Hero of the Pacific

by James Brady

  John liked this girl better all the time. Like him, she was a bit of the maverick. Together, they went to St. Mary’s Church in downtown Oceanside and found themselves a more pragmatic Catholic father, Reverend Paul Bradley, to whom they explained their dilemma, and in the end he agreed to marry the young couple with or without the fortnight’s instruction, thereby rendering unto Caesar (the Marine Corps and its chaplains) the things that were Caesar’s but rendering to God the things that were God’s, a couple of Catholic kids in love and about to be separated by the damned war.

  The ceremony was set for three p.m. on July 10 at St. Mary’s. Lena was a half hour late, the single-vehicle Oceanside taxicab company having forgotten her reservation. Attending, and patiently awaiting the bride, were John’s commanding officer Colonel Justin Duryea, the executive officer, Lena’s sergeant, and the women in her outfit. Some local people dropped by to wish the couple well, and a few reporters from Los Angeles showed up. Standing in for her dad, Sergeant Frank Budemy walked Lena down the aisle and gave the bride away.

  Father Bradley recited the vows, the couple looked into each other’s eyes, John kissed the bride, and yet another wartime marriage had been solemnized in a small-town church just outside the main gate of a military post somewhere in America.

  The only difference was that here were two Marine sergeants being wed and one of them was one of the more recognizable people in the country. The small reception was held down the street at the Carlsbad Hotel, a convenient and useful favorite of Hollywood studios making war movies and calling on the Marine Corps for cooperation and the use of facilities and open spaces on the nearby base’s tens of thousands of acres. The studios and the Washington big shots knew the value of such films to morale and the war effort, and unless a breach of security were involved, the Marine Corps and the other branches tried to be cooperative, even to the extent of having troops appear as extras. Jerry Cutter and Jim Proser describe in Basilone’s voice the place and the moment: “The reception wasn’t fancy, with meat and everything else being rationed, but even so we managed to have a pretty decent dinner with some of the people from our units. Most of them didn’t stay, making up excuses about a night maneuver or something they had to get back to in camp. None of us had much money. Everybody knew I was pretty well tapped after paying for the ceremony and I’d have to pay for them if they stayed to eat. A few of Lena’s girlfriends stayed and a few fellas from my unit got a drink at the bar and sat with us, saying they weren’t hungry.” Soldiers that age are always hungry, and it’s obvious that such men, who liked John and empathized with his financial straits, were giving the groom a gracious out.

  “After dinner,” Basilone went on, “we spent our honeymoon night in a room upstairs. We were happy together. Even though it was a rush, I know I did the right thing. I think she felt that way, too.

  “We were on the train early next day to see Lena’s people in Portland. The train was hot, crowded and dirty. We managed to get a seat while most of the Marines and sailors on board had to stand. We traveled until late the following morning, over 24 hours, with no place to sleep except our seats. I thought a lot about the fancy private cars and having our own plane on the bond tour. I wished I could give Lena some of that kind of treatment. She wanted the fancy stuff that women want for their weddings and it was a shame she didn’t get most of it. But she didn’t complain, I had to give her that. She didn’t make a peep and I started to feel lucky I married her. That was our honeymoon, a stopover in Los Angeles on the way and a few days in her parents’ home in Portland.”

  Back in Oceanside, there were no apartments they could afford, their joint income at that time being about seventy bucks a month. “Lena got pissed off after a few days and wanted to use my name and status to pry open a place to live. I was having none of that. I wasn’t going to trade on the Medal for anything. It wasn’t completely mine anyway. Nine boys also owned it with me. I thought this might be a hard idea for her to understand and I expected we would have our first big fight, but she surprised me again. I said what I had to say about it and we never talked about it again. She was a Marine and she understood what I was saying. It was then that I knew I had married the right one for me. We continued to live in camp in our separate barracks.” So much for romance in the middle of World War II.

  When the two wangled a seventy-two-hour pass they took a train north to L.A. with less than a hundred dollars between them, zeroing in on Beverly Hills and places that let servicepeople in without a cover charge. When they fell in line outside a joint owned (or fronted) by a former boxer, a very good light heavyweight turned movie comic named “Slapsie Maxie” Rosenbloom, word quickly got out that the young Marine waiting to get into the place was John Basilone, and a flunky murmuring the words “Medal of Honor” began hustling Lena and John toward the head of the line. But John “wasn’t having any of that,” and he and his bride abandoned the idea of an evening at Slapsie’s and went down the street to a different boîte, named for another comedian, Joe E. Lewis, considered more of a “class place,” where for some reason the young couple was welcomed without incident. Once inside, however, the two Marines found themselves experiencing the same sort of fuss. Basilone sets the scene: “Joe E. Lewis . . . was there. His routine was all about boozing and losing money on the horses. He had almost everybody in the place almost dying with laughter. A few people who said they were somebody in the movies came over to our table and said hello. They left business cards and told me to give them a call. They wanted to introduce me around town to movie people. Joe introduced me from the stage and I had to stand up and take a bow while everybody clapped. Joe was a real patriot. He was close to fifty [to a Marine in his twenties, apparently quite an antique] but he did shows for a lot of the fighting boys who were stranded on islands out on the Pacific.”

  It’s possible that John might have been thinking of himself on Samoa and the ’Canal or of his brother George that day on Saipan. Or of his own new 5th Division, which would soon be headed west to the islands of the Pacific. Of Lewis, he said, “The brass didn’t want him to go [to the war zone] but he needled them until he got himself flown out on a cargo transport. All he brought along, a change of clothes and a few cases of good Scotch. He made a lot of friends and brought a little bit of home out to us. He was a real good guy so I stood up for Joe and fried under the spotlight for awhile. He was a good comic for Marines since his two favorite subjects—drinking and gambling—were pretty much what we liked to do too. Lena didn’t mind all the attention, it was all new to her, so I stood up there and let her enjoy it. It was our best night together. We ended up walking back to our hotel as the sky turned from black to deep blue and the stars faded out. We were getting used to each other. That 72 hours was our best time together. Our last day was just rest. We didn’t get out of bed until dinnertime.”

  Two weeks after this Los Angeles idyll, Basilone’s new 5th Division was told it would be shipping out, destination unknown. These were, of course, the days of patriotic, war-winning slogans: “A slip of the lip can sink a ship.” So people, including the troops, were supposed to keep their mouths shut about troop deployments and weren’t told much in the first place. One of Lena’s pals, her maid of honor, in fact, a Marine named Ruby Matalon, gave the couple her Oceanside apartment for their last California night together. But it wasn’t to be, not with the schedule the Marines were on. Basilone’s unit was to leave its area on the base at four a.m., and there was no transport that could get John back there by then from Oceanside. So the couple couldn’t spend their last night in a pleasant if borrowed apartment, and had to say their goodbyes in the place where they had first locked eyes and met, a Camp Pendleton mess hall. “We talked of our life after the war—what we would name the first boy and the first girl,” Basilone said. “She held up pretty well while we talked. She didn’t cry, and pretended she was okay, but she was no poker player. But I was. I told her, ‘I’m coming back,’ and she believed me.”

  At dawn the 5th M
arine Division was on the move, shipping out and “in the field,” as the orders read, on August 12, 1944, Basilone aboard a tub called the USS Baxter, hot, filthy, and crowded, with many of the new men who’d never been at sea before puking, and the chow some of the worst swill Basilone had yet experienced in the Corps. On the day the Baxter sailed, in France the U.S. Army crossed the Loire, and on the Eastern Front Soviet troops broke the German lines and advanced fifteen miles in a day. It was becoming clear who was winning the war.

  The 5th Division Marines still didn’t know where they were ultimately headed, where they would next fight, but it was surely going to be the Pacific, and the islands. The first stop would be decidedly not a hostile beach, but the romantic, lovely Hawaiian Islands, where they would arrive at Hilo harbor on August 18. Neither the voyage from San Diego nor the new base, Camp Tarawa, were the stuff of honeymoons, especially one being taken by the groom without a bride. John still had no word of brother George on Saipan.

  Camp Tarawa, named for a bloody and thoroughly screwed-up epic Marine assault that nearly ruined the 2nd Marine Division, had been pitched in the midst of what they called the Great Hawaiian Desert, a tent city in a dusty bowl over which loomed the twin volcanoes of Mauna Loa and Mauna Lea. The nearest swimming beach was a day’s hike distant and the division wasn’t giving many days off. The intensified training schedule stimulated competition between individual Marines and units, and to boost morale and nurture unit identity, Basilone and his machine gunners shaved their heads.

  And then almost miraculously out of the vast Pacific, brother George appeared, unhurt and on the neighboring island of Maui. John wangled a pass and the brothers reunited. George had for some minor infraction been in the brig on bread and water but bragged that the Corps lost money on the deal, because he ate so many loaves of bread. Word came from Peleliu that Chesty Puller’s battalion had taken a terrible beating with very high casualties. For the time being, it was finished as an effective Marine fighting force. The Japanese might be losing the war but they weren’t throwing the game. At Camp Tarawa men were being trained to handle the improved and terrifying flamethrower, now an integrated infantry weapon in assaulting fortified positions.

  The gunners, riflemen, demolition men, and now the new flamethrowers drilled together as a lethal team with a specific set of new tactics for assaulting blockhouses and other fortified positions. The flaming napalm would do horrific things to human flesh. As the wisecrack went, “an ugly war just got uglier.”

  But many Marines, including the pragmatic Basilone, welcomed anything to the arsenal that could give the machine gunners an edge, kill the Japanese, and save his men. He drilled the gunners in flamethrower tactics hour after hour, teamwork that would pay off later in the fighting.

  John and George got lucky with the coincidental appearance of a Dr. John Fox, who ran the local school district nearest Camp Tarawa and got word to John that he was also from Raritan, New Jersey, and why didn’t John come by for an occasional home-cooked meal, and if they could spring George, he was invited as well. To men living on field rations, you didn’t turn down an offer like that. The Basilone boys and the good doctor enjoyed a jolly Raritan reunion.

  In October the first Americans landed in the Philippines, and on October 20 MacArthur splashed ashore in a carefully staged landing for the newsreel cameras following the assault troops by several hours and getting the general’s khakis wet. On that same day he broadcast to the Filipino people that, indeed, “I have returned.” There is no record of Basilone’s response, but considering his prewar years in Manila serving under MacArthur, it is difficult to believe he didn’t have some variety of emotional reaction.

  All through November fighting continued on various Philippine islands and in the surrounding sea, with Senator John McCain’s admiral grandfather one of the key players. The Allies were fighting in and around Sumatra and other of the Dutch East Indies, and in Burma the Brits had seized the initiative from the enemy and were on the offensive. Clearly, the Japanese were being pushed back everywhere.

  In December, at Camp Tarawa, the rumor mill was chattering. The 5th Division would soon be on the move. Another island would be taken, perhaps one in the chain of islands that led to Japan itself. No place names were mentioned, even in scuttlebutt form, just that it might be an island with an airfield. On December 27, 1944, two days after Christmas, the division began loading its vehicles and heavier gear and tons of supplies. In mid-January 1945, as the United States entered another new wartime year, American carriers were attacking Formosa, Nationalist Chinese were pushing the Japanese out of Burma, there was heavy fighting on Luzon in the Philippines between invading GIs and Japanese defenders, and in Europe Warsaw fell to the Russians and a Polish unit.

  At Camp Tarawa, embarkation orders were cut. The 5th Marine Division, Basilone and company, would be sailing, destination still unknown, on January 17, 1945. Manila John was once again going to the wars.

  PART FOUR

  IWO JIMA

  Iwo Jima. In the Battle of Iwo Jima, John Basilone, now a gunnery sergeant, charged across Red Beach 2 with the 1st Battalion, 27th Marines on D-day, February, 19, 1945. He would die there on that first day of the assault, falling just short of one of his unit’s primary objectives, Motoyama Airfield # 1.

  23

  Iwo Jima, Japanese for “Sulfur Island,” is a volcanic flyspeck in the Central Pacific situated roughly six hundred miles north-northwest of Saipan and Tinian in the Carolines and another six hundred or so miles from Tokyo, the capital and largest city of Japan. It was this equidistant geographical position that gave Iwo any importance whatsoever in the Pacific war. Japanese engineers had built three airstrips on the small island (only ten square miles of sand and rock) from where their Zeroes and other interceptors could attack United States B-29 Superfortresses based in the Carolines en route to Tokyo and other mainland Japanese targets. The same Japanese fighters taking off from Iwo could also ambush and shoot down B-29s on their return flights to Tinian and Saipan, especially Superforts damaged by Japanese antiaircraft fire or shot up by Zeroes over the mainland, now limping home, wounded, slowed, and vulnerable, the planes and their ten-man crews. If American forces could take Iwo, the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands of U.S. flyers would be saved and our bombardment of the home islands stepped up in frequency and in bomb tonnage. It would also permit American fighter escorts, with their relatively short range, to accompany the B-29s to Tokyo and back, improving their effectiveness.

  Invading and taking the rugged little island from its powerful garrison of good Japanese troops and dangerous aircraft would not be done on the cheap. Major General Harry Schmidt’s V Amphibious Corps would be ticketed for the task: three Marine divisions, the 3rd, the 4th (with George Basilone and commanded by Major General Clifton B. Cates), and the brand-new and untested as a unit 5th Marine Division, a blend of raw-to-combat young Marines freshly over from the States and salty and blooded veterans like gunnery sergeant John Basilone, a total of roughly 60,000 men, about half of them having already faced and fought the enemy. There would be casualties, and some senior Marine officers expected them to be heavy.

  I have been to the island once, in November 1951, almost seven years after the battle, as a replacement platoon leader being flown out to the 1st Marine Division in North Korea. Our Navy transport plane landed at Iwo to refuel, and we forty or so young officers and senior NCOs had a few hours to stretch cramped legs and wander about and gawk, very much like tourists anywhere—except that, for Marines of any generation, Iwo Jima wasn’t a tourist attraction but a sacred shrine. My memory of the place is simple. Mount Suribachi was stark, bare, smaller than I anticipated; the air reeked of sulfur, the sand was black, and the wind moaned. Beyond that, nothing. Only the imagined echoes of muted battle long ago and the sense of other presences, the ghosts of the men of both sides who fought and died here. Those sensations I took with me, along with a sense of awe, long after the stench of sulfur faded. A Japanese source
once described Iwo in these words: “no water, no sparrow, no swallow.” More prosaically, an American source described it as being shaped like “a porkchop.”

  Everyone I’ve asked about the epic battle, from Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal, who took the iconic photo of the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi, to combat Marines and one Navy nurse who were there under fire in the famous fight, remembers the shifting sands, difficult if not impossible to dig foxholes in. That sand, the smell, and the wind.

  As a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant in 1951, I was hardly an expert on Iwo, but I probably knew more about the island than did Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone as he sailed from Hawaii in late January 1945, one small element of a convoy of 500 ships and perhaps 100,000 men, sailors and Marines both. As he and his machine gunners departed Pearl Harbor on January 26 aboard the USS Hansford, it is probable that none of them, Basilone included, had ever even heard the name of their targeted destination and had not yet been told about Iwo. The Marines still took security seriously, and it was standard operating procedure in amphibious warfare not to tell the men where they were headed until they were at sea, unable to blab. Now, on the second day the Hansford was out of port, Lieutenant Colonel John Butler got on the horn over the ship’s PA system. You know, the old “Now hear this, now hear this” announcement. Said the colonel, “Our destination is Iwo Jima, an objective closer to the Empire of Japan than any other to date.” I suspect the saltier of the Marines on board took this as a good news/bad news item of information. Good in that it took us a step closer to winning the Pacific war; bad in that the closer Americans got to the Japanese mainland, the harder and more desperately the enemy would fight and the more Marines would die.