CHAPTER EIGHT
Stateside
As some Marines lingered on Pavuvu and others returned home, during the spring and summer of 1944 the Corps replenished its ranks with boys eager to fight island battles. One such Marine hopeful was teenager Chuck Tatum.
CHUCK TATUM
When Pearl Harbor hit, me and the buddies in the neighborhood were out rabbit hunting. We didn’t catch any. Rabbits run pretty fast. It was Sunday afternoon, and as we went home I pulled up in the driveway with my bicycle, and my younger brother said, “Guess what, the Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor.”
I said, “Where’s Pearl Harbor?”
“Mom said it’s in the Hawaiian Islands. She also said this means war.”
I was fifteen at the time, too young for the service, but I wanted to enlist right away the next day. My biggest worry was that the war would be over before I got in. My father had been a corporal in WWI. He’d died of pneumonia in 1934 when I was only eight years old, but I remember seeing a picture of him in uniform. So I thought If I get to be old enough, I’ll be a soldier, too. I’d always looked up to soldiers.
It was a sense of duty, too. That’s universal throughout manhood. You go to the oldest tribe in Africa, and if someone attacks them, they want to fight to defend themselves. It’s inevitable. What could be more dastardly than what the Japanese did at Pearl Harbor? Two days after Pearl Harbor, I remember walking by the post office, and there was a long line of guys out the door waiting to sign up and enlist.
I saw Marine Corps films. They always had the best-looking uniforms, and I thought, I’m not going to give my business to the Army or Navy. I’m gonna get one of those Marine uniforms, which would certainly be an attraction to girls.
But my mother didn’t want me to join up. I pestered that poor woman. One of my neighbor’s older brothers had joined, and we heard that he got killed on Guadalcanal. That really brought the war home. Still, I wanted to enlist. I kept pestering my mother. The next year she agreed that I could join up. I think she finally just gave in. Finally, after my seventeenth birthday, on July 23, 1943, I joined the United States Marine Corps.
Years later, I thought for the first time about how brave my mother had been as a parent. She was only thirty-seven when she signed the papers that allowed me to join up, and already she’d lost two husbands—one, a state trooper, was killed in a shoot-out, and her second, my father, had died of pneumonia.
I was the first one from my age group of friends who joined. When they found out, two more of them went down right away and joined the Marine Corps the next day.
I never liked boot camp. I needed to do it twice. It was eight weeks long then. The first time I went through, things went pretty good overall, but I came down with a form of pneumonia called “Cat Fever,” which is pretty common, I guess, whenever you get a lot of people together for the first time. I spent six days in the hospital in San Diego. When I got well enough, I went to a reassignment depot and tried to tell the sergeant in charge that I already had six weeks in and to please put me in a platoon that was almost finished. All he said was, “Okay, see those people over there. Stand over with them.” I went over there, and these guys were fresh off the bus. So I had to repeat boot camp from the very beginning. Sure, it was easier the second time I went through (laughs). I was kinda the authority on what was going to happen next.
Actually, I don’t remember ever being troubled by boot camp. I was never troubled by any of the physical exercise. I wanted to do this, see? What did we sign up for?! I wanted to be a Marine! There was no other place I wanted to be. We got to go shoot rifles and cannons and aim bayonets. It was the greatest adventure a seventeen-year-old boy could have.
Our drill instructor’s name was O’Leary. He’d just returned from Guadalcanal, where he’d been wounded. He was the first guy I ever saw with a Purple Heart. He was a good-looking Irishman, and his uniform was always perfect. Everything he did was always perfect. I thought, well, I’d like to emulate that guy.
I didn’t see any of the guys I went through boot camp with ever again, but we all had a good time when we were there. You get a bunch of seventeen-, eighteen-, nineteen-year-old guys together with no radio, no TV, no newspapers, and they make their own fun. There’s this term, “grab ass,” that basically means to goof off when you’re supposed to be working. There are a lot of ways you can be a grab ass. For instance, you can be in line and poke the guy in front of you so he jumps—that’s a grab-ass thing.
One time we were at the rifle range, and we had these pith helmets. We were in a long line and it got boring. One guy took off his pith helmet and hit his buddy over the head with it, just sort of lightly. It drove the helmet down so the inner band hit the guy’s ears. Well, the other guy turned around, took his helmet off, and smacked the guy back. The DI saw it. So he brought the two guys out, stood them an arm’s length apart, and ordered them to take turns hitting each other over the head. This was extremely funny as long as it didn’t happen to you. They smashed their helmets over each other to the point where the helmets were wrecked. Not to mention how sore their heads were. They had to go buy new helmets.
Another time there was this guy there from Tennessee or somewhere, and he always had this sort of smile on his face. It was just the way he normally looked. Well, the DI didn’t like it. So he went over to him, grabbed his collar, and pulled him out. “What the hell do you think is so funny?” he yelled.
“Sir, I’m not laughing,” the guy said. “I always look this way.”
“Goddamn you!” said the DI. “You get in front of a mirror and get a new expression. You practice looking different!”
In January 1944, Tatum reported to Camp Pendleton near San Diego. There, the Marines were forming a new division—the 5th Marine Division. Tatum would soon find himself in the company of hardened Marine veterans assigned to shore up the new unit, men like John Basilone.
CHUCK TATUM
Boot camp was over. I went to Camp Pendleton. Pendleton was brand spanking new and very vast—it seemed to stretch up and down the California coast. Any military base is an austere place, but Pendleton had nature’s beauty working for it. On one side was the sea, which produced an eerie coastal fog most mornings. Behind the base, the coastal mountain range provided a scenic backdrop. Between the mountains and the sea were rolling hills—the perfect place to train.
I was the first guy in the new barracks except for another guy who was just lying there asleep in his bunk. The next day John Basilone came in and right away took charge. He started us cleaning the barracks. It was intimidating meeting him. I knew his name and his reputation. I’d read about him. He said he was going to be in charge of B Company, machine guns, and I thought that’s exactly what I’m going to do—work a machine gun. So Basilone came in and told us to relax, and that was the first time I met him. The other guy left, because he was in the wrong place. So it was just me and Basilone in that platoon at first. Someone asked me if Basilone and I had ever gone on liberty together. I said, “Hey, privates don’t go on liberty with platoon sergeants.”
In the next few days they shipped more people in.
That spring, the 5th Division gained additional veterans when the Marine Corps disbanded the Raiders and Paratroops—the Marines’ Special Forces—and sent their personnel to bolster the new units. One such ex-Raider was Clinton Watters. He had recently survived the island battle of Bougainville.
CLINTON WATTERS
After Bougainville they shipped me home. I’d had my two years over there by then, so they sent me to Camp Pendleton in California, where they assigned me to a rifle platoon. I didn’t have much choice. I’d been in machine guns all the time before that, but that’s where they put me, in some rifle platoon.
One day at Pendleton I was out with a group on a field maneuver and somebody hollered, “Hey, Watters, what in the world are you doing here?” I looked, and it was John Basilone. I said, “I’m back in duty again.” Then he says, “What are you doing in a rifle company?” I said, “Well, that’s where they assigned me.” We had a good time catching up because we’d known each other back in the 1st Marine Division.
I first met John back in February 1942 when I joined the 1st Marine Division after Pearl Harbor. Originally I was in D Company, a machine gun platoon. I carried the tripod and ammo and then became a gunner. The guys in the machine gun platoon were all older than me. I was nineteen years old, almost twenty. John Basilone was my sergeant and he taught me machine guns. He was really good with them, and he even taught us to strip down the machine guns blindfolded and put them together again. I have a feeling that Greer and I probably knew each other back then, too.
I didn’t really get to be friends with Basilone at that point. I was just a “boot” [rookie] and he was an old-time soldier who hung around with all the other sergeants. The 1st Division had a lot of old, salty Marines who had been in for a long time. Before he was in the Marines, for instance, Basilone had already been in the Army.
It was a good outfit. Our battalion commander in the 7th Marines was Colonel Chesty Puller. He was quite an amazing guy. I helped him pitch his pup tent once. We were out into the woods on a field problem, and it was just a miserable day. Raining. Windy. Most of us had half a shelter, then whoever we bunked with had another half, so we’d put it together and have a full shelter. But Chesty had a whole pup tent to himself, and you needed someone to pitch it with you, because you can’t hold it down alone. So I heard, “Hey, Marine! Come over here and help me.” I happened to be near to where he was, so I went over and helped him pitch his tent. He just was as friendly with everybody and never took advantage of his rank. He would get in the chow line and he wouldn’t get up front. He would get right in the chow line and go through the line with you.
We went to the island of British Samoa and trained to go to Guadalcanal, although we didn’t know yet where we were going. Chesty signed my promotion from private to PFC on board ship on the way overseas. Training involved a lot of hikes, a lot of exercise, just getting us used to the tropics. Chesty Puller was a remarkable leader. He used to go on twenty-mile hikes with us. A lot of the guys would pass out from the heat, and he would go and talk to them. He wasn’t yelling at them, but talked to them like they were kids. He would say, “What happened, son?” He was not rough as far as talking to them. He would hike back and forth along our column and travel double the distance by the time we got through a hike. He was old but he could do it. John Basilone thought Chesty was really special and always did. He was John’s hero, no question about it. He wanted to be like him. I am feeling that he was cut from the same material.
In August 1942 I ended up with infected tonsils and yellow jaundice, so they put me in the hospital. While I was in the hospital, my unit shoved off for Guadalcanal. So I missed out on all the fighting there with Basilone.
When I got out of the hospital, they put me in a new unit, the 22nd Marines. I was very unhappy about that. I’d been ready to go into combat and was disappointed that I’d missed Guadalcanal. In my new outfit, there were a lot of young recruits. They hadn’t done much training, and I figured I’d have to go back with them and redo a lot of training I’d already done. Then the 3rd Raider Battalion was being formed on Samoa, and I volunteered for that and got in.
The Raiders had a reputation as a tough unit. They were good to me, and I made some great friends. We were in the initial wave to land on Bougainville, November 1, 1943. Bougainville is one of those battles you don’t hear much about, and that’s a shame. It was a rugged battle. Very difficult landscape. Swamps. Heat. Very messy.
This was my first landing under fire. I was a sergeant by then, a section leader in charge of twelve men and maybe three air-cooled machine guns. We were very unprepared. We landed on Bougainville in those old Higgins boats. They weren’t the ones where the front end drops and you go out. With these, you had to go over the side. The boats were wooden back then, and some guys got hit even while we were still going in. The shells just came right through the side. We discovered that there were tons of Japanese on the island. Some were tied into the trees even, shooting at us from above. We had some tanks that came in behind us. If you can picture it, they had, like, an open body on them, and the Japanese were dropping grenades on our tanks from up in the trees, right into the body. It was a real mess.
Now, what follows takes a bit of telling, but I vowed to tell this story wherever I could. I’d never been the religious sort. My father was not a Christian at all. He was an alcoholic. My mother was French-Canadian and Catholic, but Dad didn’t approve of being Catholic. So we’d never been active in church as children, although I’d go to churches with my friends sometimes. I had an aunt who was a nun, and she gave me a rosary before I went off to war. I took the cross off of it and wore that cross on the chain of my dog tags.
Anyhow, heavy fire was all around us. We were still on the beach and hadn’t gone very far inland. Suddenly I found I couldn’t move. This wave of fear swept over me and completely immobilized me. I think every man who ever goes into action is worried he’s going to get into that condition. But that was me. I didn’t know what to do. I literally couldn’t move. I ended up stopping my advance, right in the middle of the invasion.
In the middle of that battle, I did the only thing I could think of. I dropped to my knees and asked God for help. There was nobody around me, but I’d swear somebody touched me. There was an actual physical presence, just like somebody put his hand on my shoulder. He told me to get up, stand up, go forward, and that he was going to take care of me.
Well, that was all I needed. I stood up and led my men in. We went into Bougainville and cleaned up there and went on with the battle. That incident I had with God at Bougainville changed my life. I committed myself to serving God for the rest of my days, and I never felt fear in battle ever again.
CHUCK TATUM
We had Basilone for just a short time in our company. We already had a gunnery sergeant named Stanley Kavato. But another company, C Company, didn’t have a gunnery sergeant, so when John Basilone got promoted to gunny, that meant we now had two. So they gave Basilone to C Company, a few blocks up the street. Kavato stayed to be our gunnery sergeant. I was a little irritated that we lost Basilone. I thought, This guy’s our personal hero, what’s he going over there for? I never told anybody that, but that’s how I felt. Sergeant Kavato didn’t like me at first, but eventually we became friends. Our loss was C Company’s gain.
CLINTON WATTERS
Soon after my arrival at Pendleton, the company commander called me in and said, “You’re being transferred to Basilone’s platoon.” I know Basilone arranged this. So I became a section leader there. Basilone and I were the only ones, to my knowledge, that had combat experience in that unit. I was still a sergeant and kind of served as his assistant. John wasn’t a great leader. He never delegated anything as far as I was concerned (laughs). He always ended up doing it himself. He was leading by example more than delegating tasks.
John was into boxing and I boxed with him once. We had a ring, and you know, one day he said, “How about putting on the gloves with me?” and I did. I always thought, Golly, people are always talking about how he was a great boxer, and I’m no boxer. I boxed with my brother as a kid. But when I fought John, he didn’t do much, he didn’t seem to have a lot of science in his boxing. Didn’t knock me out or anything. I wasn’t impressed. Supposedly when he was in the Army, he was some kind of a champ. He was a little larger than I was, a little taller. He kept in pretty good shape. When I went back, I told the guys at the parade grounds, “He must have taken it easy on me!”
CHUCK TATUM
One day it was raining and we were indoors in the barracks. Like all guys, I was bored with it. I was looking out the window at the rain. Our platoon leader, Lieutenant Dreger, was getting testy. Finally he snapped and singled me out. “Tatum,” he said. “Explain to the group the theory of flat trajectory fire with a machine gun.”
I remembered what Basilone had told me. I said, “Sir, that’s where the bullets don’t rise over the height of a man at six hundred yards,” which was pretty correct. I know he was surprised that I knew that.
Another time, we were out on a field maneuver at Pendleton, wandering around in the boondocks. This one kid was staring off, not paying attention. Finally Sergeant George Lutchkus called him out. And the kid says, “Well, I’ll tell ya, I’m sick and tired of all this training. I want to get over there and slap me a Jap.” Oh, the sergeant just blew up. He’d been wounded at Guadalcanal. He called that guy out in front of everybody. Here’s some of what he said:
“Hold on, sonny! Let me tell all of you a thing or two about the Japanese soldier! Number one, he is not the caricature you see in newspapers with bombsight glasses and buck teeth. The average Japanese soldier has five or more years of combat experience. Their army doesn’t have a ‘boot division’ like ours…Japs are the world’s best snipers, experts at the art of camouflage, and get by on a diet of fish heads and rice. They will never surrender and will commit hari-kari rather than be taken prisoner. Heck, they don’t have corpsmen; if they are wounded, they are considered damaged goods. So, sonny, mull all that over, and don’t ever let me hear you complain about your training again.”*
I’d say we all wised up real quick. That’s what our enemy was like. They weren’t afraid of anybody. We were going up against hardened soldiers. They were well trained, no doubt about it. Plus, they thought that if they got killed fighting for the emperor, they’d get their tickets punched straight to heaven. So they were fearless.
CLINTON WATTERS
I never felt anger toward the enemy. But I never remember being uptight or upset about needing to kill them either. The Japanese did awful things, which I first saw on Bougainville. You’d find a Marine staked to the ground somewhere and they had done horrendous things to him. We would see mutilated bodies, too. It was awfully rough. After you’ve seen stuff against your own people, it makes it easier to do something when you’re fighting the other guy. We never considered being captured. You would have fought right to the end rather than let them have their way with you.
We didn’t take a lot of prisoners. We didn’t have any compound to store them, or a stockade, so we seldom took them. Where would you take them? What would you do with them? There wasn’t much choice sometimes. Lots of times when we were going through areas, we found wounded enemy soldiers, and we either shot them or bayoneted them. You didn’t know if he was dead or not, but you wanted to make sure. The Japanese often faked death then would shoot you from behind.
Sometimes you didn’t want to make noise or announce to the enemy where you were, so that’s why bayonets were used. And that bothered me. I didn’t like doing that. I could shoot the enemy, sure. But there’s a whole lot of difference between shooting someone and bayoneting him. I’d say that sticking a knife in someone is more difficult than shooting him. Sometimes if you bayoneted one who was still alive, they would grab on, you know, and all that. But you wanted to make sure they weren’t alive whenever you went by them.
CHUCK TATUM
We had an NCO named Raymond Windle, who was excellent on the machine gun. Windle was really the hero in my book. By the time he got to us, he’d already been a Paratrooper and been in two battles. Of course, these paratroopers thought their shit didn’t stink. They were real elite and hated going from the Paratroopers to regular Marines. Plus, they lost $50 a month, because they got that other fifty for jumping. They had jump wings and polished boots and kept their trousers tucked in their boots. But Windle was great.
Another ex-Paratrooper who reported to Pendleton was an “Old Breed” Marine named Clarence Rea. He was assigned to C Company with Basilone and Watters.
CLARENCE REA
You’ve heard of the term “Old Breed.” If anybody’s an Old Breed, I guess I would be—one of the guys still around today who was in the service before Pearl Harbor.
I joined the Marine Corps in August 1940, straight out of high school. It was going to be my career. At the time, Hitler was overrunning the low countries of Europe and people were still saying, “We’re never going to get involved over there,” but I got to thinking, Y’know, they’re bombing the hell out of England. We’re going to be in this for sure. I’d gotten out of high school by then and worked as a dispatcher for a trucking company. I was just a country kid who hadn’t been around much, and I always wanted to travel, see the world. America wasn’t at war yet, so I thought that by enlisting early, it would give me the chance to see some stuff before war broke out.
I lived in Bakersfield, California, so they sent me to San Diego to go to boot camp. When I finished boot camp, I went to sea school. My DI at boot camp had recommended that I try to get on a light cruiser, which he considered the best sea duty for a Marine. So I volunteered for a light cruiser, sailed to Hawaii, and went aboard.
In the latter part of September 1940 we sailed the South Pacific and Pacific on goodwill cruises. This was before the attacks on Pearl Harbor. It was considered duty at peacetime, and it was really nice. We had parades and went ashore and marched out to cemeteries and placed flowers at graves, then we’d be free for the rest of the day on liberty. About the middle of 1941, we took a replacement group of Marines out to Wake Island and dropped them off. That was their garrison out there when Wake was bombed.
In October 1941, our cruiser division left Pearl Harbor and sailed to the East Coast to escort convoys to England and other destinations.
On November 10, 1942, we made the first assault on North Africa and landed at a small town named Safi, south of Casablanca. Our mission was to take an airstrip because the planes in the armada coming to make their initial raids were Army planes on carriers, and once they took off they couldn’t land on a carrier again—they needed an airstrip. So we secured this airstrip.
My two years of sea duty were up, so I came back to the States. I still had two years left in my enlistment, and I didn’t want to get out of the service. They were asking for volunteers for the newly formed U.S. Marine Corps Paratroops. I volunteered and was accepted and went to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and went through parachute training, then stayed there as an instructor. It was a great school. The first and second battalions from the school landed at Tulagi. I think we were the first ones to ever parachute in the military. The Army sent a lot of their boys to us. I enjoyed jumping—it’s the most exhilarating thing there is. I made about two hundred jumps, mostly as an instructor. I lost only one kid in my classes—his chute wrapped around him, and he panicked and forgot to pull his reserve. In those days every man had to pack his own chute.
Toward the end of 1943, they formed a new 5th Marine Division out of Camp Pendleton, so the Marine Paratroops were disbanded, and the Marine Raiders were disbanded, and we were all sent to Pendleton to start this new division.
I was assigned as a platoon sergeant to C Company, 27th Marines. I had a platoon of my own—three rifle squads, an attached machine gun squad, one of Basilone’s, and a mortar squad. By that time I’d been around a little bit, and many of the guys were coming in new. Most of them were seventeen to nineteen. I was twenty-two, a few years older than a lot of them. My men called me “the Old Man.”
Camp Pendleton is where I met John Basilone and Clint Watters, two very good friends of mine. We were together all the time we trained these new guys at Pendleton.
CLINTON WATTERS
Basilone was a really fun guy to go with on liberty. He used to put his hat on sideways once in a while, just to be goofy. People knew who he was. Everywhere we went, you would go to a bar some place and sit down, and the drinks would just come to the table—you couldn’t drink them all. We left a lot of times with drinks on the table. People today always talk about how much Basilone drank, but I never saw him overdo it. He liked to goof around, but he was never wild or totally out of hand. I don’t care what’s been said—I never saw him dishonor that medal. Sure, he drank. We all did. But I never saw him go overboard. I think the medal quieted him down from what he might have been before I got to know him up close.
We used to hang around the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles; it was a pretty fancy place. They always had a room for us and took it awfully easy on us as far as cost went. We would split the room cost. They had a rendezvous room, a little dance hall and dining area that we used to go in, a lot of times in the afternoon, and they used to have a little orchestra there and dancers. The women went for John. He was a pretty handsome guy dressed up and everything. And of course him being a big hero—they were all interested.
They also had a bar on the entrance floor. On Saturday mornings after being out on Friday night we would all gather there and guys would come who weren’t even staying there, and they had a little breakfast area and we used to have breakfast together. John and I dated girls from that breakfast room. We took them all kinds of places, including dive bars down on Main Street. Some of those gals had never gone down there and they wanted to see what it was like.
CLARENCE REA
That Biltmore Hotel accepted Marines all through ’43, ’44, until we left, like we were adopted. We couldn’t do anything wrong. The guys would get in fights in there, tear the place up, and hell, they would be back the next night and the hotel would be buying drinks for them.* It was crazy. It was a lot different in World War II than it is today or in Vietnam. They really did treat the service guys great.
Marines could go into high-end clubs like Coconut Grove and Romanoff’s and were welcomed, high-end places that today you would never see a serviceman in. One night we were in there and Charlie Chaplin was there with his wife. Every time somebody in the house would buy you a drink because they saw you in uniform.
One night John and I were in a bar in LA, I think it was Romanoff’s, and we met this guy standing at the bar, he was an attorney. So we got to talking with him, and John had received the Congressional [Medal of Honor] you see; every place he went everybody recognized him from his war bond tours. So this attorney says, “How long are you going to be in town?” John says, “We come up every weekend.” The attorney said, “When you come, call me and I’m going to give you a car for the weekend.” So this attorney did. Every weekend we would come up there, John would call him, and we would have this Chrysler sedan, a beautiful new car. We drove that thing every weekend that we were in Los Angeles. It was just amazing how people treated us.
CLINTON WATTERS
We used to go to the Jungle Room at the Clark Hotel. It wasn’t a great hotel, not a classy place. They had a lounge in there with palm trees and a little band. We had a young Marine, his last name was Phillips as I remember, and he had a really great voice. They used to let him get up there and sing to us, a Marine on stage.
CLARENCE REA
John and I were both dating Marine women. He dated Lena, of course, the girl he eventually married, and I dated another girl who worked with Lena in the camp’s kitchen. We used to go to shows on base with them, or we took hikes out in the hills, stuff like that. If we took them to the city we’d end up at the Biltmore.
CLINTON WATTERS
After John started going with Lena Riggi, he never dated any other gals. He knew who he wanted. Lena was a real nice lady, very strict, quiet, conservative. She was a sergeant in the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve. We would sometimes double-date. In fact, I had a Marine girlfriend that was also a cook. Lena was probably the one that got us together, originally.
After a while he and Lena decided to get married, and John asked me to be his best man. I was happy to do it for him. It felt good to know he felt that way about me.
CLARENCE REA
Lena was a great lady. She reminded me a little of Martha Raye, not that she had a big mouth. But just her actions, the way she talked. Lena was funny. Just a nice lady. She really fell in love with John.
I missed John Basilone’s wedding down at Oceanside because my grandmother had just died and I’d gone home that weekend for the funeral.
In July 1944, John Basilone and Lena Riggi married.
CLINTON WATTERS
The Basilones’ wedding was in held in a Catholic church in Oceanside, California. It was quiet, not that big of an event really. All the guys in his wedding party were Marine sergeants. There were four of us, and the girls were in uniform, too; they were some of Lena’s cook friends who worked with her. Father Bradley was the priest that married them. He was really a nice guy, a young priest at the time. We were wearing our green drab for the wedding. John wore just the little blue Medal of Honor ribbon on his chest, not the medal around his neck. He never made a big deal out of it. We didn’t have the sword thing.
After the ceremony we went to a hotel near the base and had a reception. A lot of Marines attended, of course. There was a lot of champagne, and the people buying it weren’t part of the wedding. It was a really nice party and social time.
CLARENCE REA
On weekends, John used to come home with me because I lived in Bakersfield, California, which was a couple hundred miles from Camp Pendleton. My sister had a ranch where we always had these great Western barbecues. Well, John was from New Jersey, where they didn’t enjoy too many western barbecues and he loved them. He was like one of us. My family loved him. I had two young nieces, maybe ten, eleven years old then, and they thought the world of him.
John wasn’t like what people think he is. He wasn’t a rough, tough Marine like everybody thinks. He was never a braggart or loudmouth. In my days with him, I never saw anything like that. He was the softest kid I ever knew. He wasn’t too big. I called him “the little wop.” He wanted to be a singer, but everybody would tell him to shut up when he started to sing (laughs). He was always trying to sing something. He would try everything. He was kind and generous and a very good instructor. Everybody loved him.
CLINTON WATTERS
After John got married, he never went off without Lena, anywhere. I think he felt he had a good Italian gal and things were going to be great. He never mentioned having a family or getting out of the Marines. He was just happy. I don’t know of anything else that John knew to do, really. He didn’t have the education to get into college or anything. The military was his life.
The Basilones weren’t married very long before we shipped out. He didn’t need to ship out with us, but I think that’s where he felt he belonged. He was respected for this ability, for what he did. He was considered a specialist. He was in his element, being among the guys, the warriors. I think Lena accepted that that was his position.
Here’s a sad fact. All the sergeants in Basilone’s platoon were in his wedding party—me and three others made up the four groomsmen, so with John that made five men total. Out of the five men total in Basilone’s wedding party, three were killed on Iwo, one man lost an arm, and I was wounded, too. So all five of us in the wedding party ended up getting hit.
On August 11, 1944, the 5th Division Marines were told to prepare to ship out to Hawaii the following day. There, they would train for a future island invasion.
CLARENCE REA
On the last night we were in San Diego, we were already on the ship at the dock, but Basilone and I decided that evening we needed to get off that ship one last time and have one last beer. There was no liberty. They had guards at the gates at the docks. We couldn’t just get permission to go, but we saw some garbage trucks going in and out. So Basilone and I climbed in the back of a garbage truck and drove out the gates. It was just a big open truck. A few blocks away, the truck stopped and we hopped out of it.
We partied till about two in the morning, then came back to the ship about two-thirty. The officer of the deck couldn’t say anything when he saw us except “Welcome aboard.” So we got back on board.
CHUCK TATUM
We shipped out and went to a place on Hawaii called Camp Tarawa. We were on this so-called cattle ranch. Camp Tarawa was a great place to train a division because it had a lot of room. It was named such because the 2nd Marine Division had stayed there; heck, they built the camp, after fighting the bloody battle for Tarawa atoll. But it was a horrible place. Nothing like what you imagine Hawaii is like. It was actually a desert. Maybe six thousand feet in elevation. We had rain, snow, hail, everything.
One day we were out in the field cooking, maybe half a mile from camp. We didn’t have any salt or pepper, so Sergeant Windle got ahold of me and said, “Tatum, go see the mess sergeant, and get some salt and pepper for these guys.” So I went to the mess sergeant, but nobody was around. Instead, I saw all these fresh chickens already plucked and just sitting there. I realized the birds were for the officer’s mess, not ours. So I grabbed the salt and pepper and some butter, stuck two of those chickens under my dungarees, and returned to the field camp. I wasn’t wearing a T-shirt, and those chickens were colder then hell. We cut the chicken up and put it in the pot. All was going fine, but all of a sudden there stood a lieutenant with a rifle and an MP. The lieutenant said, “Go with him, you’re under arrest.”
This MP marched me back to the camp. I was put in my tent and told not to leave. Apparently this was a real crime punishable by court-martial: theft from an officer’s mess. I stayed there for a while, until all the guys came back. The corporal said, “Chuck, you really f-ed up this time; the lieutenant wants to see you over at his tent.” So I went over there. I envisioned myself going to the Marine prison. The lieutenant came out and said to me, “Dammit, Tatum, your chicken was just okay. Too much salt, but we ate it all anyway. Now, see those pots and pans over there. Go wash them out, and don’t ever do anything like that ever again.” He laughed.
So that was my punishment.
CLINTON WATTERS
The time was coming to ship out, and we knew it, so John had made arrangements to meet his brother, George, in Hawaii. George was over there already. On our last leave we went to Honolulu and saw him. Even though we were going into battle, I don’t think John went to Mass very often, although it was known that he was religious and wore a rosary, as I recall. We had the chaplains around all the time—I remember they used to even come to our tents sometimes.
We were practicing landings for Iwo. I ended up on an amphibious tractor. We went out and did exercises all day. We came back, and they wanted to refuel the tractors before they were put back in the belly of the LSTs. That LST had barrels of high octane fuel on top, and all kinds of ammo and shells aboard.
They drove us alongside the ship, and the ship dropped down a hose so we could refuel the tractor. This rope got caught on the trigger of the hose and sprayed gasoline all over the tractor’s hull, which was hot from running all day. It caught fire, all over, and fire went up the side of the ship where the gas had also spilled.
Right away, the whole crew deserted that tractor, except me and a couple of my men. The others just dove in the water. I grabbed a fire extinguisher and we fought the fire. When we got it out, I dove in the water where one of the guys was struggling to swim and ended up bringing him back over to the ship so they could get him up.
I’ve always felt that God gave me another opportunity to prove myself then. There would be more chances where we were going.
* The full description of Lutchkus’s advice to the rookie Marines can be found in Tatum’s book, Red Blood, Black Sand.
* Clarence Rea would remember, “If you stop by the Biltmore these days, ask them about the 5th Division Marines who used to hang out there—they’ll remember us.”