Hero of the Pacific_ The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone - James Brady [91]
Basilone’s later words on the beach itself, via Cutter, once we get beyond the just plain silly “Fix bayonets!” sound credible: “They tore us up while we were lying on the beach but me and Lou Plain [a colonel and the regimental executive officer] got this show on the road. We kicked their asses and dragged boys up by the scruffs of their necks. ‘Get the fuck off the beach. Move out!’ we yelled at them over the incoming fire. They were moving over the terraces now and were finding whatever cover they could in shell craters on the flat land. Bulldozers had punched gaps through the terraces and tanks were on their way up from the beach to support us. A few mixed squads of C and B Company boys were now at the edge of Motoyama #1 Airfield, our first objective. Once we took out the bunker that was slicing open the 4th Division with their cannon, we only had to worry about the snipers, the dug-in artillery looking down on us from Suribachi, and the constant hail storm of mortars that fell from the sky. Other than that, at least we were off the water’s edge. Which had turned into a killing field.”
25
I’ve tried to assess which of a number of versions of what hap pened the morning of February 19 is true. But are any of them?
John Basilone’s sister Phyllis has her version. She loves her brother, but has never seen a war. Her son Jerry Cutter, also not a writer, and his cohort, Jim Proser, have their account. The Marine Corps records say one thing. Leatherneck magazine has stories by various adepts. Charles W. “Chuck” Tatum, one of Basilone’s gunners, has written his own book, Red Blood, Black Sand, and the very professional Douglas “Bill” Lansford, a writer and a Marine who was there, has his recollection. Historian Joe Alexander writes at length of that morning. There’ve been movies with John Wayne and films directed by Clint Eastwood. Dozens of Iwo Jima books. Did Basilone die instantly from a mortar shell? From artillery fire? Did he linger for hours, speaking with a corpsman and even smoking a cigarette? Did he never regain consciousness? Gradually bleed to death of small-arms fire as the official Marine Corps casualty record of the time suggests? His Navy Cross citation says he was killed instantly by a shell. Phyllis says he lived for hours, discussed events, smoked a cigarette. Choose your version.
Maybe the Japanese have theirs. Or did they ever even know who Manila John was? Few survived to say. You have the sense their Sendai Division troops would have liked Basilone, even welcomed him into their own and very special pantheon of warriors—and then killed him before he could kill them, which he surely would have done and happily. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi might conceivably have greeted Basilone as a fellow samurai, gallant, impassioned, fierce, if a bit crude perhaps, a warrior not overly given to politesse or ritual.
I believe this was how it really was on that February morning in 1945: Basilone and other Marines headed down into the hold of the LST to board the smaller landing craft that would actually take them through the surf and up onto the black sand beach, the medium LCMs and the smaller personnel-carrying LCVPs, the tractorlike amphibians they called amtracs. Navy coxswains piloted the assault waves to the shore, backed out, returned to their mother ships, and loaded up again to return with fresh meat for Iwo, men or supplies. There was some wishful thinking in the scuttlebutt men heard that the brass figured it for a seventy-two-hour fight, over in three days, maybe five. “Bullshit,” said others, including vets like Basilone. But what the hell, anything was possible.
Historian Joe Alexander sketches the scene. “The massive assault waves [two reinforced infantry regiments from each of the two attacking divisions, the 4th and the 5th] hit the beach within two minutes of H-Hour. A Japanese observer watching