The Pacific

by Hugh Ambrose

  Basilone thumped the gunner's helmet to get his attention, then pointed at the aperture of a blockhouse.446 The marine turned to him. It was Chuck Tatum, the young man from Baker Company he had met a year ago on his first day back. Tatum was unsure. John had him look right down his arm and that did it. The snout of a large-caliber cannon emerged from a large concrete blockhouse in the face of a small ridge. The cannon was firing at the beach to their right. Into his ear, John yelled, "Get into action on that target!" Tatum slapped down the tripod and his assistant put the pintle into the slot. They loaded it; Tatum cocked it and pulled the trigger. Nothing. Opening the breach, the young marine saw it was clogged with black sand. Tatum rolled a bit and left his assistant to get the cleaning gear from his pack. He began cleaning the firing mechanism with a toothbrush. Basilone waited. Tatum snapped the cover shut, pulled the bolt and started firing. John took one look at where the tracers were hitting and realized the angle was bad. The firing port faced to their right. He signaled Tatum to shift to his right. Tatum and his buddy picked up the gun and moved about thirty yards along the terrace.

  When they opened fire, their bursts found the mark. Pinned down, the Japanese inside quit firing. John had already spied the next move. He sent Pegg, a demolitions expert, forward. Moving alongside Tatum's bullets, Pegg got near the pillbox. Basilone ran over and whacked Tatum's helmet. The machine gun stopped firing. Pegg threw the satchel full of C-2 explosives into the aperture and ran like hell. Everybody ducked. After it exploded, it was the flamethrower's turn. Tatum fired a few rounds to cover his approach. The flamethrower stuck the barrel into the mouth of the pillbox and gave it a couple of long squirts.

  John handed Tatum his carbine, unlocked the Browning from its tripod, grabbed the bail with his left hand and the handle over the trigger with his right, and sprang forward. Gaining the ridge, he fired at the soldiers who were escaping out the back of the burning pillbox. Holding the machine gun at his hip, he fired full trigger at eight or nine Japanese, most of whom were covered in burning napalm. It was a textbook approach. Tatum, his assistant gunner, and other riflemen joined him. They fired at the bodies. Basilone exchanged the machine gun for his carbine and waved them to follow.447

  They left the black ash behind and moved into a nightmarish landscape. The stunted trees and bushes had been burnt into blackened stumps. The coarse grass and twisted limbs still burned with napalm. The bombs had cratered the earth and demolished the network of low rock walls that had once divided the area. They paused frequently, looking for pillboxes and timing explosions. John led them through the few hundred yards from the last terrace to the edge of the airfield, Motoyama Number One. A steep embankment off to their right revealed where the main runway ended, its grade well above their heads. They ran around the southern end of the runway. They clambered up the embankment as explosions went off near them, so they jumped into holes. Basilone landed in one with Tatum, the assistant gunner, and two riflemen. They caught their breath. In one direction lay the wrecked planes and equipment with the shell-pocked airstrip just beyond. The volcano, about fifteen hundred yards away in the opposite direction, towered over them. Looking back, they saw the way they had come. No one was there. Tatum looked at his watch. "It's 10:33. We landed at 0900. We have been on Iwo for one hour and thirty minutes."448 The barrage grew intense. It sounded like some of it was coming from Suribachi, above them, and some from the other side of the airfield. Then the navy started shelling them--the rolling barrage was rolling back. It was like sitting in the bull's-eye. Two marines began moving back to the beach.

  John stopped them. "We took this ground and now it's up to us to hold it! Dig in! I am going back for more men! Stay here come hell or high water!"449 With that, he ran back for the beach. Racing down two terraces, John found three tanks struggling to get out of the terraces and minefields. Tanks drew fire like magnets. He had been trained to get behind the tanks and get on the phone and direct them. Instead, he stood up in front of the lead tank, so they could see him. Exposing himself gained the trust of the skittish tankers, who had already lost four of their comrades. John was calm as he walked them to solid ground.450 With the tanks headed into the brush, John ran for the beach. Hundreds of marines watched him from the safety of shell holes, aghast.

  The enemy barrage on Red Beach Two had become a torrent.451 Large-caliber artillery shells exploded at regular intervals moving in one direction parallel with the beach. At a certain point, the explosions shifted a hundred feet toward the beach or away from it, and came walking back. Heavy mortars also came swishing down in great numbers. The violence of it all overwhelmed the senses. Every marine knew he had to run forward. The knowledge made his heart pound. Yet to run forward without expecting to get hit was like expecting to run in a rainstorm without getting wet. The soft black sand, which made walking difficult, also sucked their bodies into ground level, and that felt wonderful. The amtracs, now aided by Higgins boats and LCMs, had succeeded in getting the regiment ashore.452 The entire regiment was pinned down.ak The enemy's guns had turned enough landing craft into geysers of water, wood, and metal that landing operations had been shut down. The numbers of wounded and dead were climbing fast.

  John gathered up some more men and set off for the airfield, running from shell hole to shell hole.453 Clearing the last terrace, he happened upon Clinton Watters and some of his squad. John jumped in a shell hole with his buddy. Watters had lost a lot of men just crossing the beach. Some had been hit; others were still endeavoring to heft their machine guns up the terraces. The area in front of them, so quiet on John's first trip, had come alive with small-arms fire.

  Watters had been stopped by a couple of Japanese throwing grenades from a trench system ahead. John yelled, "Let's you and I go in. You go that way and I'll go this way. We'll go in."454 An explosion caused Watters to duck. John did not wait. By the time Watters caught up to him, John had jumped into the enemy's trench and was shooting them with his carbine. Once they killed the soldiers, Watters heard John yell something about "let's do this . . ." and set off. For the next twenty minutes, every rock seemed to have become a pillbox. Before Watters understood either the target or the plan, John surged forward to go do it. Not every gunnery sergeant would have chosen to lead the attack rather than direct it, but Basilone did not even look back to see if they were following him. Watters chased Basilone. The rest of the squad followed.

  As they crossed the plateau of burnt scrub brush and shell holes on the way to the airfield, the artillery fire grew intense. The Japanese were plastering the area to halt the advance. The navy guns were preparing the airfield for the advance of the marines. Carrier planes roared overhead, dropping canisters of napalm. Small-arms fire was coming from every direction. Watters and Basilone and their rump squad got separated.

  John still had four NCOs behind him as he approached the end of the runway. They jumped into some foxholes. A mortar round exploded in the hole with the four NCOs. Charlie Company lost more of its leadership.455 John stood up to run. Bullets hit him in the right groin, the neck, and just about blew off his left arm completely.456 John Basilone died a painful death in the dirt near Motoyama Airfield Number One. In the rain of fire the men nearby could not reach him, nor was it their job to do so. The dead were left for the graves registration unit. The word went out, though. "John got it."457 Watters heard those words when he reached the hospital ship a bit later. The sailor who said them did not know Clint or his relationship with Basilone. Everybody knew John.

  ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE INTERNATIONAL DATE LINE, LENA BASILONE happened to see a newspaper headline on February 19 as she was cooking in the mess hall. It announced that ten thousand marines had landed on Iwo Jima. Though she had never heard of the island, it startled her and she spilled the pan of hot grease she was holding. The grease burned her badly on her lower leg and foot. She was taken to sick bay.

  "I HAVE A LOT OF SYMPATHY FOR THE BOYS ON IWO," EUGENE WROTE HIS PARENTS on February 24, "for I have a pretty clear i
dea of what they are facing." He did not elaborate. Gene as always did his best to avoid writing anything that might add to their concern, without pretending that he was entirely safe. His difficulty was that the battle of Peleliu had changed him in ways that he was only beginning to understand. The expectation of going into another battle before too long, and the laws of censorship, prevented him from exploring the dominating aspect of his consciousness with the two people he trusted most. On bits of paper that he kept with his pocket Bible, he set down the basic facts of his experience--small markers to help define the wild demons of horror loose within him.

  He had seen on Peleliu the bodies of marines carved into grotesque figures by enemy knives. The sight had engendered within him a consuming hatred. He became a marine with pity only for his own kind. "My comrades would fieldstrip their packs . . . and take their gold teeth," E.B. wrote, "but I never saw a Marine commit the kind of barbaric mutilation the Japanese committed if they had access to our dead."458 For now, though, his attempts to define morality in combat had to stay inside him.

  Sledge's parents, careful readers, would have discerned some of their son's turmoil. A mention of having finally gained back the weight he had lost must have made them wonder what had caused him to drop it. When he wrote of the fun he had playing volleyball, which was all the rage on Pavuvu, he added, "It certainly was fun to get out and play like a bunch of kids again." When his mother told him one of his chums at home was preparing to enlist, Gene cautioned: "Tell Billy, I always thought a lot of him and that he had plenty of sense and if he has [good sense], not to join this outfit." Although some marines got easy jobs stateside, Gene predicted that "it would be just Billy's luck to get into some bulldog outfit like this." His mother must have wondered at his reply, which came even as he requested her to have seven copies printed of a photo of him with Snafu, Burgin, and the other men of the #2 gun squad.

  By the middle of February 1945, the signs of an imminent departure for another battle were all there. The new men had had a few months with which to train. Gene found peace in worship. He found meaning in poetry, particularly the wrenching nihilism of the English poets who had survived the trenches of World War I. He found joy in classical music, although there was very little of it on Pavuvu and for good reason. Professional musicians had come to Pavuvu a few weeks after the division's return from Peleliu and attempted to put on a concert down at the steel pier. The marines had booed the musicians off the stage.459 A USO show came to Pavuvu soon after and wowed a packed house with pop songs and bawdy humor. Eugene Sledge knew he was different from the average "Leatherneck." When he needed to get away, he read his Muzzleloader magazines and admired the photos of his family, his home, and his pets.

  A letter from Sid Phillips could always cheer Eugene up. In late February, Sid wrote to share good news. He had gotten through the first part of the course, at Lejeune. Eugene let his parents know that Sid "is going to get a furlough and then going to the U. of North Carolina. I sure hope he makes out alright. He will be out to the house when he gets his furlough. I really appreciate the swell way you and pop treated him on his other furlough." Gene's conversation with his parents about his future plans led him to write the polytechnic institute in northern Alabama, for a list of its course offerings, and to ask his parents what they thought of a major in forestry as a start to his career.

  WITH ORDERS TO REPORT TO THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL Hill in his pocket, Sid Phillips went home to Mobile for ten days feeling like he was the king of the world. He borrowed Dr. Sledge's extra car again and drove directly to the Merchant's Bank, downtown, "to see if that gorgeous teller was still there and not married. She was there with no ring on her finger," so he came up with a pretense to go speak with her. He introduced himself. "Oh yes," she said, "I remember." They spoke for a bit and made a date. Sid came back to the bank a few minutes before closing "and spent the time talking to the old bank guard in his fancy uniform at the door telling him war stories, some of which might have been true. Then out the door came Mary Victoria Houston, dressed in a navy blue polka dot dress and high heels with her brown curly hair bouncing." The sight of her made his head spin. They walked across the street and up the block before he realized he had no idea where he had parked the car. Panic set in. Sid mumbled his way through a fib about having moved it so many times that day and needing to look for it. Mary "cooed not to worry, that she knew where I would park and we went to the parking lot by the old jail and there the car was. When I asked her how she knew, she replied that her family always parked there when they came to town." The rest of his furlough passed quickly.

  THE SMELL OF A NAVAL AIR STATION--THAT DISTINCTIVE BLEND OF SEA SPRAY and high-octane gasoline--bathed NAS Melbourne, Florida, just as it had NAS Wildwood, NAS North Island, and all the other stations where Lieutenant Vernon Micheel had lived and worked for months at a time, perfecting his craft. Late February 1945 found him pleased to be the operational instructor for fighter pilots at NAS Melbourne. The missions of a naval aviator had continued to evolve. Micheel taught classes in the use of rockets for ground support and the technique of glide bombing of targets, as well as "Advanced Combat."

  Mike enjoyed his job. He flew about thirty hours a month in a Hellcat and gave some classroom instruction. The small town of Melbourne, which faced the Atlantic Ocean, was a short drive. His girlfriend, Jean Miller, continued to write him twice a week and he answered her as he could. He would not think about getting serious until the war ended. Part of this stemmed from a desire to protect Jean and himself. Part of it had to do with the navy's continued preference for "unmarried pilots" in its assignments. At twenty-seven years old, Mike wanted to advance. His prospects looked good. His commanding officer gave him an outstanding fitness report, lauding Lieutenant Micheel's leadership, abilities, and "quiet, agreeable personality." Asked for his preference, Mike requested carrier duty in the Pacific. There was still a job to do. He had heard "that the marines moved a foot at a time" when they landed on Iwo Jima and thought "we didn't knock out very many of the guns we were aiming at."

  ON MARCH 7, LENA BASILONE CELEBRATED HER THIRTY-SECOND BIRTHDAY IN her bed at the base hospital. She was recovering from the bad burn on her leg suffered on February 19. Her birthday found her ready for discharge.460 Her lieutenant came up to her ward carrying a slip of paper and spoke to the doctor. The doctor walked over to her bed and told her that he wanted her to move to a private room. "You told me I could go back to the barracks today," Lena said.

  "Well, just for now because I need this room." They wheeled her into another room and her lieutenant handed her the telegram. It informed her of Johnny's death and asked her not to divulge any information to the press. She screamed. The doctor gave her a shot that knocked her out. When she awoke, she had been given a ten-day furlough. The news of her husband's death, though, seemed inescapable.

  THE 1ST DIVISION SAILED TO GUADALCANAL FOR FULL-SCALE PRACTICE MANEUVERS at the end of February. Practicing on the Canal felt like the start of Peleliu all over again, although this time Lieutenant Colonel Shofner commanded a company of military police instead of an assault battalion.461 His division's next target, the island of Okinawa, required it to coordinate with other divisions for the first time in the war. The Tenth Army, including several army divisions as well as two other marine divisions, would wrest from Japan's grip a large island not far from Tokyo. The several hundred thousand Okinawans living there presented new problems. These people needed to be separated--the harmless from the dangerous--and housed in safe areas and fed. For this large mission, Shofner's small MP unit was attached to the military government unit of the Tenth Army.

  The military government unit (MG), as he quickly became aware, was a conglomeration of units like his from all of the participating divisions, with a small nucleus of staff trained in international law. When he met with them on Pavuvu, it became clear the MG staff had been given a mission and that they knew a lot about the "obligation of the occupying forces under in
ternational law."462 The military government specialists had not been informed where their equipment and supplies were, or how this cargo would be delivered to Okinawa. The MG unit had received supplies of placards covered in Japanese writing. The creators of these posters had cleverly left empty spaces to be filled in as needed, but for weeks the MG staff had no idea what the posters said, much less how they should be used. When the division began its practice assaults on Guadalcanal in late February, the MG staff at last found the six Japanese- language speakers it had been promised. These Nisei (Nee-say) translators were Americans whose parents had been born in Japan. The Nisei had been raised to speak Japanese. Their ability to speak to the Okinawans made the mission of governing the civilians, as opposed to simply incarcerating them, possible.463

  A few of these translators, who looked Japanese but spoke like Americans, were assigned to help Shofner. Shofner also received a company of MPs from the army, which he quickly absorbed into his company. His MP unit, designed as an "A Detachment," would stay with his division as it moved across the island, establishing civilian collection points as well as collecting and interning POWs (enemy combatants). The plan called for him to turn both captured groups over to "B Detachments," for long- term care as his 1st Division displaced forward. The military government men gave the MPs a series of lectures "covering principles of military government, public safety, the law of belligerent occupation, treatment of the enemy property, and the practical problems they were likely to face."464 Any experienced officer could see, however, that the lack of a clear logistics plan jeopardized the whole military government strategy. Each U.S. infantry division had been ordered to supply the MG units with thousands of tents and hundreds of thousands of rations, while simultaneously defeating the Imperial Japanese Army.