Hero of the Pacific (25 page)

But to the machine gunners at sea in January aboard the USS
Hansford
, all this was well into the future. And, as Alexander remarked, ten days could be a lifetime on Iwo. Bruce Doorly's monograph about Basilone takes us on board with Manila John and his gunners: “The convoy of U.S. ships was still three weeks and 5,000 miles from arriving at Iwo Jima. They took time to prepare. The men kept in shape by doing exercises. Due to the limited room on the ship each group would have to wait for the limited open space used for calisthenics. John worked his men hard to ensure that they would be ready. By this time their hair started to grow in again [remember those shaved heads that relieved the boredom at Camp Tarawa?]. To keep themselves busy, the ‘soldiers' [Doorly uses the word interchangeably with ‘Marines'] played cards and read. Books were passed around and traded. A small pocket copy of The New Testament became popular as they neared Iwo Jima. Letters home were written.” Knowing Basilone's tastes, you suspect he played more cards, read fewer Bible passages, and wrote fewer letters than most.

Now that the men were safely unable to pass on the information about their location (there was no way letters could be mailed until after the invasion), officers provided them with more detailed dope about the operation. The fight was expected by some on the staff to last only a few days since the island had already been bombed for two months, and the manpower advantage would be something like four to one. When informed of this optimistic projection, Basilone is quoted as remarking, “Bullshit,” out of hearing by officers but loud enough for his men. Having fought the Japanese before, old salt Manila John knew that any fight against more than 22,000 Japanese soldiers prepared to die for emperor and country would be hard and drawn out, anything but a three-day affair.

On February 12, Lincoln's Birthday, and with only another six or seven hundred miles to go, the convoy paused at Saipan, where John's outfit was transferred to another ship, an LST (Landing Ship Tank) carrying a flotilla of smaller landing craft in which the Marines would hit the Iwo beach. On February 16 the LST departed Saipan on the last leg of its long voyage. Men were quieter now. Religious services were well attended.

Medics on some of the smaller ships reported an outbreak of diarrhea. Doorly suggests that some of the “new” men were getting nervy. Had Doorly never heard the popular and often uttered combat phrase “scared shitless,” conveying an entirely different situation? And as for only the newer Marines being affected, seasoned Marines with a few firefights under their belts will tell you that the worst time of all is before battle, the anticipation of action, and that once the firing starts, the adrenaline flows and a man's focus becomes more acute and shifts to killing the enemy instead of worrying about oneself. But all of this is small-unit stuff, and those the humble infantrymen, not the planners or decision-makers, but only the traditional raw meat at the end of the stick that prods the enemy.

Alexander provides the bigger picture. General Schmidt, who was expecting a ten-day fight, issued operation plan 5-44 on December 23. Despite its pre-Christmas timing, says Alexander, there was little gift-wrapping: “The plan offered nothing fancy.” Another, slightly junior Marine general, Holland M. Smith (“Howlin' Mad” Smith to his Marines) said of the invasion, “It's a tough proposition,” and gloomily predicted “severe casualties unless greater and more effective preliminary naval bombardment was provided.” There were two potential landing beaches, both dominated by the 550-foot-high Mount Suribachi. The three thousand yards of black sand beach to the southeast appeared more sheltered and was favored by Schmidt. On D-Day the 4th Division (George Basilone) would land on the right of that black sand beach, the 5th Division (John Basilone) on the left with the 3rd Division held in reserve and to be sent in later. It was the classic triangular USMC setup, two up and one back. Alexander lists the initial objectives: one airfield, the lower one of the three, the western shore, and the hill, Suribachi. A first-night, and probably major, enemy counterattack was expected, and welcomed, cheerfully this time, by Smith. “That's generally when we break their backs,” he said pleasantly of the anticipated enemy strike; he was a man who enjoys a good battle.

As Basilone's LST and scores of other ships, large and small, steamed toward Iwo, toward the waiting enemy and the battle to come, it may be that some of the more contemplative Marines reflected on the company of men with whom they sailed and would fight, their Corps, and how during only a few years it had grown. When Basilone and others, including 4th Marine Division C.O. Major General Clifton B. Cates, fought on the 'Canal in 1942, there existed in the entire Corps only the 1st Marine Division in the Pacific, with a 2nd Marine Division still forming up at Camp Lejeune. Now the Marine Corps comprised five divisions with a sixth on the way. There loomed yet another overall goal for the Corps, once Iwo and later Okinawa were digested, when the United States would be invading Japan's mainland, its home islands, probably starting with Honshu, with a huge American Army—an army that was to be spearheaded by six Marine divisions landing abreast, 120,000 men assaulting a hostile beach under fire in one of the greatest battles ever joined. Not that even in a six-division Corps would the intimacy of the Marine Corps ever totally vanish, that comforting sense that even if you personally didn't know another Marine, you knew a guy who did, and that sooner or later you would serve together—at Quantico, Parris Island, “Dago” (San Diego), Pendleton, “Swamp Lagoon” (Camp Lejeune), Twentynine Palms, or on those waiting hostile beaches of the Pacific.

There was still that fellowship, the brotherhood, no matter the overlapping of its generations, the timelessness of its traditions and lore, “the love of one drunken Marine for another.” It surely must have seemed that way to General Cates, now sailing in convoy with John Basilone and his machine gunners.

One of the fighting, nonstaff generals commanding the invasion troops, Cates, who had been around for a long time, was a slim, dapper gent who smoked his cigarettes through an elegant holder, and would eventually become commandant of the Marine Corps. As a second lieutenant in World War I on June 6, 1918, he went over the top with his platoon at a place called Belleau Wood where the 5th and 6th Marine regiments would in desperate combat blunt the final thrust by General Ludendorff to take Paris and end the war. Early in the firefight, hit in the helmet by a German machine-gun bullet, Cates was knocked out, only to be revived by one of his men pouring a bottle of red wine over his face and head. “Goddamn it, Tom!” protested Lieutenant Cates. “Don't put that wine over my head, give me a drink of it.” Thus revived, Cates pulled himself together, resumed the fight, and led his men into the key French village of Bouresches that was their objective, chased out the Boches, and hung on with only twenty-one men against German counterattacks until relieved. Cliff Cates was nominated for a Medal of Honor and eventually awarded a lesser decoration and fought out the rest of World War I a decorated hero.

On Guadalcanal, as a colonel, Cates commanded troops fighting to hold Henderson Field, and it may have been that Basilone then met, saw, or served under him there in 1942. Six years later, when I reported in to Quantico, Virginia, the Marine Corps Schools, as a college sophomore in the platoon leaders class, Cates was the base's commanding officer before whom all of us passed in review. I still recall seeing him strolling about with that cigarette holder. Now here he was closing in on Iwo with Manila John et al. That's what I mean about the relatively few degrees of separation between Marines of one war or another, one outfit, whatever the decade.

But in February 1945 the two men, one as a two-star general, the other a gunny, Cates and Basilone, would again be in the same fight, the general as one of the senior officers agonizing about how to get their artillery regiments ashore before dark of that first day to help handle those anticipated counterattacks against the first waves of assaulting Marines, of whom Basilone would be one. The aerial and naval bombardment of Iwo Jima was in one sense encouraging to the assault troops of the three attacking divisions. It should soften up the Japanese defenders, cave in and crush their pillboxes and blockhouses, put at least some of their artillery out of action, maybe cut some communications wire, perhaps damage, destroy, or ground some of their planes, hole their runways and break up the tarmac. All this would be good. But what of the famous element of surprise? There could be no great surprise to men being bombed and shelled for weeks. They knew the Marines were coming. And they would even know when, since the bombardment would have to lift before the first waves of Marines hit the beach.

Basilone tried to explain these things to his platoon. The men, even the boots among them, realized he knew this stuff, had fought, and brilliantly so, on an earlier island, and that if any NCO could help them get through the coming fight alive, it would be an old salt like Manila John. Even the nickname, with its suggestion of previous Asian service, of the “Old Breed” and the comforting knowledge that gunny Basilone had been there and come back alive, must have cheered his men, given them a little confidence. So what if Basilone had his doubts about the effectiveness of naval bombardment and what bombs could do or fail to do to an entrenched enemy? As for his “boys,” most of them were convinced the gunny would get them through the battle to come, if anyone could.

D-Day would be February 19. Pretty soon now they would be sufficiently close to hear the sixteen-inch guns of the battleships, the heavy bunker-busting bombs of the big planes. The convoy plowed on through chill rain squalls and even sleet. This wasn't the hot and steaming tropical South Pacific Basilone knew so well. Colonel Alexander continues to narrate the story of the Iwo Jima invasion from the point of view not of the infantry and the enlisted men, who would do the fighting, but of the staff and the flag officers, the Marine generals and Navy admirals who had worked up the plan and would now issue the commands.

Like all really good Marine officers, Joe Alexander was not only a student of tactics and the capacity of his own forces, the necessity for speed, but he also believed in “knowing your enemy.” He studied the most important subject, the opposing commander. He got to know and understand, and never to underestimate, the foe—in this case, Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, a fifty-three-year-old very senior and high-ranking officer who had once actually lived in the United States, where he was assigned to the Japanese embassy in Washington. This was quite a highly ranked officer for a command so limited and a relatively small force of only 22,000 men. But General Kuribayashi had been handpicked for this job by the very highest authorities because he was a brilliant staff officer destined for great things, as well as a fifth-generation samurai, which in imperial Japan was sort of like being an original DAR, a Son or Daughter of the American Revolution. And this being Japan with its own very particular code of military honor, rather than fail at his mission a samurai was expected to be ready to kill himself by disemboweling in the ritual manner. The Japanese were indeed sui generis.

Kuribayashi was no mindless automaton, however, but a modern and intelligent man, also very much a realist who wrote to his wife six months before the battle, “The Americans surely will invade this Iwo Jima . . . do not look for my return.” Think about being a loving wife back home and receiving a cheering little missive like that! Later, during the battle, he would candidly inform his superiors in Tokyo without dramatics and flatly that he could hold the island
only
if they sent him naval and air reinforcement. Otherwise he could not, though he assured the brass he would die there. He had already demanded and received “the finest mining engineers and fortifications specialists in the Empire.”

Colonel Alexander details how these experts were used. “When American heavy bombers from the Seventh Air Force commenced a daily pounding of the island in early December of 1944, Kuribayashi simply moved everything—weapons, command posts, barracks, aid stations—underground. These engineering achievements were remarkable. Masked gun positions provided interlocking fields of fire, miles of tunnels linked key defensive positions, every cave featured ventilation tubes and multiple outlets. As an American joker following the battle remarked, ‘everything was buried but the airstrips. ' One installation inside Mount Suribachi ran seven stories deep. The Americans would rarely see a live Japanese on Iwo Jima until the bitter end.” Maybe it was just as well, in the spirit of positive thinking, that the first assault waves to hit the beach weren't too assiduously briefed on the sophistication of the enemy defense system.

Alexander also assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the three assaulting Marine divisions. Of Basilone's 5th, the newest of all, here is Colonel Alexander's reading, including a personal note about Manila John: “The unit's newness would prove misleading. Well above half of the officers and men were veterans, including a number of former Marine parachutists and a few Raiders who had first fought in the Solomons.” Agreed a recently arrived battalion commander after observing a live-fire exercise back in Hawaii, “These were professionals.” Alexander noted that “among the veterans preparing for Iwo Jima were two Medal of Honor recipients from the Guadalcanal campaign. Gunnery sergeant John ‘Manila John' Basilone and Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Galer. Headquarters Marine Corps preferred to keep such distinguished veterans in the States for morale purposes, but both men wangled their way back overseas—Basilone leading a machine gun platoon, Galer delivering a new radar unit for employment with the Landing Force Air Support Control Unit. The Guadalcanal veterans could only shake their heads at the abundance of amphibious shipping available. . . . Admiral Turner would command 495 ships of which 140 were amphibiously configured, the whole array ten times the size of Guadalcanal's task force.” Before it was over, they would need the lot.