Hero of the Pacific (15 page)

Then, suddenly and miraculously, everything changed. They were in California, and after getting off this cross-country train, they traveled south along the coast. As Basilone is supposed to have said in his nephew's postmortem account, “The Pacific Ocean slid into view and I'd never seen anything quite as beautiful before.”

The Pacific. Where John Basilone would come of age, where he would fight the Japanese in two pivotal battles, where he would become a living American legend, a famous man, where he would return a second time to the battle, where he would die and be buried. Did any of this occur to the restless kid from Raritan, still a teenager and an untried soldier, or did he marvel only at the great ocean's splendor?

Phyllis's account resumes. “The arrival at San Diego, California was quiet. After a few days of getting settled and outfitted, we started our basic training.”

Can this possibly be correct? Basilone had already been in the Army for months, probably since the previous summer, had served with an established outfit at Fort Jay, Company D of the 16th Infantry. Whatever training they did at San Diego soon came to a close, and one night (the date is elusive) at eight p.m., machine gunner John Basilone and his outfit were mustered and marched aboard the USS
Republic
, a military transport that would take them to the Philippines. The Jersey boy had crossed the country by train and now would be leaving it entirely by ship to continue his Army career on the other side of the Pacific, 8,000 miles away. A band played, the transport slipped its lines, and the lights of San Diego slowly fell off and faded astern. Stifled by the close quarters below, Basilone slept that first night on deck, at a vacant spot near the stern.

“Making myself as comfortable as was possible, I stretched out. Looking up I could see the sky with its thousands of stars blinking, so close you felt you could reach up and touch them. Well, I thought, this is better. Outside of one rainy night, that was my bedroom the remainder of the trip.” He was eighteen years old, a child of the Great Depression, on the first leg of a long voyage en route to an eventual glory.

The Philippines had become an American territory following the Spanish-American War with a promise eventually to be granted independence. But in the mid-1930s with an elected president of their own, they were still very much subject to Washington's wish and whim, so much so that a retired American general, Douglas MacArthur, now cruelly considered a back number, commanded their armed forces, such as they were—a handful of what were romantically called “Filipino Scouts” and some 16,000 U.S. Army regulars and naval personnel—a “corporal's guard” to a man of General MacArthur's towering and magisterial self-opinion. His actual title was Military Adviser to the Commonwealth Government and his rank that of a lieutenant general in the Philippine army. For MacArthur, this was something of a professional and career comedown, since he had fought famously in World War I, and in the last hours of that war to end all wars had been promoted to flag officer rank as a brigadier general by his commanding officer, General of the Armies “Black Jack” Pershing. (It was said MacArthur had desperately twisted arms for that eleventh-hour promotion, on the grounds that once the fighting ended, so too would all promotions to general officer in the shrunken peacetime Army sure to come.)

MacArthur had later in the uneasy peace between the world wars been promoted our own Army's commander as Army chief of staff, in which role and on the president's orders he had brutally smashed the so-called Bonus Army of aggrieved war veterans camped out in the parks and streets of the national capital. Now, himself abruptly among the unemployed, the man on horseback had been stunningly dismounted.

But for MacArthur, Manila was hardly an unpleasant exile. There were powerful family ties to the islands. His own father, Arthur MacArthur, had commanded in the Philippines, and the son had lived there when he was a little boy. Now another Arthur MacArthur was growing up there with
his
parents, Jean MacArthur and “the General,” as Mrs. MacArthur habitually called him, in vice regal comfort in postcolonial Manila. There was always with MacArthur, even in economically straightened times and on a more modest scale, plenty of “pomp”; it was the “circumstance” that was missing in the Philippines.

Now in March 1935, John Basilone of Raritan who had the circumstance but hardly the pomp, was about to join the MacArthurs. Not, of course, as anything approaching a social equal, but more the equivalent of a young caddy carrying for wealthy and select country club members.

Aboard the USS
Republic
, Basilone sailed into Manila Harbor past landmarks that would within a few years be sandblasted into the American consciousness, the fortified island of Corregidor, the Bataan Peninsula, the big naval base at Cavite, delivering the young soldier to his duty station for the next two years, as a machine gunner under one of the most celebrated of all American warriors, Douglas (“Gawd Almighty Himself”) MacArthur. But here also young John would flirt for the first time with the idea of marriage, to a local girl named Lolita, and he would make something of a reputation as a fighter, not in war but in another arena, as a jock on the boxing team of a peacetime Army garrison.

Eight thousand miles from San Diego, and in a time of strained military peacetime budgets, the replacement draft that included Basilone was short of just about everything: proper uniforms, decent rations, and, for some reason, soap. (Since there was no rationing, the shortage of soap must have been the result of a logistics foul-up or an incompetent supply officer, or a supply sergeant down the line who was on the chisel and selling soap to the locals for cash.) The undersupplied troops were armed not with the old bolt-action 1903 Springfield rifles of World War I (Sergeant York, and all that) but the even older Boer War Enfield.

Out of sheer hunger, soldiers fleshed out mess hall chow with Filipino fare, goat meat becoming a staple. Some of the troops were adopted by local Philippine families or got part-time jobs in Filipino shops and businesses, or moved in with native girls. Others started up local, off-base businesses of one sort or another, of which Jerry Cutter and Jim Proser quote Basilone as saying, “For the first year or two I didn't go in for that. I was still U.S. Army and kept my nose clean as far as all that.” Some troops took up wearing Philippine civilian clothes, a few deserted entirely, or cracked, “went Asiatic.” Not Basilone, though he complained that only the constant card games got him through the boredom of that first year in country.

There were bandits up in the hills and a few rebels of one persuasion or another, and you might think that MacArthur would have had his troops constantly out in the field, aggressively patrolling, in order to train and season his men and eliminate boredom, if not the bandits. No such luck. Perhaps budgetary constraints limited such exercises and prohibited the general from issuing orders that would have benefited both his men and his entire command. These were hard times, and this was an Army on the cheap. They counted cartridges, so that firing-range practice, something you'd think to be essential, was curtailed. Or maybe MacArthur was simply getting older, saw little future in his career, and, inertia being what it was, just didn't bother ordering units into the field.

Basilone recalled that from time to time shots were fired at the Army encampments from beyond the perimeter security. There might then be a halfhearted attempt to track down and capture the “guerrillas,” but the Americans never caught anyone in the rough terrain of the countryside. And there might have been the odd firefight, though how did you chase bandits through the bush lugging a Browning water-cooled heavy machine gun, basically a defensive weapon, and with its tripod, water jacket, elevating and aiming devices, and the pintle on which everything turned, weighing when loaded nearly a hundred pounds? The answer was, you didn't, so it is highly unlikely the young machine gunner ever fired a shot in anger in the Philippine years.

For the bored, card-playing, womanizing, and randy young Basilone, there were, however, the attractive charms of the petite, dark-haired, dark-eyed local women, who he thought resembled some of the handsome Italian-American girls he'd known at home in Raritan. There were plenty of compliant “amateurs,” and there were the favorite girls at the local bordellos. According to a few dubious, entirely unproven allegations, Basilone actually became a junior partner in running one of these establishments of easy virtue. I found no credible evidence of that, but almost surely he patronized the brothels. The whorehouse “management” rumors may have derived from the small “nightclub” he and his girl, Lolita, set up inside her uncle's bicycle shop, which sounds colorful and fun but reasonably innocent.

All of MacArthur's troops looked forward to their R&R stints every six months in New Zealand, with its temperate climate, pretty girls, local beers, and “people a lot like us.” Some of the farmboys and ranchers among the enlisted men spent their R&R, and voluntarily so, living with families and working without pay and happily on farms and cattle stations (ranches). The Yanks found New Zealanders wonderful, but really they would have welcomed almost anything to get them out of the Philippines for a time. Some of Basilone's fellow soldiers, their enlistments up, instead of going home to the States returned to New Zealand to marry local girls.

Beyond his acknowledged skill as a machine gunner, there was at first little to distinguish Basilone's first overseas tour of duty, apart from his card-playing expertise and a penchant for going barefoot in monsoon season. Army-issue wool socks, when wet, itched, and men developed fungus and jungle rot. Cotton socks sent from home rotted quickly. Basilone had a simple cure—go without—and was regularly chewed out about it. But his feet toughened up, he developed surer footing, and he didn't itch anymore. Going barefoot was just about all that set him apart from his mates—or it was until he began to box.

In the jock-happy prewar regular Army, service athletes, especially competent boxers, might do pretty well for themselves. MacArthur, who served once as superintendent of the Military Academy at West Point, understood the constructive role military athletics could play in a bored peacetime Army and encouraged the athletic culture. James Jones wonderfully (and tragically) portrayed the scene in prewar Hawaii in
From Here to Eternity
with fighter and trumpeter Robert E. Lee Prewitt as his hero. Young Basilone's experience was more rewarding. He began boxing, horsing around at first in ad hoc fights. “A lot of steam had been building up in my head.”

Part of that “steam” was a professional and rather patriotic frustration. The soldiers had been told that if the Japanese (the closest, perhaps the
only
potential enemy) ever attacked, the plan was for American regulars of MacArthur's little Army to retreat to Corregidor and fight it out from there. As Jerry Cutter reported the situation from Basilone's point of view, “I didn't like sitting around waiting for an attack just so we could run for it. And I didn't like that we were stuck on this island [Luzon] and we weren't even important enough to get soap. Sparring let me blow off steam and kept me sharp. Being a fighter got you privileges sometimes like an inside bunk and credit at card games—which I didn't usually need.” Based on his success in those pickup bouts, he volunteered for the unit's organized boxing squad, and as a muscular young athlete in good shape, he began fighting in service bouts as a 160-pound middleweight. He was now nineteen, and thanks to being physically more mature, a year older, and with regular workouts, conditioning, and better chow, had soon grown into and was fighting as a light heavyweight (175 pounds). He soon caught on to the racket. “Once I started winning I started getting steaks and pork chops stolen from the Officers' Club. My fellow soldiers began to see me as a money-making enterprise.”

Soldiers, and especially other gunners and his buddies, not only backed him with cash in side bets but volunteered as sparring partners, medics as cut men, others as corner men, trainers, managers, and cheering squads. Gambling picked up and money changed hands. Basilone was becoming a popular local character on whom a man might make a buck.

There were organized bouts twice a month, and Basilone won them. Never lazy, he trained hard, running up hills or in the soft, yielding sand of the shoreline of Manila Bay. Parallels to the much later and fictional Rocky Balboa are irresistible. For all Basilone's casual, card-playing ways, there is an impressive discipline about the slimly educated youngster, the newly minted soldier. One weekend when a fellow soldier named Smits was arrested for being intoxicated, Basilone and some buddies conjured up a scheme to break him out of the drunk tank of a Filipino police station by ramming a stolen truck into the prison wall early on a Sunday morning, the clever reasoning being that the cops, being Roman Catholics, would be at their devotions and attending mass. Whether the Sunday-morning ploy was Basilone's or a group decision, they got Smits out and weren't caught themselves. The plan worked.

Following two knockouts in Basilone's first three winning formal bouts, the brass began coming by to see him fight, even MacArthur on one occasion stopping by to wish him luck. He eventually ran his record to eighteen wins, no losses. According to Cutter and Proser, the adulation went slightly to Basilone's head, and he started thinking of his undefeated record and himself as a sort of “mascot” for the general, someone to whom MacArthur, with his ego, could justifiably point in an otherwise unimpressive little command. Reputedly, word of Basilone's ability trickled back to the States, and offers to turn professional came in from New York fight managers and promoters, though no one I spoke with in Raritan could provide any names or details about what probably was just wishful thinking. But a fighting nickname, “Manila John,” seems to have stuck. And MacArthur was pleased as the kid's perfect ring record improved, with a big possible fight against a Navy boxer coming up.