Hero of the Pacific (28 page)

To begin, Phyllis talks throughout of Basilone's having landed with the first wave of assault troops, as if this makes him somehow braver than men who came later. In fact, Basilone was in the fourth wave, landing at about nine-thirty that morning, perhaps twenty-five or twenty-eight minutes after the first wave, a position every bit as perilous and courageous as the three waves that hit the sand earlier. Phyllis's account of Basilone's Iwo starts as he and his men board their landing craft, first circling, then taking a direct line to the hostile beach, and their landing under fire.

At this point, with battle about to be joined, a platoon to be steadied and encouraged, weapons and gear to be checked, Phyllis imagines, in Basilone's voice, that he isn't focused on Iwo and the battle coming up fast, but on December 7, three years earlier. “We thought of Pearl Harbor and had no compassion for the enemy.” There may be Marine gunnies who speak or think like that as they go into combat, but I don't know any. Phyllis has her brother next describing the situation on the beach as the Marines come in for a landing: “The Japs lay stunned and helpless under the curtain of fire. Our landing was met by only weak small arms fire. The beach was coarse volcanic ash which made for a bad landing. We sank deep into the ash, slowing us down, as well as practically miring our vehicles. The boys were all together gathering their equipment so that we could work our way off the beach inland to our predetermined points, when we were suddenly peppered by machine gun fire. ‘Down, fellows, hug the beach! Pull your helmets in front of your faces.'” This line is nonsense.

The ostrich buries its head in the sand; Marines in a firefight rely on their vision to target the enemy, to return fire, to figure out what's happened, to look for orders. If you cover your face with a helmet, you're blind. And this is an order given by a seasoned gunnery sergeant to his Marines? Phyllis goes on with her account, quoting Basilone: “As if struck by lightning, we hit the ground fast. Carefully tilting our helmets a bit we could see where the machine gun fire was coming from. It had to be silenced or we would be pinned down indefinitely.”

Phyllis picks up Basilone's early moments on the black sand beach of Iwo with her “tale of the blockhouse,” a dramatic vignette of which there are multiple versions. And she shifts from first to third person and back, in retelling what Basilone did next to silence the enemy gun. “Telling us to stay put [who is ‘us,' who is narrating here?], Basilone crawled in a large semi-circle toward the blockhouse, which was spitting fire and death. He was able to crawl underneath the smoking gun ports. As he rested his back against the wall of the blockhouse, we counted with him the seconds before each machine gun burst. Waiting for the interval, he pulled the pin on his grenade, slammed it in the gun port and ran like hell down the beach. He tripped in the deep ash and as he buried himself protectively we heard the muffled roar of the exploding grenade. The blockhouse was smoking and the gun at the port had disappeared. Basilone ran back, dropping another grenade in for insurance. There were no signs of life, nothing but silence and the sickening smell of burnt flesh and scorched hair. Working his way back to us Basilone yelled, ‘well, boys, there's one bunch of slantheads who won't bother anyone. They're fried.'”

Why would a machine-gun platoon sergeant be carrying hand grenades? I don't insist it never happened, but it puzzles me. Riflemen tote grenades, but machine gunners already have such heavy loads that they don't need to pile on additional gear.

Alternating between third and first person, Phyllis continues, describing the heavy enemy bombardment chewing up Marines on the beach. More disconcerting is Basilone himself explaining from the beach what the Japanese strategy is and what orders General Tadamichi Kuribayashi is sending to his various commanders. How the hell can a gunnery sergeant under fire know what's going on with general officers at the enemy headquarters as he and his men attempt to mount up and move on against hostile resistance?

When an American tank passes through Basilone's position and is hit by shells, one of its crew members scrambles out of the hatch to safety, only to be killed by Japanese small-arms fire. “Basilone was raging,” Phyllis wrote, “rising to his feet as he charged over to the tank cradling his machine gun in his arms [machine gunners in the platoon usually carry the guns; the platoon sergeant doesn't]. Spotting a flash from a tree top [were there many trees on Iwo?] he stood upright and sprayed it furiously. We heard an unearthly scream as the treacherous sniper plummeted to his death. By this time there were other tanks, unaware of the heavily mined path. Basilone yelled and waved his arms, motioning them to follow him. As we watched [who is ‘we?'] he led them in a wide circle into the safety of the wooded area.”

So now Basilone is commanding a tank platoon, and again, how does he know where the mines are? “By now Basilone was as if possessed, ignoring the flesh ripping death all about him he rushed back to us shouting ‘OK, fellows, let's get moving. We got to get these guns set up.'” Now, either they're going to set up the machine guns where they'll make a stand or they're going to move out; they can't do both. “We began to work our way off the beach. Without warning the whole beach erupted. The enemy had recovered and was fighting back.”

This is terrible stuff, and it goes on like this, making little sense, such as Phyllis's statement at this point that “it was hours before another Marine landed on the beach.” Other sources say the fifth wave had landed on the heels of the fourth (Basilone's), adding to the confusion. But Phyllis makes it sound as if Basilone's platoon was the famous “Lost Battalion” of World War I, abandoned and alone, out in front of the lines, facing 22,000 Japanese all by itself, when it was actually still on or trying to advance off the beach with thousands of other Marines. Basilone sends a scout named Sammy ahead to look over the way ahead and report back. “Fragments of white, steely death were whining and singing all about us. It was a miracle that up to this point, any of us had escaped injury, much less death.”

The fevered prose of a bad war movie goes on. And Phyllis is not alone in this. Another Marine, Charles “Chuck” Tatum, a member of Basilone's platoon, in his book
Red Blood, Black Sand
, offers this capsule description of Manila John in a firefight, from the point of view of the assistant gunner who feeds the belted ammo into Basilone's gun. “Basilone's eyes had a fury I had never seen before. Rigid, hard clenched jaw, sweat glistening on his forehead, he was not an executioner but a soldier performing his duty.”

This aside, Tatum does tend to clear up questions about Basilone and the famous blockhouse. Tatum's B Company had gotten bogged down, and as the confusion grew worse, Basilone was seen stalking up and down the beach trying, with Colonel Plain, to get his own men and the remnants of the earlier waves organized and heading inland. Tatum and the B Company machine gunners recognized Gunny Basilone and, knowing his reputation, were only too happy to fall in line when Basilone gave the “gather” signal and tried to get everyone moving forward.

Tatum writes that in the beach chaos, while trying to get men from different units organized, Basilone came across a demolitions assault team headed by Corporal Ralph Belt. It was not Basilone, but one of Belt's men, who, on Basilone's order, and given covering overhead fire by Basilone's machine gunners, rushed the looming blockhouse and tossed a heavy satchel charge of C-2 plastic explosive at its steel doors. According to Tatum, no one got up on the roof during the attack. And it was a Marine flamethrower operator, a hulking corporal named William N. Pegg, also on Basilone's orders, who finished off the blockhouse and cooked the men inside, again assisted by overhead machine-gun fire. Those Japanese able to flee, some of them actually aflame, would be shot down by Tatum, PFC Alvin C. Dunlap, PFC Steve Evanson, and Private Lawrence “Cookie Hound” Alvino.

These men and Tatum himself credit Basilone for organizing, ordering, and directing a brilliant blockhouse operation, but not for having carried out the demolition himself. It was a perfect example of carrying out a perfect plan of assault, a Marine Corps “school solution,” employing flamethrower and demolitions, the sort of live-fire maneuver Basilone had drilled into his men over and over at Pendleton and later Tarawa. It was a feat of cool, superb leadership that could easily all by itself have earned Basilone a decoration.

Which is why it's exasperating that the Navy Cross citation needlessly includes an imaginary single-handed Basilone appearance on the blockhouse roof. Tatum's book adds clarification on that point, saying that
after
the position had been destroyed, Basilone grabbed Tatum and his machine gun and they took to the roof of the wrecked fortification for a better vantage point from which to pick off fleeing Japanese.

Phyllis now resumes her own version of Basilone's final orders and actions. As Sammy the scout gives the all-clear, the unit prepares to move inland: “Turning to the rest of the boys, Sergeant Basilone snapped, ‘Okay, boys, stick close and follow me. Remember, if anyone gets it, the rest keep going. That's an order. We've got to get those guns set up. Let's go.' Single file we followed him. He never once looked back. He knew we were right behind him. Progress was slow. We had to detour and work our way around our knocked-out, still blazing vehicles. Dead Marines in our path received silent salute as we passed them. Every one of them had fallen face toward the enemy, rifles still in their hands.” This is an unlikely picture to anyone who has ever walked over a heavily shelled, chaotic field of battle and seen the contorted limbs of the dead.

“The ground was rising and slowly settling back under the thunderous impact of heavy mortars and artillery shells. Slowly, it seemed hours, we crawled for the comparative safety of the first rise of ground. The figure of Sammy loomed larger and larger through the haze as we approached the end of the beach area. A second later, just when we thought we'd make it, suddenly there was a horrible screeching, whining sound picking up in intensity until we thought our eardrums would burst.

“Sergeant Basilone yelled, ‘Hit the dirt, boys!'

“As if in rehearsal, we all hit the ash. Just at that moment, there was a terrifying roar, indescribably loud and angry. As we were slammed into the ground, we saw Sergeant Basilone hurled bodily into the air. It was as if a huge hand had reached down, smashed him deep into the volcanic ash. As we picked ourselves up, dazed, groggy and numb from the concussion we saw Sergeant Basilone lying half-buried in the swirling volcanic ash. He was unconscious and from the peculiar position he was in, appeared to have been hit bad. Sammy, who until this moment was too shocked to move, recklessly ran over to Basilone and was trying to rouse him.”

There are additional contradictions here. Other accounts have Basilone killed with three other men in a group as they advance on Motoyama Airfield #1, not on the beach. Here he seems to have been the only one in the unit to have been hit. Though later Phyllis has the scout Sammy telling the wounded Basilone, “Sarge, it's horrible. Most of the group got it,” the official Marine Corps casualty record blames small-arms fire, not a big shell. In Phyllis's version Basilone is still alive but unconscious. Several of her sentences later, he is awake and trying to shove his intestines back inside his body, and he is speaking. Others say he died instantly. Some say he lived half an hour. Phyllis has him living for hours and his men calling for help: “Medic, medic!” In the Marine Corps the call is always for “Corpsman, corpsman!” our term for a medic.

But these are details, and perhaps I'm nitpicking. Phyllis's account of her own brother's death deserves a hearing. Without my injecting further critical commentary, this is how she narrates the story in the
Somerset Messenger-Gazette
on Valentine's Day 1963, eighteen years after his death, of Manila John's last hours:

“You could see Sergeant Basilone fighting his way back to consciousness. In deep shock and tottering on the brink of complete unconsciousness, the sergeant was fighting back. His face, twisted and contorted with pain, was set in grim determination. By now Sammy was crying as he cradled Basilone protectively in his arms. Basilone slowly and with great effort, opened his pain-wracked eyes and said, ‘Sammy, what happened?' Sammy, convulsed with grief, could only mutter, ‘Sarge, it's horrible. Most of the group got it.' We watched silently, knowing the rest of us should move on, yet not wanting to leave the two of them alone on this God-forsaken beach. As we leaned over, Sammy was removing Sarge's hands which were clasped tightly over his stomach. The sight before our eyes was horrifying. Basilone's hands were drenched with deep scarlet blood, which trickled back to his wrists when Sammy elevated Sarge's hands over his head. The hot nauseating smell of blood and torn guts swirled slowly under our nostrils. We gulped back hard, but Sammy couldn't take it. He started to heave, horrible, retching, vomiting. It was then Sergeant Basilone displayed the intestinal fortitude he was so noted for. Ever so slowly and with a deftness surprising in such a muscular man, Basilone reached down into the sickening bloody mess that were his intestines, and placed them back into his torn and gashed open stomach. The effort must have been exhausting, as he lay back breathing heavily, biting huge gulps of the dust-laden air. Sammy had reached the dry retching stage. Suddenly, as if propelled from a catapult, he dashed madly down the beach, shouting, 'medic, medic!'

“Don't ever discount the courage and bravery of our medics. This lad was typical. There he was, oblivious to the hell and destruction being showered upon him as he tenderly ministered to the wounded. We watched as Sammy talked to him and gestured in our direction. No doubt Sammy told him the wounded Marine was Sergeant Basilone. It made no difference to the medic. A Marine was a Marine, Medal of Honor or not. To his credit, and keeping in the spirit of the Corps, he calmly finished bandaging his patient. Then, and only after making the wounded youngster as comfortable as possible, did he accompany Sammy back to us and Sergeant Basilone. We watched hopefully as the medic silently, and with tender hands, examined Basilone's wounds. Reaching for his kit, he fished out a hypo and bending loosely to Basilone's ear, he said softly, ‘It's OK, Sarge. I'm going to give you a shot of morphine. That'll ease your pain until we can get you to a doctor.' The enemy by this time had succeeded in stopping any more landings.