Hero of the Pacific

by James Brady

  From Guantanamo Bay, sandy, hot, wind-dried, and peaceful Gitmo, the Marines moved on to more promising exercises, those landing maneuvers at Culebra. Basilone and his heavy machine gun moved on. There were other Marine Corps “stately pleasure domes” to come. On April 19, 1941, “Patriots Day” in Boston, where they were still celebrating the battles of Concord and Lexington, Basilone and Company D arrived aboard the good ship George F. Elliott at Parris Island, South Carolina, later to become the East Coast’s recruit training depot. It was there on May 15 that Basilone was promoted, the same day the Germans were preparing to drop their paratroopers on Crete, including old heavyweight champ Max Schmeling, to take the island from the Brits, whose numbers included Royal Marine commando officer and author Evelyn Waugh and some battered Greeks.

  Basilone had been rewarded with a promotion by temporary warrant to corporal, a swift promotion in those days, which must say something about his performance, professional skills, and attitude as a relatively new Marine. When you think back to those three years of consistently “excellent” fitness reports during Army service, he seems to have been a born soldier.

  There was a brief stop at his old boot camp at Quantico, a base now expanding rapidly. A short furlough later that month was followed by what sounds like seagoing duty, aboard the Harry Lee from June 7 to July 23 and then aboard the Fuller from July 24 to August 13. On September 30, 1941, Basilone arrived in North Carolina and went ashore at a new and growing base called New River. Also on that day, in Russia, Kiev having been taken, Guderian’s panzer army wheeled toward Moscow. It looked as if the Soviets were next to finished, the Germans closing on victory. There was no comment on this that we know of from Basilone.

  Phyllis in her account has her brother touching not on the world war but about his latest duty station in the Carolinas: “If we thought Cuba and Culebra were bad, our first look at New River made them look like the Riviera.”

  Marine Barracks, New River, North Carolina, what is now known as Camp Lejeune (or in Marine jargon, “Swamp Lagoon”), was a new East Coast Marine base on a big river flowing into the nearby Atlantic. In 1941 the Navy Department and Marine brass, increasingly concerned about the Japanese, were considering an expansion of the Marine Corps from a mere 7,000 troops and 500 officers to something a lot bigger, a Corps that would have need of large new bases. Basilone is quoted as describing New River this way: “Picture if you can over 100,000 acres of plains, swamps, water infested with snakes, chiggers and sand flies. No mountains or hills, just flat, swampy terrain, and you get an idea of what our playground was.”

  With winter coming on, Basilone’s outfit was still housed in tents in the cold and damp, the heating supplied by smelly stoves prone to starting fires and very good at putting out soot, with lighting mostly limited to candles. The training concentrated on amphibious warfare drill, men climbing down cargo nets into small boats, much of the time using mockups on dry land since neither large transports or landing barges were available, though cargo nets were plentiful. There were no USO shows coming to New River, the only medium was the local weekly newspaper, and perhaps out of sheer boredom, Basilone resumed boxing, again going undefeated, though against what quality of competition isn’t clear. He enjoyed a week’s furlough that ended with his return to New River on November 26, two weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor, a shattering and historic event about which, by my reckoning, Basilone has absolutely nothing to say. The Japanese had surprise-attacked us, and Corporal Basilone issues no comment, displays no reaction.

  The United States had been attacked and was now at war, the entire country was up in arms, our military men and bases were on alert, Basilone was a serving Marine, yet there is nothing at all recorded of letters or calls or any exchanges whatsoever between him and his folks. Its is tempting to say that this is vexing, but perhaps in the new wartime situation Basilone may simply have been kept busy. After all, the Marines were supposed to be “first to fight.”

  On January 23, 1942, Basilone was promoted, again by temporary warrant, to sergeant-line, once more a rapid promotion perhaps reflecting not only on his outstanding record but the accelerating expansion of the Corps. In the Pacific the Japanese were winning almost everywhere and rolling up American and Allied forces. And on that very date of Basilone’s promotion, Japanese troops landed on New Britain, New Ireland, Borneo, and in the Solomons, on the big island of Bougainville. An enemy sub had shelled the oil fields of Long Beach, just south of Los Angeles. Incendiary balloons launched in Japan floated across the ocean on prevailing winds toward the forested slopes of Oregon and Washington State, fortunately setting no fires. But the bastards did have a helluva nerve, didn’t they?

  In March, reacting to continued enemy pressure and new landings in the Pacific, a detachment of Marines, Basilone among them, was assigned to the defense of American Samoa, and the entire 1st Marine Division, which had been created only thirteen months earlier, got its orders for service overseas. On April 10 Basilone’s bunch embarked from Norfolk for the Pacific, and after a long, leisurely voyage, “Our convoy reached Apia, Western Samoa on May 8, 1942 and set up camp.” The Battle of the Coral Sea was fought that day. A few days earlier in the Philippines, where Basilone once served, the historic 4th Marines had burned their regimental colors and sent off two officers, a field music (probably a bugler), and an interpreter to ask the victorious Japanese for terms, and then surrendered, shortly to set off on the long death march to the camps.

  In peaceful Samoa, Sergeant Basilone was just barely en route to the war and, eventually, a shot at the enemy. Neither he nor anyone else could have predicted that within months he would fight heroically in desperate battles on Guadalcanal, be shipped to Australia, awarded the grandest medal we have, and then confronted with a hard choice to make, to “stay with his boys” and go back into combat, or accept a free ride home to the States as an anointed hero.

  PART THREE

  HOME FRONT

  Major General Alexander A. Vandegrift, Colonel Merritt A. Edson, Platoon Sergeant Mitchell Paige, and Sergeant John Basilone after receiving their Congressional Medals of Honor at Camp Balcombe, in Australia, May 21, 1943, for their heroism at Guadalcanal.

  17

  The Marine Corps finally, in midsummer of 1943, after much backing and filling, made up its mind. John Basilone was being sent back to the States.

  “The day officer came in one day and handed me orders, [to] separate from my unit. I was shipping out, going home. I was to report to Marine headquarters in New York City. There were no further instructions. Talking about coming from left field, I had to read the damn thing three times. I was going home. It didn’t make any sense. My guys are gearing up for operations and I’m shipping out? [Bob] Powell looked at me as if I was Jesus H. Christ himself. He gave me his folks’ address in New Haven and for a minute I thought he was going to cry. Nobody even thought seriously about home and not even in a dream. But here it was in front of me and I was going. . . . The orders said now, so I packed my sea bag.” Basilone’s mood had changed, his earlier elation over the medal’s being a sure “ticket home” had evaporated. He would be going home, but now reluctantly.

  It’s exasperating that nowhere do we have a date for the man’s departure. It probably was July. Basilone’s service record book shows that he was promoted to temporary platoon sergeant on June 1, 1943, and the entry on the next line, partly illegible, indicates he sailed on the twenty-seventh (it had to be July) via the ship Rochambeau. In the next service record book entry, Basilone reports into Marine barracks at the Washington, D.C., Navy Yard on August 31, 1943. Furloughs might logically fill in the gaps covering most of August. The medal ceremony had been on May 21, 1943. Yet there was no official news about it until June 23 when it was released to the national press. The New York Times ran its front-page story on June 24, under a headline that read, “Slew 38 Japanese in one battle; Jersey Marine gets honor medal.” The lead read, “The son of an Italian-born tailor in New Jersey took his p
lace tonight among the great American war heroes, when a Marine Corps platoon sergeant, John Basilone of Raritan, 26, one of a family of ten children, was cited for the Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest tribute the nation can bestow on its fighting sons.” John’s letter to the family telling about the medal was dated June 12, and they received it June 21, did not understand its significance, and therefore didn’t really react until the news broke in newspapers on the twenty-third or (as in the Times) the twenty-fourth of June.

  Bruce Doorly in his monograph notes, “In July of 1943, John was notified that he was being sent home, but there was a catch to it. John would have to go on a ‘bond drive’ and on a ‘speaking tour,’ to war plants.

  “This wouldn’t be the first of these bond-selling caravansaries of Hollywood stars and actual decorated heroes to tour the country. In 1942 the luminous Carole Lombard, a glamorous figure and gifted film comedienne, the wife of Clark Gable (himself now an Air Corps officer), was killed in a plane crash during just such a trip. As John loaded up to go home he told his buddies he would be back, but they did not believe him. . . . John arrived back in the U.S., landing in California in August of 1943.”

  Jerry Cutter, Basilone’s nephew, attempts to nail down his uncle’s return to the continental United States, starting with this account, in John’s voice, of the press reception at Roosevelt Base, a wartime operation on Terminal Island off Long Beach, California, possibly where the Rochambeau docked following its long crossing from Melbourne: “They swarmed over us, snapping pictures and yelling questions, everybody calling to me, ‘Manila John, how d’ya feel when ya got the medal?’ ‘Hey, Johnny, were ya scared?’ ‘Have ya called home yet?’ ‘How’d ya feel when you killed all those Japs?’ Talk about being in the spotlight, it was like the whole country turned its headlights on me and wanted me to tell them every last thing down to what I had for breakfast.”

  Sounds like the celebrity press of today, the paparazzi, the shouted questions about whether he liked being called “Manila John, the Jap Killer”? Would he be going back into the ring?

  This was a guy who hated to be “gawked at” in his own barracks by Marines he knew, let alone total strangers doing a job. But here’s how Phyllis Cutter reconstructed the time following the May 21 award presentation at Melbourne, in Basilone’s voice, including a brief reference on a fairly important official matter. During his California sojourn in August 1943, she quotes him, fed up by all the press, as saying, “Turning down a commission, I asked to be sent back into action with my buddies and was promptly refused.”

  This is new, the mention of a possible commission, the Corps finally offering him an opportunity to become an officer, just as they had earlier with Platoon Sergeant Mitchell Paige. There would later be similar offers in Washington, but this reference is the earliest such bid of commissioned rank that I can find. In Phyllis’s article, Basilone goes on: “I think it was during the latter part of July 1943 [while still with his unit in Australia] I was being briefed on my return to the States. Yes, I was being given leave. However, there was a hitch to it. I was given a faint idea of what was expected of me and told I would be filled in at HQ in New York City.”

  Phyllis describes Basilone’s departure from Melbourne with one Marine, on seeing John crying, sneering to another, “I thought you said he was a tough guy.” There is no account of his voyage home aboard, the records say, the Rochambeau, or his brief August stay in California with its welcoming if rowdy press events. There was a quick authorized visit to Camp Pendleton at Oceanside, California, to see his brother George, who was now a young Marine there in training. “A big fuss” was made, and George was given time off (he was later sent home on leave to be with his brother).

  While Basilone was still in California the Marine Corps was already briefing him on an upcoming tour with movie people to sell war bonds around the country. “We kept hearing that this bond tour was going to get going but one thing or another held up the show. First it was some movie star couldn’t get away, and then it was a scheduled event that was delayed and would throw the whole schedule off. So we ended up sitting in our barracks with absolutely nothing to do except waiting to be called for interviews with newspaper or radio people. They all asked pretty much the same questions. So I started telling them they could read the other newspaper and get all the answers they wanted.”

  So Basilone was starting to mouth off, wise-guy style. “My shadow [his guide and monitor on the tour] lit into me after that. These were all important people from important places. If I didn’t toe the line he’d see about getting me shipped back to that jungle. That was definitely the wrong thing to say. He said it like being in the jungle fighting was a place where you went if you couldn’t get a soft desk job like him, and his important people.”

  You wonder why Manila John didn’t just deck the creep. Apparently the significant next step in his journey was the order to report to the senior Marine at 90 Church Street in Manhattan. Maybe they were finally getting started on the war bond tour.

  Phyllis picks up Basilone’s story in New York, at the Marine Corps office there, where the returning warrior would again be trotted out for the press, his first organized Manhattan press conference. A comic book called War Heroes had been released, his story as a superhero garishly reported in detail. There is no suggestion anyone in the Corps or in publishing even bothered to ask Basilone’s clearance on the comic. He was a serving Marine and, medal or no medal, he was expected to do what he was told.

  Wrote Phyllis in her brother’s voice: “It was mid-morning on September 4, and sitting in the Corps office nervous, with the perspiration rolling down my brow, I remarked, ‘Geez, this is something.’ Well, anyway, I told the reporters who had jammed the press room my story exactly as it happened. As I once again related my experiences, I seemed to have drifted back to the ’Canal, bringing home the realization that as long as I had to repeat the experience time and time again, it would take a long time to erase its memory from my mind. Maybe that’s the price a hero pays. I didn’t know.” You sense the confusion in the young man’s mind, the understandable stage fright, almost a longing for military routine, for the structure of the unit, the outfit, his pals, the Marine Corps itself. Yet this was in a Marine office in Manhattan and the Marine Corps was more or less running the show, and the sergeant was going along with it as best he could. Things lightened up that September afternoon.

  “At noon I was taken over to City Hall to meet ‘The Little Flower,’ Mayor LaGuardia. He turned out to be an all-right Joe. Of course the reporters and photographers tagged along, jotting down our every word to the steady pop of the flash-bulbs all over the place.” LaGuardia made a little talk about the significance of Basilone’s medal and the requisite pitch for Americans to buy war bonds during the bond drive coming up, and then he turned back to Basilone with a question. “Sergeant, where did your old man come from?”

  Basilone gave the proudly parochial Italian American mayor chapter and verse about Italy, Naples, the name of the ship on which his father sailed to the States, and his work as a tailor, and the Little Flower beamed. There were other press conferences, with family members participating in some of them, and Marine brother George marveling to John at one point, “The whole country is crazy about you.” Then it was off to D.C. and another round of press conferences, including one at USMC headquarters, on or about September 9, a session that would be pleasantly pivotal. Amid the usual shouted questions and flashbulbs going off in his face, Basilone later admitted, “I was sweating, nervous, and turning to an officer, I said, ‘This is worse than fighting the Japs.’ He patted me on the shoulder and told me to tell the reporters what happened on October 24-25 in my own words.”

  Apparently a hush then came over the big room, and for the first time the thing was no longer a circus or an adversarial process, a scrimmage between aggressive reporters and photographers and an overwhelmed Marine still unused to any of this. With Marine public affairs officers and noncoms in char
ge on their own turf, even the cocky press boys calmed down, stopped shouting, settled in to take notes and let the man speak. Basilone, at last and perhaps for the first time, would be able to tell his story quietly and in a measured and orderly fashion, without interruption, as he best remembered it.

  “I started to talk and as the words poured out, I became oblivious to the reporters and all the confusion going on about me. I told them how there had been a heavy tropical rain all day long.” Then he told them about the fight, starting with that field phone’s ringing at about ten that night, warning that a Japanese attack was about to hit their ridgelines, and went on from there, taking a live audience with him through the nightmare hours of darkness and into the welcoming gray half-light of another dawn, trying to explain how an exhausted, stressed man in mortal combat felt about having lived to see yet another day.

  Except for an unlikely Manila John word like “oblivious,” it almost seems that this would be the press conference where Basilone made some sort of a breakthrough, realizing that if he just told the story in his own way and his own words, he might be able to handle the challenge of speaking in public. And when the machine gunner had wrapped up his story and a colonel called a halt to the proceedings, each of the newspaper reporters, not shouting now but rather subdued, walked up and asked to shake his hand.