Hero of the Pacific (24 page)

Two weeks after this Los Angeles idyll, Basilone's new 5th Division was told it would be shipping out, destination unknown. These were, of course, the days of patriotic, war-winning slogans: “A slip of the lip can sink a ship.” So people, including the troops, were supposed to keep their mouths shut about troop deployments and weren't told much in the first place. One of Lena's pals, her maid of honor, in fact, a Marine named Ruby Matalon, gave the couple her Oceanside apartment for their last California night together. But it wasn't to be, not with the schedule the Marines were on. Basilone's unit was to leave its area on the base at four a.m., and there was no transport that could get John back there by then from Oceanside. So the couple couldn't spend their last night in a pleasant if borrowed apartment, and had to say their goodbyes in the place where they had first locked eyes and met, a Camp Pendleton mess hall. “We talked of our life after the war—what we would name the first boy and the first girl,” Basilone said. “She held up pretty well while we talked. She didn't cry, and pretended she was okay, but she was no poker player. But I was. I told her, ‘I'm coming back,' and she believed me.”

At dawn the 5th Marine Division was on the move, shipping out and “in the field,” as the orders read, on August 12, 1944, Basilone aboard a tub called the USS
Baxter
, hot, filthy, and crowded, with many of the new men who'd never been at sea before puking, and the chow some of the worst swill Basilone had yet experienced in the Corps. On the day the
Baxter
sailed, in France the U.S. Army crossed the Loire, and on the Eastern Front Soviet troops broke the German lines and advanced fifteen miles in a day. It was becoming clear who was winning the war.

The 5th Division Marines still didn't know where they were ultimately headed, where they would next fight, but it was surely going to be the Pacific, and the islands. The first stop would be decidedly not a hostile beach, but the romantic, lovely Hawaiian Islands, where they would arrive at Hilo harbor on August 18. Neither the voyage from San Diego nor the new base, Camp Tarawa, were the stuff of honeymoons, especially one being taken by the groom without a bride. John still had no word of brother George on Saipan.

Camp Tarawa, named for a bloody and thoroughly screwed-up epic Marine assault that nearly ruined the 2nd Marine Division, had been pitched in the midst of what they called the Great Hawaiian Desert, a tent city in a dusty bowl over which loomed the twin volcanoes of Mauna Loa and Mauna Lea. The nearest swimming beach was a day's hike distant and the division wasn't giving many days off. The intensified training schedule stimulated competition between individual Marines and units, and to boost morale and nurture unit identity, Basilone and his machine gunners shaved their heads.

And then almost miraculously out of the vast Pacific, brother George appeared, unhurt and on the neighboring island of Maui. John wangled a pass and the brothers reunited. George had for some minor infraction been in the brig on bread and water but bragged that the Corps lost money on the deal, because he ate so many loaves of bread. Word came from Peleliu that Chesty Puller's battalion had taken a terrible beating with very high casualties. For the time being, it was finished as an effective Marine fighting force. The Japanese might be losing the war but they weren't throwing the game. At Camp Tarawa men were being trained to handle the improved and terrifying flamethrower, now an integrated infantry weapon in assaulting fortified positions.

The gunners, riflemen, demolition men, and now the new flamethrowers drilled together as a lethal team with a specific set of new tactics for assaulting blockhouses and other fortified positions. The flaming napalm would do horrific things to human flesh. As the wisecrack went, “an ugly war just got uglier.”

But many Marines, including the pragmatic Basilone, welcomed anything to the arsenal that could give the machine gunners an edge, kill the Japanese, and save his men. He drilled the gunners in flamethrower tactics hour after hour, teamwork that would pay off later in the fighting.

John and George got lucky with the coincidental appearance of a Dr. John Fox, who ran the local school district nearest Camp Tarawa and got word to John that he was also from Raritan, New Jersey, and why didn't John come by for an occasional home-cooked meal, and if they could spring George, he was invited as well. To men living on field rations, you didn't turn down an offer like that. The Basilone boys and the good doctor enjoyed a jolly Raritan reunion.

In October the first Americans landed in the Philippines, and on October 20 MacArthur splashed ashore in a carefully staged landing for the newsreel cameras following the assault troops by several hours and getting the general's khakis wet. On that same day he broadcast to the Filipino people that, indeed, “I have returned.” There is no record of Basilone's response, but considering his prewar years in Manila serving under MacArthur, it is difficult to believe he didn't have some variety of emotional reaction.

All through November fighting continued on various Philippine islands and in the surrounding sea, with Senator John McCain's admiral grandfather one of the key players. The Allies were fighting in and around Sumatra and other of the Dutch East Indies, and in Burma the Brits had seized the initiative from the enemy and were on the offensive. Clearly, the Japanese were being pushed back everywhere.

In December, at Camp Tarawa, the rumor mill was chattering. The 5th Division would soon be on the move. Another island would be taken, perhaps one in the chain of islands that led to Japan itself. No place names were mentioned, even in scuttlebutt form, just that it might be an island with an airfield. On December 27, 1944, two days after Christmas, the division began loading its vehicles and heavier gear and tons of supplies. In mid-January 1945, as the United States entered another new wartime year, American carriers were attacking Formosa, Nationalist Chinese were pushing the Japanese out of Burma, there was heavy fighting on Luzon in the Philippines between invading GIs and Japanese defenders, and in Europe Warsaw fell to the Russians and a Polish unit.

At Camp Tarawa, embarkation orders were cut. The 5th Marine Division, Basilone and company, would be sailing, destination still unknown, on January 17, 1945. Manila John was once again going to the wars.

Iwo Jima. In the Battle of Iwo Jima, John Basilone, now a gunnery sergeant, charged across Red Beach 2 with the 1st Battalion, 27th Marines on D-day, February, 19, 1945. He would die there on that first day of the assault, falling just short of one of his unit's primary objectives, Motoyama Airfield # 1.

Iwo Jima, Japanese for “Sulfur Island,” is a volcanic flyspeck in the Central Pacific situated roughly six hundred miles north-northwest of Saipan and Tinian in the Carolines and another six hundred or so miles from Tokyo, the capital and largest city of Japan. It was this equidistant geographical position that gave Iwo any importance whatsoever in the Pacific war. Japanese engineers had built three airstrips on the small island (only ten square miles of sand and rock) from where their Zeroes and other interceptors could attack United States B-29 Superfortresses based in the Carolines en route to Tokyo and other mainland Japanese targets. The same Japanese fighters taking off from Iwo could also ambush and shoot down B-29s on their return flights to Tinian and Saipan, especially Superforts damaged by Japanese antiaircraft fire or shot up by Zeroes over the mainland, now limping home, wounded, slowed, and vulnerable, the planes and their ten-man crews. If American forces could take Iwo, the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands of U.S. flyers would be saved and our bombardment of the home islands stepped up in frequency and in bomb tonnage. It would also permit American fighter escorts, with their relatively short range, to accompany the B-29s to Tokyo and back, improving their effectiveness.

Invading and taking the rugged little island from its powerful garrison of good Japanese troops and dangerous aircraft would not be done on the cheap. Major General Harry Schmidt's V Amphibious Corps would be ticketed for the task: three Marine divisions, the 3rd, the 4th (with George Basilone and commanded by Major General Clifton B. Cates), and the brand-new and untested as a unit 5th Marine Division, a blend of raw-to-combat young Marines freshly over from the States and salty and blooded veterans like gunnery sergeant John Basilone, a total of roughly 60,000 men, about half of them having already faced and fought the enemy. There would be casualties, and some senior Marine officers expected them to be heavy.

I have been to the island once, in November 1951, almost seven years after the battle, as a replacement platoon leader being flown out to the 1st Marine Division in North Korea. Our Navy transport plane landed at Iwo to refuel, and we forty or so young officers and senior NCOs had a few hours to stretch cramped legs and wander about and gawk, very much like tourists anywhere—except that, for Marines of any generation, Iwo Jima wasn't a tourist attraction but a sacred shrine. My memory of the place is simple. Mount Suribachi was stark, bare, smaller than I anticipated; the air reeked of sulfur, the sand was black, and the wind moaned. Beyond that, nothing. Only the imagined echoes of muted battle long ago and the sense of other presences, the ghosts of the men of both sides who fought and died here. Those sensations I took with me, along with a sense of awe, long after the stench of sulfur faded. A Japanese source once described Iwo in these words: “no water, no sparrow, no swallow.” More prosaically, an American source described it as being shaped like “a porkchop.”

Everyone I've asked about the epic battle, from Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal, who took the iconic photo of the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi, to combat Marines and one Navy nurse who were there under fire in the famous fight, remembers the shifting sands, difficult if not impossible to dig foxholes in. That sand, the smell, and the wind.

As a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant in 1951, I was hardly an expert on Iwo, but I probably knew more about the island than did Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone as he sailed from Hawaii in late January 1945, one small element of a convoy of 500 ships and perhaps 100,000 men, sailors and Marines both. As he and his machine gunners departed Pearl Harbor on January 26 aboard the USS
Hansford
, it is probable that none of them, Basilone included, had ever even heard the name of their targeted destination and had not yet been told about Iwo. The Marines still took security seriously, and it was standard operating procedure in amphibious warfare not to tell the men where they were headed until they were at sea, unable to blab. Now, on the second day the
Hansford
was out of port, Lieutenant Colonel John Butler got on the horn over the ship's PA system. You know, the old “Now hear this, now hear this” announcement. Said the colonel, “Our destination is Iwo Jima, an objective closer to the Empire of Japan than any other to date.” I suspect the saltier of the Marines on board took this as a good news/bad news item of information. Good in that it took us a step closer to winning the Pacific war; bad in that the closer Americans got to the Japanese mainland, the harder and more desperately the enemy would fight and the more Marines would die.

Maybe the best place to start telling about Iwo is with Marine historian Joe Alexander. In his monograph
Closing In: Marines in the Seizure of Iwo Jima
, Alexander begins with a dramatic little vignette, not at the start of the fight but two weeks into the battle, on Sunday March 4.

There was a hot war going on and gunfire everywhere, when a desperately wounded B-29 bomber called
Dinah Might
, crippled during a bombing raid on Tokyo, piloted by Lieutenant Fred Malo and carrying a ten-man crew, came in on an emergency landing. It was crash-land at sea or risk this heavily shot-over landing strip, and Malo piloted her in safe if not precisely secure, everyone glad to be alive but anxious to be swiftly away. The Air Corps was paying its boys to fly, not to get shot at on the ground like ordinary infantry grunts.
Dinah Might
underwent half an hour of very hurried makeshift repairs, took off safely again (every Japanese gunner within range firing at the damned thing), and got back to its base without further distraction. It would be only the first of hundreds of such B-29 emergency landings on Iwo and the first ten of what would be thousands of air crewmen saved, and it proved to at least some of the Marines then fighting there that the place might turn out to have been worth taking.

Colonel Alexander sets the scene, writing that by this date, “The assault elements of the 3rd, 4th and 5th Marine Divisions were exhausted, their combat efficiency reduced to dangerously low levels, the thrilling sight of [the] American flag raised by the 28th Marines on Mount Suribachi had occurred ten days earlier, a lifetime on Sulphur Island. The landing forces of the V Amphibious Corps (VAC) had already sustained 13,000 casualties, including three thousand dead. The ‘front lines' were a jagged serration across Iwo's fat northern half, still in the middle of the main Japanese defenses. Ahead, the going seemed all uphill against a well-disciplined, rarely visible enemy.”