Hero of the Pacific by James Brady Page B

full-trigger. They were pouring out five hundred rounds a minute. The gun barrels were red and sizzling inside their water jackets—and the precious cooling water was evaporating swiftly. ‘Piss in ’em. Piss in ’em!’ Basilone yelled and some of the men got up to refill the jackets with a different liquid.
    â€œThe guns stuttered on, tumbling the onrushing Japanese down the incline, piling them up so high that by the time the first enemy flood had begun to ebb and flow back into the jungle, they had blocked Basilone’s field of fire. In the lull Manila John ordered his men out to push the bodies away and clear the fire lanes. Then he ducked out of the pit to run for more ammunition. He ran barefoot, the mud squishing between his toes. He ran into Puller’s CP and ran back again, burdened with spare barrels and half a dozen 14-pound belts slung over his shoulders.”
    By now, the enemy was drifting west, overrunning the guns to Basilone’s right. “They stabbed two Marines to death and wounded three others. They tried to swing the big Brownings on the Americans but they only jammed them. They left the [gun] pit and drove further to the rear. Basilone returned to his pit just as a runner dashed up gasping. ‘They’ve got the guys on the right.’ Basilone raced to his right. He ran past a barefoot private named Evans and called ‘Chicken ’ for his tender eighteen years. ‘C’mon you yellow bastards!’ Chicken screamed, firing and bolting his rifle, firing and reloading. Basilone ran on to the empty pit, jumped in, found the guns jammed and sprinted back to his own pit. Seizing a mounted machine gun, Basilone spread-eagled it across his back, shouted at half of his men to follow him—and was gone.”
    It must be noted here that a “mounted machine gun,” the gun and tripod mount, exclusive of ammo, weighs 49.75 pounds—the gun 31 pounds, the tripod, pintle, traversing, and elevating mechanisms the rest—not including the 14-pound belts of ammo, and Manila John was running around in the rain and mud lugging this thing on his bare back. As Basilone and his squad ran they blundered into a half dozen Japanese and killed them all. Then, at the pit, Basilone dropped one gun and lay flat on his back trying to unjam the other guns and get them working again. It isn’t clear here (via Leckie) just how many machine guns he had by now, two or three.
    By one-thirty in the morning Basilone had the guns fixed. And by now the Sendai Division was attacking once more. Puller phoned the artilleryman Colonel Pedro del Valle for support and was told the big guns were running short of ammo and when what they had was fired there would be no more shells for tomorrow. Puller informed the artilleryman coldly, an infantryman chiding a gunner, “If they get through here tonight, there won’t be a tomorrow.” And when a Captain Regan Fuller told Puller he was running out of small-arms ammo, Puller responded, “You’ve got bayonets, haven’t you?” “Sure, yes, sir.” “All right then, hang on.”
    The fight went on all night despite the staggering loss of life, especially on the attackers. Bit by bit American Army soldiers were fed into the cauldron as reinforcements for the Marines, firing the new eight-shot semiautomatic Garand rifles the Marines had not yet been issued (they were still armed with the five-cartridge-clip, bolt-action World War I ’03 Springfield). There was a wonderful exchange between Puller and his Army counterpart Colonel Robert Hall, who arrived at Puller’s post, guided through the darkness by a Navy chaplain named Father Keough who was ministering to his Marines. Puller thanked the cleric for his assistance and then turned to Colonel Hall. Leckie gives us this dialogue: “Colonel, I’m glad to see you. I don’t know who’s senior to who right now, and I don’t