Deke didn’t dwell on such thoughts for long. He reloaded his rifle and pistol.
“All right, let’s keep going,” Honcho said. “We’re here to hunt the enemy, not sit around.”
“Yeah,” Philly added. “Besides, it’s starting to stink around here.”
In the heat and humidity under the trees, flies were already buzzing around the faces of the dead and the blood-drenched soil of the trench.
“Stay sharp,” Honcho warned. “No telling if these Nips had any friends around. Deke, you take point.”
Deke moved past the others to lead the way. There was a kind of trail through the forest that the Japanese had clearly been using for moving troops and supplies. Soon the trees began to thin out, and they reached the top of a ridge. The ridge was ringed with forest but covered with tall grass, almost like the tonsure of an old-fashioned monk. The grasslands were covered in knobs, and Deke worried that many Japanese could be hiding in the waving grass. A man could easily remain unseen until you were right on top of him.
“Watch your spacing,” Philly muttered, reminding the newcomers to keep alert and stay spread out to be more difficult targets if a Nambu machine gun suddenly opened fire.
Deke’s fears about hidden enemy troops proved true when a single rifle shot split the air, and another man was hit by a Japanese sniper.
Another new guy started running toward the man. There was another shot, and the soldier went down.
“Son of a bitch! Somebody get that sniper!”
The other soldiers had all gone into a crouch, using the grass for cover. The problem was that the sniper was up on one of the grassy knobs, giving him a view of the soldiers below. He fired again, and a bullet whistled past them.
By now Deke had a good idea of the sniper’s location, but he would only be firing blindly. He took a grenade off his belt, pulled the pin, and threw it with everything he had toward the grassy knoll. The shattering blast fell short, but it was enough to rattle the sniper, who jumped up and started running away. He was crouched over, barely visible above the swaying tops of the taller clumps of grass.
That was the only target Deke needed. He swung the rifle to a point just ahead of the fleeing sniper and squeezed the trigger. The man ran directly into the bullet and fell headlong.
“He won’t be bothering us anymore,” Deke said.
“All right, nice work,” Honcho said. “Everybody, keep your eyes peeled. I’ve got a bad feeling about this. This place is too damn quiet and too damn wide open.”
They kept going, crossing more of the rolling grassland, on the lookout for more hidden Japanese. They waited for the crack of a sniper rifle. The very thought made every man itchy between the shoulder blades. Deke kept his eyes high.
Out of nowhere, they heard the roar of an approaching engine. It was not a plane. The sound came from the landscape ahead rather than from the sky. To their surprise, they saw an expensive Lincoln sedan racing through the grass, bouncing its way over the rugged spots.
“What in the world?” Philly said. “Get a load of this guy. What the hell does he think he’s doing?”
“One thing for sure, he’s not out for a Sunday drive,” Deke said.
“Who the hell is driving that thing?”
Although it was an American car, the fact that someone began shooting at them out the window settled the question about whether it was friend or foe at the wheel. The Philippines had once been filled with American cars before the war, and it was clear that the Japanese had commandeered this one.
It was time for another grenade. This one was thrown by Rodeo, who probably had the best arm in the unit.
It was a great throw. The grenade went right through the open window and exploded. The car kept going until the gas tank ignited. Even then it kept rolling, setting the dry grass on fire as it went, but the shooting had stopped. The car was no longer a threat, but there were still plenty of Japanese to deal with.
They climbed a bit farther and reached an observation post in a house that was elevated on stilts with a thatched roof.
“I don’t like the looks of that place,” Philly warned.
Sure enough, they heard the crack of a rifle, and they all ducked as the noise echoed and rolled across the knobby peaks. But it wasn’t just a rifle that was situated in that hut, because moments later there was the dreaded sound of a machine gun opening fire with the steady tap, tap, tap, tap of the deadly Nambu machine gun.
“Everybody down!” Honcho shouted. Although the warning wasn’t necessary, because the men were already hugging the ground, as the bullets flashed and flared overhead, the tracers visible even in the daylight.
“Deke!” somebody shouted.
He already had the rifle lined up on the muzzle flash in the shack. He fired, worked the bolt, and fired again. For his trouble, a bullet snapped past his head. Deke had damn near forgotten about the sniper in there too. Off to his left, a rifle fired, and the sniper in the shack fell silent.
“That’s one for me,” Philly said with a grin.
CHAPTER FOUR
Understanding the situation in the Philippines required going all the way back to December 8, 1941. Within hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces had begun their invasion of the US territory. The enemy had quickly overwhelmed the defenders, ending with the capture of more than seventy-five thousand troops and the cruel Bataan Death March that had resulted in so many deaths.
The commander of the defeated forces, General Douglas MacArthur, had left only on the direct orders of the president, vowing that “I shall return.”
Nearly three years later, on October 17, 1944, with the landing on Leyte, MacArthur had made good on his promise. Since then, the fighting had continued unabated.
The fierce fighting was a result of the Japanese decision to make a stand in the Philippines. The Japanese poured more men and supplies into the fight for Leyte, intent on hurling the Americans back into the sea.
However, the situation did not go as planned for General Tomoyuki Yamashita, hailed as the “Tiger of Malaya” for his defeat of British forces early in the war. The Americans and Australian forces had proved to be a tough nut to crack. As it turned out, it was the Japanese themselves who were cracking. For the men fighting on the beaches and hills and forests, that wasn’t happening fast enough.
The Philippines and Okinawa weren’t the only military operations taking place. As Patrol Easy made their way through the jungle, the US Navy and Marines were steaming toward Iwo Jima. There, the Japanese had turned the entire island into a fortress. More than twenty thousand Japanese troops were waiting for the Americans to arrive. Nobody expected it to be an easy fight.
All that anyone had to do was look at a map to be reminded of the vast arena that was the Pacific theater, spreading across more than 20 percent of the earth’s surface. To be able to fight a war in two spheres of the world, and supply men and materials to remote islands across thousands of miles of ocean, demonstrated the growing power of the United States.
In the Pacific, everything now seemed to be happening quickly and on a grand scale, even if each day passed much too slowly for the average soldier, sailor, marine, nurse, WAC, or WAVE. Those last two were the acronyms for Women’s Army Corps and Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service. For these men and women, home seemed far away and long ago.
Even after months of fighting, there was still plenty of mopping up to do on Leyte, which was just what Patrol Easy and the rest of the 77th Infantry Division were finding out. After all, an enemy ambush had just made mincemeat out of one of their supply convoys. The back of the Japanese defense had been broken, but the arms and legs and fingers and toes were still engaged in fighting. It didn’t help that the rugged terrain favored defensive fighting.
Once Leyte and its airfields were taken from the Japanese, the US plan of attack was to move on to Luzon, the largest island in the Philippines and the location of the capital city of Manila. General MacArthur wanted this crown jewel of the Philippines, and the Japanese were not eager to give it up.
By early 1945 the Japanese had more than one hundred thousand troops on Luzon, nearly a thousand artillery units, plus aircraft and ships at sea — although the Japanese Navy had taken a beating and was no longer the power that it had been. Even so, the combined Japanese forces seemed to be more than enough to meet the invasion.
Or so they thought.
Aboard the light cruiser USS Boise, General Douglas MacArthur managed the whole operation. There was still so much fighting going on that he had not transferred his base of operations to shore since landing and making his famous “I have returned” statement. The formidable “light” cruiser, named for the capital city of Idaho, was six hundred feet in length and carried an armament of fifteen six-inch guns that could spit a shell more than a dozen miles, along with antiaircraft guns and machine guns that could make short work of anything from a Zero to a Betty bomber. No ship was immune to a kamikaze attack, but so far USS Boise had not been targeted.
In addition to the security provided by the light cruiser, coordination with land forces and the US Navy was much easier from the ship. The living conditions weren’t so bad, either — at least compared to living on land. For starters, there were the three squares a day served up by the navy cooks — also plenty of hot coffee. There weren’t any mosquitoes to deal with at sea like there were on land. They did have to contend with flies that swarmed in through the portholes that had been opened to capture the ocean breezes and provide fresh air. Then again, this was no luxury cruise. No part of the ship was air-conditioned and not even the general had a fan.