Hero of the Pacific_ The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone - James Brady [86]
There was still that fellowship, the brotherhood, no matter the overlapping of its generations, the timelessness of its traditions and lore, “the love of one drunken Marine for another.” It surely must have seemed that way to General Cates, now sailing in convoy with John Basilone and his machine gunners.
One of the fighting, nonstaff generals commanding the invasion troops, Cates, who had been around for a long time, was a slim, dapper gent who smoked his cigarettes through an elegant holder, and would eventually become commandant of the Marine Corps. As a second lieutenant in World War I on June 6, 1918, he went over the top with his platoon at a place called Belleau Wood where the 5th and 6th Marine regiments would in desperate combat blunt the final thrust by General Ludendorff to take Paris and end the war. Early in the firefight, hit in the helmet by a German machine-gun bullet, Cates was knocked out, only to be revived by one of his men pouring a bottle of red wine over his face and head. “Goddamn it, Tom!” protested Lieutenant Cates. “Don’t put that wine over my head, give me a drink of it.” Thus revived, Cates pulled himself together, resumed the fight, and led his men into the key French village of Bouresches that was their objective, chased out the Boches, and hung on with only twenty-one men against German counterattacks until relieved. Cliff Cates was nominated for a Medal of Honor and eventually awarded a lesser decoration and fought out the rest of World War I a decorated hero.
On Guadalcanal, as a colonel, Cates commanded troops fighting to hold Henderson Field, and it may have been that Basilone then met, saw, or served under him there in 1942. Six years later, when I reported in to Quantico, Virginia, the Marine Corps Schools, as a college sophomore in the platoon leaders class, Cates was the base’s commanding officer before whom all of us passed in review. I still recall seeing him strolling about with that cigarette holder. Now here he was closing in on Iwo with Manila John et al. That’s what I mean about the relatively few degrees of separation between Marines of one war or another, one outfit, whatever the decade.
But in February 1945 the two men, one as a two-star general, the other a gunny, Cates and Basilone, would again be in the same fight, the general as one of the senior officers agonizing about how to get their artillery regiments ashore before dark of that first day to help handle those anticipated counterattacks against the first waves of assaulting Marines, of whom Basilone would be one. The aerial and naval bombardment of Iwo Jima was in one sense encouraging to the assault troops of the three attacking divisions. It should soften up the Japanese defenders, cave in and crush their pillboxes and blockhouses, put at least some of their artillery out of action, maybe cut some communications wire, perhaps damage, destroy, or ground some of their planes, hole their runways and break up the tarmac. All this would be good. But what of the famous element of surprise? There could be no great surprise to men being bombed and shelled for weeks. They knew the Marines were coming. And they would even know when, since the bombardment would have to lift before the first waves of Marines hit the beach.
Basilone tried to explain these things to his platoon. The men, even the boots among them, realized he knew this stuff, had fought, and brilliantly so, on an earlier island, and that if any NCO could help them get through the coming fight alive, it would be an old salt