Hero of the Pacific

by James Brady

Speaking of which, as early as October General Alexander Vandegrift at the Noumea conference was already lobbying to get the 1st Marine Division “to a healthier climate” as soon as possible. The Japanese offensive of October 23 and the following days rendered consideration of that a purely academic exercise; the Marines couldn’t be spared. But now that the Army had arrived and the Japanese were trying to leave, where the division would go next had become a concern. Phyllis Basilone gives us some insight into her brother’s state of mind toward the end there on the ’Canal. Basilone, for all his heroics, was now having nightmares.

  During the firefight on the long night of October 24, a lone Japanese soldier somehow broke through their position. Someone shouted, “Look out, Sarge,” and Basilone saw the man disemboweled by a Marine’s machete and Basilone and his gun were splattered with the man’s red blood “and blue guts.” Despite all he’d seen and experienced already, this particular incident seemed to have shaken Basilone. According to his sister, he threw up and was trembling uncontrollably. The machete killing was but a single event during a night of such horrors. But this one shocking moment among so many had its impact, coming back to haunt his dreams. The previously imperturbable sergeant was shaken, having trouble sleeping, and haunted by wild dreams of combat, drenched with night sweats and shivering. Was this malaria or what they call battle fatigue? Phyllis tells us that Basilone himself wondered.

  The scuttlebutt was that the division was headed for Australia, which, with its “people like us,” the girls, the cold beer, and especially the temperate climate, sounded to the Marines like Eden, and especially to Manila John with his tour in the Philippines and memorable R&R in neighboring New Zealand, where the young Americans fell in love with the people and the land. As Basilone waited to ship out, away from the ’Canal and its horrors, he sounded pensive, waxing philosophic, which would be something new for him, a facet of his makeup not previously remarked on at Raritan, the Philippines, or in his Marine experience. Combat can do that.

  Listen to Basilone in his sister’s account as the troopship carried him and his unit out of the war zone and toward what they expected to be a period of rest, refitting, and getting well: “Looking about me during the long voyage to Australia was heart-rending. Where only a few short months ago they were only boys in their teens, now they appeared old, far beyond their years. Their sunken eyes reflected the pain and misery they had been subjected to. I was no different. My family on seeing me at this moment wouldn’t even recognize me. The only thing that kept us from just collapsing on the deck and going into a shell was the gratifying thought we had met the feared enemy, defeated him on his own ground, and poured the flower of his troops back into the earth and sea.”

  This sounds a bit poetic for Basilone, but his sister goes on with his description: “After a long trip during which we soaked up the sunshine and fresh sea air, with nary a Jap sub to bother us, we dropped anchor off Brisbane, Australia, the city we had been told would be our rest camp.” Located on the northeast coast of the continent, it was hundreds of miles closer to the tropics than the other big Aussie cities of Sydney, Canberra, and Melbourne, with their more moderate climate in the country’s south. It was hardly the cooler, healthier “temperate” rest camp area Vandegrift had requested.

  Some rest. Some camp.

  8

  Down Under, the Marines might have expected to go “Waltzing Matilda,” but Australia turned out to be a shock to men you’d think were beyond shock.

  “None of us realized the weakened condition we were in, and that the camp set up outside Brisbane was only temporary,” Basilone is reported to have said. Instead of a rollicking good liberty or a more extended leave, the Marines were marched to a hastily thrown-up military tent city. “We soon learned we were supposed to set up permanent defense positions along the Australian coast.” Where they would presumably confront a Japanese invasion, if and when. And this would be along the hot, fevered, mosquito-blown northern Australian coast, only a hundred miles from New Guinea where the enemy was already established. In the inverted world of the Southern Hemisphere, the south was cool, dry, and moderate, while the north was hot and pestilential like the ’Canal. On top of that, Australia both needed the Americans and resented them.

  Here is John’s account of that first, disillusioning view the Marines would have of their new home, as recorded by Phyllis Cutter: “Coming all that distance cramped in transports, we could hardly believe our eyes when we finally marched and were carried into our rest camp. If we bitched about ‘tent city’ we were sorry. This was even worse. Guadalcanal was paradise compared to this swamp [surely this is typical Gyrene hyperbole!]. Goony birds and mosquitoes made sleep impossible. Our breaking point was not far off. General Vandegrift was furious and after having southern Australia scouted for a more suitable location, he proposed the Division be moved to Melbourne where the climate was cooler and free of the giant mosquitoes. Having decided on the new location, Vandegrift found that the Army could not spare any ships for transporting the men.”

  Marines are celebrated for the profane eloquence of their wrath, and Vandegrift was a celebrated Marine. These were his men who for months had been abiding in hell and, despite everything, had met and defeated the Japanese and captured one of their islands after nearly a year of seeing the Japanese invade and occupy our islands. And now this worn-down, fevered corps of heroes had been billeted in a swamp and barred from more salutary precincts by a lack of Army shipping! The situation did nothing to endear the U.S. Army to the Gyrenes or to their general officer commanding. Alexander Vandegrift’s righteous rage swiftly reached the United States Navy, and more to the point, it got to Bull Halsey, a man who appreciated a good exchange of oaths, who on the spot issued orders to send Navy transports to Brisbane to pick up the 1st Marine Division and deliver it to Melbourne. When the Marines out there in the swamp heard the news, they cheered Halsey’s name.

  Said Basilone, “Our first sight of Melbourne as we docked in the harbor brought tears to our eyes, it seemed so much like home. That is, the home we knew, the Golden Gate in Frisco, the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, Chicago on the Great Lakes, St. Louis and the mighty Mississippi. We disembarked and with the Division band in the foreground, we paraded through Melbourne to the cheers of thousands of friendly people. During our march through the city our eyes drank in the sights. We had forgotten what a simple thing like a wide city street looked like.”

  To men who for months had been slogging through swamps and along narrow jungle trails, such things were startling in their commonplace loveliness, as were the lighted streetlamps of a city not blacked out by night, to say nothing of the dry barracks and clean bunks following the morass of “tent city” Brisbane.

  And the girls, the girls! Basilone marveled at them as well. “They weren’t jealous like girls back home, they’d simply ask each other if they’d had a nice time. It was a little confusing, don’t get me wrong, they were nice girls and wonderful company even if your ego was dropped a bit.”

  “We had by now gotten over the first flush of liberty,” Basilone is quoted as saying, which sounds rather tame considering that, even today when Marines are asked how a liberty weekend had gone, the cheerfully vulgar but standard response might be, “I got screwed, blew-ed, and tattooed.” Basilone added that he and his buddies now, for the first time, “began to look around and enjoy the people. They were without question the most honest and sincere people we had ever met. They threw open their homes to us and most of the men took advantage of their generous hospitality. Some of the boys fell in love, some lived with families, especially the boys from the Midwest, who really had a ball. They did all the farm chores and, while exhausted, they enjoyed it.”

  One local favorite to which the Marines never got accustomed was mutton for breakfast, or pretty much at any meal and anytime. But as Basilone noted, despite mutton, “We were slowly but surely getting back our strength and, with it, our desire to live.” Part of that desire, naturally, w
as sex.

  “There were never enough girls to go around and it was a rat race to get a date and hold it. I did pretty well.” At this somewhat modest boast from the newly arrived but hardly bashful Marine sergeant, it might be well to go to Basilone’s nephew Jerry Cutter on the subject. Cutter quotes Basilone about those early days at Melbourne: “Strangers were buying us drinks, taxicabs gave us free fares and women came out of their houses to meet us. Now the women, what can I say about the women? To begin with they weren’t shy. They stood up square to a man and told him straight out what they liked, didn’t like, and how they expected things to go. And things certainly did go. One of the things going around camp after that [first] night was, ‘what they say about Atabrine [that it rendered a man impotent] ain’t true. ’ One thing I learned about nearly dying is that it gave me a hell of an appetite—for everything. The last time I had anything close to this much sex, I was nineteen years old and paying for it. I ate, drank, and screwed like a wild pig, and didn’t feel bad for one second about any of it.”

  The good times wouldn’t roll forever. They lasted, in Basilone’s words, “until the Ninth Australian Division returned home from the Middle East. They were a wonderful bunch but you couldn’t blame them for flaring up. Here we were solidly entrenched in their homeland, had the market on their women, the corner on money and we spent it, how we spent it, as if there was no end to our supply.” After all, for those months on the ’Canal, there was nothing to buy, nowhere to spend a man’s pay. “As a result, fights flared up all over town. Many a pub was wrecked in short, furious fist fights. The Aussies were hard fighters, and once we understood their methods, we more than held our own. They were clean fighters in the sense they did not use anything but their fists but they would not fight alone.”

  Apparently if you duked it out with one Australian, you had to fight every Aussie in the room. “The whole situation was well on its way towards getting entirely out of hand. We got so we wouldn’t travel alone. While this cut down on the number of fights, there were still plenty of bad ones. Finally the whole mess was laid before [Marine] General Rupertus. The general, in an effort to ease the situation, decided that the 1st Marine Division would host the Aussies with the biggest party they had ever seen. The only precaution Rupertus took was the directive be issued that the beer was to be served in paper cups. He even had the courage and conviction to order that the MPs not attend. This party, more in the nature of a peace conference, was a huge success. At least ten thousand men attended, half of them Australian. For the occasion, the Melbourne cricket grounds were turned over to both armies. We got to know the Aussies better and believe it or not the fights in the pubs stopped. Shortly after the ‘peace conference, ’ the Aussie Ninth was pulled out and sent to New Guinea [where the enemy held perhaps half the vast island, the second largest in the world]. With all the fuss and fights, we were sorry to see them go. Our money was getting low and the Aussies were always good for a beer or two.”

  Bruce Doorly in his monograph, Raritan’s Hero, recalls one of those earlier evenings, before the pacifying beer bust at the cricket grounds: “One night John got into a situation over a girl in a bar, with an Australian soldier, John tried to back off but the other guy would not. Using his boxing experience, John hit him with a straight left causing the Australian to fall to the floor. He got back up and came at John again, this time with two of his friends. Basilone’s buddies joined in and a small riot erupted. Military police got the riot under control relatively quickly.”

  Considering Basilone’s boxing prowess (nineteen wins in nineteen fights at Manila for his Army unit before the war), his fearlessness, his appetite for women and their obvious interest in him, and his adventures in the Marines and civilian life, you wonder at how few brawls there were. The man was a fighter, in every sense, but not your usual barroom brawler, bellicose or easily riled. There was an admirable prudence, the realization that his fists could be considered lethal weapons, and he disciplined himself in their use, which probably made him even more effective and dangerous when he did occasionally lash out.

  Wartime Australia, menaced by the Japanese, was hardly a normal situation for a young soldier from any country. There were rational and understandable reasons for a love-hate relationship. The Yanks were here and their own boys weren’t. As the Brits put it when Americans flooded into the United Kingdom by the hundreds of thousands in the buildup to D-Day, “The trouble with the Yanks is, they’re overpaid, oversexed, and over here.” The British understood we were there to help them beat the Germans. That still didn’t make the reality entirely palatable. The Australian situation was analogous. Tens of thousands of young Australians, including their best troops, weren’t here facing the Japanese, protecting their own country, their wives, the kids, and their homes. But the Yanks were here, and that wasn’t quite the same thing.

  “The bloody Japs aren’t a hundred miles away across the Torres Strait, their planes are bombing Darwin [on the northern coast], and our lads are half a world away fighting the bloody Eyeties [Mussolini’s Italians].” There was considerable truth to all of this. It was late 1942, early 1943, and the Americans had landed and fought their way through the Vichy French at Oran and Casablanca and near Algiers to open a second front against the Germans and their increasingly insignificant Italian partners. The Aussies (and New Zealanders) were also in North Africa with the British Eighth Army, and soon to be joining up with the new Allied invaders to the west. But in the meanwhile, the Brits and their empire were fighting full-time against Rommel and his Afrika Korps. So until their own 9th Division sailed home for a break, the only sizable forces back home Down Under would be the “bloody Yanks.”

  And waiting for them the glories and creature comforts of Melbourne, with its lonely, lusty, and compliant women, to welcome the nearly 20,000 men of the recently landed 1st Marine Division, malaria-ridden, exhausted, wasted, haunted, but randy, womanless, and by now battle-hardened. These Yanks, at least, had proved themselves able to “kill Japs.” A mixed blessing indeed!

  There is no indication that Manila John understood such dynamics or cared. All he knew was that he and his machine gunners were out of hell and, like Sydney Carton, in “a far, far better” place, a civilized country much like their own, where, drained and tired and haunted as they were, they could expect to recover and live once more as men and not animals of the field. But just how thin, in wartime with its stresses and losses, might be this veneer of civilization, even in a country as lovely as Melbourne and its agricultural environs? These were a grand people and this Australia a gorgeous place; there was beer to be drunk, liberty to be enjoyed, girls to be loved, money to be spent. Cutter reports further on “Uncle John” Basilone’s revels amid the hospitable people of Melbourne: “They’d find a bald-headed Marine dead drunk, planted face-first in their petunias, and they’d bring him into their home, clean him up, and introduce him to their daughter.”

  Basilone had singular memories of his own. “I woke up one morning in my bunk and had no idea how I got there. I didn’t remember the trip back or how I got my arm all bloodied. Somebody had wrapped it in white gauze so I figured I must have been in the sick bay at some point. All I knew was that my head hurt like hell. My mouth felt like mice had made a nest in it, and my arm hurt as bad as my head. I got myself cleaned up and had to shave with my left arm because my right was so sore. I still couldn’t remember how I had banged it up. At chow Powell looked up at me over his coffee and smiled like the cat that just shit in the corner. ‘Death Before Dishonor, sarge,’ he said.

  “‘What the hell was that?” I was thinking but didn’t say anything.

  “‘Let’s take a look at it,’ he said.

  “‘At what?’ I said. I still wasn’t too fast on my feet before coffee. Then it all started to come back to me. The drinking contest on Flinders Street, the cab ride and the little shop by the docks with drawings of dragons in the window. Powell nodded at my arm. Then I saw the rest; the tray of black inks, the
needles, and the bald top of a man’s head bent over my arm as pain shot through me. Powell was kissing a very heavy, brown-skinned girl and watching us. I peeled back the bandage on my arm, and saw the scabbed-over letters in blue ink, ‘Death Before Dishonor’ and some other design that was covered in dried blood. I liked it.

  “‘Death Before Dishonor,’ I repeated to Powell. ‘Who paid for it?’ I asked because I didn’t remember that part.

  “‘Beats me, but somebody did,’ he said. It was done now and I was pleased with it.”

  Not every night was tattooed, drunken, or lecherous. The local girls also loved the new American dance, the “jitterbug,” and were mad to learn more about it and work on their technique. There were families that took in some of the boys for domestic, warm, family-style meals and small, relatively sober parties. Men fell in love and got married, some were “adopted” by families and helped out the households with a little cash, and they learned to drink tea, sitting around the kitchen table as they’d done at home. They taught the Aussies our songs and learned theirs. To this day Marines who served Down Under can recite the lyrics of all four stanzas of “Waltzing Matilda” and do a pretty good job on its close harmony. American farmboys vanished for days at a time and then wandered back to the base explaining they’d been helping a local farmer get the crops in. Basilone fell for the younger children of one family and found himself playing on the floor with a little girl who reminded him of a niece in the Reisterstown, Maryland, home of his sister Phyllis Cutter and her husband, Bill.

  The Marines who came to Australia, as well as others who went to New Zealand in those days, were there for rest and relaxation and recuperation, to cure the malaria and purge the intestinal worms. To come back from the dead. So that soon they would be sufficiently fit to fight the Japanese all over again on some other lousy island. Or maybe right here up north in the swamps and on the beaches of the northern coast with its malaria and crocodiles. Military bases thrive on rumor, on scuttlebutt; gossip was the circulating blood of everyday garrison life, and here at Melbourne the talk was of when they might be leaving, where they would be going next, about the order of battle and terms of engagement the next time out.