Hero of the Pacific_ The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone - James Brady [89]
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John P. Marquand, the author of best-selling New England tales of manners, covering the invasion as a war correspondent, wrote these first impressions of Iwo: “Its silhouette was like a sea monster, with the little dead volcano for the head, and the beach area for the neck, and all the rest of it, with its scrubby brown cliffs for the body.”
And off they went, the 4th and 5th divisions abreast, while the 3rd Division hung back in reserve, a decision later to become controversial. Why hadn’t all three powerful divisions hit the enemy simultaneously?
John Basilone and his platoon would hit the beach in the fourth wave about nine-thirty a.m. He would be under fire for the first time in more than two years, since the ’Canal in late 1942.
In Hawaii, John’s brother George had questioned him closely about motivation. “You had it made. You could have called your shots. A commission or a soft berth at Pendleton. Why come back to this rat race? You of all people should know what our chances of getting back alive are.” According to Phyllis Basilone Cutter, John answered this way: “When I left the theatre of operations on Guadalcanal [it was actually Australia] to come back stateside, I promised my buddies I would return and that promise I didn’t make lightly.” He didn’t make it back, however, not specifically to them. With the brothers in Hawaii, George continued to argue. “You were lucky to get back alive. Why push your luck?” But John wasn’t having any. “George, the Marine Corps is my whole life. Without it the rest seems empty. This thing I have to do, something keeps pushing me. I now know what I want. If I don’t make it, try and explain to the folks. I know they always loved me. God knows I do them, but this is bigger than family and loved ones and I must do it.” This sounds too pious and self-effacing to be convincing. Phyllis, with her brother George surely the source, must have attempted to quote John accurately. Why would she phony up her beloved brother’s words on something as serious as the possibility of his own death? It’s just that the words are so stilted.
Jerry Cutter and Jim Proser take a crack at describing what it must have been like in that landing craft carrying Basilone to Iwo and his destiny. But how much of this is to be believed? Recall that Cutter once told me that they “made up” some of their reporting.
According to Cutter and Proser, it was a bitter John Basilone who got into the landing craft. “We filed down the gangways into the ship’s steel belly. Half of my boys loaded into amphibious tractor 3C27 with me. Amtrac 3C27 was an armor plated rectangular tub made for delivering men onto a beach. It rode low and slow in the water.” As the concussions from the big naval guns roiled the ocean and created waves, and the small craft circled slowly waiting for orders, men began getting seasick, including some of the twenty-five Marines in Basilone’s boat. And we have the sergeant unsure about whether he should talk straight to his men before they reached the beach. Should he assure them that the big guns and aerial bombing were paving the way to a successful assault, or tell them truly how bad it just might be? According to Cutter, Basilone was ambivalent: “It’s going to be all right, boys. They’re going to be as dizzy as shit-house rats after we get done pounding ’em. I lied—just as Topside lied to us, when they told us it would be over in 72 hours. All of us vets knew that 72 hours was pure bullshit and said so. It was like an involuntary reaction. The minute it dropped from the C.O.’s mouth, it sounded like a dozen men coughed at once. But it was a dozen mumbled ‘bullshits’ jumping right off the lips of us vets. We couldn’t help it. There were 23,000 [sic] trained Japanese jungle fighters straight ahead who had been digging in and calibrating