Hunter Sniper

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The aftermath of that combat was evident on the hillside. It wasn’t pretty. In places the earth was stained red, so savage had the fighting been. Already a few soldiers were calling it the Battle of Bloody Ridge. The name quickly caught on.

Teams of GIs had retrieved their own dead and wounded, but no one was going to clear away the enemy dead.

And there were a lot of them.

“I’ll be damned,” Deke said, looking across the slope. In the heat of battle, his fight had been limited to what he could see through his scope. Now he took in the overall panorama of the battlefield. A few fires still burned where the flamethrowers had touched. But what really caught his attention were the large numbers of corpses. “That’s a lot of dead Japanese.”

“What I want to know is, When the hell are they going to run out of soldiers?” Philly wondered.

“They didn’t run out today, and I reckon they won’t run out tomorrow,” Deke said.

“The bastards would’ve kept coming if it hadn’t been for the tanks.”

“Saved our bacon,” Deke agreed.

Philly grunted. “And fried theirs,” he said, nodding at a blackened enemy corpse.

Nobody liked to talk about it out loud, but there was something horrible about a flamethrower. Bullets, knives, and bayonets were bad enough. A flamethrower was the stuff of nightmares, the war of the future.

Deke leaned over and tried to spit but came up empty, his mouth too dry. The tangy smell of gunpowder still filled his nostrils.

After being laid low by that fever, he had rallied enough to do some good in the fight. He had managed to shoot that Japanese officer, after all.

But he didn’t feel quite right. He could feel sickness trying to get back in, like some critter gnawing at the edges of a door. A feverish tremor went through him now and again. Deke did his best to ignore it. He had been warned that malaria was like that, coming and going in fits and starts.

Victory at Bloody Ridge felt bittersweet. They had won the fight against the Japanese, but a glance at the wounded lined up on their stretchers showed that the price had been steep. Some of the men had their faces covered, having lost their lives on this nameless ridge. Covering the faces of the dead, even with nothing more than a muddy and bloodstained blanket, was the least that they could do.

After the firefight, many of the survivors slumped down on the ground, exhausted. Adrenaline had coursed through their veins, fueling the fight-or-flight response that stretched back to the dawn of humanity, when the first humans had tangled with lions or maybe a saber-toothed tiger. In this case their only choice had been to fight.

Their bodies had burned through that evolutionary jet fuel, leaving them feeling hollowed out and spent, as if they had just run a marathon. Mixed with the exhaustion was a euphoria at still being alive.

A few men managed to get food into themselves. They craved anything sweet, even wolfing down the tropical chocolate bars that had the consistency of chalk. Others sat quietly, too dazed for words, smoking cigarettes, their hands shaking.

The rear-echelon troops who had plugged the gap and experienced their first real combat felt the most dazed of all, but also proud.

However, there would be no resting on their laurels. The newly blooded soldiers weren’t being given a chance to process what they had just been through, not with more fighting ahead.

“We’re moving out!” shouted Lieutenant Steele, once again reluctantly thrust into a command position. The fight at Bloody Ridge had left another lieutenant under one of those blankets. That left the company with just two officers. Honcho had found himself second in command as Captain Merrick’s company prepared for the final push toward Ormoc.

“But I was just getting comfortable, Honcho,” Philly complained, pushing himself up from where he had sprawled on a patch of soft ground. “How about letting us rest for a while?”

“Get your ass up and moving,” Honcho snapped, sounding uncharacteristically short tempered. “That’s an order, goddammit.”

Surprised, Philly hurried to stand up. “Yes, sir.”

Nearby, the others got to their feet as well and prepared to move out. They could see that this wasn’t the laid-back Honcho who had commanded their sniper squad. He certainly commanded respect, but he had never appeared angry before — until now.

The lieutenant stalked away and shouted at other men who were slow to get to their feet.

“Gee, I wonder what got into his craw?” Philly wondered aloud — once the lieutenant was safely out of earshot.

“Yep, he’s crankier than a moonshiner with a hole in his still,” Deke agreed. It was clear that Honcho was stretched thin, and his customary patience with Philly’s banter had finally snapped. “I wouldn’t go poking at him, if I were you.”

Philly snorted. “No worries there. Where the hell are we going, anyhow? I hope it’s not far. Maybe we can hitch a ride on one of those captured Japanese trucks, or even better, a tank.”

“I don’t think we’re goin’ anywhere good. We cleared those Japanese off the ridge, so our next dance is gonna be in Ormoc, sure as an egg-suckin’ dog finds the henhouse.”

They glanced hopefully in the direction of the trucks, the captured Japanese vehicles painted with the lopsided US stars. There was a wide road ahead that would have meant a smooth ride to Ormoc. However, the trucks were being loaded with the wounded, pointed in the opposite direction, apparently for transport back to the beach. Maybe word had gone out that the navy was ferrying the wounded to the hospital ships once again.

They could see Doc Harmon directing the effort, checking each man as he did so. Some were being left behind on the ground, too badly wounded to transport. It would be only a matter of time before there was a grimy blanket covering their faces, to keep off the flies and the heat of the sun.

Philly sighed. “Looks like we’re walking.”

The men were ordered to assemble at the base of the ridge, in the road that had formed their line during the battle. The sun beat down, and men jostled to get under what little shade was offered by the roadside trees.

Once again they donned their battered helmets and loaded up on ammunition. More C rations were handed around and stuffed into haversacks. Some men slung their rifles, which were starting to feel heavy, but others preferred the reassurance of having a fully loaded M1 in their hands.

They were a motley crew, these fighting soldiers, their fatigues alternately filthy with mud or streaked with white from the soaking in the salt water when they had landed on Leyte. But this was no dress parade. This was setting out to finish the job of liberating Ormoc. These men meant business, and there was no doubt that they looked the part.

With the Japanese finally pushed off the ridge, the road toward Ormoc had been opened. Patrol Easy followed the road through the fields and forest, taking point ahead of the rest of the company.

“I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop,” Philly whispered, nervously scanning the surrounding landscape for any sign of the enemy.

“I hate to tell you this, Philly, but it ain’t gonna be a shoe that drops. It’s gonna be a boot,” Deke said. “And that boot ain’t gonna drop. No, sir. It’s gonna kick us in the ass. Keep your eyes open.”

“What the hell do you think I’m doing? I wasn’t planning on taking a nap.”

Like his buddy, Deke moved cautiously, alert for any sign of an ambush. Despite the scene of destruction that they had left behind, they had not completely wiped out the Japanese back on the ridge, so the question was, Where had the enemy gone?

Ideally, Deke thought, the enemy would have jumped in the ocean and swum all the way back to Japan, but that was wishful thinking.

If the enemy wasn’t out here somewhere waiting for them, then they had fallen back to Ormoc and would be waiting for them there. Neither prospect was particularly appealing.

Their battered company wasn’t the only one moving into position. Most of the entire division was converging on Ormoc. In the distance, when there were breaks in the trees, revealing a vista of open rice paddies, Deke could see another unit following a path parallel to their own. Deke had waved at them, making sure that they had seen him, in order to avoid any surprises down the road.

There had been more than one situation where soldiers had been killed by friendly fire, which was easy enough in the confusion of the jungle landscape.

The day’s heat bore down, the air feeling heavier by the moment. Sweat slicked the men’s faces, rolled down the backs of their necks, soaked their uniforms. It was almost enough to make them wish for another beach to storm, just for the chance to cool off in the surf.

Like a pot of old stew simmering on the back of a hot stove, Deke had felt troublesome waves of the fever that had afflicted him earlier returning. At first he had tried to ignore it. Then he had stumbled now and again, starting to feel dizzy.

Danilo had given him a knowing, concerned look. The Filipino guide was more than aware of the ebb and flow of the various jungle fevers. They receded like the tide and then came racing back in.

“Are you all right?” Philly asked, after Deke stumbled for a second time.

“Just tired, is all.”

“If you say so. I can tell Doc Harmon about it. Maybe he’s got some pills to fix you right up.”

Deke might have argued that this was a bad idea, that the surgeon might put him in a truck with the other wounded and send him back to the beach, but he was feeling too tired to argue.

It was true that their numbers had been bolstered by the cooks, truck drivers, and mechanics who had not returned to their field kitchens and maintenance yards but had been set on the road to Ormoc. For the fight at Ormoc, where the Japanese planned to make a stand in the streets, the division was going to need every man it had to be carrying a rifle.

They followed the road toward the city, occasionally passing detritus left behind by the retreating Japanese, everything from broken crates to discarded gas masks and an occasional dented canteen. Once or twice they passed a wounded soldier who had succumbed and whose body had been left behind. The GIs studied the bodies with curiosity, hoping for some clue to the enemy. But dead men told no tales. The GIs trudged on down the road.

In places the road ran through wide rice paddies, the sun sparkling off the water that lay in the flooded fields. They passed a few small houses that looked abandoned and forlorn. There was no sign of the Japanese.

Ormoc was a place that few Americans had heard of before late 1944, and it was a name that few would remember in the intervening years, with the exception of those who had been there and perhaps lost a buddy in the street fighting or during combat with Japanese holdouts in the surrounding jungle.

The name itself had come from “Ogmok” in the old Visayan language — a precursor to the modern Tagalog spoken by Filipinos — from a word that meant “low-lying place.” The name hinted at the abundant rice fields on the city’s outskirts.

Perhaps it was not an auspicious name, but the sprawling, small city always had been a busy port, going back centuries, so it had a worldliness to it that belied its remote location.

Stretching back centuries, Ormoc had been a seaside trading village. The Spanish had arrived in 1595 but had never seemed to put their stamp on the place, as they had in larger towns. Ormoc looked and felt very much Filipino.

Given this history of watching the world come and go, there wasn’t much that the people of Ormoc hadn’t seen, and not much surprised them.

Yet it remained a welcoming place. The seaside port had the easy, languid feel of many tropical towns. There was an innocence about the city when the Japanese were out of sight and the city wasn’t under threat of imminent attack. It was rare to see a man in a suit. Younger teenage boys rarely wore anything more than shorts, and the girls went about barefoot in colorful skirts.

You might say that Ormoc was busy but not ambitious. Few buildings were more than two stories high, and judging from the humble nature of even these taller buildings, there was very little wealth in the town. It didn’t help that the war had squeezed dry what little commerce there was, wringing out the local businesses like a sweaty bandanna.

Although the town was pleasant and friendly, it had a ramshackle appearance and made no effort at order or neatness. Even the houses along the waterfront, with its beautiful view of the bay, looked as if they had survived one typhoon too many. These buildings near the waterfront tended to be the largest structures in town.

The streets were winding, unpaved, passing between tightly packed small houses covered in stucco and with tin roofs. Many of the houses occupied miniature compounds with fences or even walls around the cramped yards. Muddy brown chickens scratched in the dirt, and friendly, tan-colored dogs wandered everywhere.

Despite the poverty and oppression by the occupiers, the residents had not lost their love of plants. Entire fronts of houses were taken up with rows of potted plants, sometimes stacked on rickety wooden shelves several rows high. Lush greenery grew in every yard and untended corner, giving the town the appearance of being one sprawling garden. All in all, Ormoc was a town that a Western visitor found easy to love — as long as there weren’t any bullets flying.

Considering that the Japanese preferred everything to be neat and tidy, which was the opposite inclination of the average Ormoc resident, it was easy to see how from their perspective the occupants of the city might be inferior. The residents had been treated accordingly.

To that end, an entire element of the port city’s population was absent. The older boys and men had long since been rounded up to work as slave labor on the Japanese defensive projects, such as the bunkers at Ipil. Without any heavy equipment, most of the work had been done with buckets and shovels, requiring backbreaking effort in the tropical heat. There was little food or rest.

The Japanese were harsh taskmasters. Treated cruelly, given little to eat and forced to work long hours, many of these Filipinos would never return home.

With a battle imminent, it was fortunate that most of the residents had fled. Where they had gone was anybody’s guess, but they had likely hidden in the surrounding forests and rice paddies.

It was only the Japanese who now occupied Ormoc, and they had turned the entire city into a fortress. Sandbags had been placed around the sturdier stucco houses, which now bristled with machine guns. Soldiers had dug trenches at key crossroads and corners, enabling them to command long fields of fire along the city streets.

A few of the bunkers even contained field artillery or antiaircraft guns that had been turned from the skies to the streets to deal with any tanks that appeared.

The tropical buildings typically did not have cellars or basements, but soldiers had created dugouts in the crawl spaces, enabling them to shoot from beneath.

Snipers hid themselves in the upper floors of shops and houses. With some water and a few rations, they waited patiently for the arrival of the Americans.

All in all, capturing Ormoc wasn’t going to be easy.

Ultimately, it was a fight that the Japanese must have known that they could not win, but they were prepared to sacrifice themselves and the city itself if it meant slowing down the US advance.

In a sense, the fight taking place at Ormoc was a microcosm of the Japanese situation. All around the Pacific, the noose was tightening around the Japanese. The strands of the web that held their sprawling empire together were snapping, one by one.

Had the Japanese really believed that they could command an empire that stretched across such a vast expanse? True, Japan was a powerful and determined nation, but it lacked the necessary natural resources to maintain its war machine — chiefly rubber and oil. Its army and navy operated independent of one another, and joint operations were undertaken more in a spirit of grudging cooperation than under a combined command structure. It was no way to fight a world war — but no one seemed to have told that to the Japanese.

Finally, their attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor seemed to have been an act of supreme hubris. They had provoked a powerful nation in the worst way possible. Admiral Yamamoto had said it best, saying that Japan had awoken a sleeping giant.

The people of the United States had willingly joined forces with the beleaguered nations of Europe to fight Nazi Germany. In the view of the US government, the war in Europe came first. For all Germany’s aggression in Europe, Nazi forces had never attacked the US outright — although they had certainly schemed to do so. Sure, Americans fought Nazi Germany because it was a job that needed to be done.

But the Japanese had attacked in the most despicable way possible. In the minds of many, the attack on sleepy Pearl Harbor seemed more like an act of murder than an act of war. Consequently, many Americans felt a special enmity toward the Japanese that had carried over to the island battlefields across the Pacific.

They may have found themselves increasingly surrounded, but the Japanese only fought harder. Their backs were to the wall. Despite tremendous losses, they provided a seemingly endless supply of soldiers and planes and ships. Fewer each day, perhaps, but still a threat.

Although it was far beyond the pay grade of the average soldier, plans were already being made at the highest levels for the eventual assault on the Japanese home islands. Iwo Jima, the smaller Ryukyu islands, and then Okinawa would be in the crosshairs. Losses promised to be heavy.

No one liked to talk about it, but after those large stepping stones would come the attack on Japan itself. Knowing the way the Japanese fought so desperately, the combat losses promised to be almost incalculable. Would the American public be able to stomach such losses? These were the sort of thoughts that kept men like Douglas MacArthur and the president, FDR, awake at night.

But if the military planners remained two steps ahead, the troops on the ground still needed to deal with the business before them. Ormoc and Leyte itself could not be left in Japanese hands.

In Ormoc, there had been fewer blatant atrocities than in other population centers in the Philippines. Instead, the Japanese had primarily controlled the population by threatening to starve them and by abducting their men and boys as slave labor. If they behaved, there were vague promises that their men might be returned.

The vast rice fields in the region were quite productive. Most food production had been channeled to feed the Japanese military, with whatever the farmers produced being taken from them.

If local officials did not cooperate, the supply of rice to the civilian population would be cut off. The threat of famine made a very effective whip.

Although local officials gave the appearance of collaborating with the Japanese, they also walked a dangerous tightrope by also staying in communication with guerrilla forces. It was a dangerous game that they played with the Kempeitai — the Japanese military police, who surely suspected what the local officials were up to and used all the informants at their disposal to catch them in the act.

It didn’t help matters that the Kempeitai was itself corrupt, with everyone from the commander on down working to fill his own pockets with bribes. In addition to black market foodstuffs, there were the profits from brothels and bars to consider. All in all, occupied Ormoc was a tangled web, indeed.

Given this tableau of misery, the people of Ormoc had cheered when news arrived of the US landing on the other side of the island. But now the war had arrived within the city itself, with all its destructive force. There would be a price to pay for liberation.

The sun was still high in the sky when the first US troops crept cautiously down the empty streets. The Japanese held their fire, letting the enemy get well within firing range.

Their fingers on their triggers, they waited.

Deke, Philly, Yoshio, and Danilo were among the first of those soldiers entering the city. Right behind them came Honcho and a handful of the rear-echelon troops who had been pressed into service, mixed with veterans from Captain Merrick’s company.

The more inexperienced men were doing their best to follow Honcho’s orders and imitate the combat men who scurried from one building to another, covering one another in the process.

“It’s awfully damn quiet,” Philly whispered to no one in particular. “I don’t like it.”

“Don’t you worry your pretty head,” Deke said. “I reckon it’s about to get real noisy around here.”