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fight.” Estimates of Japanese strength ranged from 3,100 to just over 8,400. In actual count, there were only a total of 3,457, and of those 2,500 were mostly Korean laborers, not actual fighting men. Said Shaw, “The first landing craft carrying assault troops of the 5th Marines touched down at 0909 [9:09 a.m.] on Red Beach. To the men’s surprise (and relief), no Japanese appeared to resist the landing. . . . The Japanese troops . . . had fled to the west, spooked by a week’s B-17 bombardment, the pre-assault naval gunfire, and the sight of the ships offshore [those twenty-three transports and their escort vessels].” The U.S. assault troops were reported to have moved “off the beach and into the surrounding jungle, waded the steep-banked Ilu River, and headed for the enemy airfield.” That airfield was the point of the entire operation, and on their very first day ashore the U.S. troops were nearly there.
    But the Japanese enemy was nothing if not resilient. Heavy combat raged on the small nearby island of Tulagi where the enemy consisted of the Japanese equivalent of Marines, what they called “special naval landing force sailors,” and those babies weren’t running from anyone. On Tulagi that first day the Raider Battalion suffered ninety-nine casualties; a rifle battalion had fifty-six. When night fell on Gavutu, the enemy stayed in caves as the first wave of parachute Marines came ashore, and brisk fighting ensued as they emerged, with the Marines having to fall back for a time. On August 8, the airfield was taken, but more Japanese forces were on their way, by air and naval surface ships. On the several small islands near Guadalcanal in one day the Americans had suffered 144 dead and 194 wounded. On the second day Japanese airplanes sank the destroyer Jarvis , and in dogfights over the two days twenty-one Marine Wildcats were lost. Guadalcanal was not going to be a walkover. But there was worse to come, and swiftly.
    On the night of the eighth an enemy cruiser-destroyer force off Savo Island proved themselves our superior at night fighting, sinking with no loss to themselves four Allied heavy cruisers, three American and one Australian, and knocking off the bow of a fifth heavy cruiser. About 1,300 U.S. and Aussie sailors died that night, with another 700 badly wounded or severely burned. These losses were such a shock that a panicky Admiral Jack Fletcher asked for and got permission to withdraw his carrier force. The supply and other amphibious support vessels were also pulled from the area, in effect leaving the Marines ashore on their own and without the heavy artillery that had been due to be landed, to follow the assault waves and reinforce the lighter field artillery already ashore. As for ammo and rations, the 1st Marine Division had only a four-day supply of ammunition for all weapons and, even counting captured Japanese food, only seventeen days’ worth of chow.
    All this as still half-filled supply ships steamed away from the beaches, fleeing the island and the enemy at flank speed. Their departure was so hasty that several small Marine units that should have been landed were still on board and didn’t rejoin the division until October 29. Worse still, on August 12 a sizable Japanese force of reinforcements for Guadalcanal was massing at the huge Japanese base of Truk, only a thousand miles away in the Carolines. On Guadalcanal through August and into September there was heavy fighting, continued combat and recon patrolling, strongpoints and beachheads that changed hands several times over, nightly bombing, naval shelling by ships of both sides, and mounting Marine casualties, as well as the first cases of malaria. No wonder Vandegrift had gone over to the defensive before the 7th Marines, and Sergeant Basilone, even got to the ’Canal and the war.
    On that first battalion-sized “probing” by Puller and his men on the ’Canal, what would be