Hero of the Pacific (3 page)

And what really happened later on Iwo? Had Basilone destroyed an enemy blockhouse single-handedly with demolitions, while contemptuously brandishing a knife at the Japanese? In the end, how did he die, on the beach or attacking Motoyama Airfield #1? Was he hit by an artillery or mortar shell and killed instantly as his Navy Cross citation reads? Or did he bleed slowly to death from small-arms fire, as the Marine casualty report has it? Shot up with morphine by a corpsman, had he left messages for his brother, smoked a cigarette, and lived for hours? Was the Navy Cross he received posthumously awarded to make up for the near-unprecedented second Medal of Honor he was thought by some to be chasing?

Then there's this: so hard up were we for heroes that there were suspicions the government had turned to “manufacturing” them. How else to explain the convenience of Basilone—a Marine under orders who would do what he was told, including a war bond tour and morale-boosting visits to war plants? This has clearly happened in more recent wars. Remember feckless young private Jessica Lynch and Arizona Cardinals football star Pat Tillman? Both became the innocent tools of a military publicity apparatus that ambitiously turned an understandably terrified young woman and a tragic victim of friendly fire into heroic but essentially synthetic symbols of American courage under fire. The
New York Times
editorial page savaged the Pentagon's misinformation campaign for conjuring up “the false story that PFC Jessica Lynch had been captured in Iraq after a Rambo-like performance,” when she'd actually been injured in a truck crash. And Tillman's mother, Mary, in a book about her son, wrote that “officials tried to hide details about the incident because . . . it made the Army look bad.” Ergo the cover-up, trying to persuade a nation that Tillman “had been killed by the enemy in Afghanistan (in a battle that won him a questionable Silver Star) long after the military knew he had been killed accidentally by fire from American forces.”

But even suggesting half a century later that Basilone's heroics might similarly have been concocted infuriates contemporary keepers of the Basilone flame. Men such as Deacon John Pacifico of St. Ann's Roman Catholic Church in Raritan seem ever vigilant and ready to stand up to defend the Basilone name and his legend. In May 2007, sixty-five years after the Marine's death, Deacon Pacifico angrily told Vicki Hyman of the state's largest newspaper, the
Newark Star-Ledger
, “That's not what the Army was like in World War II. That's not what the Marines were like.”

Having been a Marine myself and still a working journalist and writer of books about Marines at war, I thought Basilone's story was worth telling, worth a search for the real Basilone. I've grown fascinated by Manila John, sometimes puzzled by him, and I'm still trying to get a grip on him—not the bronze statue but the real man, not the marketing image but the real hero—and what made him tick.

In the Corps, you meet natural-born warriors, live with them, fight in the next hole to them, men like Basilone. Sometimes you understand them, frequently you don't. Or there's nothing to understand; he's just another Marine you serve with but never really know. In ways, we're all the same, we're all different. Maybe you're a cowboy, a kid off the farm, a young tough, an inner-city smartass, or a college boy like me, a young lieutenant, as mysterious to the other fellow as he is to you. You have nothing in common, you and he, only the one thing: you're both Marines. You have that, and when you both have also fought in combat, you very much have that, too.

Fighting a war, especially alongside other soldiers, fighting together, you learn the password, you know the secret handshake of combat, of the Few, the Proud, the Marines. Which is why it was conceivable that before I finished writing this book I might eventually get to know a man I never met, who died when I was a schoolboy, get to know him almost as well as all those folks who loved him so.

His story begins on an island few people had heard of before 1942.

Guadalcanal. On the evening of October 24, 1942, then sergeant John Basilone made a stand on the strategically important high ground near Guadalcanls Lunga River and south of the vital Marine beachhead, which included Henderson Field, His efforts and thiose of his fellow Marines and sailors handed the Japanese their first defeat in the U.S. island-hopping campaign up the Pacific.

Like Johnny Basilone, the country itself back then was big and brawny, a bit wild and sure of itself, had never been defeated in war, and was accustomed to winning; still young and tough, not effete or decadent like all of those tired Europeans being bullied by dictators, caving in to and being overrun by the loathsome, menacing Adolf Hitler. Our purported allies, fellow democracies Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Greece, were already lost or in peril, and the French Army, the greatest in the world it was often boasted, had been thrashed in six weeks and Paris occupied. Britain, even with its powerful Royal Navy and gallant Royal Air Force, was isolated, under siege, its great cities ablaze, its schoolchildren evacuated, its people sheltering in the Underground.

We were different, though. This country didn't lose wars. In eight terrible years of bloody revolution the ill-trained farmers and shopkeepers and frontiersmen of colonial militias had defeated the great British Empire, with the aid of the French fleet had forced the famous Lord Cornwallis to surrender, marching out of Yorktown with his band playing “The World Turned Upside Down.” In 1812 the British were back, burning Washington, but again beaten in the end. In 1848 we rolled over the Mexicans. In the most terrible war Americans ever fought, the country defeated Robert E. Lee, who was perhaps our greatest general but did not possess quite the army of Ulysses S. Grant. Spain in 1898 was a walkover, San Juan Hill, Manila Bay, and all that. In 1917-1918 we came to the rescue of the Allies in Flanders fields and the Argonne Forest.

Yet despite our pride, despite our history and sense of destiny, for the seven months since December 1941 American Marines had done little more than die gallantly in losing causes or surrender, as they had done under fire at Wake Island, or peacefully, striking flags and stacking rifles in humiliating parade formation at the legation of Peking. Except for the air and naval battles at Midway and the Coral Sea, we had been losing and, worse, not to the powerful German army with its Luftwaffe and panzers, its economic machine, its science and technology, or to Mussolini, but to a lesser foe.

They were, to American eyes, the short, skinny warriors of a small island nation with a third of our population, a strange, derivative people known in world markets largely for manufacturing dinnerware and porcelains, knockoff gadgets, china, fine silk textiles, and cheap, colorful children's gimmickry and tin toys, a third-world country of comic-book figures stereotyped and mocked in B-movies as sinister “Oriental” villains or farcical heroes like Mr. Moto, portrayed by Mittel-European Peter Lorre as a clever little detective with outsized horn-rimmed glasses and a mouthful of false teeth, grinning and bowing and given to hissing absurd lines like, “So solly . . . yes, pliss,” appealing, like the rest of our view of Japan, to our most facile racist and xenophobic chauvinisms.

What we didn't see was a people with a grand martial tradition who at the opening of the twentieth century in blizzard-swept Siberia and at sea had defeated the czarist fleet and the great peasant armies and Cossack cavalry of the vast Russian empire. And who, since 1937, had been waging another, consistently and appallingly victorious war against the corrupt but much larger China. Instead we dismissed them as colonial snobs told us that “the Japs,” or “the Nips” (lifted from their own name for their country, Nippon), as it was then permissible to call them, were cunning little fellows but not very imaginative. For instance, having years earlier purchased an old surplus Royal Navy destroyer from the British in order to learn how to build modern warships, they had then duplicated the thing precisely, right down to the dent in its bow occasioned by some forgotten collision with an inconvenient pier.

In addition, we were fighting a war like none we or the world had ever seen nor may ever see again, one we couldn't lean on our history for lessons in how to fight. Sprawled across seven thousand miles of great ocean, it featured powerful naval armadas and air forces on both sides and pitted soldiers against one another in murderous ground combat in jungles and on coral beaches, atop mountains and deep in swamps. These were some of the finest light infantry in the world, ours and theirs, Japanese regulars with their samurai traditions of courage and barbarity, their screaming banzai assaults, battling hundreds of thousands of American GIs, sailors, and airmen, and six divisions of United States Marines, who on island after deadly island were living up to their own motto of Semper Fidelis, “always faithful.”

A half dozen years after that war, a young New Yorker, a Marine replacement platoon leader, a college boy turned second lieutenant, flew west out of San Francisco bound for the winter mountains of North Korea. The obsolescent Navy C-54 Skymaster carrying the replacement draft took seven days to cross the great ocean, conveniently breaking down or pausing for fuel each night, on Kwajalein, Guam, touching en route Marine holy places such as Iwo Jima of that far greater war. The young lieutenant had never seen combat, knew but secondhand about the South Pacific, beyond seeing the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical in 1949 and attending college with men who had actually fought that war. Now he would be serving alongside many of the seasoned Marines who had defeated the Japanese. For the next year the young officer would fight with the 7th Marines (Basilone's old regiment) against the Koreans and the Chinese army, and would himself come of age in combat at the other end of that greatest of oceans, the Pacific.

In the snowy wartime autumn of 1951, I was that kid lieutenant. A Marine tracking the steps of other, earlier Marines, including Manila John Basilone, but never in war or in peace getting to the obscure Pacific island where his story really begins.

 

Guadalcanal, whose name derives from the hometown of a long-ago Spanish adventurer, is nearly three thousand miles southwest of Hawaii and one of the larger of the Solomons. It was an appalling place to fight a war, but it was there that we would finally take the ground war to the enemy, give Japan its first land defeat in a half-century of combat against westerners and prove that, mano a mano, American troops were as good as the Japanese Imperial Army.

According to the official records of the United States Marine Corps, the
History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II
, volume 1,
Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal
, “Not a single accurate or complete map of Guadalcanal or Tulagi [the tiny neighboring island] existed in the summer of 1942. The hydro-graphic charts, containing just sufficient data to prevent trading schooners from running aground, were little better.”

Aerial photography might have been helpful,
Marine Ops
conceded, but there was a shortage of long-range aircraft and suitable air bases from which they could take off. A lone flight was made, “the beaches appeared suitable landing,” another aerial-strip map was scraped up in Australia, and that was deemed it. Estimates of enemy strength were put at 1,850 men on Tulagi and 5,275 on Guadalcanal. “Both estimates were high,” Marine historians later admitted. As for the place itself, and its stinking climate, “Rainfall is extremely heavy, and changes in season are marked only by changes in intensity of precipitation. This, together with an average temperature in the high 80s, results in an unhealthy climate. Malaria, dengue, and other fevers, as well as fungus infections, afflict the population.” The well-traveled novelist Jack London was once quoted as saying, “If I were king, the worst punishment I could afflict on my enemies would be to banish them to the Solomons.”

By the autumn of 1942, “banished to the Solomons” to join that “afflicted population” of those unhappy islands were nearly 20,000 Marines and a smaller number of American soldiers, fighting the equivalent number of Japanese troops. One of those Marines, Robert Leckie, gives us a more intimate and personal description of the place in his book
Challenge for the Pacific
: “Seen from the air, it was a beautiful island, about ninety miles in length and twenty-five wide at its waist, and traversed end to end by lofty mountains, some as high as eight thousand feet.” In domestic terms, the place was roughly the size and shape of New York's Long Island but with mountain peaks far taller than any New England ski resort. It was when you got closer up that you recognized the differences.

Leckie quotes one of the local “coast watchers,” brave men who stayed behind to report back by radio after the first Japanese landed in the midsummer of 1942, an event that caused most Europeans and Chinese to flee. The coast watcher, British district officer Martin Clemens, described the place for Leckie: “She was a poisonous morass. Crocodiles hid in her creeks or patrolled her turgid backwaters. Her jungles were alive with slithering, crawling, scuttling things; with giant lizards that barked like dogs, with huge, red furry spiders, with centipedes and leeches and scorpions, with rats and bats and fiddler crabs and one big species of land-crab which moved through the bush with all the stealth of a steamroller. Beautiful butterflies abounded on Guadalcanal, but there were also devouring myriads of sucking, biting, burrowing insects that found sustenance in human blood; armies of fiery white ants. Swarms upon swarms of filthy black flies that fed upon open cuts and made festering ulcers of them, and clouds of malaria-bearing mosquitos. When it was hot, Guadalcanal was humid; when the rains came she was sodden and chill; and all her reeking vegetation was soft and squishy to the touch.”