• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“I was trying to round up all my guys at the foot of Motoyama Airfield #1 and the assault groups had gone through and there were a lot of Japanese dead lying around. It had been raining intermittently and I went over to one of the dead to go through the body for papers or maps or whatever, which we did for intelligence. He was wearing a raincoat and their [Japanese] raincoats were better than our ponchos and we would take things like that. And John Basilone came out onto the plaza near the lip of Motoyama Airfield #1 and he was calling his men together, you know with his hand circling above his head [the ‘gather on me’ gesture] and five or six guys came over. That was when a mortar shell came in and killed all of them, I don’t know, four or five. I saw the medical report from the people who do the examination and it was one mortar shell. Just one.”

I said, “One is all it takes,” or something like that, and I again thanked Bill Lansford, a wonderful writer, who was writing a new book of his own and had worked on other projects with Ken Burns and Steven Spielberg.

26

There are as many descriptions of John Basilone’s last firefight and where and how he died as there are Alamo legends about a wounded Jim Bowie’s final fight in the old monastic cell where he lay waiting for the enemy with a knife and a gun or two. In Texas, they tell to this day of platoons of Mexicans found dead around Colonel Bowie’s last bed.

I don’t mean to be flip about this, but the Basilone family has been of little help in establishing the facts of just how John died and what he accomplished that terrible morning under heavy fire against the Japanese. Phyllis Basilone Cutter provides us perhaps the most colorful and probably the least credible account of her brother’s heroics, in her hagiographic depiction of the fighting and of his unspoken thoughts and what he supposedly said and actually did in the battle. This is entirely understandable. Phyllis was a civilian writing about the brother she loved and lost, for a local audience, many of whom knew young John, remembered him as a boy, and revered his memory. Whether in Phyllis’s family biography of the Basilones or in the fourteen installments of the same story she wrote for the Somerset County, New Jersey, Messenger-Gazette newspaper, there is a “lives of the saints” quality to her account of his heroics, the stuff of B-movie, Republic Pictures films of the era when John and his sister were growing up and going to the local movie theater (“the Madhouse”) in Raritan.

To begin, Phyllis talks throughout of Basilone’s having landed with the first wave of assault troops, as if this makes him somehow braver than men who came later. In fact, Basilone was in the fourth wave, landing at about nine-thirty that morning, perhaps twenty-five or twenty-eight minutes after the first wave, a position every bit as perilous and courageous as the three waves that hit the sand earlier. Phyllis’s account of Basilone’s Iwo starts as he and his men board their landing craft, first circling, then taking a direct line to the hostile beach, and their landing under fire.

At this point, with battle about to be joined, a platoon to be steadied and encouraged, weapons and gear to be checked, Phyllis imagines, in Basilone’s voice, that he isn’t focused on Iwo and the battle coming up fast, but on December 7, three years earlier. “We thought of Pearl Harbor and had no compassion for the enemy.” There may be Marine gunnies who speak or think like that as they go into combat, but I don’t know any. Phyllis has her brother next describing the situation on the beach as the Marines come in for a landing: “The Japs lay stunned and helpless under the curtain of fire. Our landing was met by only weak small arms fire. The beach was coarse volcanic ash which made for a bad landing. We sank deep into the ash, slowing us down, as well as practically miring our vehicles. The boys were all together gathering their equipment so that we could work our way off the beach inland to our predetermined points,