Hero of the Pacific

by James Brady

  That plotline alone would have made a swell Hollywood romance of the period, the juvenile dream of every obscure young man who comes out of nowhere, becomes an overnight sensation of one sort or another, and encounters the beautiful princess, or in this case the movie matinee equivalent of royalty, a movie star, the beauty who falls in love with the clean-cut young war hero. Garfield, one of the troupe, might not have been bad in the role of the fighting Marine.

  Basilone was credited by the tour organizers for drawing crowds that bought millions of dollars’ worth of bonds. In Newark and Jersey City, where Basilone and Grey first shared a moment, and at New Haven, where Yale undergrads turned out to hail the young man who never even went to high school, in Pittsburgh, Albany, and all over the East, they organized parades: mayors, aldermen, governors, retail merchants drumming up trade, leading citizens and schoolchildren lining up to touch or even just to see Manila John.

  He shook hands at factory gates and inside armaments and munitions plants. At a gala black-tie dinner at the Waldorf sponsored by the National Association of Manufacturers, Sergeant Basilone was seated on the dais, mingling with influential and wealthy men, captains of industry and other tycoons, the onetime laundry delivery boy fired for napping on the job atop the soiled laundry bags. A movement was launched to get his face on a postage stamp (eventually issued well after his death). Raritan gave him a parade of its own with tobacco heiress Doris Duke throwing open her estate to handle the overflow crowd. Catholic mass was said by Basilone’s old priest, Father Amadeo Russo. The snob membership of the Raritan Valley Country Club turned out, remembering fondly, they claimed, the teenager who’d worked out of their caddy shack, lugging their golf clubs for tips. Basilone was invited to address a Bar Association lunch. He visited elementary school classrooms, signed autographs, kissed pretty girls in the crowd, and greeted old soldiers from earlier wars dating back to the Spanish-American, who approached to pay their respects and, perhaps, to bore the Marine with hoary war stories of their own.

  At the family home in Raritan where Basilone grew up with his nine siblings, with only three bedrooms and two baths, they were inundated with fan mail, thousands of cards and letters, mostly from women, including a number of mash notes, and even marriage proposals from girls who had never met the machine gunner. One young woman wrote, “I always wanted to marry a hero.” Basilone’s brother marveled, “Johnny, everybody in the country loves you.” An unsubstantiated rumor surfaced, courtesy of ribald Marine tattle, and possible enlisted men’s jealousy, that when a USO show came through the islands of the South Pacific during Manila John’s campaigning days, he had “bedded one of the Andrews Sisters.” No one held it against either him or Miss Andrews, if the anecdote was true, because in wartime such “showing the flag” might justifiably be considered patriotic.

  Basilone got married, but not to a movie star. His wife was another young Marine, a cute sergeant named Lena Riggi whom Basilone met in a Camp Pendleton mess hall.

  Then he was gone again, without a honeymoon, back to the fight, back to his boys. He had been offered, and stubbornly turned down, an officers’ rank and posh duty stations, politicking instead for just the opposite: to get back to the Pacific. Finally, the Marines had relented and reluctantly cut new orders reuniting him with the Fleet Marine Force Pacific.

  Then he was gone for good, the “unkillable” hero of Guadalcanal dead on Iwo Jima, torn apart that first February morning by Japanese fire in the shadow of Mount Suribachi, a hero once again. Then he was forgotten.

  How this could happen goes beyond the passage of time simply blurring and obscuring his image. Within the violent priesthood of the Marine Corps, there has long been contention and controversy, and some doubt, surrounding Basilone. There are contradictory and incorrect accounts about what exactly he’d done that dreadful night in the rain on the ridgelines of Guadalcanal in October 1942, starting with the official record in the History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II, volume 1, Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal:

  The Japanese continued to assault out of the jungle and up the slopes. A small group forced a salient in the Marine line to fall upon a mortar position, and further to the front [General] Nasu’s soldiers worked close to a water-cooled machine gun and knocked out all but two of its crew. Marines near the mortar position won back the tube from the enemy, and in the machine gun section Sergeant John Basilone took rescue matters into his own hands. For this action and later heroism in braving Japanese fire to bring up ammunition, Basilone became the first enlisted Marine in World War II to win the Medal of Honor.

  In fact, the first enlisted Marine to earn the medal was another sergeant, Clyde Thomason of the 2nd Raider Battalion, killed in the small-scale (and ill-fated) raid in August on Makin Island. But the brief record above does convey some of the savagery and chaotic nature of the fighting that night along the ridgelines, with infantrymen of both sides grappling in the dark over a single mortar tube, and a lone Marine (Basilone) risking hostile fire to sprint out and fetch more ammo for the machine guns, the heavy ammo belts slung about his neck and bare shoulders glistening in the rain. So began the legend of Manila John.

  And what really happened later on Iwo? Had Basilone destroyed an enemy blockhouse single-handedly with demolitions, while contemptuously brandishing a knife at the Japanese? In the end, how did he die, on the beach or attacking Motoyama Airfield #1? Was he hit by an artillery or mortar shell and killed instantly as his Navy Cross citation reads? Or did he bleed slowly to death from small-arms fire, as the Marine casualty report has it? Shot up with morphine by a corpsman, had he left messages for his brother, smoked a cigarette, and lived for hours? Was the Navy Cross he received posthumously awarded to make up for the near-unprecedented second Medal of Honor he was thought by some to be chasing?

  Then there’s this: so hard up were we for heroes that there were suspicions the government had turned to “manufacturing” them. How else to explain the convenience of Basilone—a Marine under orders who would do what he was told, including a war bond tour and morale-boosting visits to war plants? This has clearly happened in more recent wars. Remember feckless young private Jessica Lynch and Arizona Cardinals football star Pat Tillman? Both became the innocent tools of a military publicity apparatus that ambitiously turned an understandably terrified young woman and a tragic victim of friendly fire into heroic but essentially synthetic symbols of American courage under fire. The New York Times editorial page savaged the Pentagon’s misinformation campaign for conjuring up “the false story that PFC Jessica Lynch had been captured in Iraq after a Rambo-like performance,” when she’d actually been injured in a truck crash. And Tillman’s mother, Mary, in a book about her son, wrote that “officials tried to hide details about the incident because . . . it made the Army look bad.” Ergo the cover-up, trying to persuade a nation that Tillman “had been killed by the enemy in Afghanistan (in a battle that won him a questionable Silver Star) long after the military knew he had been killed accidentally by fire from American forces.”

  But even suggesting half a century later that Basilone’s heroics might similarly have been concocted infuriates contemporary keepers of the Basilone flame. Men such as Deacon John Pacifico of St. Ann’s Roman Catholic Church in Raritan seem ever vigilant and ready to stand up to defend the Basilone name and his legend. In May 2007, sixty-five years after the Marine’s death, Deacon Pacifico angrily told Vicki Hyman of the state’s largest newspaper, the Newark Star-Ledger, “That’s not what the Army was like in World War II. That’s not what the Marines were like.”

  Having been a Marine myself and still a working journalist and writer of books about Marines at war, I thought Basilone’s story was worth telling, worth a search for the real Basilone. I’ve grown fascinated by Manila John, sometimes puzzled by him, and I’m still trying to get a grip on him—not the bronze statue but the real man, not the marketing image but the real hero—and what made him tick.

  In the Corps, you meet natural-born warri
ors, live with them, fight in the next hole to them, men like Basilone. Sometimes you understand them, frequently you don’t. Or there’s nothing to understand; he’s just another Marine you serve with but never really know. In ways, we’re all the same, we’re all different. Maybe you’re a cowboy, a kid off the farm, a young tough, an inner-city smartass, or a college boy like me, a young lieutenant, as mysterious to the other fellow as he is to you. You have nothing in common, you and he, only the one thing: you’re both Marines. You have that, and when you both have also fought in combat, you very much have that, too.

  Fighting a war, especially alongside other soldiers, fighting together, you learn the password, you know the secret handshake of combat, of the Few, the Proud, the Marines. Which is why it was conceivable that before I finished writing this book I might eventually get to know a man I never met, who died when I was a schoolboy, get to know him almost as well as all those folks who loved him so.

  His story begins on an island few people had heard of before 1942.

  PART ONE

  GUADALCANAL

  Guadalcanal. On the evening of October 24, 1942, then sergeant John Basilone made a stand on the strategically important high ground near Guadalcanls Lunga River and south of the vital Marine beachhead, which included Henderson Field, His efforts and thiose of his fellow Marines and sailors handed the Japanese their first defeat in the U.S. island-hopping campaign up the Pacific.

  1

  Like Johnny Basilone, the country itself back then was big and brawny, a bit wild and sure of itself, had never been defeated in war, and was accustomed to winning; still young and tough, not effete or decadent like all of those tired Europeans being bullied by dictators, caving in to and being overrun by the loathsome, menacing Adolf Hitler. Our purported allies, fellow democracies Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Greece, were already lost or in peril, and the French Army, the greatest in the world it was often boasted, had been thrashed in six weeks and Paris occupied. Britain, even with its powerful Royal Navy and gallant Royal Air Force, was isolated, under siege, its great cities ablaze, its schoolchildren evacuated, its people sheltering in the Underground.

  We were different, though. This country didn’t lose wars. In eight terrible years of bloody revolution the ill-trained farmers and shopkeepers and frontiersmen of colonial militias had defeated the great British Empire, with the aid of the French fleet had forced the famous Lord Cornwallis to surrender, marching out of Yorktown with his band playing “The World Turned Upside Down.” In 1812 the British were back, burning Washington, but again beaten in the end. In 1848 we rolled over the Mexicans. In the most terrible war Americans ever fought, the country defeated Robert E. Lee, who was perhaps our greatest general but did not possess quite the army of Ulysses S. Grant. Spain in 1898 was a walkover, San Juan Hill, Manila Bay, and all that. In 1917-1918 we came to the rescue of the Allies in Flanders fields and the Argonne Forest.

  Yet despite our pride, despite our history and sense of destiny, for the seven months since December 1941 American Marines had done little more than die gallantly in losing causes or surrender, as they had done under fire at Wake Island, or peacefully, striking flags and stacking rifles in humiliating parade formation at the legation of Peking. Except for the air and naval battles at Midway and the Coral Sea, we had been losing and, worse, not to the powerful German army with its Luftwaffe and panzers, its economic machine, its science and technology, or to Mussolini, but to a lesser foe.

  They were, to American eyes, the short, skinny warriors of a small island nation with a third of our population, a strange, derivative people known in world markets largely for manufacturing dinnerware and porcelains, knockoff gadgets, china, fine silk textiles, and cheap, colorful children’s gimmickry and tin toys, a third-world country of comic-book figures stereotyped and mocked in B-movies as sinister “Oriental” villains or farcical heroes like Mr. Moto, portrayed by Mittel-European Peter Lorre as a clever little detective with outsized horn-rimmed glasses and a mouthful of false teeth, grinning and bowing and given to hissing absurd lines like, “So solly . . . yes, pliss,” appealing, like the rest of our view of Japan, to our most facile racist and xenophobic chauvinisms.

  What we didn’t see was a people with a grand martial tradition who at the opening of the twentieth century in blizzard-swept Siberia and at sea had defeated the czarist fleet and the great peasant armies and Cossack cavalry of the vast Russian empire. And who, since 1937, had been waging another, consistently and appallingly victorious war against the corrupt but much larger China. Instead we dismissed them as colonial snobs told us that “the Japs,” or “the Nips” (lifted from their own name for their country, Nippon), as it was then permissible to call them, were cunning little fellows but not very imaginative. For instance, having years earlier purchased an old surplus Royal Navy destroyer from the British in order to learn how to build modern warships, they had then duplicated the thing precisely, right down to the dent in its bow occasioned by some forgotten collision with an inconvenient pier.

  In addition, we were fighting a war like none we or the world had ever seen nor may ever see again, one we couldn’t lean on our history for lessons in how to fight. Sprawled across seven thousand miles of great ocean, it featured powerful naval armadas and air forces on both sides and pitted soldiers against one another in murderous ground combat in jungles and on coral beaches, atop mountains and deep in swamps. These were some of the finest light infantry in the world, ours and theirs, Japanese regulars with their samurai traditions of courage and barbarity, their screaming banzai assaults, battling hundreds of thousands of American GIs, sailors, and airmen, and six divisions of United States Marines, who on island after deadly island were living up to their own motto of Semper Fidelis, “always faithful.”

  A half dozen years after that war, a young New Yorker, a Marine replacement platoon leader, a college boy turned second lieutenant, flew west out of San Francisco bound for the winter mountains of North Korea. The obsolescent Navy C-54 Skymaster carrying the replacement draft took seven days to cross the great ocean, conveniently breaking down or pausing for fuel each night, on Kwajalein, Guam, touching en route Marine holy places such as Iwo Jima of that far greater war. The young lieutenant had never seen combat, knew but secondhand about the South Pacific, beyond seeing the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical in 1949 and attending college with men who had actually fought that war. Now he would be serving alongside many of the seasoned Marines who had defeated the Japanese. For the next year the young officer would fight with the 7th Marines (Basilone’s old regiment) against the Koreans and the Chinese army, and would himself come of age in combat at the other end of that greatest of oceans, the Pacific.

  In the snowy wartime autumn of 1951, I was that kid lieutenant. A Marine tracking the steps of other, earlier Marines, including Manila John Basilone, but never in war or in peace getting to the obscure Pacific island where his story really begins.

  Guadalcanal, whose name derives from the hometown of a long-ago Spanish adventurer, is nearly three thousand miles southwest of Hawaii and one of the larger of the Solomons. It was an appalling place to fight a war, but it was there that we would finally take the ground war to the enemy, give Japan its first land defeat in a half-century of combat against westerners and prove that, mano a mano, American troops were as good as the Japanese Imperial Army.

  According to the official records of the United States Marine Corps, the History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II, volume 1, Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal, “Not a single accurate or complete map of Guadalcanal or Tulagi [the tiny neighboring island] existed in the summer of 1942. The hydro-graphic charts, containing just sufficient data to prevent trading schooners from running aground, were little better.”

  Aerial photography might have been helpful, Marine Ops conceded, but there was a shortage of long-range aircraft and suitable air bases from which they could take off. A lone flight was made, “the beaches appeared suitable landing,” ano
ther aerial-strip map was scraped up in Australia, and that was deemed it. Estimates of enemy strength were put at 1,850 men on Tulagi and 5,275 on Guadalcanal. “Both estimates were high,” Marine historians later admitted. As for the place itself, and its stinking climate, “Rainfall is extremely heavy, and changes in season are marked only by changes in intensity of precipitation. This, together with an average temperature in the high 80s, results in an unhealthy climate. Malaria, dengue, and other fevers, as well as fungus infections, afflict the population.” The well-traveled novelist Jack London was once quoted as saying, “If I were king, the worst punishment I could afflict on my enemies would be to banish them to the Solomons.”

  By the autumn of 1942, “banished to the Solomons” to join that “afflicted population” of those unhappy islands were nearly 20,000 Marines and a smaller number of American soldiers, fighting the equivalent number of Japanese troops. One of those Marines, Robert Leckie, gives us a more intimate and personal description of the place in his book Challenge for the Pacific: “Seen from the air, it was a beautiful island, about ninety miles in length and twenty-five wide at its waist, and traversed end to end by lofty mountains, some as high as eight thousand feet.” In domestic terms, the place was roughly the size and shape of New York’s Long Island but with mountain peaks far taller than any New England ski resort. It was when you got closer up that you recognized the differences.