Hero of the Pacific (26 page)

Before the Navy and the Marine Corps even reached Iwo, they were already feuding, the dispute ignited by an Army Air Corps-Navy rivalry. With a bloody fight like Iwo coming up, you marvel that senior professional officers, the best products of West Point and Annapolis, would permit themselves the luxury of jealous, pride-driven college-boy spats. But they did.

The Air Corps Superfortresses had recently flown a big mission over Japan that failed to destroy the targeted aircraft factories, and Naval Air was out to prove it could do the job. Task Force 58, assigned to batter the island of Iwo Jima with big guns and fleet aviation just prior to the Marine landings, sort of a knockout blow, was instead being lured by a new target of opportunity, within easy reach on Honshu, those Japanese factories the B-29s missed. Ambitious naval leadership allowed itself to be distracted and sent the huge task force steaming away from Iwo toward the Japanese mainland, creating for the Marines two problems. This sudden, last-minute change of plans meant that the Navy was taking away not only its big new battleships and their sixteen-inch guns so effective in shore bombardment, but also the fleet's eight Marine squadrons of specially trained, close air support fighter-bombers, experienced in working with ground air control officers to fly shotgun for the infantrymen hitting the beaches and then heading inland against formidable enemy defenses. In the end, Task Force 58 did its thing on Honshu and then belatedly returned to Iwo in time, if only briefly, to support the landings. It then hurried somewhere else again on yet another mission, not to return to Sulfur Island.

As D-Day (February 19) came closer, the commanders of both sides met with their staffs. Tadamichi Kuribayashi declared that despite all of the bombing and shelling, the bulk of his defenses were intact and functioning, and kept his message to the staff simple: “I pray for an heroic fight.”

On board Admiral Richmond Kelly “Terrible” Turner's flag-ship, Joe Alexander reports, “The press briefing held the night before D-Day was uncommonly somber. General Holland Smith predicted heavy casualties, possibly as many as 15,000, which shocked all hands. A man clad in khakis without rank insignia then stood up to address the room. It was James V. Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy. ‘Iwo Jima, like Tarawa, leaves very little choice,' he said quietly. ‘Except to take it by force of arms, by character and courage.'” That reference to Tarawa was sufficient to shake any Marine in the room, since it was well-known that Tarawa was a bloody foul-up and losses there, for a three-day fight on such a small island, had been ghastly. Colonel Alexander now takes us to D-Day itself, the nineteenth (as for the brilliant Forrestal, he so exhausted and drained himself, so suffered over the casualty rolls on Iwo and elsewhere in the Pacific as secretary of the Navy, that he would eventually commit suicide). “Weather conditions around Iwo Jima on D-Day morning were almost ideal. At 0645 Admiral Turner signaled, ‘Land the landing force.'”

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John P. Marquand, the author of best-selling New England tales of manners, covering the invasion as a war correspondent, wrote these first impressions of Iwo: “Its silhouette was like a sea monster, with the little dead volcano for the head, and the beach area for the neck, and all the rest of it, with its scrubby brown cliffs for the body.”

And off they went, the 4th and 5th divisions abreast, while the 3rd Division hung back in reserve, a decision later to become controversial. Why hadn't all three powerful divisions hit the enemy simultaneously?

John Basilone and his platoon would hit the beach in the fourth wave about nine-thirty a.m. He would be under fire for the first time in more than two years, since the 'Canal in late 1942.

In Hawaii, John's brother George had questioned him closely about motivation. “You had it made. You could have called your shots. A commission or a soft berth at Pendleton. Why come back to this rat race? You of all people should know what our chances of getting back alive are.” According to Phyllis Basilone Cutter, John answered this way: “When I left the theatre of operations on Guadalcanal [it was actually Australia] to come back stateside, I promised my buddies I would return and that promise I didn't make lightly.” He didn't make it back, however, not specifically to them. With the brothers in Hawaii, George continued to argue. “You were lucky to get back alive. Why push your luck?” But John wasn't having any. “George, the Marine Corps is my whole life. Without it the rest seems empty. This thing I have to do, something keeps pushing me. I now know what I want. If I don't make it, try and explain to the folks. I know they always loved me. God knows I do them, but this is bigger than family and loved ones and I must do it.” This sounds too pious and self-effacing to be convincing. Phyllis, with her brother George surely the source, must have attempted to quote John accurately. Why would she phony up her beloved brother's words on something as serious as the possibility of his own death? It's just that the words are so stilted.

Jerry Cutter and Jim Proser take a crack at describing what it must have been like in that landing craft carrying Basilone to Iwo and his destiny. But how much of this is to be believed? Recall that Cutter once told me that they “made up” some of their reporting.

According to Cutter and Proser, it was a bitter John Basilone who got into the landing craft. “We filed down the gangways into the ship's steel belly. Half of my boys loaded into amphibious tractor 3C27 with me. Amtrac 3C27 was an armor plated rectangular tub made for delivering men onto a beach. It rode low and slow in the water.” As the concussions from the big naval guns roiled the ocean and created waves, and the small craft circled slowly waiting for orders, men began getting seasick, including some of the twenty-five Marines in Basilone's boat. And we have the sergeant unsure about whether he should talk straight to his men before they reached the beach. Should he assure them that the big guns and aerial bombing were paving the way to a successful assault, or tell them truly how bad it just might be? According to Cutter, Basilone was ambivalent: “It's going to be all right, boys. They're going to be as dizzy as shit-house rats after we get done pounding 'em. I lied—just as Topside lied to us, when they told us it would be over in 72 hours. All of us vets knew that 72 hours was pure bullshit and said so. It was like an involuntary reaction. The minute it dropped from the C.O.'s mouth, it sounded like a dozen men coughed at once. But it was a dozen mumbled ‘bullshits' jumping right off the lips of us vets. We couldn't help it. There were 23,000 [
sic
] trained Japanese jungle fighters straight ahead who had been digging in and calibrating their guns for the last three months.” Cutter's book leaves Basilone's dilemma unsolved. What did he actually tell his men? It is not clear that he said anything. And not to quibble, but there was no jungle on Iwo Jima for those “Japanese jungle fighters” to exploit.

The book goes on to describe the landing craft's ride toward the beach, the men puking, the shells passing overhead, Basilone's memories of prewar Japanese golfers at the Raritan Valley Country Club, his premonitions of a war to come. Then it reels off into what seems to be pure fiction in which Basilone, the hardened combat veteran and professional gunnery sergeant, behaves like a clown: “A few more of the boys tossed their steak and eggs as we came around. Tension had been ratcheting up as we turned around in circles at the rally point. This was it, we were going in. I got up behind the .50 caliber machine gun mounted by the driver. Orders were not to fire unless we saw enemy, but I knew we wouldn't see any. After three months of waiting for us, they were dug in too deep, and the Japs were too good at camouflage. We wouldn't see a damn thing. So I planned to shoot everything just to be sure. I chambered the .50 and squeezed off a few rounds. The driver [remember, the ‘driver,' a Navy coxswain, was in command of the craft, not a Marine sergeant along as passenger] reminded me of orders not to fire unless we saw something, and I gave him my opinion. ‘Fuck orders and fuck you, Mac.'”

This is just crazy. At a time when a veteran platoon leader should be calming and reassuring his seasick, scared, green troops about to hit a hostile beach under fire, and whatever Cutter and Proser's good intentions to show Basilone off at his dynamic, decisive warrior's best, the passage only brings into question his leadership skills, his emotional stability, and his savvy as a combat veteran at a critical moment. First, the small craft was pitching and tossing so wildly that men were “puking,” which meant there was no stable platform on which Basilone could stand while firing. They were not in the first wave but in the fourth wave, so that other Marines, several thousand of them, were already ashore and in the sights of that .50-caliber gun he'd just commandeered and was arrogantly threatening to fire beachward, quite possibly at his fellow Marines! And here is the experienced, cool Sergeant Basilone, who should at this point be preparing his men to hit the beach, counseling the reluctant or afraid, soothing the overexcited, doing none of these things. Instead, he's jumping up, cursing out the coxswain, grabbing the .50-caliber to fire off a few random rounds, not at any target he can see but just generally in the direction of the beach where his most likely victims would be fellow Marines. This is not believable and is insulting to Manila John.

Cutter's story of Basilone's arrival on the beach at Iwo grows more bizarre. Now, as the amtrac rolls up on the sand and encounters steep terraces that slow and then halt its progress, the Marines leap out into deep, clinging black sand. As the Marines and their “Doberman war dogs” (first mention of those, by the way) try to dig in, Gunnery Sergeant Basilone issues his first order to the machine gunners, not to organize themselves, and then position, load, and sight their guns, but instead to “Fix bayonets!”

He tells the boys to pull out their scout knives, an order given usually when ammo is short or hand-to-hand combat is about to erupt? This is idiotic. If a machine-gun sergeant expects trouble, an enemy counterattack, he gets his machine guns ready to turn back the oncoming Japanese, wipe them out, and break the attack, what Basilone himself did with such lethal effectiveness on the 'Canal. Neither machine gunners nor assistant gunners even carry bayonets, though ammo carriers who are armed with carbines may do so (“which weren't worth diddily shit,” my machine-gun expert Charles Curley assures me). The Japanese counterattack never came, not at the beach, where there were already four Marine waves ashore and a fifth arriving on the heels of Basilone's fourth. The problem now was for NCOs like Basilone to help get the men on the beach unscrambled and to head inland, in Manila John's case, toward an airstrip, Motoyama #1.

Basilone's later words on the beach itself, via Cutter, once we get beyond the just plain silly “Fix bayonets!” sound credible: “They tore us up while we were lying on the beach but me and Lou Plain [a colonel and the regimental executive officer] got this show on the road. We kicked their asses and dragged boys up by the scruffs of their necks. ‘Get the fuck off the beach. Move out!' we yelled at them over the incoming fire. They were moving over the terraces now and were finding whatever cover they could in shell craters on the flat land. Bulldozers had punched gaps through the terraces and tanks were on their way up from the beach to support us. A few mixed squads of C and B Company boys were now at the edge of Motoyama #1 Airfield, our first objective. Once we took out the bunker that was slicing open the 4th Division with their cannon, we only had to worry about the snipers, the dug-in artillery looking down on us from Suribachi, and the constant hail storm of mortars that fell from the sky. Other than that, at least we were off the water's edge. Which had turned into a killing field.”

I've tried to assess which of a number of versions of what hap pened the morning of February 19 is true. But are any of them?

John Basilone's sister Phyllis has her version. She loves her brother, but has never seen a war. Her son Jerry Cutter, also not a writer, and his cohort, Jim Proser, have their account. The Marine Corps records say one thing.
Leatherneck
magazine has stories by various adepts. Charles W. “Chuck” Tatum, one of Basilone's gunners, has written his own book,
Red Blood, Black Sand
, and the very professional Douglas “Bill” Lansford, a writer and a Marine who was there, has his recollection. Historian Joe Alexander writes at length of that morning. There've been movies with John Wayne and films directed by Clint Eastwood. Dozens of Iwo Jima books. Did Basilone die instantly from a mortar shell? From artillery fire? Did he linger for hours, speaking with a corpsman and even smoking a cigarette? Did he never regain consciousness? Gradually bleed to death of small-arms fire as the official Marine Corps casualty record of the time suggests? His Navy Cross citation says he was killed instantly by a shell. Phyllis says he lived for hours, discussed events, smoked a cigarette. Choose your version.

Maybe the Japanese have theirs. Or did they ever even know who Manila John was? Few survived to say. You have the sense their Sendai Division troops would have liked Basilone, even welcomed him into their own and very special pantheon of warriors—and then killed him before he could kill them, which he surely would have done and happily. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi might conceivably have greeted Basilone as a fellow samurai, gallant, impassioned, fierce, if a bit crude perhaps, a warrior not overly given to politesse or ritual.

I believe this was how it really was on that February morning in 1945: Basilone and other Marines headed down into the hold of the LST to board the smaller landing craft that would actually take them through the surf and up onto the black sand beach, the medium LCMs and the smaller personnel-carrying LCVPs, the tractorlike amphibians they called amtracs. Navy coxswains piloted the assault waves to the shore, backed out, returned to their mother ships, and loaded up again to return with fresh meat for Iwo, men or supplies. There was some wishful thinking in the scuttlebutt men heard that the brass figured it for a seventy-two-hour fight, over in three days, maybe five. “Bullshit,” said others, including vets like Basilone. But what the hell, anything was possible.