There had to be an ultimate moment, a darkest hour, and it came before DeBenedictis had been long on the island.
In the days preceding there had been signs of increased Jap activity; it was known that fresh artillery had been landed by them, together, with new forces of infantry. On this night the very first crash of the guns after sunset told the Marines what was coming, and each man, lonely at his post, felt the added danger like wind in his face. “They just loosened up and poured it on us,” said DeBenedictis. “They plastered the line, the hill, the jungle, every inch of our position, and I knew that we couldn’t hold them off. I’d seen how thin our troops were stretched, and through the holes the Japes were bound to leak. It would be like trying to hold water in a sieve.”
It was the kind of time when it’s easy to give up; the night was so black, and the wind seemed to puff the darkness in your face. “There was some light, but it came in cracks and snatches from the tracers whiplashing across the sky. That kind of light doesn’t do you much good, because you know the other fellow is using it to see you by. You get a blink-blink-glimmer, and then crash comes a shell, or the ripping of machine-gun bullets. And all the while I kept remembering that the Marines had had all they could do several times before. They were tired, now, and they were sick. And now they were having it poured to them twice as heavy as ever before.
“The Nips began to plaster our hill, and pretty soon the hospital wasn’t tenable. That meant we had to move the sick and wounded. We had some bad cases that were waiting evacuation, men so badly hurt that I thought they’d fall apart when we lifted them, and there were malaria cases with chills and fever shaking their bones. There were fellows groaning, but they didn’t groan any more when we picked them up; and they wouldn’t let their teeth chatter, because it might sound as though they were afraid. We got them all to the farther side of the hill, wrapped up in blankets or whatever we could find. Some of them were out of their heads, but now their minds cleared up fast because they knew what was coming. They knew that surrendering was out of the question. There are a lot of painful ways to die, heart trouble and poison and all that, but nothing compares with death-by-Jap, because they’re experts and know by instinct all the nerve centers. It’s not pleasant to have your eyes cut out or your balls cut off. I saw fellows so sick that a minute before, they hardly cared whether they lived or died; but they started caring right now and began to scratch the ground to make foxholes.”
And DeBenedictis continued: “All the while the gunfire got heavier and heavier. The rifle bullets flicked by close to your ear, the machine-gun stuff rattled like bursts of heavy rain, and the shells came in with a rip and a wow looking for you. There’s this about any steady fire: the source seems to keep coming closer and closer. You could feel the Japs pressing in, and then during patches of half-silence there were voices howling. When you hear a sound like that it gives you the willies. You think of a man already dying but enough alive to make a last run at you. You think of a face gone crazy with pain and coming at you like a nightmare. Then somebody said close to my ear, ‘It’s all over; they’ve got us!’ I listened, and my brain wouldn’t understand. The guy went on: ‘They’ve broke through, behind the hill!’ I told him to shut up, because I didn’t want the hospital cases to hear. But a rumor like that can penetrate farther and faster than an armor-piercing shell, and before I could turn around the sick men had the word.
“If the Japs had broken through our line then, the invalids were cooked; we were all cooked. “I got a glimpse of the trees along the base of the hill below us where they must have cut through, and the trees themselves seemed to be creeping closer. Well, we managed to get a rifle, a pistol, some sort of a weapon, to every one of the boys out there on the hill, and they damned the Japs a little and got ready to do their last shooting. If Tojo’s boys thought the hospital would be a soft touch, they had a surprise coming. I began wondering, though, why, if the Japs had cut through, some of our men from the broken line hadn’t fallen back to where we were. But then I realized what must have happened. Those Marines in the line would not be falling back. They’d known, all of them, that one breakthrough was death for the whole outfit; they’d die where they stood. So Tojo had won out, at last! But sill he’d find when he got to us that there were hornets stinging till the last man was finished. There was a strange comfort in the felling I’d had from the first that this was to be the last stand on Guadalcanal. From the very first the Marines had been put up there to be expended and save vital time for somebody, somewhere. And this was the finish.”
DeBenedictis’s voice grew quieter as he told what followed; “It seemed a little queer, however, that the Japs didn’t pour right through and swallow us up, but I could understand that, too. Having cut open a gap, they were gathering reinforcements so as to pour in a bigger wave on us and put out all the lights in a single rush. Then something moved on the hill below. I got ready to shoot. I suppose twenty more rifles were trained on that shadow. But in a moment the shadow said in good American, “They nicked me a little. Somebody tie up this damn thing for me?’
“We grabbed him. We asked him how big a gap the Japs had cut in the line. He laughed. ‘What gap? How could the Japs cut through a line of Marines?’
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