to the destroyer Ballard to make the arrangements and signal back to his men on the beach) and find its way back to the perimeter. The fighting was confused and uncoordinated, and along with the newly arrived 7th Marines (Basilone and his comrades), both the Raiders and the 5th Marines also were forced to pull back from the Matanikau. It was typical of combat at that stage on Guadalcanal that the three-day battle didn’t even rate a name. But all the to-ing and fro-ing gained no ground and cost sixty Marine dead and a hundred wounded. The newly arrived Marines were learning, and it was a painful schooling.
    Welcome to the war, Manila John.

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    In September 1942, a month after the fight began, Manila John and the 7th Marines finally left Samoa, sailing in convoy to join up with the other two Marine regiments fighting on Guadalcanal. For Basilone’s arrival at the war we have to turn from the historian Henry Shaw to Basilone’s sister Phyllis Basilone Cutter’s serialized newspaper account, written well after the fact and by a civilian who didn’t seem to understand the difference between the 7th Marine Regiment, which was John’s outfit, and the 7th Marine Division, which never existed, then or now. Such criticism may seem trivial and somewhat hard on a family member, but since numerous articles, one monograph, and a hardcover book have been published that are to an extent reliant on Phyllis’s recollections, an analysis of her work is justified. Here then, caveats established, is how she describes, supposedly in her brother’s words, the time just before he reached the island: “The Japs were putting reinforcements in nightly and now the talk was maybe our boys would be driven off the island and into the sea. We could not understand where our Navy was. Why couldn’t they have stopped the Jap transports? We didn’t know our Navy had taken quite a beating, even though they won the sea battle, the losses were costly and the Japs were still pouring in.” If John here is referring to the battle of Savo Island, our Navy didn’t win the sea battle; it had been massacred, losing four heavy