Hero of the Pacific

by James Brady

  “We practiced setting up various pieces of equipment until everyone could recognize any piece of a weapon by its feel and set it up in the dark. A vet sergeant named Ray Windle came on board in the next week or so. He’d seen plenty of action and knew the score on a jungle battlefield. He was a tough talker like Chesty, and a hot head, so I knew he’d be an easy mark in a card game and this gave me hope for off-duty entertainment. I couldn’t fraternize with the boys to the point of gambling with them, so I was left with the non-coms. This cut my chances for extra income in half. But I was glad to have Windle with us. He was the kind of battle commander we needed around these boys. They looked so damn young, some of them. They looked like the sons or the kid brothers of the boys in the 1/7 [John’s Guadalcanal battalion]. Malaria and combat hadn’t touched these boys yet. Entire battalions started arriving. Many were boys who had trained to be paratroopers, like the earlier group. Once Topside caught on that you can’t parachute into a jungle, where most of our work was going to be, it became our job to retrain them in amphibious assault tactics and jungle warfare. Basilone was back in business.

  The only drawback, according to Cutter and Proser, was “dames.” As Basilone said so himself, “Even on base I couldn’t get away from the women and the truth was, I didn’t want to.” There were plenty of Camp Pendleton women, healthy, fit young female Marines working the mess halls, and Basilone had begun looking them over. Despite their shapeless fatigues you couldn’t miss the curves.

  You have to wonder why, only a two-hour drive from Los Angeles, it hadn’t even occurred to Basilone to call Virginia Grey, hop a Greyhound bus north to drop by her place, send her a post-card to say hi. After all, on the bond tour, all those overnight hotel stops and their having fallen for each other, it would have been the natural thing to do. Recall Basilone’s determination that there would be no more “love ’em and leave ’em” for Manila John. Not the way he felt about his movie star, Virginia, the lovely, classy, coolly irreverent actress who liked to knock back a drink with him and who made him laugh, the young woman who had nothing of Raritan about her, still less of prewar Manila.

  But on her side, Miss Grey must have heard through Hollywood’s gossipy bush telegraph that her good friend John Basilone had been transferred to the West Coast a few hours away. Yet she made no move that we know of, even though it would have been the simplest thing to have the studio set up a PR mission to Camp Pendleton starring Miss Grey with a couple of other pretty actresses along for cover, a singer, and a comedian or two, to entertain the troops. The studios loved to do that stuff. It was good PR, good community relations, it was free publicity for the next movie release, the politicians liked it; in the White House Louis Mayer’s friend FDR would show his gratitude to the industry. But Virginia never came to Pendleton. Basilone never called her. Maybe, on both sides, their storied love affair had been nothing more than a flirt, or at a more basic level, a one-night stand.

  Or Virginia Grey may have been off on location, making a movie somewhere, fantasy material; the reality was these mess hall girls on the same base. And Basilone was feeling horny and checking out the women Marines, still in that chauvinist time vulgarly referred to as BAMs, “broad-assed Marines,” though not usually in their earshot. Think of it, all those healthy young men and strapping, fit young women in their late teens or early twenties, eyeing each other, young hormones raging, while wartime husbands and wives, fiancées and girlfriends were far away. All this against the coiled tension of a nation at war and with new battles waiting. Manila John unblushingly admits to his own sexual frame of mind in early 1944, describing his preoccupation at the time as that of “a pig in a pastry shop when it came to females.” However many of the mess hall girls he went through—none of them immune to the fact he was not only handsome and a platoon (soon to be gunnery) sergeant but perhaps the most famous and openly admired noncom on the sprawling base—there must have been a few. “There was plenty of whispering about me being a war hero,” he admitted.

  Then, and we can be sure about this, along came a BAM who was different, who cast a spell, who wasn’t just another attractive pastry in the shop. She was sergeant Lena Riggi, a reservist with one less stripe than John, but with other attributes. And Basilone was hooked. Here is his account of the meeting: “I saw her as I came down the serving line. She was dark—Italian or Spanish kind of dark. Black hair, dark eyes, and she walked around like she owned the place. Damn, I had to get to know that one. At first it was just a look between us. There was nothing on it. No wink or smile like we knew something special between us. It was just her looking at me from a distance taking stock of me and me looking back at her. I nodded and she might have nodded, or not, but she wasn’t falling all over herself, to get to know me. I liked this girl. She was tough. And she was a sergeant, the rules against fraternizing [with enlisted female personnel] didn’t apply.”

  Maybe this was the girl he’d been waiting for since Manila and his cockeyed plans to take the bar girl Lolita home to mom, or, alternatively, to stay there in the Philippines with Lolita to start up a good bar or another bicycle shop (and, as things would have turned out, to end up in a Japanese POW camp).

  Lena Riggi was a beauty, dark-haired, dark-eyed, like the girls and young women he most admired growing up in New Jersey. She was Italian, probably Catholic (yes, it happened that she was), the daughter of working people like his own, in her case onion farmers back in Oregon. That little nod and look John mentioned was sufficient to get the Pendleton mess hall rumor mill working. “Sergeant Lena Riggi ‘heard all from her lady friends about me. They went on and on about what a hero I was, how brave I was and that I knew all the movie stars.’ Sgt. Riggi waited for the gossips to tire themselves out, looked at them and said, ‘So what?’ She was the girl for me. When she saw me again she pretended like no one told her a thing about me and that was just the way I liked it.”

  Given the exigencies of war and the accelerated training schedule of a brand-new division being formed, the romance wasn’t going to be easy. The young lovers had conflicting schedules, there was little privacy, their barracks were several miles apart with very little available transport within the base to shuttle them back and forth. By day he was with his machine gunners, drilling them on both guns, the heavy Brownie of his heart and the more mobile air-cooled light. The pace picked up, the days of battle were coming, and they piled it on the new men and on the 5th Division generally: gunnery, night problems, obstacle courses, leaps into pools to simulate abandon-ship drill. They did underwater rescue and open-ocean distance swims.

  Basilone, of course, concentrated on the guns, but as a veteran noncommissioned officer who had plenty of combat time and knew that more was coming, he kept up on the other skills, the intensified training the division was working on. “It was clear to everybody that because of the build-up, that we were headed toward a hell of a fight somewhere. We practiced beach landings and assaulted fortified positions. My machine gunners needed steady hands and cool heads for the work we had assigned to us. Our most important assault exercise was providing covering fire for a demolition man in an attack on a fortified position. We drilled by laying a line of covering fire about a foot over a man’s shoulder as he ran toward an objective. One slip or a half second of distraction meant we would shoot our own man. Under bombardment on a beach it would be ten times worse and fatal for both the gunners or the demo man if it failed.” On Iwo Jima, these drills would pay off for Basilone’s gunners.

  Every Marine infantryman understands, and certainly a hardened close-range combat veteran like Basilone knew, the very risky aspect of covering fire, especially overhead fire, where short rounds meant you were hitting your own men in the back. At the same time, Marines assaulting a dug-in enemy loved accurate overhead fire that would kill or distract the men bringing entrenched fire to bear on them, the vulnerable assaulting infantry. The assaulting Marines were willing to take the risk to reap the potential reward of keeping the other guy’s head down. These
were among the fundamental truths by which the infantry lives—or dies.

  Off duty, the next time John and Lena met, he asked for her phone number and got it. They had a movie date. This was hardly the only event on the Pendleton social calendar. The 5th Division would now formally be recognized as an entity, be awarded its regimental colors: the band would play, the generals gather, the regiments march. A few Hollywood people came down—Edmond O’Brien and Ann Blyth among them, but no Virginia Grey. Basilone feared for a time he might be asked to speak, but the idea of an audience of 25,000 Marines chilled him, and he was relieved the issue did not come up. After the festivities, a remainder of the day’s liberty would be authorized. Finally, an afternoon free for Sergeants Riggi and Basilone. And it was obvious John’s mind was on the young woman and not on the parade, the visiting Hollywood firemen, the brass, the regimental colors, or his newly minted division, but on Lena and the way her body moved. “She walked easy, like a girl walks when she’s on her way somewhere important. She didn’t have the kind of sway girls can turn on when they want to impress a guy. She walked right up and stood square on her feet with a beautiful big smile. Damn, she had a big beautiful smile with a mouthful of teeth you could see from a mile away.”

  Evidently, John had seen plenty of women walking before, either with a sway or with a squared decisiveness as they approached him. And he knew the difference. Now, on this sunny liberty afternoon following the ritual formalities of the 5th Division’s official entry into the Corps, all over the huge base, wherever there was an empty flat space, ballgames broke out, basketball but mostly baseball with one outfit pitted against another, intramural affairs, but well backed by cash-money wagering, the kind of thing on which Basilone had long thrived, betting on himself mostly. But on this particular Southern California afternoon Manila John had another sort of sporting life in mind.

  Here is how in his words this rather sweet and very simple homespun mating dance began between a Marine and his girl, between a hero of the Pacific and the young woman who would become his wife. And just how, supposedly in his own words, it came down over the years through family to his nephew Jerry: “We probably walked several miles going from one ballgame to the next, talking all the way. She came from a big Italian family, onion farmers up near Portland, Oregon. That accounted for the stance she had that I recognized right away. She grew up working hard like the farm kids I grew up with. It generally made for a strong back and square shoulders, even on women. She didn’t ask me a thing about the Medal. She didn’t even seem much interested in war stories. That was good because I wasn’t the guy to tell any. We just walked and talked like any other two people getting to know each other. Both being Italian and Catholic, there was a lot we already knew and didn’t have to say. Mostly we talked about our families. She didn’t mind walking which was always a good sign because I always had to walk to think clearly.”

  Basilone and Virginia Grey had also walked for hours the night they met, first for drinks and then back to the hotel. Walking with a girl apparently brought out the talk in the usually reticent Basilone, though this particular stroll on a military base doesn’t sound like much of a romantic lovers’ lane. “We walked past rows of tanks, trucks, and all types of artillery. She joined the Corps because she wanted to be with the top outfit in the war effort.” It may be difficult to accept in a more skeptical age, but during World War II people in the United States actually did talk in patriotic phrases like that. Basilone continues, “It wasn’t hard to figure out that with all this hardware around us, and only a few hours left of liberty, that we didn’t have all the time in the world to get to know each other. The talk always circled back to family and how much we missed them.”

  That was February 1944. Basilone was twenty-seven years old and had a year to live.

  22

  For several months the young lovers saw each other once or twice a week, despite the distance between their barracks. The typical date was a movie on base and a couple of sodas at the PX since John, as he put it, had “stopped boozing,” except on a few occasions when he went out with the boys to the Oceanside bars where they drank 3.2 beer, “getting dizzier” and spending more time “pissing” the weak brew than drinking it.

  On March 1, 1944, Basilone had earned that other stripe, being promoted (on a temporary basis, which was the norm at the time) to gunnery sergeant. A few more bucks every payday, increased respect, additional responsibility. The promotion surely was welcomed and enthusiastically accepted, unlike those second lieutenant’s commissions he’d flatly turned down.

  Out in the Pacific as March became spring, fighting came to a bloody end on Bougainville, where 8,000 Japanese died or were wounded in the last-ditch fighting at a cost of only 300 American casualties, and an air and naval war raged in the Carolines with U.S. forces having the upper hand, while the Australians pushed ahead on New Guinea. Everywhere we seemed to be winning and the once “invincible” Japanese enemy losing. The great Japanese base of Truk was hammered. In a single naval and air attack the ever larger and more powerful American Navy could now typically deploy a dozen carriers. Basilone and his pals could recall bitterly when the United States was so short of operational carriers that Admiral Jack Fletcher asked permission to pull back from the Solomons entirely while we still had one or two carriers left, and in so doing left the fighting Marines ashore bereft of air support except for the handful of shore-based “Cactus Air Force” planes at small, battered Henderson Field. To a veteran of those bleak and bloody months on Guadalcanal, Marines, sailors, and GIs, it seemed another war entirely.

  Then at Pendleton word went out. Another of the two big new Marine divisions, the 4th, George Basilone’s division, was getting its orders and would be headed west to the fleet, to the war, to the Japanese-held islands. And in early June on the other side of the world, a huge amphibious force of Americans, Brits, Canadians, and French landed on the beaches of Normandy. It was D-Day; Europe had been invaded, Hitler would be dead within eleven months, and Germany would surrender soon after. But here in the Pacific, the Japanese would still be fighting, and few of them ever surrendered.

  Once the 4th Division had shipped out for the Pacific, Basilone and his mates in the 5th knew their turn was coming. The tempo and difficulty of the training became more intense; the field exercises stepped up even further. And this just as the poor guy had fallen in love and for the first time in his often chaotic life was seriously thinking about marriage and wondering just what it took to have a lifelong and loving relationship like the one he knew at close range between his own mother and father. Was such an enviable life partnership possible for Manila John and his new love, Lena Riggi?

  There were no uncertainties about the growing intensity of his daily military training grind, the pounding the Marine infantry was taking in the hardening process. No one knew precisely when or on which new hostile island it might be, but the 5th Division Marines sensed another landing was coming, and their officers wanted them ready. The Marines themselves wanted to be ready. Basilone summed it up for his machine gunners, who on average had to carry considerably more weight than a mere rifleman, not only the heavier weight of the guns but the ammo boxes, the tripods, the aiming devices, all hard steel, as the men themselves were now hardening into. “We worked a lot on physical training, getting our lungs and legs to the point where we could hump steel and supplies uphill or through deep sand all day.” It sounds reminiscent of Basilone’s own training runs off Manila Bay in preparation for prizefights against the likes of Sailor Burt.

  Basilone drove his men as he had driven himself, knowing how even more demanding combat could be. None of this facilitated a love affair with the girl he wanted to marry. “It was hard to have energy left over to see Lena even though I was thinking of her all the time now. She was thinking of me too and wasn’t at all shy about telling me how she felt.” By the start of May, John knew that his time with Lena, their time together here at Pendleton, was running out. He was trying for once to
think ahead. There was much to talk about, to do, if only there wasn’t the pressure of time, the need to rush. “I wanted to know how it was to love somebody the way Pop loved Mama. At least I wanted a few days, or weeks if I could get it, to know what it was like to be married. I wanted to be able to say ‘I love you’ a few times and mean it. Maybe it was something we wouldn’t have done if we weren’t in a rush, but Lena agreed to marry me. We set the date for July 10th, 1944.”

  There were three problems: the Marine Corps, money, and the Catholic Church. There was also John’s brother George, now in harm’s way. On June 15, the 2nd and 4th Marine divisions had landed on the big enemy-held island of Saipan, and hard fighting raged with heavy casualties on each side. Was George okay? No one could yet say.

  Closer to home, Lena was working out things to be done, and laying plans for something she’d always hoped for: a big, white wedding. The duty chaplain, the Catholic padre of course, declared in ex cathedra tones that he needed two weeks of instruction for the bride. As a Catholic myself, I’m not sure why the priest didn’t also need two weeks with John. When Lena explained to the chaplain (all Marine chaplains are naval officers, not Marines) that as a serving sergeant in time of war, she couldn’t just take off for two weeks to go to wedding school, the good father was tolerant but firm. She would just have to find the time. Rules were rules, and as not only her priest but as her superior officer, he intended to follow them, and she had better as well. Fed up already, an irritated Lena Riggi demanded of the stuffy priest, “What are you going to tell me? You’ve never been married.” And that was that.