Hero of the Pacific_ The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone - James Brady [102]
At St. Ann’s they held a memorial mass later on Sunday, April 29, 1945, with Father Russo saying the high mass and the chaplain of nearby Camp Kilmer (named for the New Jersey poet killed in World War I), Reverend Raymond Kilmera, there to concelebrate. The Marine Corps dispatched a Marine color guard and a colonel, Harold Parsons. Governor Walter Edge sent the state adjutant general, and other local officials attended, as did people from the VFW and American Legion and the Army and Navy Union. Two Boy Scout troops were on hand, a band from Camp Kilmer, a detachment of troops and WACs from Fort Dix, and civilians from other New Jersey towns—Camden, Perth Amboy, South Orange, Trenton, and Newark.
A month earlier, on March 26, after thirty-six days of battle (remember that optimistic estimate that this might be a seventy-two-hour fight?), combat on Iwo ended with a final suicide attack by 500 Japanese troops against Basilone’s 5th Marine Division. By the time the guns fell mute, 25,000 Americans were casualties, 7,000 of them dead. On that day on the Western Front the American 7th Division began to cross the Rhine. In the Philippines 14,000 American soldiers landed against hostile opposition near Cebu City.
When I first went down to Basilone’s hometown that January morning all those years later on the early train out of Newark, and those three old boys from the Basilone Parade Committee met me at the depot in the red truck, they told me that when news of Basilone’s death came, it was like the world ended in Raritan, just came to an end, not as literally but just as certainly as it had out in the Pacific for Manila John.
But worlds don’t come to ends. Amid the grief, life goes on. And the war itself went on, until it eventually ended, too late for Sergeant Basilone and for so many more. Among them were small-town boys from burgs like Raritan where local people put up markers and ever after recalled.
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