Hero of the Pacific

by James Brady

  For the bored, card-playing, womanizing, and randy young Basilone, there were, however, the attractive charms of the petite, dark-haired, dark-eyed local women, who he thought resembled some of the handsome Italian-American girls he’d known at home in Raritan. There were plenty of compliant “amateurs,” and there were the favorite girls at the local bordellos. According to a few dubious, entirely unproven allegations, Basilone actually became a junior partner in running one of these establishments of easy virtue. I found no credible evidence of that, but almost surely he patronized the brothels. The whorehouse “management” rumors may have derived from the small “nightclub” he and his girl, Lolita, set up inside her uncle’s bicycle shop, which sounds colorful and fun but reasonably innocent.

  All of MacArthur’s troops looked forward to their R&R stints every six months in New Zealand, with its temperate climate, pretty girls, local beers, and “people a lot like us.” Some of the farmboys and ranchers among the enlisted men spent their R&R, and voluntarily so, living with families and working without pay and happily on farms and cattle stations (ranches). The Yanks found New Zealanders wonderful, but really they would have welcomed almost anything to get them out of the Philippines for a time. Some of Basilone’s fellow soldiers, their enlistments up, instead of going home to the States returned to New Zealand to marry local girls.

  Beyond his acknowledged skill as a machine gunner, there was at first little to distinguish Basilone’s first overseas tour of duty, apart from his card-playing expertise and a penchant for going barefoot in monsoon season. Army-issue wool socks, when wet, itched, and men developed fungus and jungle rot. Cotton socks sent from home rotted quickly. Basilone had a simple cure—go without—and was regularly chewed out about it. But his feet toughened up, he developed surer footing, and he didn’t itch anymore. Going barefoot was just about all that set him apart from his mates—or it was until he began to box.

  In the jock-happy prewar regular Army, service athletes, especially competent boxers, might do pretty well for themselves. MacArthur, who served once as superintendent of the Military Academy at West Point, understood the constructive role military athletics could play in a bored peacetime Army and encouraged the athletic culture. James Jones wonderfully (and tragically) portrayed the scene in prewar Hawaii in From Here to Eternity with fighter and trumpeter Robert E. Lee Prewitt as his hero. Young Basilone’s experience was more rewarding. He began boxing, horsing around at first in ad hoc fights. “A lot of steam had been building up in my head.”

  Part of that “steam” was a professional and rather patriotic frustration. The soldiers had been told that if the Japanese (the closest, perhaps the only potential enemy) ever attacked, the plan was for American regulars of MacArthur’s little Army to retreat to Corregidor and fight it out from there. As Jerry Cutter reported the situation from Basilone’s point of view, “I didn’t like sitting around waiting for an attack just so we could run for it. And I didn’t like that we were stuck on this island [Luzon] and we weren’t even important enough to get soap. Sparring let me blow off steam and kept me sharp. Being a fighter got you privileges sometimes like an inside bunk and credit at card games—which I didn’t usually need.” Based on his success in those pickup bouts, he volunteered for the unit’s organized boxing squad, and as a muscular young athlete in good shape, he began fighting in service bouts as a 160-pound middleweight. He was now nineteen, and thanks to being physically more mature, a year older, and with regular workouts, conditioning, and better chow, had soon grown into and was fighting as a light heavyweight (175 pounds). He soon caught on to the racket. “Once I started winning I started getting steaks and pork chops stolen from the Officers’ Club. My fellow soldiers began to see me as a money-making enterprise.”

  Soldiers, and especially other gunners and his buddies, not only backed him with cash in side bets but volunteered as sparring partners, medics as cut men, others as corner men, trainers, managers, and cheering squads. Gambling picked up and money changed hands. Basilone was becoming a popular local character on whom a man might make a buck.

  There were organized bouts twice a month, and Basilone won them. Never lazy, he trained hard, running up hills or in the soft, yielding sand of the shoreline of Manila Bay. Parallels to the much later and fictional Rocky Balboa are irresistible. For all Basilone’s casual, card-playing ways, there is an impressive discipline about the slimly educated youngster, the newly minted soldier. One weekend when a fellow soldier named Smits was arrested for being intoxicated, Basilone and some buddies conjured up a scheme to break him out of the drunk tank of a Filipino police station by ramming a stolen truck into the prison wall early on a Sunday morning, the clever reasoning being that the cops, being Roman Catholics, would be at their devotions and attending mass. Whether the Sunday-morning ploy was Basilone’s or a group decision, they got Smits out and weren’t caught themselves. The plan worked.

  Following two knockouts in Basilone’s first three winning formal bouts, the brass began coming by to see him fight, even MacArthur on one occasion stopping by to wish him luck. He eventually ran his record to eighteen wins, no losses. According to Cutter and Proser, the adulation went slightly to Basilone’s head, and he started thinking of his undefeated record and himself as a sort of “mascot” for the general, someone to whom MacArthur, with his ego, could justifiably point in an otherwise unimpressive little command. Reputedly, word of Basilone’s ability trickled back to the States, and offers to turn professional came in from New York fight managers and promoters, though no one I spoke with in Raritan could provide any names or details about what probably was just wishful thinking. But a fighting nickname, “Manila John,” seems to have stuck. And MacArthur was pleased as the kid’s perfect ring record improved, with a big possible fight against a Navy boxer coming up.

  It was always an occasion, the whores and the saloons especially rejoicing, when the fleet sailed into Manila, and with Army and Navy rivalry heightening, officers trading boasts and placing bets, they staged Basilone’s last Army bout, matching him as a soldier against a formidable American Navy tar, “Sailor Burt,” a tough machinist’s mate, “a fucking Dane . . . a shoveler of shit,” as the troops rudely put it. Manila John’s buddies placed their own bets, warning him he’d “better win” or they’d be broke till next payday. He tried, prudently, to warn them off. Sailor Burt was tough and Manila John could guarantee nothing. But the soldiers didn’t listen.

  The day of the big fight arrived, and with it a lunch that wasn’t the usual dreary mess hall chow for the gladiator, but a steak, French fries, sliced Bermuda onion, topped off by apple pie, and steaming black coffee. With a cheering, foot-stamping audience of sailors and soldiers, including the brass from both services, Basilone and Burt went at it, trading knockdowns, both men nearly out. In the end it was a twelve-rounder and yet another knockout, as “Manila John” won again, running his record to 19-0. His commanding officer was jubilant, and even the disappointed admiral came back to the lockers to congratulate the foe, the Army boy who knocked out Sailor Burt.

  With his Army hitch nearing its end, the young man was torn. He hated the boredom, the weather, not enough to eat even of the usual lousy food, the malaria, the bugs, the chiggers, the snakes, but most of all those “standing orders to retreat” in case of war, the prospect of a fallback to Corregidor if and when the Japanese came ashore. And John knew they were coming. He liked the discipline and much of the structure and purpose he found in the Army but hated some of it. He’s quoted on how enlisted men were handled: “They trained us to be fighters and treated us like convicts.”

  John thought he might be in love with Lolita, even considered staying in the islands with her and starting a real business outside the bike shop cum nightclub. But in the end when his sergeant asked if Basilone planned to re-up for another tour, he said no. Twenty-one years old, he headed home to Raritan, as adrift as he had been three years before, as directionless and unfocused, as unskilled in civilian terms. And even
worse, having returned home, he realized already that he missed some aspects of Army life—the machine gun, the boxing, the camaraderie. His nephew Jerry Cutter summed it up, supposedly in his uncle’s words: “I had lost the life, the calling I had found. I wasn’t a soldier anymore. I was lost.”

  16

  Back home, again a civilian, John Basilone recognized swiftly, pragmatically that “there’s not much use for a machine gunner in New Jersey.” If he expected much out of his hometown, he was mistaken. He went to see and seek counsel from his old priest/adviser Amadeo Russo at St. Ann’s. The men talked with the old familiarity, but there were no easy answers. At home Basilone self-consciously told stories of the Philippines but not about Lolita, whom he sloughed off as just another of the generic native girls he’d encountered. Asked about the Army, he didn’t feel that he could explain it very well, not so they would understand—the contradictions, the pull it had on him still, and the other, less appealing aspects of garrison life—not so that anyone “got” his mixed emotions. It was frustrating.

  The Depression had eased marginally, and some of Basilone’s boyhood friends were settled down and doing well. Others were as adrift as he was. No high school, no marketable skills, nothing beyond being able to field-strip and rebuild a Browning water-cooled heavy machine gun. Basilone was a good boxer in amateur circles but was sufficiently savvy to know that was a long way from being a professional paid to fight like his old idol, Primo Carnera, in Madison Square Garden. There was always the caddy shack at the Raritan Valley Country Club. As an adult, he was caddying again that summer over his father’s objections: “You can’t be a caddy your whole life,” his father said. For a time he drove a laundry delivery truck for Gaburo’s Laundry (his sleeping atop the laundry bags apparently forgiven). Then he took a job in nearby Bound Brook with the Calco Chemical Division of American Cyanamid. That job lasted a year.

  Basilone’s sister Phyllis and her husband, Bill Cutter, were living in Reisterstown, Maryland, near Baltimore, and Bill convinced John to become an installation mechanic for his gas company employer, the Philgas Company. Basilone moved in with the Cutters. He seemed to enjoy the work and was good at it, but after about eight months the old restlessness was working at him.

  In a way he missed the orderly, organized misery of an enlisted man’s daily routine on a military post, no matter how distant or alien. And he was again sensing that war was coming to his country, his home, as it had to so many other nations around the world. It got him thinking about again enlisting. But this time he wouldn’t go Army.

  Basilone was now twenty-three years old, a veteran, a traveled man, strong and aware of his own highly specialized skills and strengths, a solid 180 pounds, a formidable amateur boxer, and considerably larger than his father. But he didn’t know quite how to break the news to his parents that civilian life wasn’t working out for him and that he was going back into the service. That in fact, and without telling anyone, on July 11, 1940, the day on which Marshal Pétain, now virtually a Nazi puppet, became president of Occupied France, John had gone into Baltimore and enlisted in the Marine Corps. The Marines were apparently glad to have a man with three years of Army service behind him and a veteran machine gunner at that. Phyllis was stunned, but Bill seemed to understand and be supportive, agreeing to help smooth things over with the family and especially with the patriarch, the Old Man, Salvatore the tailor.

  The two men and Phyllis drove north the next day to Raritan. The situation promised to be awkward. John seemed to have grown tranquil now that he’d made a decision and taken action. He thought he now knew how to appeal to his father, through the old man’s love of his adopted country, his patriotism, and though his mother might “carry on,” she would eventually fall in line. The ploy worked. Over a smoke he told his father he was concerned about threats from the country’s enemies. Who would dare attack us? the senior Basilone demanded. John was prepared. “The Japs, Pop.” Maybe he was still thinking of that golfing foursome at the country club, those Japanese golfers taking photos.

  At Sal’s insistence, John agreed to remain in Raritan for a round of leave-taking with family and friends. At first he resented these duty calls. But as the visits went on, seeing pals and relations, with the well-wishing, the ritual glass of wine, the gifts, usually money, pressed into Basilone’s hands, he felt better about things. And to be candid about it, he could use the dough. His appointed date with the Marines arrived, and he left Raritan for the South, reporting to boot camp at what was then the Marine Corps recruit depot at Quantico, Virginia, just thirty-five miles south of Washington, D.C.

  In her serialized newspaper account of her brother’s adventures, and in his voice, this is how Phyllis describes John’s formal introduction to the Corps: “A hot sweltering humid day. The processing didn’t help any, however. Looking back I can truthfully say the first night at Quantico was the only night I found it difficult to fall asleep. If I thought Army training was tough, it was soon put out of my mind. When they train you to become a Marine, you either fall by the wayside or you emerge as the best damn fighting man in the service. We trained and went through exercises at Quantico until we were razor sharp. Our sergeant was a holy terror and if only one-tenth of our bitching came true, he’d never have a restful night’s sleep. Later on we thanked God for our training under Sarge. It certainly paid off. Maybe he knew; he always hollered, ‘Come on you guys, get the lead out of your asses. What’d you think, you’re in the Army? Set up these guns, on the double.’ It got so we could set them up in seconds flat. Secretly, I had the feeling he was satisfied, even proud of us.”

  All this may have dismayed Phyllis, but to most Marines the drill sounds familiar, routine, and rather tame. If “asses” was the worst language and “hollering” the worst treatment that boot camp drill instructors passed out back in 1940, Manila John was a fortunate man. One can assume this business of “setting up guns” dealt with the Browning heavy machine guns on which Basilone had been already thoroughly checked out during his Army hitch. As for that “hot sweltering humid” Quantico weather, I can testify as a Marine who spent three summers there (1948, 1949, and 1951) that heat and humidity was commonplace. For an American with two years in the tropical Philippines, the climate of northern Virginia shouldn’t have been a shock. And for an enlisted man and trained athlete with three years of Army service behind him, a Marine recruit depot would be tolerable if not posh. Yet as Phyllis sums up in John’s voice his Quantico experience, “If we thought boot training was tough, we soon discovered that compared to our training and exercises at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, it was duck soup.”

  According to Basilone’s USMC military service record, he boarded ship, traveling “tourist class” aboard the SS McCawley on September 28, 1940, and was ashore at Guantanamo on October 2. Nothing much was going on there, just a handful of peacetime Marines in canvas leggings toting Springfield ’03s, guardians of one of the modest and most enduring outposts of American colonialism, held ever since the Spanish-American War. Teddy Roosevelt may have landed at or embarked from here. And in Basilone’s words, “There we put in seven miserable months of maneuvers. For this we earned the title of ‘Raggedy-Ass Marines.’”

  Some of those maneuvers weren’t at Guantanamo itself but at the Puerto Rican Island of Culebra where, as early as the winter of 1923-1924, the Marine Corps had begun a concentrated and very serious program of amphibious warfare, training troops to land on hostile beaches under fire, from small boats launched beachward from transports, destroyers, or other larger craft. By 1940 and 1941, Basilone was one of many Marines readying for amphibious warfare. There were as yet no specially designed landing craft, and photos of the time show Marines jumping into shallow-water beaches from Chris-Craft speedboats, civilian-style 1920s motorboats of one sort or another, rifles at high port to keep them dry and out of the corroding saltwater.

  In a still young country like ours, it’s fascinating the way history can compress and fold in on itself. Here we were
in the 1940s training troops on islands and beaches won by Teddy Roosevelt and his generation at the end of the last century during the Spanish-American War, incorporating new assault tactics developed in the 1920s, to be put into action against the Japanese in the mid-twentieth century in World War II.

  On New Year’s Day 1941 Basilone joined the outfit with which he would first see combat, D Company, 1st Battalion of the 7th Marine Regiment of the Fleet Marine Force (FMF). On March 1, 1941, he was transferred to D Company of the 1st Marines, a different regiment. There is no explanation for this transfer. Perhaps someone was short of a machine gunner, and indeed Basilone would soon land back in the 7th Regiment.

  He wrote little, nothing that came down to us through family and friends or through the years. Instead, we get the spare official record of his service, the flawed memories of his folks, most of them now dead, and beyond that, a frustrating silence.

  The paucity of letters from Basilone to the family, or to anyone, is frustrating. The nuns at his grammar school and Father Russo, his mentor, must share the blame for Manila John’s failure to write, even to the family, or keep some sort of informal diary. He must have had some informed, interesting things to say, one young man’s commentary on being in a peacetime American military while much of the cultured and civilized Old World was at war, a war that was maybe coming, and soon, to a still peaceful, complacent America. Why should we be immune? If France with its greatest army in the world could fall, London burn, and Poland, the Low Counties, Norway, and Denmark be conquered, why would we stand untouched?

  Or might not machine gunner Basilone have made pungent comparisons between the Marines and his previous employer, the U.S. Army? Did he miss General Douglas MacArthur and his paternalistic cheerleading, yearn for the boxing, ache for Lolita? Was Marine chow better than the crap they fed him in Manila? Or was there anything else from his previous enlistment and two years in a foreign country from which he took lessons? From which fellow Marines might have learned something? When he read the papers, if he did, was he following with even a narrow professional interest what was happening in Europe and North Africa? When he heard of growing tensions in the Pacific, did he once more recall that foursome of Japanese golfers he once took as spies? Might Basilone not have taken scribbled notes, worried about the future, concerned himself about a possible American war, drawn and mulled obvious conclusions?