Hero of the Pacific (2 page)

Basilone's feats of arms became such lore that nowhere in the world is there a Marine base that does not boast a building or a street named for him. At huge, sprawling Camp Pendleton, California, where all Marines including Basilone received their final combat training before shipping out to Asian wars from World War II to Korea, Vietnam to Afghanistan, a two-lane stretch of macadam called Basilone Road starts at the commanding general's house and meanders for thirteen miles. Intersecting with Vandegrift Boulevard (generals are awarded “boulevards”; sergeants get “roads”), crossing the Santa Margarita River, and finally exiting the base near San Onofre to merge into and lose its identity amid the humming multiple lanes of Interstate 5, Basilone's modest road disappears just as surely as the man himself has largely vanished from the American consciousness.

He appeared just as suddenly at a time when the Japanese, edging ever closer to our West Coast with each battle, had been, to be candid, beating the crap out of the United States of America in fight after fight, and we sorely needed heroes.

Nonetheless it took the Marines, understandably distracted by war, until May 1943 to award Basilone the first of his medals for what he'd done seven months earlier on Guadalcanal. And it was late June before the vaunted Marine publicity machine even bothered to put out a press release. A story ran in the
New York Times
under the headline “Slew 38 Japanese in One Battle; Jersey Marine Gets Honor Medal.” It was a one-day story that without a little hype soon faded. Basilone returned to a pleasant obscurity and the routine of wartime garrison life near Melbourne, Australia, drilling the troops, going on wild liberty weekends, just another good, tough sergeant in a Corps full of them.

Then some bright boys in Washington realized there might be pure promotional gold in Basilone. There were already a couple of Medal of Honor commissioned officers from Guadalcanal, General Alexander A. Vandegrift and Colonel “Red Mike” Edson. How about an enlisted man? Preferably unmarried (women would like that), somewhat colorful, younger? Maybe they could put this Jersey kid Basilone, a nobody from nowhere, to even better purpose than he had shown he was capable of in a foxhole.

Despite desperate battles yet to come and a shooting war raging in the Pacific, orders were cut, and as his buddies gaped and a few fellow soldiers griped about favoritism, Basilone was ordered to the States as an officially anointed hero. He was to go on tour with a handful of other heroic soldiers and sailors, supported by a troupe of Hollywood stars—traveling salesmen assigned to show the flag, boost morale, and sell war bonds.

Needless to say, it wasn't his idea, nor did he want to leave his “boys.” Reluctantly, and reportedly in tears, Basilone left Melbourne, sailed to the West Coast, and was swiftly flown east by military aircraft to New York City where the media were—the big radio networks, major newspapers,
Time
and
Life
and
Newsweek
and the other national magazines, as well as the smooth boys of the Madison Avenue ad agencies. And following a crash course, it would be there in Manhattan that Basilone would face the only formal press conference he had ever attended.

It was his first real exposure to the American public. Terrified, he turned to a Marine colonel for help. “Just tell them your story, Sergeant,” the colonel said. Tell them how it was.” Basilone began to talk about that terrible Guadalcanal night he fought through, barefoot and bare-chested, the tropical jungle rain coming down, the Japanese crying “Banzai!” and “Marines, you die!” and coming on toward his machine guns. Always coming on.

Basilone was a smash hit. In his halting but modest and untutored answers, he responded to the shouted questions of cynical reporters who had seen it all, and won them over with his sincerity. In the end he had them queuing up to shake his hand and say thanks. And so the road show began.

If the press and just plain civilians were impressed by their first glimpses of the heroic Marine, and they were, Basilone was overwhelmed by the enthusiastic “well dones” of his fellow Americans. In the next few months of 1943, he would learn just how supportive they were. General Douglas MacArthur, who had long ago been Basilone's commanding officer in Manila—where the young soldier achieved a first small fame as an undefeated Army boxer, earning the sobriquet “Manila John”—was jollied into issuing a statement calling Basilone “a one-man army,” a brand of enthusiastic cheerleading the general usually reserved for his own greatness.

Dozens of press conferences, some orchestrated, others ad hoc and on the run, were laid on with their hurled questions: “Hey, John, how many Japs ya kill?” New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, “the Little Flower,” welcomed him to city hall, asking where his father came from in Italy. The
New York Times
did an interview. Damon Runyon wrote a piece.
Life
magazine did an elaborate photo spread. John would be photographed wherever he went, often out of uniform and in cock-eyed or clowning poses to please the cameramen, and appeared on magazine covers, bare-chested and firing a heavy machine gun cradled in his arms. One of these pictures, a painting on the June 24, 1944, issue of
Collier's
(ten cents a copy), was the most lurid, in the grand tradition of the pulp magazines.

Basilone was trotted out by his military handlers (peacetime press agents and Madison Avenue ad men in wartime uniform) to one radio station interview after another. Famed, best-selling war correspondent Lowell Thomas, who spent World War I trekking Arabia with Colonel T. E. Lawrence, got into the act, talking about Basilone on the newsreels, mispronouncing his name to rhyme with “baloney.” The sergeant was saluted from the White House by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in whose name the medal had been awarded.

As Basilone read, rather bashfully, a canned speech cobbled for him by the handlers, he got a standing ovation from nineteen thousand at Madison Square Garden on Eighth Avenue, where he had once hoped to box. He was headlined in newspapers large and small, often as “Manila John, the Jap Killer.” Newspaper columnist Ed Sullivan, always on the lookout for a new sensation to co-opt, took him up, wrote a piece, and did a radio show, basking in the hero's reflected glory. Celebrity saloonkeeper Toots Shor, a notorious front-runner, got on board the “Basilone Express,” buying the drinks and glad-handing him around, introducing the kid to the athletes and glamour girls, the wealthy debutantes and chinless wonders of Café Society, the showbiz people and literary types among his boldface regulars. The Navy Department and Marine handlers got him past the velvet ropes and maîtres d'hotel of the Stork Club, “21,” and El Morocco, and under the El on Third Avenue, Johnny was welcomed by the barmen and serious drinkers of P.J. Clarke's. Everyone wanted a piece of Manila John.

To the people of Raritan, though, Basilone was already theirs and always would be. They renamed streets and the American Legion post, and in time they would erect a magnificent bronze statue of him holding his favorite weapon, the heavy water-cooled Browning .30-caliber M1917A1 machine gun, which he had loved to the point of obsession.

The Basilone family was transported into Manhattan to be interviewed. A
Manila John Basilone at War
comic book for kids was published (not a dime in royalties was ever paid). Two members of the Basilone clan would write their own books, amateurish and fanciful, admiring but brief on fact. John's sister Phyllis Basilone Cutter did a fourteen-part serialized account in a local newspaper, the
Somerset Messenger-Gazette
, and her son, Jerry Cutter, and a hired writer named Jim Proser published a book titled
I'm Staying with My Boys—
Cutter admitted that when they got stuck, they “made things up.” Best-selling author Quentin Reynolds wrote a magazine piece. An ambitious writer began hanging around the family home hoping to win the hero's cooperation if not collaboration on an “authorized” book, until Basilone himself told the pest to “scram.”

The federal government set up a city-to-city “Back the Attack!” war bond-selling tour of the country, first in the East and eventually to go national, with Basilone supported by a handful of other decorated servicemen (he was clearly the star turn) and Hollywood actors volunteered for the task by their movie studios. It would be, said FDR's friend Louis B. Mayer of MGM, excellent, patriotic, and quite free publicity for Mayer's next releases. Joining the tour were Gene Hersholt, John Garfield, Keenan Wynn, Eddie Bracken, and a pride of actresses, beautiful young women including one fairly well-known performer, Virginia Grey, who promptly fell for the young Marine over drinks and cigarettes in a dark hotel bar their first night out on the road.

That plotline alone would have made a swell Hollywood romance of the period, the juvenile dream of every obscure young man who comes out of nowhere, becomes an overnight sensation of one sort or another, and encounters the beautiful princess, or in this case the movie matinee equivalent of royalty, a movie star, the beauty who falls in love with the clean-cut young war hero. Garfield, one of the troupe, might not have been bad in the role of the fighting Marine.

Basilone was credited by the tour organizers for drawing crowds that bought millions of dollars' worth of bonds. In Newark and Jersey City, where Basilone and Grey first shared a moment, and at New Haven, where Yale undergrads turned out to hail the young man who never even went to high school, in Pittsburgh, Albany, and all over the East, they organized parades: mayors, aldermen, governors, retail merchants drumming up trade, leading citizens and schoolchildren lining up to touch or even just to see Manila John.

He shook hands at factory gates and inside armaments and munitions plants. At a gala black-tie dinner at the Waldorf sponsored by the National Association of Manufacturers, Sergeant Basilone was seated on the dais, mingling with influential and wealthy men, captains of industry and other tycoons, the onetime laundry delivery boy fired for napping on the job atop the soiled laundry bags. A movement was launched to get his face on a postage stamp (eventually issued well after his death). Raritan gave him a parade of its own with tobacco heiress Doris Duke throwing open her estate to handle the overflow crowd. Catholic mass was said by Basilone's old priest, Father Amadeo Russo. The snob membership of the Raritan Valley Country Club turned out, remembering fondly, they claimed, the teenager who'd worked out of their caddy shack, lugging their golf clubs for tips. Basilone was invited to address a Bar Association lunch. He visited elementary school classrooms, signed autographs, kissed pretty girls in the crowd, and greeted old soldiers from earlier wars dating back to the Spanish-American, who approached to pay their respects and, perhaps, to bore the Marine with hoary war stories of their own.

At the family home in Raritan where Basilone grew up with his nine siblings, with only three bedrooms and two baths, they were inundated with fan mail, thousands of cards and letters, mostly from women, including a number of mash notes, and even marriage proposals from girls who had never met the machine gunner. One young woman wrote, “I always wanted to marry a hero.” Basilone's brother marveled, “Johnny, everybody in the country loves you.” An unsubstantiated rumor surfaced, courtesy of ribald Marine tattle, and possible enlisted men's jealousy, that when a USO show came through the islands of the South Pacific during Manila John's campaigning days, he had “bedded one of the Andrews Sisters.” No one held it against either him or Miss Andrews, if the anecdote was true, because in wartime such “showing the flag” might justifiably be considered patriotic.

Basilone got married, but not to a movie star. His wife was another young Marine, a cute sergeant named Lena Riggi whom Basilone met in a Camp Pendleton mess hall.

Then he was gone again, without a honeymoon, back to the fight, back to his boys. He had been offered, and stubbornly turned down, an officers' rank and posh duty stations, politicking instead for just the opposite: to get back to the Pacific. Finally, the Marines had relented and reluctantly cut new orders reuniting him with the Fleet Marine Force Pacific.

Then he was gone for good, the “unkillable” hero of Guadalcanal dead on Iwo Jima, torn apart that first February morning by Japanese fire in the shadow of Mount Suribachi, a hero once again. Then he was forgotten.

How this could happen goes beyond the passage of time simply blurring and obscuring his image. Within the violent priesthood of the Marine Corps, there has long been contention and controversy, and some doubt, surrounding Basilone. There are contradictory and incorrect accounts about what exactly he'd done that dreadful night in the rain on the ridgelines of Guadalcanal in October 1942, starting with the official record in the
History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II
, volume 1,
Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal
:

In fact, the first enlisted Marine to earn the medal was another sergeant, Clyde Thomason of the 2nd Raider Battalion, killed in the small-scale (and ill-fated) raid in August on Makin Island. But the brief record above does convey some of the savagery and chaotic nature of the fighting that night along the ridgelines, with infantrymen of both sides grappling in the dark over a single mortar tube, and a lone Marine (Basilone) risking hostile fire to sprint out and fetch more ammo for the machine guns, the heavy ammo belts slung about his neck and bare shoulders glistening in the rain. So began the legend of Manila John.