by James Brady
Basilone, in the Cutter and Proser book, goes on: “For me, it was a God-given moment [those first rounds squeezed off]. It was pure thunder in my hand. The most awesome personal weapon ever built. With correct technique, the gun could fire almost continuously for days before the barrel had to be replaced. It could fire in all weather, in all directions and accurate at 150 yards [This is also silly. The gun’s sights are graduated to 2,400 yards and the effective maximum range almost half that and not the meager 150 yards impressionable recruit Basilone supposedly believed.] I was safe and nobody else was. I was like the God who throws thunderbolts.” The mock literary allusion doesn’t really fit the Basilone we know.
His enthusiasm wasn’t feigned, however. This wasn’t just a kid’s normal excitement over a new and elaborate toy. Basilone truly loved the machine gun. The passion began right there on Governor’s Island and would continue through his army years, the first overseas tour at Manila, his Marine Corps hitch, on the ’Canal, and he would still be lugging a Browning machine gun, fiddling with its head space, fretting over its care and feeding, using it to kill people, up until Iwo Jima, on the last day of his young life.
But long before then, there was that other youthful enthusiasm which also sounds genuine; there were the girls. Just a pleasant ferry ride away, the city of New York, with its millions of women, its Third and Sixth Avenue bars under the elevated trains, the Greenwich Village joints, the German beer cellars, the brauhauses of Yorkville on the Upper East Side. So passed a pleasant season, machine-gun drill, poker, ferry rides, and Manhattan honeys.
And sometime early in the new year of 1935 the young soldier was, for the first time, about to travel at government expense, to begin seeing something of the great world beyond Raritan and neighboring New York City. Basilone was being transferred, first sent to the West Coast, and then overseas, to the distant shores of the faraway Philippines. Had a restless small-town kid really found a home in the Army?
14
John Basilone had been a soldier long enough by now to have put aside any youthful illusions. You think it was easy earning that twenty-one dollars a month in the Depression-era Army? The corporals and sergeants chivvied and hassled you from reveille to Taps, the officers lorded it over you, and if you cursed back, hit out, or even gave anyone ranked higher than you a sour look, the MPs beat the shit out of you and you went to the stockade where they beat up on you some more. But what were the options? Where were you going to go? There was no money and little hope or opportunity beyond the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) or the Army, only the unemployment lines, the soup kitchens, and the hobo jungles with the rest of the tramps, where the strong screwed boys and weaker men, because there were no women, and thugs would beat a man to death for a pint of rye whiskey or his mulligan stew. As hard as the soldier’s life was in the thirties, were you really going to give it up for that and go out on the tramp?
Phyllis Basilone Cutter’s story details her kid brother’s travels as he departed the garrison at Fort Jay for California and then across the Pacific to Asia. She makes it sound a pleasant idyll.
“The group of us were herded into buses for the quick trip to the Pennsylvania Station in New York. Arriving at this tremendous station our sergeant for the trip counted noses as we filed out of the buses and stood at attention on the walk. To the curious onlookers we must have presented quite a sight as we marched through the station, down the steps to the lower level where our train lay waiting. I was anxious for a window seat as I had never traveled much before and did not want to miss the view. Approaching the vestibule of the Pullman car, I broke ahead and ran for a window seat which I fortunately got. In a few minutes we heard the conductor’s ‘all aboard,’ the peep-peep of the signal, and we were on our way. I got into my seat, hunched back and munched on my goodies, and we were on our way.
“Reaching Chicago, we passed over a maze of tracks and had a tiresome three-hour layover waiting for the West Coast Limited. Finally we were made a part of this super train and heading westward. Looking back, the huge buildings and skyscrapers of Chicago faded in the distance as our train picked up speed. The trip was uneventful. As I watched the countryside speeding by, milepost after milepost, I was amazed and felt small indeed as the vast panorama spread itself before my eyes. I had never been on such a long trip. I soaked up the ever-changing landscape like a dry sponge, for which, during the dark and anxious days still to come, I thanked God because it gave me strength when I needed it most. Just to feel that I was a tiny part of a vast country that we all more or less take for granted, until we sense the danger of losing it, was the spark that kept us going in the face of odds that seemed insurmountable. So you see, folks, we young-uns do think seriously on occasion.”
There is much in this passage that’s both phony and yet quite sweet, natural, and rather innocent. Maybe it was just a protective big sister’s efforts years after the fact to shape the narrative in ways to make her kid brother sound better. The phony part isn’t simply that self-consciously corny “young-uns” line, but the reference to those “insurmountable odds.” In 1935 as John set off for the coast on his first serious travels, there was no war going on; that was still six years ahead. Such passages, written long after Basilone’s much later voyage to a real war in which he would fight heroically and be killed, suggest that his sister was imagining what a boy on his way to war might have felt, translating his wartime emotions to a much earlier, long but essentially uneventful peacetime train ride across a tranquil nation. But some of the passage does ring true: a young man’s excitement at embarking on a long trip and seeing the big country for the first time, hustling to find a window seat, munching his goodies—chocolate bars and peanut brittle—gawking at the landscape speeding past, marveling at a first glimpse of Chicago. He was, after all, still a boy, but if it was all a long way from Raritan, Johnny Basilone was to travel farther, and further, much, much further.
The Jerry Cutter and Jim Proser parallel account of that same train ride is juicier, somehow more credible, even when contradictory. In their book, Basilone leaves for California from Grand Central Station instead of Penn Station. Here’s their account leading up to and of his trip west following a couple of days leave in Raritan:
“In July there was a machine gun competition on the base. My unit, D Company, walked away with the pennant. I was in a company of 58 winners. I could easier spend a year with these guys than a weekend at home. They were my family now. This was my home and the army was my life. I was a soldier.
“We shipped out to San Diego on the Super Chief out of Grand Central Station. You might have thought of it as the Wild West by what went on in the saloons in the station. The closer it got to ‘all aboard’ the wilder things got. Fellas who never smoked or drank in their life were doing two at a time. That went for women, too. I’m not proud of the way we acted but I won’t pretend we were choirboys either. We were warriors and likely off to war [once again, a war that wouldn’t begin for them until 1941]. Orders were for the Philippines. Soon enough, the MPs cleaned the places out and got us on the train. They were some of the roughest sons of bitches I ever met, those MPs. If you didn’t hear them the first time they said something you might never hear anything again. They used those white batons the way Ted Williams used a ball bat. [Williams was at this time, in 1935, still an unknown schoolboy, not the major league star who hit .400, so the reference simply doesn’t work.] Five or six boys got dumped into the train bleeding or doubled over with the wind knocked out of them. I hadn’t really seen that kind of rough stuff before. In camp nobody was ever gotten beaten like that, that bad. In a way, after all the ceremonies, and speeches after basic training, this was the real graduation. We were trained for violence and here it was. Every one of us who could still walk wanted to jump off that train and smash those MPs in the face. That’s who we were now. We were violent men. We were a hunting pack and our blood had been spilled. We were ready for our first kill.”
What first kill? No one was
fighting; there was no war.
“A long train with soldiers holding full pay envelopes was like a dream come true. The first crap game started before we cleared Grand Central. I was in no hurry because the money wasn’t leaving this train for the next four days. I wanted to see the country since I’d never been outside New York and New Jersey.
“We slept in our seats and washed over a basin the size of a soup bowl with one foot wedged against the bathroom door so we wouldn’t get knocked around by the swaying of the train. By the second day we were starting to smell like goats. Civilians who got on the train didn’t stay around us long. We were irritated as hell from not getting any decent sleep and arguments were breaking out every hour or so. If it weren’t for gambling, I’m sure we would have been at each other more than we were. The fact we still had three days to go didn’t help. We had our choice of three kinds of sandwiches, ham, cheese, or ham and cheese. Pretty soon we weren’t a crack fighting force, we were a gang of squabbling chiselers and malcontents. The Army made sure we were going to get to California alive, but they weren’t worried about morale. The unfunny joke going around was they were going to put down straw for us and give us hay instead of sandwiches at the next stop. I lost interest in the passing scenery. It all looked the same. I just wanted to get off that train and away from my brothers-at-arms. After the third day of sleeping sitting up and eating stale sandwiches, we were all miserable. Liquor bottles, puke, and cigarette butts covered the floor in some cars. The porters wouldn’t come near us anymore, and neither would any civilians. We were stuck with each other in our filth and stench. We sat shoulder-to-shoulder unshaven and hung over. All we thought about was getting off that train. Fights broke out and almost nobody tried to stop them.”
Then, suddenly and miraculously, everything changed. They were in California, and after getting off this cross-country train, they traveled south along the coast. As Basilone is supposed to have said in his nephew’s postmortem account, “The Pacific Ocean slid into view and I’d never seen anything quite as beautiful before.”
The Pacific. Where John Basilone would come of age, where he would fight the Japanese in two pivotal battles, where he would become a living American legend, a famous man, where he would return a second time to the battle, where he would die and be buried. Did any of this occur to the restless kid from Raritan, still a teenager and an untried soldier, or did he marvel only at the great ocean’s splendor?
Phyllis’s account resumes. “The arrival at San Diego, California was quiet. After a few days of getting settled and outfitted, we started our basic training.”
Can this possibly be correct? Basilone had already been in the Army for months, probably since the previous summer, had served with an established outfit at Fort Jay, Company D of the 16th Infantry. Whatever training they did at San Diego soon came to a close, and one night (the date is elusive) at eight p.m., machine gunner John Basilone and his outfit were mustered and marched aboard the USS Republic, a military transport that would take them to the Philippines. The Jersey boy had crossed the country by train and now would be leaving it entirely by ship to continue his Army career on the other side of the Pacific, 8,000 miles away. A band played, the transport slipped its lines, and the lights of San Diego slowly fell off and faded astern. Stifled by the close quarters below, Basilone slept that first night on deck, at a vacant spot near the stern.
“Making myself as comfortable as was possible, I stretched out. Looking up I could see the sky with its thousands of stars blinking, so close you felt you could reach up and touch them. Well, I thought, this is better. Outside of one rainy night, that was my bedroom the remainder of the trip.” He was eighteen years old, a child of the Great Depression, on the first leg of a long voyage en route to an eventual glory.
15
The Philippines had become an American territory following the Spanish-American War with a promise eventually to be granted independence. But in the mid-1930s with an elected president of their own, they were still very much subject to Washington’s wish and whim, so much so that a retired American general, Douglas MacArthur, now cruelly considered a back number, commanded their armed forces, such as they were—a handful of what were romantically called “Filipino Scouts” and some 16,000 U.S. Army regulars and naval personnel—a “corporal’s guard” to a man of General MacArthur’s towering and magisterial self-opinion. His actual title was Military Adviser to the Commonwealth Government and his rank that of a lieutenant general in the Philippine army. For MacArthur, this was something of a professional and career comedown, since he had fought famously in World War I, and in the last hours of that war to end all wars had been promoted to flag officer rank as a brigadier general by his commanding officer, General of the Armies “Black Jack” Pershing. (It was said MacArthur had desperately twisted arms for that eleventh-hour promotion, on the grounds that once the fighting ended, so too would all promotions to general officer in the shrunken peacetime Army sure to come.)
MacArthur had later in the uneasy peace between the world wars been promoted our own Army’s commander as Army chief of staff, in which role and on the president’s orders he had brutally smashed the so-called Bonus Army of aggrieved war veterans camped out in the parks and streets of the national capital. Now, himself abruptly among the unemployed, the man on horseback had been stunningly dismounted.
But for MacArthur, Manila was hardly an unpleasant exile. There were powerful family ties to the islands. His own father, Arthur MacArthur, had commanded in the Philippines, and the son had lived there when he was a little boy. Now another Arthur MacArthur was growing up there with his parents, Jean MacArthur and “the General,” as Mrs. MacArthur habitually called him, in vice regal comfort in postcolonial Manila. There was always with MacArthur, even in economically straightened times and on a more modest scale, plenty of “pomp”; it was the “circumstance” that was missing in the Philippines.
Now in March 1935, John Basilone of Raritan who had the circumstance but hardly the pomp, was about to join the MacArthurs. Not, of course, as anything approaching a social equal, but more the equivalent of a young caddy carrying for wealthy and select country club members.
Aboard the USS Republic, Basilone sailed into Manila Harbor past landmarks that would within a few years be sandblasted into the American consciousness, the fortified island of Corregidor, the Bataan Peninsula, the big naval base at Cavite, delivering the young soldier to his duty station for the next two years, as a machine gunner under one of the most celebrated of all American warriors, Douglas (“Gawd Almighty Himself”) MacArthur. But here also young John would flirt for the first time with the idea of marriage, to a local girl named Lolita, and he would make something of a reputation as a fighter, not in war but in another arena, as a jock on the boxing team of a peacetime Army garrison.
Eight thousand miles from San Diego, and in a time of strained military peacetime budgets, the replacement draft that included Basilone was short of just about everything: proper uniforms, decent rations, and, for some reason, soap. (Since there was no rationing, the shortage of soap must have been the result of a logistics foul-up or an incompetent supply officer, or a supply sergeant down the line who was on the chisel and selling soap to the locals for cash.) The undersupplied troops were armed not with the old bolt-action 1903 Springfield rifles of World War I (Sergeant York, and all that) but the even older Boer War Enfield.
Out of sheer hunger, soldiers fleshed out mess hall chow with Filipino fare, goat meat becoming a staple. Some of the troops were adopted by local Philippine families or got part-time jobs in Filipino shops and businesses, or moved in with native girls. Others started up local, off-base businesses of one sort or another, of which Jerry Cutter and Jim Proser quote Basilone as saying, “For the first year or two I didn’t go in for that. I was still U.S. Army and kept my nose clean as far as all that.” Some troops took up wearing Philippine civilian clothes, a few deserted entirely, or cracked, “went Asiatic.” Not Basilone, though he complained
that only the constant card games got him through the boredom of that first year in country.
There were bandits up in the hills and a few rebels of one persuasion or another, and you might think that MacArthur would have had his troops constantly out in the field, aggressively patrolling, in order to train and season his men and eliminate boredom, if not the bandits. No such luck. Perhaps budgetary constraints limited such exercises and prohibited the general from issuing orders that would have benefited both his men and his entire command. These were hard times, and this was an Army on the cheap. They counted cartridges, so that firing-range practice, something you’d think to be essential, was curtailed. Or maybe MacArthur was simply getting older, saw little future in his career, and, inertia being what it was, just didn’t bother ordering units into the field.
Basilone recalled that from time to time shots were fired at the Army encampments from beyond the perimeter security. There might then be a halfhearted attempt to track down and capture the “guerrillas,” but the Americans never caught anyone in the rough terrain of the countryside. And there might have been the odd firefight, though how did you chase bandits through the bush lugging a Browning water-cooled heavy machine gun, basically a defensive weapon, and with its tripod, water jacket, elevating and aiming devices, and the pintle on which everything turned, weighing when loaded nearly a hundred pounds? The answer was, you didn’t, so it is highly unlikely the young machine gunner ever fired a shot in anger in the Philippine years.