Pacific Sniper

Chapter Eleven

No sooner had Deke and the rest of the squad dug in as best as they could in the hard volcanic soil than the rain that had been threatening on the horizon arrived.

Rain in the tropics wasn’t quite like anywhere else. The rain clouds seemed to build up momentum while crossing the vast expanses of the Pacific, soaking up moisture like a sponge. Once over land, those clouds seemed determined to wring themselves out. Torrents of rain fell, washing the dust of battle from the fronds of the coconut and palm trees overhead. The hard-packed ground couldn’t drain fast enough, and deep puddles formed. Thunder rumbled as darkness fell and lightning flashed. Deke had experienced his share of mountain storms back home, but for some reason, being on an island made the experience feel more like being on a ship at sea.

Deke hunkered down. The foxhole that he and Philly had dug soon began to fill with rainwater. Their boots and uniforms were soaked through. The rain had brought chill air, and their teeth chattered from the cold.

“It would be a hell of a thing to freeze to death on Guam,” Philly complained.

“Yeah, your chances of getting a Jap bayonet in the gut are a lot better.”

“Now that’s a thought to warm anybody up,” Philly said. “Thanks for that.”

Neither of them could resist turning a nervous eye toward Private Shimizu, who had been put into the foxhole by them. Quietly, he had done his part digging. He now sat with the brim of his helmet dipped low over his eyes, a cascade of water flowing off it, looking as miserable as they felt.

Deke’s wide-brimmed hat provided some measure of protection against the downpour, keeping the rain from running down the back of his neck. He unsnapped the other side to provide more protection. The hat was a useful item in the tropics, all right.

As another tropical night approached, they all settled in, digging foxholes as deep as they could in the island soil. Remembering what they had gone through the previous night with constant Japanese attacks, no one argued about laboring to dig his foxhole. The deeper the hole, the better one’s chances of survival.

“You know, it’s funny,” Philly said.

“What is?” Deke asked.

“I would have thought that being a good soldier meant being good with a rifle. In reality, it means you’re good with a shovel.”

“Just shut up and dig.”

The only one who seemed to have trouble digging his foxhole was Private Shimizu. After a half hour of steady toil, it seemed as if he had barely scratched much more than a shallow hole into the tough, coral soil.

Philly wasn’t shy about pointing out that the hole wasn’t sufficient.

“Better dig deeper,” Philly warned him. “You might look like those Japs, but they’re going to shoot you all the same.”

Shimizu went back to shoveling. After a while, he straightened up and looked over at Deke. Philly had gone to bum cigarettes off the next squad over.

“Do you think that this is deep enough?” Shimizu asked.

Deke just shrugged.

“You don’t like me much, do you? I can tell.”

“Listen, kid, I just don’t care about you, one way or the other. The last buddy I looked out for got himself killed, and there wasn’t a damn thing that I could do about it. You’re better off on your own.”

“What about Philly?”

“Philly can handle himself. It’s you I’m not so sure about. We’ll see if you even last the night.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean you’ll probably get killed, that’s what.”

Shimizu shook his head and went back to digging, probably wishing that he was back at HQ on the beach, interrogating enemy prisoners — although those tended to be few and far between. The enemy hadn’t shown himself to be much in favor of surrender.

The sound of distant gunfire was punctuated only by the dig and scrape of shovels nearby. Finally, the sun began to dip toward the horizon and another night of hell.

Little did the men know that the attacks of the previous night had been no more than harassment. Hidden in the lengthening shadows of the jungle, emerging from their hiding places and the tunnels where they had concealed themselves, more than six thousand Japanese soldiers were preparing to attack the thin American lines at dawn.

Despite the threat of attack, the soldiers managed to sleep fitfully during the night. They came fully awake only when one of the guard dogs attached to an adjacent company began barking madly.

“Somethin’ has got that dog riled up.”

“That dog smells Japs, that’s what,” Deke said.

As it turned out, Deke was right. The next warning of an attack came when a flare was launched into the sky, floating down and illuminating the scene before them.

“Is that one of their flares or one of ours?” Philly wanted to know.

“Don’t matter,” Cole said, jacking a shell into his rifle.

In the sudden glare of light, he looked around and took stock of their position. The sniper squad had been rolled into another company to anchor its flank. Ingram and Alphabet were to his right, then Rodeo. Lieutenant Steele had squeezed himself into the foxhole that Shimizu had dug, sharing it with him. As foxholes went, it was more like a shack than a mansion, but it would have to do.

“Here they come!” the lieutenant shouted. “Get ready!”

“Guess it’s one of theirs,” Philly said. “See? I told you so.”

The warning from Lieutenant Steele hadn’t been necessary. From the cover of the jungle vegetation, they could hear bugles blowing and shouts in the strange, guttural Japanese tongue. It had been said that German was a warlike language, but to Deke’s ears, Japanese was a close second. From the jungle, they even heard the clash of metal and what sounded like a sword slithering from a sheath. In the darkness, the sound was even more frightening.

Deke tightened his grip on the rifle, but he didn’t put it to his shoulder just yet. There were no targets to be seen.

Off to his left, a few soldiers began shooting into the dark undergrowth.

“Those boys are wasting ammo,” he grumped at Philly, who was poised in the foxhole beside him. “There ain’t nothin’ to shoot at.”

Lieutenant Steele seemed to agree. “Hold your fire!” he shouted.

The chorus of potshots slackened but did not stop altogether.

The noises from the dark jungle grew louder, like a storm rumbling on the horizon, but did not yet break.

“I wish they would get this over with.”

Then came several bugle calls at once, followed by troops shouting “Banzai!” three times in rapid succession.

From the darkness, a roar of voices seemed to coalesce into one. Muzzle flashes stabbed the predawn darkness. The front seemed impossibly wide — the number of attackers looked overwhelming.

More flares were launched, adding a surreal light to the scene. Before them were hundreds, if not thousands, of Japanese troops. It was hard to pick out any single soldier. Instead, the overall effect was that of a roiling brown-and-tan mass, like an angry wave boiling over the land, coming right at them. The sea of uniforms was broken only by the occasional flash of color from an Imperial Japanese flag, white and red in the gloom. Deke was at a loss to pick out any individual target, so he held his fire.

“Holy shit, will you look at that!” Philly exclaimed. “That must be the whole damn Jap army. Shimizu, come up here and yell at them to stop.”

“I do not think that will work,” said the Nisei interpreter, who had somehow found his way into their foxhole.

“Maybe not, but this ought to send the right message,” said Philly, who began firing his M1.

Deke reached over and smacked him on the helmet. “What are you even shooting at, Philly? Knock it off. You’re just wasting ammo.”

He emptied the clip, slapped in another. “I just want to thin them out some.”

As it turned out, the machine gunners were doing a better job of that. Long streamers of fire stretched across no-man’s-land, mowing down swaths of enemy troops wherever the fire hose of flame touched the approaching brown wall.

The Japanese kept screaming, “Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!”

Deke knew that he should have been terrified. Maybe part of him was. But mainly he found himself captivated by the scene. The charge was magnificent, a grand spectacle. He reckoned that his ancestors had seen the same thing at Gettysburg. He knew how that had turned out. Did the Japs think they knew better? Bullets whistled overhead, but he couldn’t seem to tear himself away from the sight or even bring his rifle to bear.

Although the flares lit the gloom, they wouldn’t be needed for long. To the east, the sun was just beginning to rise, appearing as a red glow on the horizon of the endless sea.

Deke was brought back to his senses when a bullet snapped past his ear. He ducked deeper into the foxhole. If he wasn’t careful, this attack was going to be the last sight that he ever saw.

He raised his rifle. The front ranks of the banzai charge were crossing the ground at a run, much closer now. Deke put his sights on a Japanese officer who was running at them with a sword. Crazy bastard, he thought. He killed the man with a single shot that dropped him in his tracks.

Deke worked the bolt, settled the crosshairs on a man carrying one of those Japanese flags. Both the flag and the soldier fell into the dry coral dust of Guam and didn’t stir.

All along the American line, the soldiers’ fire was taking a similar toll, with the machine gunners proving to be the deadliest. Gaps now appeared in the Japanese line — and yet they were still coming.

“Don’t these Nip bastards get the message?” Philly wondered, putting another clip into his weapon. “Even if they don’t speak English, getting shot at is kind of a universal language.”

“Watch those bastards on the flank,” Deke warned. “They’re trying to get around us.”

Indeed, a knot of soldiers had broken free from the rest, and the attackers were trying to run for the end of the American position to get in behind the foxholes. Fortunately, Deke wasn’t the only one who had spotted them. There was a sudden burst from a machine gun, and the knot of attackers was cut down as if by a scythe. Soon enough, another group took their place. It was all too clear that the Japanese strategy involved more than a blind attack. They were trying to flank the Americans. If that happened, the defense might very well fall apart.

Lieutenant Steele suddenly appeared, running at a crouch.

“Come with me,” he said. “We’ve got to keep those Nips from getting behind us.”

Deke and Philly leaped from their foxhole and followed. Deke saw Shimizu hesitate, not sure if the order included him, and then he scrambled out after them.

Following Steele, they ran behind the American line, dodging stretchers and frantic GIs, who were starting to fall back as the Japanese attack pressed closer. It was all too clear that this was soon going to become a hand-to-hand combat situation.

Although the fire against the banzai attack had been devastating, the Japanese fire also had taken its toll. Everywhere they looked, wounded men lay on stretchers or were simply on the ground. Medics ran from one wounded man to another, trying to do what they could for them. For many, it was too late. They stared sightlessly up at the dawn sky.

“Hurry it up!” Steele urged.

Soon, they reached the flank. Sure enough, here came another group of Japanese attackers, bayonets fixed, howling like savages. The handful of surviving soldiers looked ready to run, but Steele wouldn’t let them.

“Pour it into them!” he shouted. “Don’t let those Nips get any closer!”

The fire from the foxholes increased as the enemy attack grew even closer. The lieutenant leveled his shotgun, and the big boom of the twelve-gauge joined in. At this range, one-eyed or not, he really couldn’t miss. A soldier who had outpaced the others was flung back by the buckshot.

Deke jumped into a foxhole, picked a target, and fired. Another enemy soldier fell. He worked the bolt, fired again. The Japanese were so close now that he could make out individual faces — although they seemed contorted by rage, all screaming at the top of their lungs.

He put his sights on another soldier and dropped him. He fired again, then reached for another clip.

Looking up, Deke saw that Shimizu was still standing above the foxhole. He had his rifle pointed toward the enemy and was blazing away, but he was making himself a target.

Cursing, Deke reached up and grabbed a handful of the fabric on Shimizu’s trousers and pulled him down. “What the hell are you doing? Get down.”

Shimizu tumbled into the foxhole just as something exploded nearby. The Japs were close enough now to throw grenades.

Deke shoved Shimizu off him and got back on the rifle. The Japs were practically on top of them by now. The Springfield didn’t have a bayonet, so he fired one last shot and drew his knife.

Lieutenant Steele was still mowing down the enemy using the shotgun. Each blast from the pump-action gun had a devastating effect but wasn’t enough to stop the enemy attack.

That was when the grenade bounced into the foxhole. Deke stared at it for a moment, figuring This is it.

Quick as lightning, Shimizu grabbed the grenade and threw it back at the Japanese. It detonated while it was still in the air, but they heard the screams as the grenade did its deadly work.

“Son of a bitch,” Deke muttered. “That was close.”

Then the Japanese were upon them. He saw a bayonet jabbing down at him and grabbed the rifle, his powerful farm boy’s muscles dragging the weapon out of the enemy’s grasp. Beside him, Steele leveled the shotgun and fired, taking the soldier out.

Another soldier fell into the foxhole, screaming bloody murder. Deke stabbed him in the belly, but the soldier kept fighting, too frenzied to realize that he had several inches of steel buried in his guts. To his relief, Philly clobbered the Jap in the head with the butt of his rifle, and the man went down for good.

The fight for control of the flank was over almost as quickly as it started. The flank remained anchored for now.

Meanwhile, the banzai charge had broken upon the Americans like a wave crashing against a sandcastle. Some places held, but others dissolved in the onslaught of the enemy as thousands of screaming Japanese soldiers struck, their bayonets flashing in the first light from the rising sun. All up and down the line, countless small fights for life and death broke out.

In places, the Japanese had so much momentum that they literally tumbled into the foxholes. Terrified GIs stabbed with their own bayonets or hacked with their knives as the Japanese fell upon them. Rifles fired on both sides. It was 1944, but it might have been a medieval battlefield where both sides hacked each other bloody.

A few of the Japanese didn’t even stop for the foxholes but leaped over them, dropping grenades as they went. The grenades exploded, leaving shattered GIs in their wake, while the Japanese soldiers charged on toward the beach itself, seemingly unstoppable.

As Deke watched, a Japanese officer rushed toward a machine-gun crew, his sword held high in one hand and a pistol in the other. A soldier rose to meet him, and the officer impaled him with the sword. He shot the other man with his pistol. With an effort, the officer tugged his sword free of the dying man and waved the bloody blade high, exhorting the Japanese troops to follow him.

Deke raised his rifle and shot the officer through the heart.

“We are supposed to capture a few officers to question them,” the Nisei interpreter protested, having seen Deke shoot the sword-wielding officer.

“You go on and capture all the officers you want,” Deke said, glaring at him. “Maybe if you had asked him real nice, he would have given up.”

“I’m just saying that if we get the chance, we should capture an officer.”

“You go on and capture all the Japs you want,” Deke said. “Me, I’m gonna try to keep them from killing us.”

All around them, the scene was one of utter confusion as the melee continued. GIs were fighting back with the butts of their rifles or even their trenching shovels. Incredibly, even more Japanese troops poured out of the woods.

The platoon leader was dead, stabbed to death with a bayonet, so Lieutenant Steele took charge of their section of the line — as much as anyone could take charge of chaos. He grabbed a couple of soldiers and shoved them toward the machine gun. “You two, get that machine gun back in action. I want a field of fire directly in front of us. Don’t let any more Japs reach this line.”

But no sooner had the machine-gun tracer fire begun spitting forth again than the gun fell silent. Both men slumped over the weapon, shot dead. Despite the chaos, no enemy had been nearby, so who had shot them?

“We’ve got us a sniper someplace out there,” Steele said, scanning the field before them in the growing daylight. “Deke, Philly, see what you can do about that.”

“You got it, Honcho.”