Hero of the Pacific

by James Brady

  The whole catalog shouts quintessential Americana on parade, the local hero, whether Medal of Honor winner or captain of the high school’s winning football eleven, passing the home folks in review. In a nice nostalgic touch, one marcher was John Reilly, who had four decades earlier been awarded the Medal of Honor during the Spanish-American War. “John Basilone rode in an open car with his parents Sal and Dora, who beamed with pride throughout the parade,” Doorly reported. “Also in his car was Private Stephen Helstowski of Pittsfield, Mass. [who had] fought with John on Guadalcanal and had been injured in the battle.”

  There’s a photo from that parade showing Basilone sitting happily, high atop the backseat of the convertible behind his parents, with Helstowski in the front passenger seat alongside a capped and uniformed chauffeur, Basilone waving at the crowd and the sun-drenched crowd gawking and some waving back, little kids and a few uniformed servicemen and women visible, several people walking behind or beside the slowly moving auto, so slowly that Basilone was able to shake hands with pedestrians even as the open car rolled along without having to stop, some of the handshakers aging vets from World War I.

  Flags flew, the weather was perfect, and little Peter Vitelli remembered how orderly the big crowd was as he sat on the curb in front of St. Ann’s Church watching the parade pass by and eventually halt and morph into a “rally.” At some point, the lovely actress Louise Allbritton was kissing Basilone. There is no mention of Virginia Grey. The disgraced though still popular former New York City mayor James J. “Jimmy” Walker somehow showed up, ubiquitous, beaming and shaking hands, “working the room,” so to speak. This had become commonplace, people wanting to be seen with the hero, wanting to be associated with him. To a fallen idol like Walker, this was the sort of event he needed and could use. The crowd, as anticipated, was so great that “local rich girl made good” Doris Duke Cromwell had generously invited the committee to move everyone onto her vast estate, where they’d erected a grandstand, and to continue the festivities, holding the culminating rally right there, which is just what they did. Father Russo gave an invocation. A local girl, Catherine Mastice, who would later sing in the 1949 Radio City Music Hall Christmas show, sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Anthony Hudek, then wide-eyed and thirteen years old, recalls, “It was as if the world came to Raritan.”

  A five-thousand-dollar war bond was presented to Basilone, and he responded gracefully, accepting it “for all my buddies overseas on the front lines—they really appreciate everything you wonderful people are doing by ‘backing the attack’ [he had the advertising agency selling line down pat by now] and buying these war bonds. Today is like a dream to me. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart.” Former state senator Joseph Frelinghuysen (from a local family of considerable wealth and distinction and himself a very appealing figure whose own son was a POW in enemy hands) spoke, and Basilone responded again, noting that his medal belonged in part to many others, “the boys who fought by my side.”

  During the Frelinghuysen remarks, Basilone’s small niece, five-year-old Janice, sneaked up onstage to sit with him, drawing a roar in response, and remaining with her heroic uncle throughout. That was the press photo everyone ran the next day, the war hero and the little girl in her party dress on his lap. Fox Movietone News got it all, and the newsreel ran coast to coast the following week, including a recording of Basilone delivering a short speech about the country and its good people and promoting the sale of war bonds. His delivery is a bit stilted, but his voice is deep, almost rich. Catherine Mastice returned to sing a new song entitled “Manila John,” composed by the organist of St. Ann’s, Joseph Memoli with words by W. A. Jack.

  Basilone at times seemed overwhelmed by what organizers called “the biggest day in the history of Raritan.” But for some stupid reason, pure military bureaucracy at work, I suppose, Basilone wasn’t to be permitted to enjoy the night at home. On orders, and pointlessly, he was hustled back to New York and a Manhattan hotel for the night. Maybe they feared that this close to home and family, he might go AWOL and they’d have difficulty getting their boy back to the tour. By Monday the call of the war plants was heard, and Basilone was back in New Jersey at the Johns Manville factory in Manville, just north of Raritan, meeting war production workers, shaking hands, and talking up war bonds.

  The next day Basilone was at Calco Chemical, where he’d worked as a laborer. The Somerset County Bar Association beckoned that same day. One can only imagine what Basilone managed to say to the Bar Association: citing torts and precedents? Then it was off to Pittsburgh for a bond rally at a big steel plant. Within hours he was back in New Jersey, speaking to the Rotary Club at Somerville. It is not clear any of this coming and going so close to Raritan included a trip home to his mother and father’s house for a meal or a night with the family. Or what Gene Lockhart and Eddie Bracken and the actresses thought of small-town and industrial New Jersey as they were trotted around.

  Doorly reports that someone, somewhere, finally decided to give the poor guy a break. A thirty-day leave came down from the top. Thirty days of no speeches, no war plants, no bond rallies. And by now Basilone badly needed a rest. He spent the time at home in Raritan, where he played with the local kids and slept late, bunking in with little brother Don, nights where he and his Raritan pals all did a little drinking and admired the local girls. But there was a letdown, a long-delayed reaction. Doorly details it. He quotes Basilone as telling friends in Raritan that as much as he appreciated the admiration and attention, he was a soldier and wanted to get back to the war. This is the first mention of Basilone’s yearning for the Pacific.

  19

  There are men who quite literally love war, the rattle of auto matic fire, the crack of a single rifle shot, the song of the bullet’s ricochet, the sweet reek of gunsmoke hanging blue in the air, the heightened tension, the living (and too often dying) on the edge, the adrenaline rush, the yelling and shouting, the sound and the fury. Many of such men are Marines, veterans of different wars in different climes and down through the ages. I have myself after a firefight heard Marines coming out of the fight and back inside the wire coarsely enthusing, “Lieutenant, I love this shit.” In a book I wrote about motivation, about what draws Marines to the guns rather than, more rationally, away from them, a few Marine critics carped that of all the various reasons Marines fight, I had scanted the sheer love of a fight, the appeal of battle, the call to the guns, the passion warriors bring to battle. Manila John Basilone seems to have been one of those men, one of the war lovers.

  By the late summer and early autumn of 1943, Basilone had been for some months distanced from combat, death, and the war, had been home long enough seeing family and old friends, appearing before cheering audiences, consorting with Hollywood movie stars, to understand that the medal had given him some leverage, and that perhaps the time was nearing when he might start using it. He had never been much of a politician, but this could soon be the moment. Perhaps the bond tour had lost its charms, had become boring, the parroted, scripted phrases grown glib, so easily tumbling from the lips. Maybe Virginia Grey’s ardor had cooled. The shrewder of the brass may have begun to sense that their pet machine gunner was no longer as docile and instantly obedient, no longer entirely on board. He’d gotten over his stage fright, his anxiety at being the center of attention, the bashful unease of being “gawked at.” He’d picked up the sales jargon for the war bond drive—“Back the Attack,” that sort of thing—and preached it on demand. Or was that cynical even to suggest?

  For the first time, and quite specifically, Basilone bridled at being “Manila John.” After all, Manila was no longer the town he once knew, where he found and loved Lolita, where he’d first tasted a small fame as he boxed undefeated, was backed in wagers and cheered on by his fellows, and where General Douglas “Himself” MacArthur, who lorded it over the poor Filipinos, vice regal in style and manner, had still found time to come back to the dressing room to shake his hand after a winning bout over a to
ugh sailor. That Manila no longer existed, wasn’t Manila anymore; it had been a “Jap” city for more than eighteen months, “Yokohama South.” If there was in Basilone no longer any affinity for the place, why should people still be yammering questions at him as Manila John? Or worse, “Manila John the Jap killer”?

  Basilone by now might well have been asking himself, what did civilians, even those who loved or just plain admired him, the home folks, the kids, the reporters, the girls, the fans, with their glib queries about “killing Japs,” really know about war, combat, and death? So, to mollify a performer apparently growing antsy and querulous, the brass again offered Basilone a commission as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps, the same rank that Mitch Paige, while they were both Down Under, had quickly accepted. And now six months later, the sergeant in Basilone would again turn it down. He was an enlisted man, a noncommissioned officer, and happy to be so. None of this “officer and a gentleman” snobbery for him. The brass then tried another incentive. Would Basilone like to go to Camp Pendleton at the pleasant seaside town of Oceanside in Southern California as a gunnery instructor and run machine-gun training there? He loved machine guns, knew the weapon intimately, was a proven teacher of the weapon’s construction, operation, usage, its deadly effect. In a way, this would be a perfect fit, a dream assignment. Thanks, sir, but no thanks.

  Then just what did John Basilone want? What would it take to keep him out there visiting war plants, selling bonds, doing interviews, boosting home-front morale? To Basilone, if to few others, the answer was simple: he wanted to return to the Pacific, to go back to the old outfit, to “his boys,” to combat and the war. He was starting to mouth off about missing the Pacific, missing being a Marine and being tired of his role as a performing seal.

  Every Marine senior NCO or officer who ever served knew guys like Basilone. They could be great Marines, the very men you wanted in the next hole to you in combat, but when it came to the chain of command, the regulations, to getting along, “brown-nosing” a little if he had to, the man could be a pain in the ass. There was the usual old commissioned snobbery at work still in the Corps, the occasional officer’s snarl about “shifty-eyed enlisted men” or about “a guy who every morning you ought to punch right in the face because you know damned well before the day is over, that bastard is going to fuck up one way or another.” Basilone was hardly that, not a troublemaker or a malingerer, not after three years in the Army with consistently excellent fitness reports, or in combat as a Marine. He was by late 1943 a thorough professional. But he was also a Marine who wanted his way and kept after you until he got it.

  Basilone sent in an official request through channels to rejoin the Fleet Marine Force Pacific, the famed FMF PAC for which he had fought as a member of the 7th Marines, 1st Marine Division. It was just as officially turned down. The Marine Corps didn’t see any profit in returning a Medal of Honor man to combat and suffering the angst and second-guessing inevitable in getting a hero killed off.

  And, the brass told itself, let’s face it, this guy was good at selling war bonds. In a traveling troupe of heroic servicemen and Hollywood stars, Basilone was a movie star himself. The dark good looks, the hint of danger, of a coiled tension, a recklessness that appealed to women sexually and to men who wished they had something of that same aura, these were the qualities that made Basilone so good at what he did on the war bond promotional tour. The best thing about it was that he was a “movie star” who in real life had been as heroic as any Hollywood idol on a make-believe screen.

  Basilone was the goods and people got it. They recognized him for the real thing, and when he spoke and cracked that lop-sided Italian smile, the crowd understood this wasn’t just a practiced performer. This was a genuine American legend come to town or to the gates of the big war plant just outside, to say hello, to shake your hand, to congratulate the shift worker who’d exceeded his or her production goals that month, to the factory manager whose assembly line had earned an “E for Excellence” banner from the War Production Agency, to visit the local grammar school, to kiss the baby and muss the hair of the local kid, and to do it all with an easy grin, a half-bashful hello, a dashing young man in an honorable uniform, and, above all, that pale blue ribbon on his chest or the medal itself suspended from his neck by another matching pale blue ribbon. No wonder the girls and the women loved him, the men admired him, the kids shouted and ran after him. Louis B. Mayer of MGM, President Franklin Roosevelt’s close friend and financial backer, couldn’t have invented him, no Oscar-winning screenwriter could have written him, the marquee part of Manila John Basilone, a hero of the Pacific. As Basilone’s brother George had remarked, “Everybody loves you, John.”

  Basilone raised money, boosted morale, sold bonds, reaped publicity, did the damned job, a job he was continually told was every bit as vital to the nation’s war effort as had been his ferocity in a fight, his mastery of the lethal Browning heavy machine gun, the man’s sheer animal endurance, the physical courage, the killer instinct.

  Basilone, not educated, naive but hardly stupid, must have been aware this was simply pious, full-blown press pageantry. Peddling war bonds door-to-door was important, of course, the war had to be paid for, but there were plenty of good salesmen in America selling everything else, from Fords to encyclopedias and patent medicines. There were only a relatively few men capable, strong enough, and sufficiently courageous to go into the jungle barefoot and armed in a tropical rainstorm at night and fight hand-to-hand against the flower of Japanese imperial infantry, out to kill you and your buddies, and fully capable, as they’d already shown on island after island, of doing so.

  Bruce Doorly gives us this evocative and in ways shrewdly illuminating vignette of the restless hero paradoxically at rest, during that monthlong military furlough back home in Raritan as 1943 neared its end: “After bond tours and visits to war industries, John was granted a thirty-day leave which he was able to spend at home. While most of the attention bothered John, when the attention came from kids, he loved it. John’s brother Carlo remembers that kids would gather outside the house at 113 First Avenue, yelling until John came out to talk to them. The kids would swarm over John, which he greatly enjoyed. His old boss from Gaburo’s Laundry, Alfred Gaburo, remarked, ‘his greatest pride was the kids in the neighborhood. The kids idolized him and he idolized the kids.’”

  “During the time that John was home after the big celebration [of September 19] he made special visits that those present will always remember. In between public appearances, John got some relaxation, visiting neighbors, feeling somewhat like a regular guy again.

  “One weekday, John took time to pay a special visit to his niece Janice’s school. . . . Janice was the niece who climbed on his lap at the rally on Basilone Day and had her picture on the front page of the newspaper. Janice, now 65, when interviewed for this [Doorly’s] book, lit up and described how special that day was when her Uncle John, everyone’s hero, came to visit ‘her’ kindergarten class. He talked with kids and shook hands with many teachers. The whole school was excited and she was a very proud five year old. While Janice says she has only vague memories of the parade and rally on Basilone Day, and no specific memories of sitting on John’s lap at the rally, she remembers vividly his visit to her school.

  “One night on leave, John stopped by the local tavern, Orlando’s. The owner, Tony Orlando, was very dedicated to the local servicemen. He posted their pictures on the wall, wrote them letters, sent them packages. To have John Basilone, Raritan’s hero, stop in to socialize, was an honor for the Orlando Tavern. All eyes and attention that night were on John. His drinks were, of course, ‘on the house.’”

  Another favorite local hangout, for Pop Basilone’s generation more than the son’s, was the Star of Italy Mutual Aid Society building on Anderson Street. This was an outfit that helped recently arrived immigrant Italians to get started in America. Since Basilone was officially still “under orders,” even on leave, he was pressed into
service, speaking to an audience of a hundred about the appeal, patriotic as well as financial, of war bonds. The club’s president, Charles Franchino, recalled young Basilone as “likable, regular” and, according to Doorly, Franchino was surprised to hear Manila John talking during his leave about wanting to get “back into action,” and asked why. Basilone, possibly having fun and kidding an older civilian, said, because he liked the feel of firing a machine gun.

  It wasn’t all small-town, back-home camaraderie, laughter, dinner dates, and drinks on the house. Basilone was no longer on the war bond tour hustling sales, but the publicity mill, like the war itself, ground on.

  “Basilone was featured on the radio a few times toward the end of 1943,” Doorly recalls. “The NBC show entitled ‘Marine Story’ had John talk about his experience at Guadalcanal. Legendary Ed Sullivan, who had a variety show on radio, similar to his later TV show, had John Basilone on the air. Ed and John would come to know each other as ‘friends.’ They met at a bond rally at the Capital Theatre in New York where Sullivan was the master of ceremonies. At this rally, John spoke to the crowd about his Division’s action on Guadalcanal. When he finished he received a standing ovation that lasted several minutes. Ed Sullivan wrote a few times about John in his newspaper column for the New York Daily News [then the biggest circulation newspaper in the country selling three million copies per day], John wrote that ‘Ed went out of the way to do things for me and he took pleasure in whatever he did. I shall never forget him and his sincere friendship.’ Even years after John’s death, Ed Sullivan continued sending John’s family free tickets to his newly launched and successful TV show. John’s sister Dolores recalled Ed to be very personable and caring.”