Hero of the Pacific Read online

  Table of Contents

  Also by James Brady

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  PART ONE - GUADALCANAL

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  PART TWO - HOMETOWN

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  PART THREE - HOME FRONT

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  PART FOUR - IWO JIMA

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  PART FIVE - COMING HOME

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Epilogue

  Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  Also by James Brady

  The Coldest War: A Memoir of Korea

  Why Marines Fight

  The Scariest Place in the World: A Marine Returns to North Korea

  The Marines of Au tumn: A Novel of the Korean War

  The Marine: A Novel of War from Guadalcanal to Korea

  Warning of War: A Novel of the North China Marines

  Designs

  Nielsen’s Children

  The Press Lord

  Holy Wars

  Fashion Show, or The Adventures of Bingo Marsh

  Paris One

  Superchic

  The Hamptons Novels

  Further Lane

  Gin Lane

  The House That Ate the Hamptons

  A Hamptons Christmas

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Copyright © 2010 by James Brady. All rights reserved

  Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Credits appear on page 243 amd constitute an extension of the copyright page.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Brady, James, date.

  Hero of the Pacific : the life of Marine legend John Basilone / James Brady. p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN : 978-0-470-53555-4

  1. Basilone, John, 1916-1945. 2. Medal of Honor—Biography. 3. United States. Marine Corps—Biography. 4. Guadalcanal, Battle of, Solomon Islands, 1942-1943. 5. Iwo Jima, Battle of, Japan, 1945. 6. World War, 1939-1945—Biography. 7. Marines—New Jersey—Biography. 8. Soldiers—New Jersey—Biography. 9. Raritan (N.J.)—Biography. I. Title.

  VE25.B36B73 2009

  940.54’5973092—dc22

  [B]

  2009015922

  To all who put themselves in harm’s way, especially the men and women of the United States Marine Corps—then, now, always.

  To absent friends and family, who are loved so well.

  And for Sarah, Joe, Nick, and Matthew—your Pop Pop loves you so much!

  Acknowledgments

  The day after completing this book, Jim Brady died, suddenly and unexpectedly. Because he had not yet written the acknowledgments, we, his daughters, have done so for him.

  Near the end of this book, our dad describes himself as “neither a scholar nor a historian, just another old newspaperman who once fought in a war.” This is true enough, and yet the statement is not entirely genuine. Jim Brady was a man fiercely proud of his bond with the Marine Corps and of the extraordinary experiences and friendships that he amassed over those six decades. He was also unabashedly delighted at having made a success in journalism. He grew up wanting to write and was a working writer to the last. As difficult as his loss has been for those of us left behind, there is a true sense of joy in knowing that he was doing what he absolutely loved right up to the end.

  While our dad did not have the opportunity to compose his own thank-you list, he left stacks of notes and references. Clearly, a great many people gave generously of their time, knowledge, and insights. Some are mentioned in the text, while others remain unsung. Among those we would especially like to recognize are Stephen S. Power of John Wiley & Sons, who first proposed the idea of doing the book; USMC historian Robert Aquilina, who provided what our dad called a “Rosetta Stone of sorts” in primary-source materials from within the Corps’ History Division at Quantico; Leatherneck magazine’s executive editor, Colonel Walt Ford, USMC (Ret.); Colonel John Keenan, USMC (Ret.), editor of the Marine Corps Gazette; Colonel Bill White, USMC (Ret.); Raritan’s John Pacifico, for his invaluable ad hoc reporting skills; the Newark Star-Ledger’s Vinessa Ermino and Jeanette Rundquist; Marine Lou Piantadosi; and Marine Clinton Watters, John Basilone’s best man. Sincere thanks to all who contributed to the making of this book.

  Fiona Brady and Susan Konig

  Marine platoon sergeant “Manila John” Basilone of Raritan, New Jersey, proudly wears the Congressional Medal of Honor, May 21, 1943.

  Prologue

  Whatever the century, whatever the war, machine gunners have always been a different military breed, focused and lethal warriors armed with and operating a terrible weapon in a risky trade, very competent at killing en masse, pretty good at getting killed themselves.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, who came of age in the appalling slaughter that was then called the Great War, understood this, which may be why he made his iconic hero Jay Gatsby a machine gunner. We first learn about Gatsby’s war as the mysterious but glamorous bootlegger reveals himself bit by tantalizing bit to narrator Nick Carraway while the
two young men speed toward Manhattan in Gatsby’s cream-colored roadster. Nick listens, fascinated, not sure just how to respond or what to believe, as Jay goes on in his strange, mannered style of speech:

  “Then came the war, old sport.

  “In the Argonne Forest I took two machine gun detachments so far forward that there was a half mile gap on either side of us where the infantry couldn’t advance.

  We stayed there two days and two nights, a hundred and thirty men and sixteen Lewis guns, and when the infantry came up at last they found the insignia of three German divisions among the piles of dead.

  “I was promoted to be major and every Allied government gave me a decoration—even Montenegro, little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea.”

  A generation and a world war later, in the 1940s, another young roughneck of a machine gunner, not a character in a book but an actual Marine from Raritan, New Jersey, was similarly piling up the dead of famous enemy divisions before his guns. He would be awarded the most illustrious decoration for gallantry that we have—the Congressional Medal of Honor—for what he did in the historic battle for Guadalcanal, and later, posthumously, the prized and nearly as rare Navy Cross, for his actions on the first day ashore at Iwo Jima. This man was Sergeant John Basilone.

  Basilone was for several years during World War II one of the most recognizable celebrities in the country, a national hero and quite a famous man—young, laughing and roistering, unmarried and, in contemporary terms, quite sexy. Yet today, except among the hard men of the Marine Corps, which so reveres tradition, and in blue-collar, Italo-American Raritan, where the people of his hometown still tend the flame, few Americans could tell you who Basilone was or what he did in our desperate war against the Japanese in the Pacific.

  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 lite
rary 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.