Hero of the Pacific_ The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone - James Brady [30]
The good times wouldn’t roll forever. They lasted, in Basilone’s words, “until the Ninth Australian Division returned home from the Middle East. They were a wonderful bunch but you couldn’t blame them for flaring up. Here we were solidly entrenched in their homeland, had the market on their women, the corner on money and we spent it, how we spent it, as if there was no end to our supply.” After all, for those months on the ’Canal, there was nothing to buy, nowhere to spend a man’s pay. “As a result, fights flared up all over town. Many a pub was wrecked in short, furious fist fights. The Aussies were hard fighters, and once we understood their methods, we more than held our own. They were clean fighters in the sense they did not use anything but their fists but they would not fight alone.”
Apparently if you duked it out with one Australian, you had to fight every Aussie in the room. “The whole situation was well on its way towards getting entirely out of hand. We got so we wouldn’t travel alone. While this cut down on the number of fights, there were still plenty of bad ones. Finally the whole mess was laid before [Marine] General Rupertus. The general, in an effort to ease the situation, decided that the 1st Marine Division would host the Aussies with the biggest party they had ever seen. The only precaution Rupertus took was the directive be issued that the beer was to be served in paper cups. He even had the courage and conviction to order that the MPs not attend. This party, more in the nature of a peace conference, was a huge success. At least ten thousand men attended, half of them Australian. For the occasion, the Melbourne cricket grounds were turned over to both armies. We got to know the Aussies better and believe it or not the fights in the pubs stopped. Shortly after the ‘peace conference, ’ the Aussie Ninth was pulled out and sent to New Guinea [where the enemy held perhaps half the vast island, the second largest in the world]. With all the fuss and fights, we were sorry to see them go. Our money was getting low and the Aussies were always good for a beer or two.”
Bruce Doorly in his monograph, Raritan’s Hero, recalls one of those earlier evenings, before the pacifying beer bust at the cricket grounds: “One night John got into a situation over a girl in a bar, with an Australian soldier, John tried to back off but the other guy would not. Using his boxing experience, John hit him with a straight left causing the Australian to fall to the floor. He got back up and came at John again, this time with two of his friends. Basilone’s buddies joined in and a small riot erupted. Military police got the riot under control relatively quickly.”
Considering Basilone’s boxing prowess (nineteen wins in nineteen fights at Manila for his Army unit before the war), his fearlessness, his appetite for women and their obvious interest in him, and his adventures in the Marines and civilian life, you wonder at how few brawls there were. The man was a fighter, in every sense, but not your usual barroom brawler, bellicose or easily riled. There was an admirable prudence, the realization that his fists could be considered lethal weapons, and he disciplined himself in their use, which probably made him even more effective and dangerous when he did occasionally lash out.
Wartime Australia, menaced by the Japanese, was hardly a normal situation for a young soldier from any country. There were rational and understandable reasons for a love-hate relationship. The Yanks were here and their own boys weren’t. As the Brits put it when Americans flooded into the United Kingdom by the hundreds of thousands in the buildup to D-Day, “The trouble with the Yanks is, they’re overpaid, oversexed, and over here.” The British understood we were there to help them beat the Germans. That still