Hero of the Pacific_ The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone - James Brady [31]
“The bloody Japs aren’t a hundred miles away across the Torres Strait, their planes are bombing Darwin [on the northern coast], and our lads are half a world away fighting the bloody Eyeties [Mussolini’s Italians].” There was considerable truth to all of this. It was late 1942, early 1943, and the Americans had landed and fought their way through the Vichy French at Oran and Casablanca and near Algiers to open a second front against the Germans and their increasingly insignificant Italian partners. The Aussies (and New Zealanders) were also in North Africa with the British Eighth Army, and soon to be joining up with the new Allied invaders to the west. But in the meanwhile, the Brits and their empire were fighting full-time against Rommel and his Afrika Korps. So until their own 9th Division sailed home for a break, the only sizable forces back home Down Under would be the “bloody Yanks.”
And waiting for them the glories and creature comforts of Melbourne, with its lonely, lusty, and compliant women, to welcome the nearly 20,000 men of the recently landed 1st Marine Division, malaria-ridden, exhausted, wasted, haunted, but randy, womanless, and by now battle-hardened. These Yanks, at least, had proved themselves able to “kill Japs.” A mixed blessing indeed!
There is no indication that Manila John understood such dynamics or cared. All he knew was that he and his machine gunners were out of hell and, like Sydney Carton, in “a far, far better” place, a civilized country much like their own, where, drained and tired and haunted as they were, they could expect to recover and live once more as men and not animals of the field. But just how thin, in wartime with its stresses and losses, might be this veneer of civilization, even in a country as lovely as Melbourne and its agricultural environs? These were a grand people and this Australia a gorgeous place; there was beer to be drunk, liberty to be enjoyed, girls to be loved, money to be spent. Cutter reports further on “Uncle John” Basilone’s revels amid the hospitable people of Melbourne: “They’d find a bald-headed Marine dead drunk, planted face-first in their petunias, and they’d bring him into their home, clean him up, and introduce him to their daughter.”
Basilone had singular memories of his own. “I woke up one morning in my bunk and had no idea how I got there. I didn’t remember the trip back or how I got my arm all bloodied. Somebody had wrapped it in white gauze so I figured I must have been in the sick bay at some point. All I knew was that my head hurt like hell. My mouth felt like mice had made a nest in it, and my arm hurt as bad as my head. I got myself cleaned up and had to shave with my left arm because my right was so sore. I still couldn’t remember how I had banged it up. At chow Powell looked up at me over his coffee and smiled like the cat that just shit in the corner. ‘Death Before Dishonor, sarge,’ he said.
“‘What the hell was that?” I was thinking but didn’t say anything.
“‘Let’s take a look at it,’ he said.
“‘At what?’ I said. I still wasn’t too fast on my feet before coffee. Then it all started to come back to me. The drinking contest on Flinders Street, the cab ride and the little shop by the docks with drawings of dragons in the window. Powell nodded at my arm. Then I saw the rest; the tray of black inks, the needles, and the bald top of a man’s head bent over my arm as pain shot through me. Powell was kissing a very heavy, brown-skinned girl and watching us. I peeled back the bandage on my arm, and saw the scabbed-over letters in blue ink, ‘Death Before Dishonor’ and some other design that was covered in dried blood. I liked it.
“‘Death Before Dishonor,’ I repeated to Powell. ‘Who paid for it?’ I asked because I didn’t remember