Hero of the Pacific_ The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone - James Brady [94]
Before the landings George Basilone had warned his brother about pushing his luck. Now Bill Lansford picks up the theme, just before going on with his account of Manila John’s death that first day on Iwo Jima. “Many men have said they saw John Basilone fall on the beach, which he did not. One said Basilone’s legs were blown off by a mine. Several claim they heard Basilone’s final words, and one said Basilone begged to be put out of his misery with his own pistol. Perhaps the most credible witness is Roy Elsner, the headquarters cook who had watched our machine gun drills back at Pendleton and was now on Iwo. He said that when he and some buddies were hunting for their headquarters, ‘A few hundred yards from Motoyama Field #1 we heard an explosion, which caused us to look a bit to our right, toward the field. We saw Basilone and the three guys who were with him fall. We reached him almost immediately.’”
There are the other versions, not only from Marines in the Iwo fight but from members of the family, some of which I will cite. First, though, a moving note from Lansford in Leatherneck magazine: “Some time after noon I came across a group of blackened bodies on the edge of Motoyama Airfield #1. Company C was advancing half a mile ahead, sweeping the flat field clean, when one of the dead caught my eye. He was a thin, pallid kid. His helmet was half off, and he lay face up, arched over his combat pack. With his jacket torn back and his mouth open I vaguely recognized someone in that lean, lifeless face beneath its dusty stubble of hair. ‘That’s John Basilone,’ said one of the men standing around. ‘He just got it.’
“That’s bullshit. I know Basilone. We were in the same company. Someone else said, ‘That’s Basilone.’ A guy I knew said, ‘Yeah, he was briefing his guys when a mortar scored a direct hit. It killed them all.’ I went and studied the dead man closely, but I didn’t touch him. The shell had landed at his feet and sent shrapnel into his groin, neck, and left arm. He looked incredibly thin like an undernourished kid, with his hands near his stomach as though it hurt. This was the hero of Guadalcanal, the joy of a nation, the pride of the Marines, and my friend Manila John Basilone.”
Reading that, I was unsure whether Lansford really accepted that the “thin” body was John’s. So in June 2008 I phoned Bill again in California to ask. He said, “It was about noon of the first day and getting shelled to hell and all of us were in some state of shock. And of course it was John. I saw his pack with his name on it. And when the burial detail came up this cook was in it who knew our outfit and knew John and he made the same ID. I used to stay in touch with him [the cook Elsner] down in El Paso and then we lost contact. And I certainly knew Basilone from our time in the same machine-gun outfit. I was a section leader and he had a squad. We had gone on liberty together, gotten drunk together, and remember how we all shaved our heads that time?”
When I mentioned the several versions of Basilone’s death that I’d read, Lansford reacted contemptuously. “There’s a lot of scuttlebutt and bullshit out there, a lot of self-promoters. I’ve seen the different versions.”
I then cited the official casualty report from the History Division in Quantico attributing Basilone’s wounds to “GSW,” gunshot wounds. Lansford wasn’t buying that either. “That’s absurd. I saw the body.” I then mentioned the report’s detailing three different hits, right groin, neck, and left arm. Lansford agreed that part sounded like what he’d seen but held to his insistence it was a single mortar shell that did it, not gunshots. We’d both seen dead bodies and knew that shellfire and small arms usually make different-looking entry wounds. He then continued with a last description of the living Basilone