Hero of the Pacific by James Brady Page B

another lieutenant colonel named Conoley was also given the cross. At the ceremony, Paige stood with Conoley and Basilone with Puller. In this section of Paige’s book, he goes into no additional detail on why Basilone may have been selected to go home and why it was assumed Paige himself would stay in the Pacific for that “next campaign.” All Paige would add about his friend Johnny was a gracious little passage of l’envoi : “Manila John went home to sell war bonds and two years later he had volunteered to go back overseas. Johnny joined the 5th Marine Division which went to Iwo Jima. A few minutes after they hit the beach in the opening assault, on February 19, 1945, Johnny and four of his men were caught by Japanese mortar fire and were killed. My good friend, Manila John Basilone, was awarded the Navy Cross posthumously for that action.”
    Almost three weeks went by at Melbourne before, on June 12, Basilone bothered to write home about the famous medal, and he did so briefly and simply: “I am very happy, for the other day I received the Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest decoration you can receive in the armed forces. Tell Pop his son is still tough. Tell Don [John’s kid brother] thanks for the prayer they say in school [for soldiers overseas].”
    For all the talk about “a ticket home,” the famous medal around his neck, and the brief flurry of publicity, as May became June and then July, Basilone was still in Australia, routinely drilling his machine gunners, marching in step, and dutifully saluting officers, including brand-new shavetails, young second lieutenants who’d never heard a shot fired in anger. They, too, were saluted and were to be obeyed. The more sensible young officers knew how absurd the situation was and restrained themselves, playing it cool and trying to learn from these salty and combat-hardened enlisted Marines and NCOs, not throwing their rank around with guys like Basilone. Basilone’s new and raw young machine gunners were impressed by their betters, the veterans of the ’Canal, and were eager to listen and to learn—which was what Sergeant Basilone wanted, young men to be taught the hard, deadly lessons of combat.
    Manila John had announced prematurely to Paige in May that they had that “ticket home.” But in July he was still there, training troops, making formation every morning, doing whatever it was he did each night as the weeks passed. And the Pacific war went on. For a time it wasn’t really a Marines war at all. The only substantial fighting by late May was in far-off Attu in the Aleutians where the Japanese had dug in and the American Army, the GIs as they were now widely called in the headlines, were taking significant losses trying to dig them out. The Aleutians were cold and windswept, isolated and only thinly populated, really not very strategically important. But they were part of territorial Alaska and therefore American ground. And that was sufficient emotional and political reason to take them back, regardless of the cost. Fighting continued in the Solomons, though not on the ’Canal, and it was mostly a naval fight and an aviator’s war. Henderson Field remained vital, and the once tiny, beleaguered, potholed little airstrip was now capable of launching a hundred American warplanes at a time to harass and sink Japanese shipping, to shoot down Zeroes, to take the bombing war to other of the Solomons still in Japanese hands. Henderson Field had indeed been worth fighting for.
    On May 30, Attu fell. The ghastly count read 600 Americans dead, 1,200 wounded. True to their tradition, only 28 Japanese troops, all of them wounded, survived, with 2,350 dead, many of those suicides. Across the world the Russians were chewing up the Germans in fierce spring fighting, Tunisia still held out against the Allies, while plans firmed up for the invasion of Sicily, Patton and Monty and all that. In the