Now, as marines press their bodies into the black sand lining the beaches, Japanese bullets fly unabated. Yet Sergeant Basilone stands upright, surveying the situation.
The terrain slopes steeply forward from his position to a high bank directly behind the beach. Mortar shells rain down, throwing up great clouds of sand as they explode. Japanese artillery launched from a mile away, atop the flat peak of Mount Suribachi, pounds the Americans. Destroyed landing craft litter the beach, yet Basilone disregards the destruction. He has come ashore in the third wave of marines this morning and now screams for his men to move forward. “Get your butts off the beach,” he bawls in his best parade-ground voice. “Move out.”
But some men don’t move—they can’t. Dead or mortally wounded, their bodies lie still, soaking the sand with blood.
Soon Basilone is leading some of the surviving marines forward, away from the extreme danger of the landing zone. Machine-gun fire peppers them as they labor to crest the bank. The Japanese have built elaborate concrete pillboxes and covered them with sand, not only camouflaging their positions but also dampening the blow of any incoming artillery. Quickly surveying his position, Basilone knows he will need a machine gun to knock out the bunker whose bullets are now killing his men. Spotting a gun crew amid the chaos and deafening noise of the explosions, he scrambles over and smacks the gunner on the back of the helmet to get his attention. “Fire on that target,” he demands.
But Private First Class Chuck Tatum’s gun barrel is full of sand. It will not fire. Quickly, the marine cleans his weapon as Basilone looks on, frustrated. In less than thirty seconds, the job is done. Tatum opens fire on the bunker, his illuminated tracer bullets showing the path.
To a man, Basilone and the marines are tired of war. They are exhausted by intense fighting and the six-week voyages needed to reach the next island to be captured. Yet Iwo Jima must be taken before they will finally reach the island that matters most: Kyushu, at the southernmost tip of Japan. One of its major cities is a port known for shipbuilding called Nagasaki.
The question for most marines is not how many more invasions will take place between now and the war’s end but whether they will survive to ever see their families again.
Gunnery Sergeant “Manila John” Basilone is newly married, with everything to live for. Yet he conducts himself as a man with nothing to lose. As Chuck Tatum lays down covering fire, the sergeant moves down the line, desperate to destroy the pillbox and save the lives of his men.
* * *
Back in Manila, Douglas MacArthur turns to leave his former apartment, escorted by soldiers from the army’s Thirty-Seventh Division. Their machine-gun barrels are still hot after the firefight that cleared the Japanese from the Manila Hotel. Beyond the hotel walls, the raging battle for this once-beautiful city has turned into urban combat, a rarity in the Pacific theater. Three American army divisions comprising thirty-five thousand men battle a combined group of seventeen thousand Japanese sailors, marines, and soldiers. For MacArthur, who has long known the transient life of a military man, Manila is as close to a hometown as any place he has ever lived. He considers the city a “citadel of democracy in the East” and has been reluctant to wage all-out war to recapture it. In fact, the general initially refused to allow the aerial bombardment and bruising artillery barrages needed to dislodge the Japanese occupiers.
MacArthur is cautiously optimistic. His material possessions are gone, but Jean and Arthur are on the way, and he still commands the largest army in the Pacific. Perhaps most important, MacArthur knows his military legacy remains untarnished, despite the many months it has taken to capture the Philippines.
The same cannot be said for the people of Manila. They have lost not just their homes but in many cases also their dignity.
The battle for Manila began two weeks ago, on February 3, 1945. By February 6, MacArthur had prematurely declared the fighting over, proclaiming to the press that “Manila had fallen.”
That was false. Even though General Tomoyuki Yamashita had ordered Japanese forces to evacuate the city, rogue elements under his command refused to obey, successfully encouraging a large group of Japanese sailors and marines to join them in fighting the Americans to the last man.
These Japanese holdouts have mined the streets. Concealed snipers shoot Americans on sight. The fighting takes place from house to house, room to room. No place is safe. Even after American troops burn the Japanese alive with flamethrowers and demolish the buildings in which they are hiding, the Japanese still find a way to attack; one American patrol is suddenly assaulted by a sword-wielding Japanese soldier who slices open the point man’s skull before the Americans shoot him and his six companions dead.
Knowing they will never win, some Japanese soldiers get drunk and then blow themselves up with hand grenades. But many more have become obsessed with brutalizing the citizens of Manila before they die. The Japanese believe their race is superior to the Filipinos. After three years of absolute authority over the city of Manila, they are unable to bear the thought that these lesser people will triumph.2
So even as they fight MacArthur’s army for control of Manila, the Japanese are systematically murdering as many innocent local residents as possible. A formal order has been issued to Japanese troops detailing how this is to be accomplished: “When Filipinos are to be killed, they must be gathered into one place and disposed of in such a manner that does not demand excessive amounts of ammunition or manpower. Given the difficulties of disposing of bodies, they should be collected in houses scheduled for burning, demolished, or thrown into the river.”3
Douglas MacArthur’s rationale for not allowing aerial bombardment of Manila is that the lives of innocent civilians will be endangered, yet the horrors being inflicted upon the Filipino people defy description. Instant death from a bomb might be preferable to the agonizing murders being perpetrated by the Japanese. These war crimes are heinous even by the imperial army’s own gruesome standards.
In the weeks to come, from February 25 to April 9, US Army war crimes investigators will interrogate eyewitnesses and report on these barbaric acts in detail. Witnesses will be interviewed in hospitals, refugee camps, and their own homes. Claims of injury and dismemberment will be verified with photographs taken in the presence of US Army nurses and doctors; cases of rape are always verified by two eyewitnesses. With bureaucratic efficiency and matter-of-fact detail, these reports will permanently document the barbarity of the Japanese military during the Battle of Manila.
One report recounts: “On 11 February 1945, at about 6:00 PM, just after Mr. Lim Kinnog Tiang, Chinese, age 23, a grocer, had closed his store, the Japanese came and brought over one hundred Filipinos and Chinese who were all tied up. The Japanese covered the eyes of the men by taking strips of cloth and blindfolding them. The victims were then taken in groups of ten upstairs and had their heads cut off.”
And another: “In the early part of February 1945, at about 7:00 PM, a group of Japanese, most of them officers, came to the house, of Miss Asuncion Marvas, 239 San Marcellino [sic], Manila. Miss Marvas, and the members of her family were taken to the German Club. There were an estimated five hundred people assembled there. When anyone attempted to leave the building they were shot or hand grenades were thrown at them. Most of the people were killed because the place was burned. Miss Marvas wanted to go away, but the Japanese stabbed her in the buttocks. She was lying on her face or stomach at the time they stabbed her.”
Other war crimes reports detail what the Japanese did to Filipino children. Soldiers gouged their eyes from their skulls and threw the innocent kids against walls until their bodies broke apart. Annoyed by the children’s screams, some Japanese soldiers murdered them by swinging their heads against trees.
As the official United States Army investigators will soon document, every day brings brutal new terrors to the Filipino people.
* * *
On Iwo Jima, American marines are experiencing Japanese terror as well. Nippon
fighters are deadly effective with their bayonets. Sergeant John Basilone, however, finds the flamethrower to be a suitable antidote. He directs Corporal William Pegg to pour fire on the besieged Japanese pillbox. Pegg is a mountain of a man, well over two hundred pounds, and wields the flamethrower with ease. As napalm enters the small gun openings in the concrete, setting the men inside ablaze, Basilone unhooks PFC Tatum’s machine gun from its tripod and runs toward the bunker. Tatum sprints at his side, clutching the ammo belt. “Basilone’s eyes had a fury I had never seen before,” Tatum will later write. “Rigid, hard clenched jaw, sweat glistening on his forehead. He was not an executioner but a soldier performing his duty.”
Basilone and Tatum make it to the bunker. Then they wait, even as distant Japanese gunners now focus their aim on the two Americans exposed atop the pillbox.
But Basilone and Tatum don’t wait for long. Eight Japanese soldiers, their bodies on fire, rush out the back entrance. Firing from the hip, Basilone mows them down. “Mercy killing,” Tatum thinks to himself, noting that the Japanese bodies were already coated in fiery napalm.
Fearing for his life, Tatum turns to race back to the safety of the marine lines. But Basilone stops him. The sergeant can see a distant bunker’s location on the edge of Iwo Jima’s airstrip and is convinced it is a perfect strategic position.
“You’re staying here come hell or high water,” he coolly tells Tatum. “I’m going back to get more marines and we’re going to fight our way across this island.”
Then John Basilone hands Chuck Tatum the machine gun and sprints back to the lines, ignoring the bullets whizzing all around him.
* * *
In the meantime, US Navy vessels are firing from offshore, pounding the Japanese artillery atop Mount Suribachi. This allows the men under John Basilone’s command to move forward.
But suddenly some of the Japanese naval ordnance descends on them. The marines hit the dirt.
Throughout the war, marines and army soldiers who fight on the ground grouse about how good life is for their naval peers, with their hot meals and clean living conditions aboard ships. Even some sailors are sheepish about their way of life in comparison to the fighting men on the islands. From the safety of their ships offshore of Iwo Jima, in the words of one young naval officer, the sailors “could just watch the war going on. Through the glasses I could see the tanks trying to get through the sand and not having a whole lot of luck, and see Marines diving into foxholes.”
But life at sea can also be very dangerous. Japanese kamikaze pilots have proven adept at weaving through antiaircraft fire to fly their bomb-laden planes into American vessels.4 The escort carrier Bismarck Sea and the Lexington-class aircraft carrier Saratoga will both be targeted during the fight for Iwo Jima. While Saratoga will suffer damage and stay afloat, Bismarck Sea will sink. The first kamikaze that strikes plows through the hangar deck and explodes the ship’s ordnance. The second kamikaze hits the Bismarck Sea’s elevator shaft, destroying its firefighting system in the process. Three hundred and eighteen men are burned to death, scalded by exploding boilers, or set ablaze in oily waters as Bismarck Sea settles to the bottom of the Pacific. Six hundred more sailors agonize in the water for up to twelve long hours, repeatedly attacked by sharks, before being picked up by other nearby vessels.
Before the marine landing, the navy bombarded Iwo Jima for three days. More than 450 ships are massed offshore, including the battleships USS Texas, USS Tennessee, USS Nevada, and USS Idaho, each of which now shells the island. Tennessee alone has twelve fourteen-inch guns, sixteen five-inch guns, forty antiaircraft guns, and forty-one cannons. She will fire more than eight thousand rounds of artillery over the course of the three-week battle for Iwo Jima.
But it is not sailors who choose the targets during battle. Instead, marines known as forward observers radio back to the ships with precise firing instructions. Sometimes the enemy is so close that the men on board the ship can hear Japanese soldiers yelling in the background. “I’ve lost his name, unfortunately,” young naval officer Ben Bradlee will later remember of the marine lieutenant calling in the naval bombardment. One day he will become famous as the editor of the Washington Post, but for now he is just another young American trying to survive the war. “He would ask for gunfire in such and such place—often within a few yards of his foxhole—and I would relay the coordinates he gave me to the gunnery officer. First ‘fire,’ then deafening explosion. Then, pause, while the 57-pound shells streaked toward their target, followed by comments from our unseen buddy. ‘Fan-fucking-tastic’ or ‘Bullseye,’ maybe. Often, even. And sometimes, ‘that was a little close friends. Back off a blond one.’”5
As John Basilone moves his men into position, they are actually in front of the forward observers. This places them in extreme danger. “Bring back the men on this side,” Basilone yells to one squad as he scrambles to keep his fighting force in the most ideal strategic location. The machine guns, flamethrowers, and carbines carried by his unit are no match for the Japanese big guns high atop the mountain. “You’re too far out front. I’m going back to get a tank or something to see if we can get some artillery in here.”
As if bulletproof, Basilone sprints away under the fusillade of shells raining down from both directions. Beneath him, the ground rises and falls as mortars and artillery explode.
* * *
Back in Manila, inhumane acts against civilians continue and war crimes investigators gather testimonies. Mrs. Esther Garcia Moras reports in horrific detail:
On 9 February 1945, at 7:00 PM, fires were started in the Ermita section near our home. We went out of our houses. The Japanese separated the men from the women and children. I estimate that there were about 6,000 women and children in Plaza Ferguson near the Bayview Hotel. They separated the Filipinas from the Mestizas and the young girls from the older women and took the Mestizas in to the hotel. About twenty-five girls ranging in age from thirteen to twenty-seven years were placed in one room and given food, whiskey and cigarettes. They were allowed to eat and drink in the room, and for about twenty minutes there was nobody else present. Afterwards a group of three or four soldiers came into the room, and each took a girl from the room, including one of my two sisters, age 14, who was returned to the room by the soldiers when they found she was having a menstrual period. Afterwards they took my other sister who later came back and said the Japanese had attacked her by having her take off all her clothes and making her lie on the floor and then raping her. One of the girls tried to resist but she was slapped. Each soldier did it only once, but there were an average of four different soldiers per girl. My sister did her best to resist, but she and others could do nothing. She told all to everyone in the room. The Japanese soldiers would come in with candies and choose the girl they wanted. There were similar groups of girls in other rooms. I estimated at least five or six, making a total of about one hundred girls. Nothing was done to Luey Tani, age 24, as the soldiers found that she had a defect on her—that she was so small that they could not do anything to her. Gloria Gelzi was another girl, age 15, but the names of others are not known. After taking my sister, one Japanese returned and took me. He took me to a room and locked the door. He tore my dress and my pants. He threw me on the floor and did it. It hurt me. I screamed and shouted and tried to push him off, but in vain. He was about five feet, six inches tall. About twelve or fifteen different ones took me. The last one was so large that he hurt me. I actually bled. He took all of my clothes and put me on a bed. He kept me there about a half hour, raping me several times.
One girl was pregnant about eight months or more and they started to take her out. They did nothing to her because she kicked them. We stayed in the Bayview Hotel three days without food or water, but they only raped us that one night. When the building was on fire they told us to go away. We could not go home because our house was burned. We kept running about in Arquisa Street. No medical attention was given any of the girls. My sister was very badly hurt because she sta
rted to bleed as it was the first time anyone did that to her. They did it to her four times. We tried to take her to a doctor, but we couldn’t. However, I saw a Filipino doctor about four days ago. He examined me and told me that I had a venereal disease. My sister also has a venereal disease from the raping. I would like to have my name and address and that I testified not told to anyone. The name of Mrs. Mora’s [sic] sister who was also raped is Priscilla Garcia and the sister who was not raped because she was having a menstrual period was Evangeline Garcia.6
* * *
Sergeant John Basilone surely has seen his share of Japanese atrocities on the battlefield. It is ten thirty in the morning as the sergeant runs back to where Chuck Tatum has been ordered to hold his position at the edge of the Iwo Jima airfield. Unable to find a large number of reinforcements, Basilone has just three men at his side.
But they will be enough.
Basilone’s heroism is his final statement on earth. He can clearly see Tatum near the Japanese bunker. As he and his three men run toward the bunker, all hell breaks loose.
“He was seventy-five yards from me, less than a football field,” Chuck Tatum will later remember. “I heard the incoming mortar shell come in. That mortar shell hit right by Basilone and the other Marines.”
United States Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi. The moment later become iconic when it was staged a second time for the benefit of photographers.
Tatum, who will be promoted to lead the company in Basilone’s absence later that day, will describe the sergeant’s demise vividly. “I didn’t see anyone moving. I knew they were all dead.7
Killing the Rising Sun Page 6