Hero of the Pacific

by James Brady

  Phyllis Basilone Cutter recalled her brother’s new love affair with New York, the big city just across the Hudson a few miles (and a world) east of little hometown Raritan. “New York, supposedly the city without feeling, took me into her heart. Every door was open to me. Ed Sullivan of the New York Daily News and Toots Shor took me in tow. They went out of their way to do things for me and what I liked about them both was that they took real pleasure in whatever they did. Both are grand fellows and I shall never forget them and their sincere friendship. It was a privilege and an honor to know them.”

  To those who knew Sullivan, then or later, he was a self-important and rather cynical man mostly involved not with others but with himself. Basilone’s and his family’s impressions of Sullivan’s goodness of heart may say more about Basilone and his folks, their own decency and their essential niceness and authenticity, than about the worldly Sullivan. Regarding Toots Shor, a large, vulgar man who ran a “great joint” (his own description), a Marine enlisted man of Basilone’s age and appearance, without the Medal of Honor, might not have been entirely welcomed by Toots or his doorkeepers. If you were famous, even marginally, it was, “Come right in, pally. The drinks are on us.” Otherwise it might be, “Beat it, Marine. Try the joints under the El on Third Avenue.”

  There is a wonderful small and telling scene in Sydney Pollack’s The Way We Were burlesquing popular nightspots such as Shor’s, the Stork Club, and El Morocco during wartime, where the headwaiter at the velvet rope smilingly welcomes the colonels and the ranking naval officers and then curtly dismisses a GI and his girl, enraging Barbra Streisand’s feisty character, the “pinko” scold, who promptly ushers the young couple swiftly past the rope and chews out the flunky, dressing him down as “You fascist rope holder!” That’s how it was at Shor’s joint back then and would have been for Basilone, had he been just a sergeant on his own, without a medal or an escort of military PR flacks.

  By this time, Manila John was a star. With Sullivan and Shor, that was the difference. Basilone’s youthful, innocent naiveté was never more evident than in his assessment of these two front-runners, his appreciation of the newspaper columnist and the saloonkeeper, his gratitude and their “sincerity,” for the things they did for him. He didn’t yet realize, and perhaps never fully would, what his heroism and consequent fame did for the sycophantic users around him, the leechlike pilotfish attached to the deadly prowling shark.

  As Doorly puts it, “Basilone’s life was no longer private. An article appeared in the Sunday Daily News [whose circulation rose to four million on Sundays] including many things about John’s life, including that John had a girlfriend. The girl was Helen Helstowski of Pittsfield, Massachusetts . . . sister of John’s military buddy Stephen Helstowski.” The surprise here is there was no mention anywhere at this time of Hollywood glamour girl and fellow war bond trouper and reputed love Virginia Grey, the well-known if not precisely famous film actress. Where were gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons at moments like this? Yet here was this publicity about an anonymous Pittsfield girl with a difficult name. John and Helen, with her brother the intermediary, had corresponded, he’d visited her while touring at Albany, not far from Pittsfield, and the two certainly became friends and saw each other several other times. There is no indication it went much beyond that. “While no one said the romance was a wild, passionate affair, John was a celebrity, and the newspapers were going to report and sensationalize the story, writing that, ‘He fell in love.’” Maybe the media haven’t really changed all that much.

  Meanwhile, at the little house in Raritan, fan mail arrived in volume. It was mostly from young women. Some included photos. Some were outright proposals of marriage. According to Doorly, one hopeful girl said, “I think you are wonderful. I always wanted to marry a hero.” A writer named James Golden had been trying for some days to get to Basilone and do an interview, to get the hero to talk about himself. When the pestering continued, an irritated Basilone had had enough. “Look, Golden, forget my part. There was not a man on the ’Canal that night who doesn’t own a piece of that medal awarded to me.”

  Basilone had proved himself a natural at war. It was coping with civilians during a peaceful interlude at home that was giving him difficulty.

  20

  Agala dinner at the Waldorf and there he was on Park Avenue, up on the dais, young, handsome, bemedaled, and dashing, a man’s man, somehow larger than life. But some still thought of John Basilone as the aimless, perhaps even shiftless, half-educated, hard-drinking young Italian Catholic Jersey kid with nine siblings but no “family” to speak of. A gambler and a brawler, a misfit who didn’t get out of grammar school until he was fifteen, who never attended for a single day the local high school, who caddied for a living at the country club, cadging tips from the rich guys, beating the other caddies at cutthroat poker for their tips, and who was fired from one of the few jobs he ever had, working on a laundry truck. And now here he was, Basilone of the U.S. Marine Corps, sitting up there on the dais in uniform and wearing the famous medal, at the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf, alongside such industrial giants as Alfred P. Sloan Jr. and others out of the pages of Forbes and Fortune magazines, a scheduled dinner speaker and an honored guest of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM).

  Those seating arrangements are one of the many paradoxes of this narrative, and was there ever such an absurd dichotomy? Manila John and the big shots. Seated nearby, the closest thing Basilone ever had to a role model or an icon, a Marine lieutenant general named Alexander A. Vandegrift, honored by President Franklin Roosevelt with the same pale blue ribbon that Basilone wore, a couple of very brave men of disparate backgrounds, the commanding general of the 1st Marine Division (and eventually commandant of the Corps) and the lowly machine-gun sergeant of the same division, but both of them Marines, both of them now, and maybe forever, legends of the Corps. If only Basilone’s battalion commander, Chesty Puller, were here, John could brace Chesty with his plaints. Well, then, with no Chesty on board, the “Old Man,” Vandegrift, would have to do.

  With the timing and instinct that in the Philippines had earned Basilone the reputation and the undefeated record of a feared prizefighter, one who recognized and would exploit an opening when he saw one, and could sense weakness in an opponent, Basilone took immediate advantage of the place and the moment. During a (men’s room?) break in the proceedings he pounced on General Vandegrift, who had commanded him on the ’Canal and had that day in Australia pinned the medal on him. Vandegrift wore the same medal and additionally had a flag officer’s clout, but on this night Basilone had his ear, and he didn’t hesitate. The war in the Pacific raged, Basilone was a Marine who’d been there at the start, and now he wanted in at the finish. How could he get back into the fight when the big shots insisted on parading him around the country like a show pony, a traveling salesman working conventions and formal affairs like this one, when all he really wanted to do was to rejoin the war, again lead troops in the field? Could Vandegrift help? The general promised to look into it.

  Maybe he did, but all John subsequently learned was that instead of being sent to join one of the Marine divisions now fighting the Japanese in the Pacific (there would eventually be six before the war ended), he found himself shunted off into the ultimate rear echelons of rear echelons, in a Navy yard a hundred miles from the nearest sea.

  On August 31, 1943, while the American carriers Essex, Yorktown, and Independence attacked Marcus Island in the central Pacific, and in Europe the Russians advanced on Smolensk, John Basilone was reporting at and would be pulling guard duty in the Guard Company, Marine Barracks, Washington Navy Yard, with frequent timeouts to address a group or hawk another war bond.

  Was this bureaucratic coincidence or was the Corps punishing the audacious SOB for having gone outside the chain of command to pester Vandegrift at the Waldorf? Whatever the situation, Basilone was increasingly pissed off.

  “I felt I was still on display,” he
complained to his family. At another time he compared himself to “a museum piece.” By now, the movie stars, including the Virginia Grey he had “fallen for,” had all gone back to Hollywood. They had been freed to return to their real jobs as movie heroes, while the one actual hero among them was prohibited from getting back to his profession, that of killing Japanese infantry. Surely Basilone grasped the irony.

  Try to analyze Basilone’s state of mind as he followed in the newspapers what was happening in the Pacific while he manned a duty desk in Washington. The Marines were fighting on Bougainville in the Solomons, his old Aussie “mates” were slogging ahead in New Guinea, on Christmas Eve American naval forces attacked Buin and Buka islands to draw attention from an imminent landing by other Marines on New Britain, and on December 26 those landings took place, as General Rupertus’s 1st Marine Division, Basilone’s old outfit from the ’Canal, splashed ashore and headed inland as 1943 ended, to capture the Japanese airfield at Cape Gloucester. Basilone, instead of being there, was reading about the Pacific in the Washington Post and the Washington Times-Herald.

  It wasn’t as if Basilone had some schoolboy’s romantic idea of what combat was all about. He was a realist and had known war. Maybe he felt he was letting his fellow Marines down.

  Or maybe it was the country itself and its people who were driving him back to the war—his handlers, the shadows, the PR people and the ad men, the military brass, the war bond lobby, the crowds cheering him, the kids shouting his name, the newspaper reporters and radio broadcasters dogging his steps, the celebrity hunters like Ed Sullivan and Toots Shor, the legendary journalists like Lowell Thomas, the big businessmen of the NAM, like Sloan of GM who put him to use, the clergymen who preached his virtues, the heiress Doris Duke who turned over her acres to a grandstand where he would be saluted, the lovesick but ignorant girls proposing marriage, the authors who wanted to do books about him.

  Then in December with the holidays coming, an impatient Platoon Sergeant John Basilone did what Marines in trouble are trained to do. He went to “the man.” His commanding officer, knowing Basilone to be something of a ballbreaker, but one with an impeccable combat record and the famous pale blue ribbon, asked irritably what it was this time, what was it the sergeant wanted?

  Basilone answered in five words: “Sir, I want the fleet.”

  Do not be confused by the phrase. Basilone wasn’t asking for a shipboard assignment but a transfer to the Fleet Marine Force, to one of the Marine divisions now fighting the Japanese somewhere out there in the vast Pacific theater. And within days (it was just before Christmas), and possibly and belatedly due to General Vandegrift’s intervention, Basilone at last got his wish.

  Orders were cut dated December 29, sending him off to Camp Pendleton, California, to join the then newly forming 5th Marine Division, to report on January 17, 1944, to the Headquarters and Service Company of the 27th Marines, an infantry regiment. Nine days later, on January 26, he was sent up to HQ Company of the 1st Battalion of the 27th Regiment, one of the three rifle battalions that made up the fighting heart of a Marine regiment, just what he wanted and had been asking for. In November 1942, following his epic fight on the ’Canal, Basilone had been promoted to platoon sergeant, line, and now on March 8, 1944, he would be given his final promotion in the Marine Corps, to (temporary) gunnery sergeant, one of the most highly respected and important ranks a noncommissioned officer could be given, a rating that carried with it the informal and yet revered abbreviated title of “gunny.” So that, as a Marine, “Gunny” John Basilone would some ten months later make a final landing on a hostile beach.

  21

  The Marines gave John Basilone a few days’ leave over the holidays to tidy up his affairs at home, see the family, jaw with Pop and his siblings, reassure his mom, have a glass at Orlando’s Tavern, say so long to his pals, attend mass in Father Russo’s old church, and sing “Auld Lang Syne” on New Year’s Eve. Then it was off to the West Coast and a line outfit at Camp Pendleton, a man back where he belonged and very much at ease with the place, the people, the job, and himself, once again a real Marine.

  Camp Pendleton, where I’ve served (most Marines have), is a big, stark, parched, and rather primitive ranchlike spread of hilly brown terrain given to brush fires in the Santa Ana wind season and floods in the rainy time, covered with wartime acres of dun tentage and flat fields dotted with metal Quonset huts and the newer large, spare two-story wood-framed barracks and similar-looking mess halls and outbuildings, some of them still smelling of newly sawn wood. The landscape was populated, except for the Marines, largely by rattlesnakes, coyotes, jackrabbits, and plenty of tarantulas, the husky, hairy spiders mainly visible by night when the headlights of speeding autos or military vehicles pick them up, slow-moving and shimmering, on the brownish hill-sides. Pendleton is situated on the Pacific coast a half hour north of San Diego, an hour south of Laguna Beach and its beachfront hotels and bars, surfers and pretty California girls, and maybe another hour south of LA and Hollywood.

  I suppose there is some way to calculate how many Marines have passed through the main gate of Camp Pendleton, California, since John Basilone arrived there in January 1944, men either reporting in for training or prior to shipping out later for the Asian or the Middle Eastern wars. Named for famed Marine general “Uncle Joe” Pendleton, it is a huge base fronting on its west side the Pacific coastline and the garrison town of Oceanside, whose main drags are a kaleidoscope of bars and small restaurants, uniform tailoring and pressing shops, a couple of small churches, filling stations, pawn shops, fast-food joints, barbershops and beauty salons, and tattoo parlors, with plenty of cute young California blondes and the off-duty, on-the-prowl Marines who hunt them.

  This chunk of Southern California is an arid stretch of hills, cut by arroyos that flood swiftly after sudden downpours, the terrain reaching mile after rolling mile to the east where further miles away you can see the Southern California coastal range, mountains that for half the year are topped by snow. Marines began going to war from Pendleton in the 1940s when the enemy was the Japanese five thousand miles away, on all those lethal islands. In the summer of 1950 Pendleton started sending another generation of Marines seven thousand miles to Korea, to the Pusan Perimeter, the landing at Inchon, the desperate fight at the Chosin Reservoir in North Korea, and to the bloody Outpost War in which my class of young Marines fought until the truce of 1953. Then came Vietnam and the awful decade in which 58,000 American soldiers and Marines died, most if not all of the Marines direct from Camp Pendleton. In more recent years, the maws of Iraq I, Afghanistan, and Iraq II, were once again being fed through the main gate at Camp Joseph H. Pendleton.

  Sensibly, they gave Basilone a platoon sergeant’s job with a machine gun platoon. The men of the platoon, most of them young, including a kid named Charles W. “Chuck” Tatum, who would write a good book about that time at Pendleton and the battle for Iwo Jima, all recognized who Basilone was. You could hardly have been a Marine in 1943 or 1944 and not known of Manila John. The legend was now a member of the new 5th Marine Division, but his brother George was also on the base, training with the slightly older 4th Division, which would be heading out to the Pacific and the war before the 5th Division got itself organized. At the moment the 5th was nothing more than a skeleton formation peopled by newly graduated Marine boots and a cadre of seasoned noncoms and a few young officers. Basilone was by far the most famous 5th Division Marine already here.

  In the months he’d been away the war itself and even the helmets and the weapons had changed. The new Garand M1 semiautomatic rifles were slowly replacing the old bolt-action Springfields that went into service in 1903, and, more to the point with a machine gunner, there was the relatively new air-cooled version of the .30-caliber Browning machine gun, much lighter. No more pissing into the water jacket with these babies.

  But as an Old Breed Marine, an old-fashioned sort of fellow, Platoon Sergeant Basilone took a traditional tack in breaking in the r
aw Marines of this brand-new platoon in a brand-new division. He requisitioned cleaning gear, buckets, swabs, and pine oil floor cleaner and put his handful of boots to work sweeping and swabbing the wood-frame barracks. It took two days to get the place up to the sergeant’s gleaming, polished standards, but that’s what boots were for, menial duties, physical labor, snappily delivered orders to keep them busy and out of trouble. And now the new men began to trickle in to fill out the new division’s ranks, some of them from a recently disbanded Marine parachute outfit, paramarines, a cocky bunch who thought of themselves as the “elite.” Manila John wasn’t impressed by what he thought of as “candy-assed” parachute training and wasn’t buying much of that crap—including their penchant for tucking their trousers into their boots instead of wearing them loose outside as proper Marines did. Even the paratroopers knew about Basilone, and that in itself defused potential problems. As did the arrival of a couple of salty noncoms Basilone had known before, men who knew their stuff and didn’t take any shit either from boots or from boot-wearing paramarines. We are forever being told that “sergeants run the Marine Corps,” and as a brand-new and still amorphous division like the 5th was forming up and starting to organize itself, the adage was never more valid.

  Basilone and his NCOs soon had his platoon out on the ground working with the two machine guns. Nobody knew the heavy better than Sergeant Basilone, but he was no slouch on the LMG (light machine gun) either. He worked them hard, snapping in (drills without live ammo), prepping them for the real thing on the firing range. Jerry Cutter and Jim Proser, in their book, possibly assisted by brother George Basilone, flesh out the Pendleton episode before, in John’s voice, he sailed again for “the fleet”: “A young sergeant, Biz Bisonette, checked in at the same time as the paratroopers and assisted with training of the company. [This is a mistake—Basilone had a platoon, not a company.] He was a tough cookie and an expert in hand-to-hand combat. When it came to jungle fighting we learned our lessons on the ’Canal. Any front-line fighter would need hand-to-hand skills as much as any weapon in the arsenal. The first order of business was getting the boys on the firing range with the .30-caliber machine guns, the old water-cooled Brownies and the lighter, air-cooled version. I drilled the boys on the mechanics and took them through the book, my book, on machine gunning . . . the care and maintenance, and of course, blindfold set-up, repair and tear-down, were all chapters in my book that my new boys would learn better than anything they ever studied in their lives. These new boots would also know how to operate all the weapons on the battlefield, ours and the enemy’s, in case they had to use them.