Hero of the Pacific

by James Brady

  “Leaving the tanks on high ground, Basilone returned to round up more troops for the assault team he had started building near the edge of Motoyama Airfield #1 (one of his unit’s several first-day objectives). To do this he’d have to re-cross the steep volcanic beach where he had met the tanks and where many Marines were still pinned down by Kuribayashi’s relentless shelling and well-camouflaged pillboxes.” To one who’s read descriptions and the citation for what Basilone did on Guadalcanal in October 1942, there is an eerie resonance, this business of going back, under heavy fire, small arms as well as shelling, and more than once, to pick up ammo or water or even a few stragglers he could use in the fight.

  Lansford cites one of the officers in the battle who was an eyewitness: “Among those trying to reorganize their scattered units was Major (later Colonel) Justin G. Duryea of the 1st Battalion, 27th Marines. Duryea, who would lose an arm in an enemy mine explosion on D118, (and who) was so impressed by Basilone’s heroism that he later recommended him for a second Medal of Honor.” The second medal he once joked with buddies about going after?

  “Basilone had landed with the fourth wave approximately at 0930. It was now almost noon and throughout the battle he had risked his life repeatedly, disregarding every danger, to restore momentum to the stalled attack. It seemed nothing could touch him [as nothing had touched him on the ’Canal two years before], and yet by ignoring fire that would eventually kill or wound thousands of men, Basilone had finally pushed his luck beyond its limits.”

  Before the landings George Basilone had warned his brother about pushing his luck. Now Bill Lansford picks up the theme, just before going on with his account of Manila John’s death that first day on Iwo Jima. “Many men have said they saw John Basilone fall on the beach, which he did not. One said Basilone’s legs were blown off by a mine. Several claim they heard Basilone’s final words, and one said Basilone begged to be put out of his misery with his own pistol. Perhaps the most credible witness is Roy Elsner, the headquarters cook who had watched our machine gun drills back at Pendleton and was now on Iwo. He said that when he and some buddies were hunting for their headquarters, ‘A few hundred yards from Motoyama Field #1 we heard an explosion, which caused us to look a bit to our right, toward the field. We saw Basilone and the three guys who were with him fall. We reached him almost immediately.’”

  There are the other versions, not only from Marines in the Iwo fight but from members of the family, some of which I will cite. First, though, a moving note from Lansford in Leatherneck magazine: “Some time after noon I came across a group of blackened bodies on the edge of Motoyama Airfield #1. Company C was advancing half a mile ahead, sweeping the flat field clean, when one of the dead caught my eye. He was a thin, pallid kid. His helmet was half off, and he lay face up, arched over his combat pack. With his jacket torn back and his mouth open I vaguely recognized someone in that lean, lifeless face beneath its dusty stubble of hair. ‘That’s John Basilone,’ said one of the men standing around. ‘He just got it.’

  “That’s bullshit. I know Basilone. We were in the same company. Someone else said, ‘That’s Basilone.’ A guy I knew said, ‘Yeah, he was briefing his guys when a mortar scored a direct hit. It killed them all.’ I went and studied the dead man closely, but I didn’t touch him. The shell had landed at his feet and sent shrapnel into his groin, neck, and left arm. He looked incredibly thin like an undernourished kid, with his hands near his stomach as though it hurt. This was the hero of Guadalcanal, the joy of a nation, the pride of the Marines, and my friend Manila John Basilone.”

  Reading that, I was unsure whether Lansford really accepted that the “thin” body was John’s. So in June 2008 I phoned Bill again in California to ask. He said, “It was about noon of the first day and getting shelled to hell and all of us were in some state of shock. And of course it was John. I saw his pack with his name on it. And when the burial detail came up this cook was in it who knew our outfit and knew John and he made the same ID. I used to stay in touch with him [the cook Elsner] down in El Paso and then we lost contact. And I certainly knew Basilone from our time in the same machine-gun outfit. I was a section leader and he had a squad. We had gone on liberty together, gotten drunk together, and remember how we all shaved our heads that time?”

  When I mentioned the several versions of Basilone’s death that I’d read, Lansford reacted contemptuously. “There’s a lot of scuttlebutt and bullshit out there, a lot of self-promoters. I’ve seen the different versions.”

  I then cited the official casualty report from the History Division in Quantico attributing Basilone’s wounds to “GSW,” gunshot wounds. Lansford wasn’t buying that either. “That’s absurd. I saw the body.” I then mentioned the report’s detailing three different hits, right groin, neck, and left arm. Lansford agreed that part sounded like what he’d seen but held to his insistence it was a single mortar shell that did it, not gunshots. We’d both seen dead bodies and knew that shellfire and small arms usually make different-looking entry wounds. He then continued with a last description of the living Basilone from memory. It’s worth hearing.

  “I was trying to round up all my guys at the foot of Motoyama Airfield #1 and the assault groups had gone through and there were a lot of Japanese dead lying around. It had been raining intermittently and I went over to one of the dead to go through the body for papers or maps or whatever, which we did for intelligence. He was wearing a raincoat and their [Japanese] raincoats were better than our ponchos and we would take things like that. And John Basilone came out onto the plaza near the lip of Motoyama Airfield #1 and he was calling his men together, you know with his hand circling above his head [the ‘gather on me’ gesture] and five or six guys came over. That was when a mortar shell came in and killed all of them, I don’t know, four or five. I saw the medical report from the people who do the examination and it was one mortar shell. Just one.”

  I said, “One is all it takes,” or something like that, and I again thanked Bill Lansford, a wonderful writer, who was writing a new book of his own and had worked on other projects with Ken Burns and Steven Spielberg.

  26

  There are as many descriptions of John Basilone’s last firefight and where and how he died as there are Alamo legends about a wounded Jim Bowie’s final fight in the old monastic cell where he lay waiting for the enemy with a knife and a gun or two. In Texas, they tell to this day of platoons of Mexicans found dead around Colonel Bowie’s last bed.

  I don’t mean to be flip about this, but the Basilone family has been of little help in establishing the facts of just how John died and what he accomplished that terrible morning under heavy fire against the Japanese. Phyllis Basilone Cutter provides us perhaps the most colorful and probably the least credible account of her brother’s heroics, in her hagiographic depiction of the fighting and of his unspoken thoughts and what he supposedly said and actually did in the battle. This is entirely understandable. Phyllis was a civilian writing about the brother she loved and lost, for a local audience, many of whom knew young John, remembered him as a boy, and revered his memory. Whether in Phyllis’s family biography of the Basilones or in the fourteen installments of the same story she wrote for the Somerset County, New Jersey, Messenger-Gazette newspaper, there is a “lives of the saints” quality to her account of his heroics, the stuff of B-movie, Republic Pictures films of the era when John and his sister were growing up and going to the local movie theater (“the Madhouse”) in Raritan.

  To begin, Phyllis talks throughout of Basilone’s having landed with the first wave of assault troops, as if this makes him somehow braver than men who came later. In fact, Basilone was in the fourth wave, landing at about nine-thirty that morning, perhaps twenty-five or twenty-eight minutes after the first wave, a position every bit as perilous and courageous as the three waves that hit the sand earlier. Phyllis’s account of Basilone’s Iwo starts as he and his men board their landing craft, first circling, then taking a direct line to the hostile beach, an
d their landing under fire.

  At this point, with battle about to be joined, a platoon to be steadied and encouraged, weapons and gear to be checked, Phyllis imagines, in Basilone’s voice, that he isn’t focused on Iwo and the battle coming up fast, but on December 7, three years earlier. “We thought of Pearl Harbor and had no compassion for the enemy.” There may be Marine gunnies who speak or think like that as they go into combat, but I don’t know any. Phyllis has her brother next describing the situation on the beach as the Marines come in for a landing: “The Japs lay stunned and helpless under the curtain of fire. Our landing was met by only weak small arms fire. The beach was coarse volcanic ash which made for a bad landing. We sank deep into the ash, slowing us down, as well as practically miring our vehicles. The boys were all together gathering their equipment so that we could work our way off the beach inland to our predetermined points, when we were suddenly peppered by machine gun fire. ‘Down, fellows, hug the beach! Pull your helmets in front of your faces.’” This line is nonsense.

  The ostrich buries its head in the sand; Marines in a firefight rely on their vision to target the enemy, to return fire, to figure out what’s happened, to look for orders. If you cover your face with a helmet, you’re blind. And this is an order given by a seasoned gunnery sergeant to his Marines? Phyllis goes on with her account, quoting Basilone: “As if struck by lightning, we hit the ground fast. Carefully tilting our helmets a bit we could see where the machine gun fire was coming from. It had to be silenced or we would be pinned down indefinitely.”

  Phyllis picks up Basilone’s early moments on the black sand beach of Iwo with her “tale of the blockhouse,” a dramatic vignette of which there are multiple versions. And she shifts from first to third person and back, in retelling what Basilone did next to silence the enemy gun. “Telling us to stay put [who is ‘us,’ who is narrating here?], Basilone crawled in a large semi-circle toward the blockhouse, which was spitting fire and death. He was able to crawl underneath the smoking gun ports. As he rested his back against the wall of the blockhouse, we counted with him the seconds before each machine gun burst. Waiting for the interval, he pulled the pin on his grenade, slammed it in the gun port and ran like hell down the beach. He tripped in the deep ash and as he buried himself protectively we heard the muffled roar of the exploding grenade. The blockhouse was smoking and the gun at the port had disappeared. Basilone ran back, dropping another grenade in for insurance. There were no signs of life, nothing but silence and the sickening smell of burnt flesh and scorched hair. Working his way back to us Basilone yelled, ‘well, boys, there’s one bunch of slantheads who won’t bother anyone. They’re fried.’”

  Why would a machine-gun platoon sergeant be carrying hand grenades? I don’t insist it never happened, but it puzzles me. Riflemen tote grenades, but machine gunners already have such heavy loads that they don’t need to pile on additional gear.

  Alternating between third and first person, Phyllis continues, describing the heavy enemy bombardment chewing up Marines on the beach. More disconcerting is Basilone himself explaining from the beach what the Japanese strategy is and what orders General Tadamichi Kuribayashi is sending to his various commanders. How the hell can a gunnery sergeant under fire know what’s going on with general officers at the enemy headquarters as he and his men attempt to mount up and move on against hostile resistance?

  When an American tank passes through Basilone’s position and is hit by shells, one of its crew members scrambles out of the hatch to safety, only to be killed by Japanese small-arms fire. “Basilone was raging,” Phyllis wrote, “rising to his feet as he charged over to the tank cradling his machine gun in his arms [machine gunners in the platoon usually carry the guns; the platoon sergeant doesn’t]. Spotting a flash from a tree top [were there many trees on Iwo?] he stood upright and sprayed it furiously. We heard an unearthly scream as the treacherous sniper plummeted to his death. By this time there were other tanks, unaware of the heavily mined path. Basilone yelled and waved his arms, motioning them to follow him. As we watched [who is ‘we?’] he led them in a wide circle into the safety of the wooded area.”

  So now Basilone is commanding a tank platoon, and again, how does he know where the mines are? “By now Basilone was as if possessed, ignoring the flesh ripping death all about him he rushed back to us shouting ‘OK, fellows, let’s get moving. We got to get these guns set up.’” Now, either they’re going to set up the machine guns where they’ll make a stand or they’re going to move out; they can’t do both. “We began to work our way off the beach. Without warning the whole beach erupted. The enemy had recovered and was fighting back.”

  This is terrible stuff, and it goes on like this, making little sense, such as Phyllis’s statement at this point that “it was hours before another Marine landed on the beach.” Other sources say the fifth wave had landed on the heels of the fourth (Basilone’s), adding to the confusion. But Phyllis makes it sound as if Basilone’s platoon was the famous “Lost Battalion” of World War I, abandoned and alone, out in front of the lines, facing 22,000 Japanese all by itself, when it was actually still on or trying to advance off the beach with thousands of other Marines. Basilone sends a scout named Sammy ahead to look over the way ahead and report back. “Fragments of white, steely death were whining and singing all about us. It was a miracle that up to this point, any of us had escaped injury, much less death.”

  The fevered prose of a bad war movie goes on. And Phyllis is not alone in this. Another Marine, Charles “Chuck” Tatum, a member of Basilone’s platoon, in his book Red Blood, Black Sand, offers this capsule description of Manila John in a firefight, from the point of view of the assistant gunner who feeds the belted ammo into Basilone’s gun. “Basilone’s eyes had a fury I had never seen before. Rigid, hard clenched jaw, sweat glistening on his forehead, he was not an executioner but a soldier performing his duty.”

  This aside, Tatum does tend to clear up questions about Basilone and the famous blockhouse. Tatum’s B Company had gotten bogged down, and as the confusion grew worse, Basilone was seen stalking up and down the beach trying, with Colonel Plain, to get his own men and the remnants of the earlier waves organized and heading inland. Tatum and the B Company machine gunners recognized Gunny Basilone and, knowing his reputation, were only too happy to fall in line when Basilone gave the “gather” signal and tried to get everyone moving forward.

  Tatum writes that in the beach chaos, while trying to get men from different units organized, Basilone came across a demolitions assault team headed by Corporal Ralph Belt. It was not Basilone, but one of Belt’s men, who, on Basilone’s order, and given covering overhead fire by Basilone’s machine gunners, rushed the looming blockhouse and tossed a heavy satchel charge of C-2 plastic explosive at its steel doors. According to Tatum, no one got up on the roof during the attack. And it was a Marine flamethrower operator, a hulking corporal named William N. Pegg, also on Basilone’s orders, who finished off the blockhouse and cooked the men inside, again assisted by overhead machine-gun fire. Those Japanese able to flee, some of them actually aflame, would be shot down by Tatum, PFC Alvin C. Dunlap, PFC Steve Evanson, and Private Lawrence “Cookie Hound” Alvino.

  These men and Tatum himself credit Basilone for organizing, ordering, and directing a brilliant blockhouse operation, but not for having carried out the demolition himself. It was a perfect example of carrying out a perfect plan of assault, a Marine Corps “school solution,” employing flamethrower and demolitions, the sort of live-fire maneuver Basilone had drilled into his men over and over at Pendleton and later Tarawa. It was a feat of cool, superb leadership that could easily all by itself have earned Basilone a decoration.

  Which is why it’s exasperating that the Navy Cross citation needlessly includes an imaginary single-handed Basilone appearance on the blockhouse roof. Tatum’s book adds clarification on that point, saying that after the position had been destroyed, Basilone grabbed Tatum and his machine gun and they took to the roof of
the wrecked fortification for a better vantage point from which to pick off fleeing Japanese.

  Phyllis now resumes her own version of Basilone’s final orders and actions. As Sammy the scout gives the all-clear, the unit prepares to move inland: “Turning to the rest of the boys, Sergeant Basilone snapped, ‘Okay, boys, stick close and follow me. Remember, if anyone gets it, the rest keep going. That’s an order. We’ve got to get those guns set up. Let’s go.’ Single file we followed him. He never once looked back. He knew we were right behind him. Progress was slow. We had to detour and work our way around our knocked-out, still blazing vehicles. Dead Marines in our path received silent salute as we passed them. Every one of them had fallen face toward the enemy, rifles still in their hands.” This is an unlikely picture to anyone who has ever walked over a heavily shelled, chaotic field of battle and seen the contorted limbs of the dead.

  “The ground was rising and slowly settling back under the thunderous impact of heavy mortars and artillery shells. Slowly, it seemed hours, we crawled for the comparative safety of the first rise of ground. The figure of Sammy loomed larger and larger through the haze as we approached the end of the beach area. A second later, just when we thought we’d make it, suddenly there was a horrible screeching, whining sound picking up in intensity until we thought our eardrums would burst.

  “Sergeant Basilone yelled, ‘Hit the dirt, boys!’