Hero of the Pacific (30 page)

Germany surrendered in May, Japan on August 15, 1945. On that mid-August day an impromptu parade of thanksgiving made its straggling way along Somerset Street in Raritan, and when the VJ Day march ended, the celebrations continued at local places like Orlando's Tavern, where John Basilone used to drink, and where Tony Orlando hosted a victory party. Surely toasts were drunk to Manila John's memory. He would have liked that. One unnamed local serviceman was quoted as saying on that last day of the war, “I keep thinking of my buddies who won't come back.” But many of the dead
would
be coming back.

During World War II, we often buried the bodies of our men where they died—Italy or Normandy or the Pacific islands—with the tacit understanding that our people would eventually be brought home and planted here where they grew up and where they belonged. In 1948, three years after he died on Iwo, John Basilone came home from Iwo Jima.

And so it happened that in April of that year Raritan would have yet another opportunity to mourn and celebrate their local hero. The government had begun moving bodies back from Iwo's ad hoc cemeteries, giving families the option of choosing a burial near home or a plot at Arlington. Dora initially preferred to have John buried at Raritan, where the family lived and where he grew up. But local funeral director Anthony Bongiovi, nearly one hundred years old when I interviewed him, told me there was indecision at first. He admitted he didn't want to be in the middle of it, didn't welcome having to handle the job with its possible complications.

Well, after my talk with undertaker Bongiovi I was still getting differing versions of whether the body had passed through Raritan, where a mass was said at St. Ann's Church, several sources insisting they had seen the casket. So I asked Deacon John Pacifico of the church to clear up the mystery. On September 2, 2008, he wrote back: “Dear Jim, Both Anna Marie Bongiovi and Steve Del Rocco have confirmed that the body of John Basilone never came to Raritan. The body was at Arlington.”

So at some point the decision had been made to bury their son at Arlington, instead of in New Jersey. Some sources say Bongiovi recommended Arlington. He didn't say that to me but continued telling me what then happened.

According to Doorly it was the undertaker who convinced Dora being buried at Arlington was a big deal, would do honor to her boy, and that Arlington was where Basilone belonged. I don't believe that any of them, including the undertaker Bongiovi, suspected what was coming. They all expected an intimate little funeral, a prayer from Father Russo, some friends, the family, a rite appropriate to a small Jersey town and a blue-collar family and their boy who never made money or much of a splash when he lived there, who joined the Marines, and then died in the war.

The burial was on April 20, 1948, but the Basilone funeral was going to be relentlessly small-town. Police chief Rossi volunteered to drive the limo, Bongiovi volunteered the undertaking services, Father Russo drove up front with the chief, with Dora and Sal, the parents, in back. A couple of other cars made up the cortege, carrying Basilone brothers and sisters and some neighbors. Al Gaburo the laundryman came, the man who once fired Johnny for goofing off and sleeping on the laundry bags; the mayor Rocco Miele; a future mayor, Steve Del Rocco. It was about two hundred miles, but the traffic was lighter then and they made it in under four hours.

Bongiovi told me they expected a simple affair, a couple of guys with rifles, maybe a bugler to play Taps, that was about it. Doorly gives this account from the family and Raritan vantage point: “When they arrived, they were amazed. First, they were picked up from their vehicles and driven in jeeps to the grave site. There they saw dozens of military dignitaries, a Marine band, and uniformed soldiers [Marines, surely] who would fire a gun salute. It was a most impressive, inspiring service, a true tribute to an unselfish hero. Father Russo blessed the casket. An American flag had first covered the coffin, and then as is customary, it was later taken off, folded in the ritual manner, and given to the Basilone family. Anthony Bongiovi, when he spoke with Doorly, said the funeral was simply unbelievable. He recalls that it was during the playing of Taps that everyone became emotional. The family and friends all drove back the same day.”

More than four hundred miles down and back and eight hours behind the wheel. No one thought to have reserved a couple of hotel rooms or a motel, what was then called a travel court. Maybe they didn't have the dough. But they had properly buried their Johnny. Lena Riggi Basilone, the widow, wasn't there. She had come east after the war to meet John's family, though only the once. Her niece, an actress and dancer, lives in New York, where in 2007 I interviewed her.

Doorly contacted Virginia Grey for a comment to use in his monograph, asking if she remembered Basilone. She was eighty-seven by then and still living in California, and she sent a statement: “How I do remember John. Every time I pass Basilone Drive at Camp Pendleton, it brings tears to my eyes.”

Curiously, there is very little about Basilone's widow, though there is a photo from 1949 when she and the family attended in Boston the commissioning of the destroyer USS
Basilone
on July 26. Doorly writes this brief passage about her: “Lena did not meet John's parents until after his death when she came to New Jersey. A picture of them together appears in this book. She never remarried, as she was very content with her life. She told a friend ‘Once you have the best you can't settle for less.' Lena was described by her friends as a great cook, who enjoyed inviting people over for special dinners. She worked at an electrical plant. Always active in military affairs, she volunteered at the Long Beach Veterans Hospital, the American Veterans Auxiliary, and the Women Marines Association. She died on June [11] of 1999 at the age of 86.” Former Marine Clinton Watters, the best man at their wedding in 1944, told me in admiring tones, “When she was in her eighties, she looked fifty.”

With the widow so relentlessly offstage in the various accounts of Basilone's life, I contacted her niece, Fiddle Viracola, an Emmy-winning actress, singer, and dancer who appeared on Broadway in such plays as
The Beauty Part
and
The Rose Tattoo
, and who lives in Greenwich Village. She told me she had met with a writer for a new Steven Spielberg-Tom Hanks television series about the Pacific war, and has on her own been collecting material about John and Lena for a screenplay. She's also had an exchange of letters with the Spielberg office and with the casting people, so she's anxious to see the finished project. “I'm working on the script now [her own script, not theirs] and I've got eighty-eight pages. It's a powerful love story. Lena was so strong, and they were very compatible. He was very lost, always losing jobs, and Lena gave him a center. She knew his passion to go back [to the Pacific and the war].”

According to Ms. Viracola, Lena met the Basilone family only that one time in Massachusetts and never in New Jersey (as other sources insist she did). “They met up in Boston for the commissioning of the ship. The Basilones had been horrible to her. Raritan was resentful. I gather his sister wanted to run the show, getting all the limelight and the plaudits. There were a lot of self-serving people around.”

To my knowledge, the widow did not attend the 1948 reburial at Arlington. “I don't know if she was invited,” Viracola said. “I hear the mother [Dora] wanted Lena to come back to Raritan and live there, but that wasn't her style. She became a master sergeant and left the Marine Corps eventually and ran a company that was in air-conditioning and things like that and was involved in many things for the vets. People were drawn to Lena.”

What about that line explaining why she never remarried, “I was married to the best”? “Yes,” said the niece, “that quote is true. She also said, ‘Great love only happens once.'”

Had she as reported handed over her ten-thousand-dollar government check as next of kin to the Basilone family? “Yes, she gave it to them. And when Lena was asked if she wanted to be buried next to John at Arlington, she said, ‘I don't want anything to do with them.'” Was “them” the government or the family? “The family. They did not treat her well. And when she died Lena was buried in California wearing his wedding ring.”

Sixty-five years after he earned the Medal of Honor fighting on Guadalcanal, sixty-three years after his death on Iwo Jima, there remains within the Marine Corps controversy about John Basilone. Not that anyone seriously disputes his heroism or questions the Medal of Honor, but you encounter differences of opinion about him, and he has his critics.

For instance, did Chesty Puller recommend Basilone not for a Medal of Honor but for a lesser award, a Navy Cross? No, reported Bob Aquilina, of the Marine Corps History Division, who sent me Puller's formal recommendation of October 30, 1942 (just a week after the October 25 battle), for a Medal of Honor for Basilone.

Aquilina also provided more information about what exactly happened on Iwo. According to a dispatch from Marine combat correspondent Henry Giniger, shortly after the landing Basilone was “wounded fatally” when “he was about to lead his machine gun platoon forward through a heavy barrage.”

More descriptive is part of a cover story in the
Marine Corps Gazette
of October 1963, which also brings into question the account in Chuck Tatum's book of the famous blockhouse attack that first day on Iwo. It quotes former Marine corporal Ralph R. Belt (also cited in a disparate version by Tatum): “Basilone and I were both in the 27th Regiment—he was with C Company, I was in B Company. We landed on Red Beach 2. Right after we'd landed, my squad ran into a Jap block-house firing canister shells at the 26th Marines, and doing a lot of damage, too. There was a Marine standing on top of this pillbox, shouting for flame throwers and demolition men, I was a demolition man, and my buddy right alongside, PFC William N. Pegg, was a flame-thrower man. Before I had time to prepare demolition, Pegg moved to one side of the pill-box and knocked it out. He got a Silver Star. The Marine standing on top of the pill-box—shouting instructions, yelling for a machine gun, shaking a Ka-Bar knife at the Japs trying to get out—was Manila John. He would turn his back on the Japs to yell at us—wave his knife and laugh, then turn around toward them again—wave his knife and laugh right in their faces. I think Manila John was a great Marine. I'm very proud to have served with him in the Marines and on Iwo Jima. With the block-house out of the way, Manila John and his platoon fought their way across those bullet-torn sand dunes toward Airfield Number 1.”

Corporal Belt then also corroborates the yarn about Basilone's guiding the tanks ahead before winding up his eyewitness account. “They had reached the edge of the airfield when the end came for Manila John a bursting mortar shell got him along with four others of his platoon.” Later, crossing the airfield itself, “Pegg and I ran across a kid from our company by the name of Sorenson who had a very bad shoulder wound. A few feet away a corpsman was working on another wounded Marine. It was Manila John. He'd been hit bad. It looked like a mortar shell had landed right in front of him and ripped him wide open from his chin on down. As bad off as he was, he spoke to us—and he wore that grand smile of his. I have thought about that smile many, many times since. He died soon afterwards.”

In 1992 a couple of newspaper reporters named Laurence Arnold and Regina de Peri Whitmer of the
Bridgewater (NJ) Courier-News
Sunday paper, for a feature about Basilone, got hold of a letter sent by a Lieutenant Hector R. Gai Jr. to his own sister on March 7, 1945, writing this about Iwo. “When a Japanese mortar struck Basilone's position, I was with him when he died on the south edge of [the airfield] Motoyama 1. He certainly did a hell of a fine job before he got it. He was only in action about two hours and a half…. John lived about an hour and a half but was in a coma. Surgery was the only thing and, of course, at that time it was out of the question. There wasn't any.”

Aquilina also highlighted a copy of Basilone's posthumous Navy Cross citation signed by Forrestal and cited earlier. In part it reads—according to Corporal Belt, inaccurately—how Manila John, on top of the blockhouse, destroyed it single-handedly with grenades and demolitions.

As
Time
magazine reported in 1945, it was a mortar shell that killed Basilone. That story was also appended by the reference branch, as were other newspaper clips from the
Journal-American
in New York, a 1943 story bylined by Burris Jenkins Jr., headlined “Fought full regiment of Japs, Now he has Congressional Medal.”

Regarding Corporal Belt, how just plain wacky is it that a veteran Marine machine-gun platoon sergeant in a firefight would be on the roof of an enemy blockhouse waving a Ka-Bar hunting knife around and taunting the Japanese instead of firmly on the ground commanding his gun crews and directing their fire? Tatum's earlier version seems more credible, that Basilone ordered demolitions man Belt and flamethrower Pegg to attack the bunker while his machine guns provided overhead covering fire.

Then again, as in Tatum's memory and book, was Basilone firing off a storm of bullets at the enemy in a fury, eyes blazing, or had he never fired a round just before he was hit? You can't have it both ways. Was his final action on the beach? Clearly not. Or inland on the approach to Motoyama Airfield #1? Probably there. The contradictions escalate with each different source. I'm not quite sure just which of the competing accounts is the most reliable. Some seem more bizarre than anything else with their obvious fabrications.

As far as Basilone's performance on Iwo is concerned, we have the official citation for his Navy Cross with attachments, including the signature of the commandant of the Marine Corps, who by that time late in the war, six months after Basilone died, was General Alexander Vandegrift, his commanding officer on the 'Canal and the very officer who in Australia in May 1943 presented Basilone with his Medal of Honor.