Hero of the Pacific (18 page)

Wrote Phyllis in her brother's voice: “It was mid-morning on September 4, and sitting in the Corps office nervous, with the perspiration rolling down my brow, I remarked, ‘Geez, this is something.' Well, anyway, I told the reporters who had jammed the press room my story exactly as it happened. As I once again related my experiences, I seemed to have drifted back to the 'Canal, bringing home the realization that as long as I had to repeat the experience time and time again, it would take a long time to erase its memory from my mind. Maybe that's the price a hero pays. I didn't know.” You sense the confusion in the young man's mind, the understandable stage fright, almost a longing for military routine, for the structure of the unit, the outfit, his pals, the Marine Corps itself. Yet this was in a Marine office in Manhattan and the Marine Corps was more or less running the show, and the sergeant was going along with it as best he could. Things lightened up that September afternoon.

“At noon I was taken over to City Hall to meet ‘The Little Flower,' Mayor LaGuardia. He turned out to be an all-right Joe. Of course the reporters and photographers tagged along, jotting down our every word to the steady pop of the flash-bulbs all over the place.” LaGuardia made a little talk about the significance of Basilone's medal and the requisite pitch for Americans to buy war bonds during the bond drive coming up, and then he turned back to Basilone with a question. “Sergeant, where did your old man come from?”

Basilone gave the proudly parochial Italian American mayor chapter and verse about Italy, Naples, the name of the ship on which his father sailed to the States, and his work as a tailor, and the Little Flower beamed. There were other press conferences, with family members participating in some of them, and Marine brother George marveling to John at one point, “The whole country is crazy about you.” Then it was off to D.C. and another round of press conferences, including one at USMC headquarters, on or about September 9, a session that would be pleasantly pivotal. Amid the usual shouted questions and flashbulbs going off in his face, Basilone later admitted, “I was sweating, nervous, and turning to an officer, I said, ‘This is worse than fighting the Japs.' He patted me on the shoulder and told me to tell the reporters what happened on October 24-25 in my own words.”

Apparently a hush then came over the big room, and for the first time the thing was no longer a circus or an adversarial process, a scrimmage between aggressive reporters and photographers and an overwhelmed Marine still unused to any of this. With Marine public affairs officers and noncoms in charge on their own turf, even the cocky press boys calmed down, stopped shouting, settled in to take notes and let the man speak. Basilone, at last and perhaps for the first time, would be able to tell his story quietly and in a measured and orderly fashion, without interruption, as he best remembered it.

“I started to talk and as the words poured out, I became oblivious to the reporters and all the confusion going on about me. I told them how there had been a heavy tropical rain all day long.” Then he told them about the fight, starting with that field phone's ringing at about ten that night, warning that a Japanese attack was about to hit their ridgelines, and went on from there, taking a live audience with him through the nightmare hours of darkness and into the welcoming gray half-light of another dawn, trying to explain how an exhausted, stressed man in mortal combat felt about having lived to see yet another day.

Except for an unlikely Manila John word like “oblivious,” it almost seems that this would be the press conference where Basilone made some sort of a breakthrough, realizing that if he just told the story in his own way and his own words, he might be able to handle the challenge of speaking in public. And when the machine gunner had wrapped up his story and a colonel called a halt to the proceedings, each of the newspaper reporters, not shouting now but rather subdued, walked up and asked to shake his hand.

“With that they filed out of the press room. I was a little shaken, retelling those terrible hours all over again.” Shaken, sure, but he had coped, had talked at some length, and if not articulately then clearly, to hard-bitten professional journalists. He had not only responded to their questions but, it was quite apparent, moved some of those hard-shelled pros. Peter Vitelli, one of my sources in Raritan, supplied me the CD of a Basilone sound bite, so I've actually heard his voice talking to an admiring crowd. He could be an effective speaker.

Now, as Basilone's tour of the United States was about to start, Phyllis's account becomes quite detailed and precise, with dates, places, events, names, and ranks, everything but serial numbers. Her son Jerry's later but parallel version differs somewhat in the racier details of the journey.

According to Phyllis, the same public relations colonel who'd calmed and encouraged Basilone earlier now took him aside in D.C. and briefed him on the coming agenda. The tour would kick off shortly, the month of September 1943, roughly a year after Basilone and the rest of the 7th Marines went ashore on the 'Canal. “The colonel came over to me and told me to sit down and take it easy. He then outlined the coming bond tour. I was assigned to Flight number 5 of the War Veterans Airmadas [you begin to suspect a Madison Avenue ad agency copywriter at work here in the jargon, with that coined word “Airmadas”]. My companions were to be Sergeant Schiller Cohen, Bosun's Mate 2nd Class Ward L. Gemmer, Machinist Mate 1st Class Robert J. Creak, and film stars Virginia Grey, Martha Scott, Eddie Bracken, John Garfield, and Gene Lockhart [Keenan Wynn would be added].” Not precisely the A-list of Hollywood legends, but not bad. The destinations were largely and conveniently in the Northeast to start. “We were to cover the following cities, Newark, Jersey City, New Haven, Conn., Providence, R.I., Pawtucket, R.I., Worcester, Mass., Albany, Utica, and Rochester N.Y., and Allentown, Pa.” And though Basilone was only one of four servicemen on the tour it was obvious he was the big catch, with the first stops in his home state. But he had questions and might as well ask them now.

“I said to the colonel, ‘Sir, you mean to tell me I have to speak at all of these rallies? What in the world will I talk about?' ‘Sergeant, don't worry about it, you will be introduced and asked to say a few words. Just remember, this tour is important to the war effort, in addition to raising money, you will be speaking at war plants and you of all people should know how desperately we need supplies, guns, and ammunition at the front lines. You may not think so now, but you will be serving your country as much as if you were back in the jungle killing the enemy.'”

How much of this Basilone actually bought into is impossible at this remove to say, but as a schoolboy at the time, five years before my own Marine Corps enlistment, I remember how seriously civilians took such patriotic exhortations in wartime. We had rationing and blackouts and casualty lists, so the war was hardly a far-off story. We at home were in ways also living with it. In the daily papers and in the magazines that came to our house, and on the radio and in the movie newsreels, to a boy like me seeing footage of heroic figures like Manila John Basilone mouthing the same or similar words, they meant something. We weren't yet jaded.

In Newark, New Jersey, the bond tour's first stop, and only a forty-minute train ride on the Raritan Valley line from his hometown, John Basilone recalled, “There were a lot of speeches by top officials. I remember Mayor Murphy saying how proud he was of what Newark had contributed to the war effort, and how he urged all citizens to buy bonds until it hurt—and then buy one extra. After a wonderful dinner and more speeches we were taken to Proctors Theatre for a showing of ‘Mr. Lucky' [with Cary Grant and Leo Durocher's wife, Laraine Day]. Following the showing, the Hollywood stars in the Airmada introduced us service men. We all gave a short talk and urged the audience to ‘Back the Attack.' Judging the reception we were given in Newark [where there were surely Basilones and a pride of neighbors and friends in attendance], we knew we were in for a hectic tour. There would be little rest, except for short naps, between our jumps from city to city. We were formally greeted at [Jersey City's] City Hall by the commissioners before proceeding to the Hotel Plaza, where we were the guests of about 300 leading citizens for luncheon. Commissioner Potterton was the toastmaster and thanks to him, the speeches were held down to three minutes each.” Whether this was because the commissioner took up all the time with his own verbosity is not explained.

It was also in Jersey City that, according to Jerry Cutter, things started to warm up between the returning hero and one of the Hollywood stars, Virginia Grey. “Mayor Murphy made a good speech. We all got our turn at the microphone. Bracken and Garfield were completely relaxed as they told people how important it was that they support the boys overseas.

“Virginia introduced me and turned to me with a look that was a little different than the look she gave to the other guys. We did another event in Jersey City that afternoon and then a few hours off. Virginia and I managed to separate us from the others and slipped away to a hotel for a few drinks in a dark, back booth. She was from a show business family and grew up in Hollywood. I never met anyone even a little bit like her before. She was just about the funniest lady I'd ever run across, and beautiful, with real movie star looks—honey-colored hair and eyes that were deep blue, cornflower blue. She was thin, must have weighed just over a hundred pounds, and had so much energy I thought she was going to get up and tap dance on the table. We laughed our heads off. She didn't take Hollywood glamour seriously at all because to her, it was just the family business. And could she tell dirty stories on all the big stars going back all the way to the silent movie days when her dad was a big shot.

“She was too good to be true. I couldn't stop looking at her. What really got me was that she was the real McCoy—inside. The tour was more important to her than her Hollywood movies. It wasn't some put-up job just to get her face in the papers, she really put her heart into everything she said out there in front of the people. When I heard that from her and knew she was telling the truth, I was like the dog with a bone. It seemed like green lights all the way for Virginia and me. Being on the road like we were, meant that we were together every day.” Clearly, Manila John was a fast worker.

Since Jersey City was only the second stop on the newly launched tour and their drinks and conversation in the back booth of the hotel bar their first hours alone, one marvels at how quickly Basilone “fell for a dame.” There was another dinner at a different “fancy hotel,” lots of speeches, plenty of big shots, and much pulling out of wallets and checkbooks for war bonds. There then followed at the big Jersey City theater another showing of Cary Grant's
Mr. Lucky
. Virginia had an informed take on that, you can be sure. “We laughed all the way through, even the sappy love story was okay,” said Basilone. “Virginia kept whispering funny comments . . . about Cary not knowing what a woman might want.”

Less laughingly, and apparently meaning it, Basilone went on: “Virginia and me were falling hard and fast even though we'd just met. It was easy to be around her when we were alone. She never put on airs. And I didn't treat her like some of the girls who just wanted to have a good time with soldier boys for an evening. She was a real first class lady. She made her own money, a hell of a lot more than I did, and didn't need anybody. She was altogether a new deal. Everything was still brand new between us and we were surrounded day and night by wild guys like Eddie Bracken who was just about the funniest guy I'd ever met. He was like me, couldn't sit still. That took the pressure off us when we were out in public because Eddie was always there making jokes and playing tricks on everybody. It was the perfect set-up. Nobody made a big deal about us. It must have seemed like the natural thing.

“We eventually got around to the talk about what I was planning for the future. I hadn't been with one woman for years, and wasn't sure if I was one-woman material any more. It was always love 'em and leave 'em, have a few laughs and then have to ship out or make it back to base. Now I was in a whole new ballgame with Virginia but I couldn't tell her. It would only have made us both feel bad. After the movie the movie stars walked out on the stage in front of the screen and introduced us vets to the other servicemen and people in the audience. The slogan was ‘Back the Attack,' and we pumped a few more bond sales out of them. Virginia was a tiger and would have taken their gold teeth if she could.

“We left the theatre, off for the evening. Orders were to report to the hotel lobby tomorrow morning. Virginia and I walked through the quiet streets for a while and didn't say too much. We got back to our hotel late and went up to our rooms. It was one of the only nights I didn't wake up around midnight and grab for a weapon. Just having her in the same building was enough for me. I slept.”

There are two surprises here. This is the first time since Australia that Basilone mentions nightmares of battle, sudden awakenings and a grab for weapons. And there is an admirable discipline on the part of both Grey and himself, that business of going to their separate rooms. Well, the tour was still young. And so were they. Phyllis Cutter picks up the thread: “In Plainfield [another New Jersey town] we went through much of the same. The people listened intently when Max R. Roener, the master of ceremonies, introduced us, we got a wonderful reception and were deeply impressed when the people stood in silent tribute as seaman 1st class Elmer Cornwell, U.S. Navy told how he lost 50 pounds while adrift in a lifeboat for 36 days with rations for only 15 days. It's amazing [Basilone concluded silently, perhaps recalling his own ordeals] how much the human body can take, although I feel there must be a guardian angel that watches over us at times of great stress. How else can you account for any of us being on this platform, instead of in a lonely grave thousands of miles from home and our loved ones?”