Pacific Sniper

Chapter Twenty-Five

Now that US forces had arrived in strength, it was time to move against the fortified Japanese positions. The first big push started at Yigo, an enemy outpost in the shadow of Mount Santa Rosa.

“I’m nervous about this,” Yoshio admitted. “We all know that the Japanese are going to fight to the last man standing. Anyhow, what use am I if we aren’t supposed to take any prisoners.”

“Stick close to me and Philly, and keep your head down,” Deke said. “No matter what the lieutenant says, there might be a few prisoners.”

What really rankled Deke was the fact that Lieutenant Thibault already had a sniper, Corporal Conlon, who had gotten his rifle with its telescopic sight mainly by virtue of being a kiss-ass since basic training. You couldn’t really blame Conlon — it seemed to be in his nature to do what he was told and please others. In Deke’s mind, these were not the qualities that made a good sniper, no matter how many shooting matches Conlon had won or how much ass he kissed. Fighting the Japanese was not the same as a day on the rifle range. Deke reckoned that being a sniper was about one part shooting and two parts animal cunning.

Thibault had other ideas. He had relegated Patrol Easy to sentry duty, assigned to watching the supply depot while the rest of the squad joined in planning for the attack.

What had started out as the final push to end enemy control of Guam soon evolved into a quest for revenge, after an unfortunate incident earlier that day.

On the outskirts of Vigo, Colonel Douglas McNair, the chief of staff of the division, had been riding in a jeep when the vehicle was ambushed by a Japanese patrol that had been lying in wait for this very purpose. McNair and three other men had died in a blaze of machine-gun fire. The Japanese had melted back into the jungle. McNair had been popular with the men, and they had taken his loss hard.

“Colonel McNair was all right,” Deke said when he heard the news. He always seemed as though he was going to bat for his soldiers. “I just hope to hell they don’t promote Thibault now. That would be a good way to lose the war.”

“Those low-down dirty Japs,” Philly muttered.

That summed up about how everybody felt. They would welcome a chance to get back at the Japanese.

As the focus of the attack, Yigo was essentially a supply depot on the fringes of the stronghold built into the mountain. Quietly, all roads leading toward Yigo were sealed off. The dense jungle served to hem in the Japanese soldiers in the outpost.

The attack was two-pronged. Fighters hit the outpost from the air, strafing the Japanese with gunfire and dropping bombs. Unlike on the mountain, the Japanese here didn’t have bunkers and tunnels but only hastily dug foxholes and grass huts. When the aircraft attacked, all that the Japanese could do was run for cover. Some escaped into the jungle, but others funneled into the narrow roads leading away from the outpost.

This was just what the Americans had expected. All the roads had been covered by fields of fire. A few tanks had been brought up, along with mortars. Machine-gun emplacements covered all the angles. When the fleeing Japanese appeared, running away from the aerial attack on the outpost, all that firepower opened up on them.

It was nothing short of a slaughter. The Japanese had been running for their lives, many of them not so much as carrying a weapon.

“My God, it’s a massacre,” remarked one of the American pilots, who had a bird’s-eye view of the Japanese scurrying like ants — directly into the guns waiting for them. Bodies littered the ground where they had been cut down by the strafing attack. The grass huts caught on fire and burned furiously, sending pillars of black smoke into the blue tropical sky.

Within minutes, it was all over. The planes continued to swoop overhead, but there wasn’t anything left alive to shoot at. The GIs advanced up the path, stepping around the bodies of the dead.

Somehow, a few enemy soldiers had managed to survive. They hid themselves in the jungle or climbed into trees, firing down at the advancing Americans.

Deke and the rest of Patrol Easy had been assigned to bring up the rear. Nervously, Deke watched their flanks as they advanced, his eyes roving the tight walls of greenery. It was perfect cover for an ambush. The Japanese seemed to have a natural-born talent for sneakiness. They liked to wait for a group of soldiers to go by and then attack them from behind, once they had let their guard down. Thankfully, the fleeing Japanese didn’t seem to have had much time to prepare many surprises along the trail. They had been too busy being slaughtered.

A few enemy troops had survived, however, and weren’t letting the Americans advance unmolested.

But it was Conlon, not Deke, that Lieutenant Thibault called upon to clear the way forward.

“Conlon, get your ass up here and clear out these snipers,” Lieutenant Thibault ordered.

“Yes, sir.”

But it was easier said than done. Conlon made a show of taking aim and firing several shots, but there was no telling if he had hit anything.

None of that mattered to Thibault, who seemed pleased by the performance.

“That’s six for Conlon!” the lieutenant shouted, never mind the fact that they had yet to see a single dead body as a result of Conlon’s shooting. “Hey, Cole, try not to shoot any of us in the ass back there!”

As they entered the clearing that had served as the main staging area for the outpost, Lieutenant Thibault stood near the base of a tree that a Japanese sniper had climbed into. His single-shot weapon was no match for the incoming flood of GIs, and he seemed to have run out of ammo, anyhow. They could see him up there, only partially obscured by the palm fronds. The soldiers were having a good time taking pot shots at him.

Just like a treed coon, Deke thought.

“Lieutenant, do you want me to tell him to surrender and climb down here?” Yoshio asked.

“Oh, he’s coming down, all right. We’re just going to skip the surrender part. Sergeant, bring that Thompson up here,” Thibault said.

Sergeant Hawley approached and handed the submachine gun to the lieutenant, who aimed it up into the tree and proceeded to empty the magazine. The Japanese soldier fell to the ground with a heavy thud and didn’t move.

“Good shooting, sir.”

“That’s what I call a Jap coconut,” Thibault said. He called over a combat photographer and had him snap a photo of himself standing over the dead soldier while striking a pose with the submachine gun. A group of soldiers gathered to see the show.

Watching, Deke felt a little sick. It wasn’t that he was opposed to killing the enemy, but he didn’t care for the way the lieutenant was making a spectacle of it. He turned away.

Unfortunately, the lieutenant spotted him and noticed the look of disapproval on Deke’s face.

“What’s the matter, Deke?” Thibault wanted to know. “We’re here to kill Japs, in case you didn’t notice.”

“You sure killed the hell out of that one,” Deke said.

“What’s that?”

“You sure killed the hell out of that one, sir.”

Deke moved off before he said or did something that he’d regret later.

A short distance away, Philly had been watching the whole thing. “You sure like to push it, don’t you?”

“He’s taking pictures of Japs he shot like it’s a hunting trip or maybe he’s gonna show his grandkids someday,” Deke said. “Don’t that seem wrong to you?”

“He’s an officer. He gets to do what he wants.”

As it turned out, the wholesale killing of Japanese was just beginning.

Soldiers began to ransack the shelters that hadn’t caught fire. There wasn’t much left, but the GIs let out a whoop when they found several cases of canned crabmeat and even a couple of bottles of Japanese rice wine.

What the officers were mostly interested in were stacks of fuel barrels that had somehow escaped the incendiary strafing fire. While Americans used big fifty-gallon drums for fuel, the Japanese barrels were smaller. Nonetheless, there was enough gasoline to keep the tanks going for a while longer, and it was that much less fuel that would need to be carted over the jungle trail from the beachhead. The Japanese had apparently intended the fuel for use by their own tanks, most of which had been destroyed by the handful of Shermans or in aerial attacks.

With the outpost secured, the next object was Mount Santa Rosa itself. The squad that now included Patrol Easy headed out once again. The Japanese had spent the months leading up to the attack on the island that they had known was coming by preparing their fallback position. The closer they got to the Japanese bastion, the more that the rugged landscape became dotted with tunnels and bunkers.

Up ahead, Conlon spotted three Japanese soldiers making a run for it. He raised his rifle but didn’t manage to get off a shot before the enemy soldiers slipped into a hole in the ground and disappeared from sight.

Excited, Lieutenant Thibault broke into a run. He reached the spot where the Japanese had disappeared and used the muzzle of his carbine to flip open a hatch made from woven sticks and grass. It was so cleverly made that they could have walked right past it and never noticed. The hatch revealed the entrance to a large tunnel.

As the men gathered around, they could hear the echo of many, many voices singing down below.

“It sounds like there are hundreds of them down there,” Thibault said in surprise. He looked at the interpreter. “What the hell are they singing, anyhow?”

“Sounds like patriotic songs.”

“Spread out and see if there are any other entrances,” the lieutenant said. “I don’t want these Nips sneaking out and attacking us from behind.”

Within minutes, now that they had an idea of what to look for, the squad had found two more entrances, all leading down into large tunnels.

“I’ll bet the whole underside of this hill is filled with Japs.”

It was an unsettling thought. They’d heard so many voices that it indicated the Japanese far outnumbered the Americans aboveground. But with the tunnel entrances covered, the Americans had the Japanese trapped.

“Sir, do you want me to shout down there and see if they will surrender?” To Deke’s ears, it sounded as if Yoshio already knew what the lieutenant’s answer would be, but he had to ask.

“No, I’ve got a better idea.”

The lieutenant sent a detail to Yigo with orders to bring back several drums of gasoline. Meanwhile, the rest of the platoon guarded the tunnel entrances to make certain that none of the Japanese escaped. All the while, the deep, manly singing continued. Deke thought it sounded spooky.

When the men returned with the fuel drums, they flooded the tunnels with gasoline. Still, no effort had been made to ask the Japanese if they wanted to surrender. Some of the men knew what was coming next, and they looked sickened by it.

“Fire in the hole!” Thibault shouted, hurling a satchel charge into a tunnel entrance. The other tunnel entrances were treated in similar fashion. “Everybody down!”

The explosion was enormous. Deke felt the ground heave under his feet, reminding him of the bucking deck of the landing craft that had carried him to Guam in the first place.

Gouts of flame erupted from the mouths of the tunnels as the gasoline caught fire.

Deke thought that there was no way anyone could have survived the blast. Yet no sooner had the dust and debris settled than they could hear the singing again. The sound was muted but sounded more determined than ever to Deke, or maybe that was just the vestiges of the blast ringing in his ears.

The lieutenant looked angry. “Roll some stones over here and block up these tunnels,” he said.

Considering that the explosions had caved in some of the entrances, the soldiers made short work of closing up the remaining tunnels. The Japanese were soon sealed underground, and the GIs trudged on toward Mount Santa Rosa.

It was clear that the attack on the stronghold would not be nearly so easy. The mountainside bristled with artillery positions. With nowhere else to go, the Japanese there clearly planned to fight, not hide. Uneasily, the soldiers glanced up at their destination, knowing that it was going to be a bloodbath.

But first they had to get there. A swath of jungle stood between the advancing troops and the mountainside. As they entered the heavy growth, it became clear that the Japanese planned to make them fight for every inch of progress. Every few minutes, they were greeted with grenade attacks, machine-gun fire, or snipers.

“I thought the Japs were beaten,” Philly complained, sprawled out beside Deke on the jungle floor.

“You saw that hillside up ahead,” Deke replied. “Do they look beaten to you?”

They both tried to ignore a large centipede, around the size of a man’s thumb, that scuttled past under their noses. Tracer fire zipped overhead. A centipede bite packed a wallop, but bugs were the least of their worries.

“Got a grenade?” Deke asked. “One, two, three—”

Both men hurled their grenades and ducked low as the resulting shrapnel shredded the foliage ahead. They heard a scream of pain — but they weren’t done yet. They poured several shots into the brush ahead. A few paces off to their left, Yoshio joined in from where he also lay sprawled in the underbrush.

That was the strategy that quickly evolved for the advancing troops. With the heavy jungle infested with handfuls of Japanese defenders, the Americans would advance, throw grenades, pepper the area ahead with gunfire, and then advance again.

Off to their right, another squad was equipped with a flamethrower painted with stripes of green-and-black camouflage. The flames sprayed the foliage and burned everything in its path to a crisp.

“Lucky bastards. We need one of those.”

“If you say so. It’s a hell of a thing.”

As they slowly advanced, they crisscrossed swaths where the flamethrower had taken its toll. The flamethrower was effective, but it was a brutal weapon. What it left behind was the stuff of nightmares that would haunt the men the rest of their lives.

Soldiers had to advance through a blackened landscape, past the still-smoking corpses of the enemy. The dead enemy soldiers were left curled in positions of pure agony, teeth bright white against shriveled and blackened lips. The flamethrowers also claimed more innocent victims, and they passed the burned corpses of forest creatures, birds, and even the humanlike remains of monkeys.

They were all too glad to get clear of the jungle, even if it meant that they were that much closer to the assault on the main Japanese defenses.

As it turned out, they received a reprieve.

“We’ll hold up here for the night,” Lieutenant Thibault announced, having received new orders by radio. “The navy is going to give us a little help.”

Aside from the dangers posed by submarines and a few stray enemy ships and planes, the US Navy was free to maneuver in the Philippine Sea. Coordinating with the land assault, ships moved into position and unleashed a bombardment against Mount Santa Rosa.

After a while, the navy guns fell silent, and they could hear the drone of bombers coming in. These were the big boys, B-29s out of Saipan, which the US had wrested earlier that summer from the Japanese and turned into a major airfield and base of operations.

The result was a spectacular show. Explosions covered the face of the mountain. Eruptions of dirt and rock stretched toward the sky. Once again, it seemed impossible that anyone could survive all that naval firepower along with the bombing mission, but the Japanese had proved them wrong about that before.

“Get some sleep,” Deke said to Philly and Yoshio, although that was easier said than done, given the fireworks show. “When the shooting stops tomorrow, we get to head up there and see who’s left.”

“Lucky us,” Philly said.

Deke was thinking about one enemy soldier in particular, the Samurai Sniper. They had seen no sign of him today during the attack on Yigo.

But the noose was tightening around the necks of the enemy.

If this Captain Okubo was still alive, he would be one of the enemy holdouts, and along with the rest of the Japanese, he wouldn’t be going quietly.