Jungle Sniper

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Seconds after Deke’s warning, the Japanese attack arrived with furious force. Enemy soldiers launched themselves at the Americans in the trench, live grenades held in each hand. They leaped down before anyone could stop them, blowing themselves and any nearby GIs to kingdom come.

The suicidal fervor of the Japanese made the attack that much more terrifying — how did you fight back against soldiers who were already so eager to die?

Flares shot overhead, illuminating the scene with a ghostly light. Deke spotted a Japanese soldier running at them and fired. The soldier had been hanging on to a couple of grenades, which detonated with earsplitting blasts. Bits of rock and dirt rained down on their section of trench. Something warm and wet that Deke didn’t want to think about glopped across his face.

“Watch it!” Philly shouted.

Deke whirled, too late to stop a Japanese officer who leaped into the trench to their left, flailing all around him with a sword in one hand and a pistol in the other. In the light from the flares, they could see that the officer’s face was contorted in rage, a perfect picture of battle madness. The small Japanese pistol barely made more than a cracking sound, but it was deadly enough to drop a couple of men.

Deke, Philly, and Yoshio fired almost simultaneously, the shots striking the officer and knocking him down. Deke worked the bolt and put another round into the man for good measure. Even so, he half expected the Japanese officer to leap to his feet and attack them all over again.

This was the weapon that shook the American soldiers more than a Nambu machine gun or a dive-bombing Zero — the sheer fanaticism of the Japanese attacks. The enemy came out of the darkness like the Japanese yōkai demons of folklore, something inhuman, screaming in a language they couldn’t understand. Holding live grenades, or wielding swords, the enemy had clearly come to die at close range. In doing so, they would take as many GIs with them as they could.

This mindset was something the Americans simply could not understand. Sure, there were times when a heroic soldier might make a last stand, selling his life dearly, knowing that he wouldn’t survive. For the Japanese, suicidal attacks seemed to be a military strategy. Every enemy soldier they killed was making his last stand on this hill. It was hard to fathom.

“Aaaeiie!” a soldier screamed, running at the trench with a fixed bayonet.

Deke pulled the trigger and dropped him. At his elbow, Yoshio fired at a soldier who had belly crawled to within grenade-throwing range of the trench.

The soldier rolled behind a rock just as Yoshio fired, causing him to miss. He worked the bolt, but the rifle was empty. There wasn’t time to reload.

“Deke!” Yoshio shouted.

“Got him,” Deke replied, nailing the soldier just as he sprang up to hurl his grenades. The soldier slumped down, followed seconds later by the twin blasts of his grenades at a safe distance from the trench.

The Japanese kept coming. Yet another soldier materialized and dove for the trench as if the darkness had spit him out like a watermelon seed. He landed right between Deke and Yoshio. Neither man even had the space in which to raise his weapon. Fortunately, neither did the enemy soldier, but that wasn’t his plan. He wasn’t armed with hand grenades or a rifle. Instead, he was carrying a long Japanese knife known as a tantō. He slashed at Deke, who twisted away, the blade hissing through the air where his face had been a split second before.

Clutching the rifle in his left hand, Deke grabbed for the bowie knife that he had stuck in the wall of the trench. His hand closed around the bone handle, and he pulled it free. Again, he had to dodge away as the Japanese soldier swung the tantō at him. As the momentum of the enemy soldier’s swing carried his arm away, Deke jabbed with the knife. The razor-sharp blade sank into the soldier’s belly. Deke shoved it the rest of the way in and buried the knife to the hilt.

At that moment, Yoshio hit the Japanese soldier over the head with his rifle barrel. Deke yanked the knife free, and the enemy soldier sank to his knees, several inches of mountain-forged steel having carved a hole in his belly. Yoshio hit the enemy soldier on the head again, and he finally went down.

No more soldiers rushed at them out of the darkness. It had been a desperate fight, lasting no more than a few minutes, but it had felt like an eternity. Deke found himself gasping for breath. That Jap was crazy as a mad dog. He stuck the knife back in the wall of the trench and got both hands on the rifle again, ready for whatever came next.

Up and down the trench, similar scenes were playing out. Sometimes the GIs got the Japanese before they threw their grenades into the trench; sometimes they didn’t. It was a brutal game of luck and timing, with life or death being the stakes. Finally the Japanese seemed to exhaust themselves. Those attackers who had survived slipped back into the enemy defenses to lick their wounds and regroup.

“That’s it, that’s it. Cease fire! We got them all!” Lieutenant Steele shouted. Up and down the trench, other officers and sergeants called out the same orders. Those shouts were soon followed by others.

“Medic!” someone called desperately. “Oh, for the love of God, where’s the doc? Hurry it up!”

Deke kept his eyes trained on the darkness, but asked, “Philly? Yoshio? You fellas all right?”

“Yes,” Yoshio said quietly.

“I dunno,” Philly replied after a moment’s hesitation. “It’s too soon to tell. Ask me in the morning.”

Deke knew just what he meant. There would likely be more attacks by the Japanese, each one increasingly desperate. It was going to be a long night.

With the coming of night, Ikeda and his snipers welcomed a chance to join the attacks taking place against the American position. They had been killing from a distance, but this would be an opportunity to make the fight up close and personal. The stalemate must end, he thought. The Americans must be pushed off this hill.

A young officer organized the attack, leading a group of about fifty men against the enemy. All around the hill, similar attacks were being organized, but this seemed to be the largest group. Ikeda saw that the strategy was to overwhelm the Americans by attacking from several points at once.

And then what? Before darkness descended, he had seen the numbers of troops still arriving on the beach. If they pushed these soldiers off the hill, the Americans would only send more.

Due to attrition, the junior officers seemed to be getting younger and younger. The young officer was armed with a sword and a pistol. He appeared almost gleeful, as if he could not wait to die for the Emperor and for Japan. Ikeda was not much older than the lieutenant, but he couldn’t help thinking, You young fool.

“It is easy enough to die,” Ikeda muttered. “Let’s try killing a few of the enemy first.”

“Sir?” asked one of his sogekihei snipers who crouched nearby.

“Never mind.”

Many of the Japanese soldiers had forgone their rifles or carbines and had laden themselves with hand grenades to maximize the damage against the enemy. The strategy was to get in among the Americans and kill as many as possible with the grenades. Several soldiers expressed their eagerness to die in the process. Others simply accepted their fate grimly and silently. They might not want to die, but they had little choice.

“Hang back and let the men with the grenades do their work,” Ikeda quietly told his handful of men. He did not want to be overheard by the fanatical young lieutenant, who might think of them as cowards. But Ikeda did not see the point of dying needlessly. If all the soldiers were killed, there would be no one left to fight. A broken knife does not cut. “Use your rifles to pick off any enemy soldiers that you see; then we will withdraw. We will live to fight another day.”

As expected, the lieutenant drew his sword and led the attack. In the darkness, Ikeda could see the glint of the officer’s blade going down the hill. The group moved slowly at first, as quietly as possible. They picked up speed as they crossed the final few yards in front of the American position. It was hard to make out anything in the darkness, and the attackers spread out and became disorganized. Were they even going in the right direction? Once again, Ikeda caught a glimpse of the sword bobbing up and down as the officer ran.

“Follow me,” he whispered, and led his squad that way.

At first it seemed as if the Japanese might fall upon the unsuspecting Americans in total surprise. However, something gave them away — perhaps the scuff of a boot on a rock, or the metallic clink of a string of grenades as the Japanese ran.

The Americans opened fire into the darkness, one of their machine guns blazing in the night. Rapid muzzle flashes from rifles followed, the Americans having the advantage of the rapid-firing M1 rifles and their BAR weapons. A flare was launched, bathing the scene in ghostly shades of white. The hillside that had been cloaked in darkness was now revealed, including the running figures of Japanese soldiers.

“Get down!” Ikeda ordered his men. There was no hope of reaching the trench without being cut down. “Fire! Choose your targets!”

He got to one knee, put his rifle to his shoulder, and fired at one of the enemy machine gunners illuminated by the muzzle flashes. The gun fell silent.

Ikeda had made sure to be in the attack that hit the American position roughly where the enemy sniper was located. But in the confusion, it was impossible to tell whom he was shooting at.

He saw their lieutenant, screaming a battle cry now, slashing with his sword as he leaped down into the trench. There were two quick muzzle flashes, and the lieutenant went down.

All along the line came the sound of explosions as the attackers set off their grenades. Even from this distance, he felt the concussion in his bones. He soon heard the screams of the wounded and the Americans shouting for medics.

Medics made good targets. When he spotted one of the medics with his white armband in the flashes of light, he shot him.

The attack had been savage. There was no doubt about that. But the Americans had clearly been expecting it, and their overwhelming firepower soon brought it to an end. There was no one left to order a retreat and no one to follow such an order, anyhow. Of the assault force, Ikeda and his men were the only ones who returned. This was no way to win a war, Ikeda thought.

During the night, orders came to withdraw into the deep caves and tunnels that honeycombed the hillside.

“The Americans will have to dig us out!” an officer said gleefully. It sounded like Major Noguchi. “They will never take this hill!”

Perhaps it was a sound strategy, perhaps not. The hillside definitely offered deep defenses. However, Ikeda had no desire to fight from underground, trapped like a rat. Perhaps that strategy suited Major Noguchi, who had dressed for his own funeral today, but Ikeda had other plans.

Before first light, when the American planes would begin to fly again, Ikeda led his men into the jungle.

In the morning, Deke and the others were surprised to find that the enemy positions across from them were mostly vacant. There were a few potshots to harass them, but not the withering fire that they had experienced yesterday. Most of the Japanese defenders appeared to have vanished.

“What I’d like to know is, where did all the Japs go?” Philly wondered.

Deke nodded at the slope above, littered with bodies in brown uniforms. “That’s where they went,” Deke said. “Look at ’em all.”

Daylight had revealed the numbers of Japanese troops that had attacked during the night, only to be mowed down by the sheer volume of fire that had come from the US position. Most of the Japanese spread across the hillside were dead, but not all. A few of the men moved, badly wounded, crawling to who knew where. Shots rang out from the US position, putting the wounded out of their misery. Yoshio winced.

“So many dead. They have gone to meet their ancestors,” Yoshio said quietly.

Philly snorted. “Yeah? Well, good luck to them. I’m in no hurry to meet my ancestors, that’s for damn sure. I’ll bet my granddad is up there right now, getting drunk all day with Saint Peter. And I don’t want to spend eternity with my uncle Fred, who told corny jokes all the time.”

“Perhaps the Japanese have a different view,” Yoshio said.

“If you say so. Like I said, I’m in no hurry to meet up with any of my ancestors. As for the family I’ve got that’s still living, seeing them at Christmas and Easter is enough — never mind eternity. How about you, Deke?”

Deke thought about his father and mother, his grandparents, old neighbors he had known. Good people. Ben Hemphill dead on the beach in Guam. Just another kid who was never meant to be a soldier. He shook his head. “You know what, Philly? Sometimes you talk too much. You don’t know when the hell to shut up.”

Philly could see that he had touched a nerve. “All right, don’t get sore,” he said quickly.

With daylight, the order came to push up the hill. Nothing was easy about it. Although the number of dead enemy soldiers seemed to indicate that the defenders had been wiped out, there were many troops still facing them, but not in the numbers that had confronted them before.

The Japanese had hidden rifle pits and tunnel entrances everywhere, popping out to fire on the soldiers. Frustrated GIs soon began tossing grenades into any hole they could find. Satchel charges were used to seal up the larger tunnel entrances.

Nearby, a knot of soldiers was engaged in pouring gasoline down what appeared to be an air vent into an underground passage. They took a step back and tossed a lit match at the vent. Instantly flames raced underground.

It was hard to know whether the Japanese had an escape route elsewhere on the hill, or if they were trapped inside for good. Nobody gave a damn that they were burying men alive, or if they did realize it, they tried not to think too much about it.

After all, it was hard to have much sympathy for the Japanese. The butcher’s bill had been heavy. More than twenty men had died on the hill, with twice as many wounded. Most of those had been lost in the vicious nighttime attacks by the Japanese.

Patrol Easy had been lucky, but that luck hadn’t extended to the unit that they had accompanied here. Many of the dead had been replacements, and their war had been all too short. Back home, telegrams would soon be going out to shatter the lives of the fathers and mothers, or wives and children, of the soldiers who wouldn’t be coming back from Hill 522.

“You remember what the Filipinos call this place?” Yoshio asked. “Guinhangdan Hill.”

“Guinhangdan,” Deke drawled, stumbling over the pronunciation. “The name might be hard to say, but nobody is gonna forget that place anytime soon.”

As they pushed up the hill, there was little respite for the weary GIs. No one had gotten any sleep for a couple of days now, other than grabbing a few minutes here and there. They had been living off cold rations and tepid canteen water — and there was precious little of that as the heat of the day began building again.

Through the haze and smoke, they could see the accumulation of US troops on the beach, everything from makeshift tents to groups of tanks and trucks were now ashore. The beach was looking more and more like a parking lot.

Another welcome sight were the formations of planes overhead, on the prowl for any Japanese resistance. These were all navy flyboys. It had been a long time since anyone had seen a Japanese plane — most had long since been blown out of the sky.

By midafternoon, the last push for the summit came. Men stormed toward the battery in the cave, their rifles loaded and at the ready. By now the attackers had it down to a science. They hurled in grenades and charges, ducked and covered, and the earth shook with the force of the explosions. It took just a few minutes to finally wipe out the battery. At long last, the Japanese artillery on the hilltop was silenced. The surviving enemy soldiers had been buried alive underground. Except for a few stray Japanese soldiers, Hill 522 was now in American hands.

The soldiers spent the remainder of the day mopping up or wandering among the many Japanese dead, collecting weapons and other souvenirs. Not everyone wanted to participate in that, thinking it wasn’t right somehow — or maybe they just had an aversion to being around so many dead bodies starting to decompose in the heat. The smell grew more unpleasant as the sun rose higher. Swarms of flies appeared and settled over the bodies. When it came time to eat, the GIs desperately shooed flies off their food, knowing full well that those same flies had been resting on the body of a dead Japanese just a short time before.

Worst of all were the ants, which scurried across the faces of the dead in large numbers, making scavenging forays into ears and nostrils. The sight made more than one soldier shudder, thinking that if he’d been a little less lucky, that would be him out there covered in ants.

Even Philly contented himself with retrieving the sword from the Japanese officer they had killed the night before, and he didn’t venture into the killing field to search for more souvenirs.

“Why, Philly, I reckoned you’d be busy emptying the pockets of those dead Japs.”

“Just more to carry,” he said by way of an excuse.

No orders came to bury the dead.

“Let ’em rot,” said an officer. “Do you think that the Japs would have bothered to bury your stinking carcass if it had been the other way around?”

Nobody could argue with the officer’s perspective, but it still didn’t sit right with a lot of the men.

For the rest of their time on the hill, the men of the battalion looked for caves and tunnels that might be housing Japanese troops. They also killed a number of rats and snakes.

The men who had fought so hard for the hill were exhausted, their uniforms soaked with sweat and blood that was not their own. But they had won.

“I’ll be damned,” Deke muttered, looking around at the carnage. “I was halfway thinking that we wouldn’t be here today.”

“I hope you’re not disappointed,” Philly said. Like a lot of soldiers, he had embraced a black sense of humor. “Besides, the day is young. There’s still plenty of time for us to get killed.”