It was an intense and chaotic fight, the air thick with smoke, the tropical day suddenly filled with fire and thunder.
“Here I come, boys!” cried Private Frazier, firing his BAR from the hip as he advanced toward the grove. There were now so many falling leaves that it looked as if a whirlwind had taken hold among the trees.
But his magazine was soon spent, and in the face of heavy fire, he was forced to throw himself to the jungle floor. He rolled among the leaves, fumbling to get another magazine into the ammunition-hungry BAR.
The problem was that the column was now pinned down effectively by the ambush. There was no way to go except forward on the trail. Certainly there was no going back.
Deke found himself on the ground but had no recollection of getting there. He had been in something of a daze when the ambush broke out, and it was Yoshio who’d saved his bacon by grabbing hold of Deke’s shoulder and pulling him down just before the machine gun swept the line.
Several men behind them were felled or scattered by the burst of fire. Deke struggled to get up and reached for his rifle, but it wasn’t there. He suffered a moment of panic, realizing that Yoshio was still carrying the weapon over his own shoulder.
“Get down, you fool!” Yoshio cried out in a rare show of exasperation. “Just keep your head down and try not to get shot. Let someone else fight this war for a change.”
Deke realized that he didn’t have the energy to argue, much less fight back against the enemy onslaught. He simply pressed his face into the muddy trail, hoping this wouldn’t last forever. The smell of the earth and even the cool dirt against his face felt soothing. Ashes to ashes, he thought. Dust to dust.
It was a hell of a thing to be in a war and be too sick to fight.
Seeing that they were pinned down, Lieutenant Gurley decided that he’d had enough. Wielding a submachine gun, the lieutenant sprinted forward with it toward the coconut grove, screaming a mad battle cry and peppering leaves and trunks with a hail of automatic fire. It was brave, if foolish.
His attack suppressed the ambush just enough that it enabled the soldiers to pick themselves up out of the dirt and get into better positions.
Their rate of fire increased against the Japanese in the grove. It was impossible to say just how many enemy soldiers were hidden in there. They certainly did not outnumber the Americans, but there must have been at least a couple of dozen Japanese pouring fire at them. Also, the enemy had the advantage of cover, while the GIs were caught out in the open.
Lieutenant Gurley hadn’t slowed down, but was still charging at the enemy position. The lieutenant’s plan seemed to be to run all the way into the coconut grove and get in among the trees to scatter the Japanese.
“Look at that bastard go!” Philly shouted in amazement.
For the briefest of moments, it looked as if the lieutenant might succeed and turn the tide to put the Japanese on the run.
But in battle tides are treacherous. The fortunes of war swirled and ebbed at the whims of fate and chance. For the young lieutenant, the tide suddenly turned against him.
He had just reached the perimeter of the trees when a bullet caught him and spun him around. Gurley stumbled but kept going. Then he was hit again, finally collapsing with his submachine gun underneath him, the weapon’s hot barrel still smoking.
His death hadn’t been for naught. The sight of the fallen lieutenant enraged the soldiers, filling them with new resolve. Two more men followed Gurley’s example, leaping up and sprinting for the coconut trees. One man named Simmons went down almost immediately, caught by Japanese fire.
The other soldier got close enough to hurl a grenade that reached deep into the grove and detonated with an ear-shattering blast. Shredded greenery and shards of wood whirled out from the center of the blast. Then that soldier also went down.
“Goddammit!” yelled Captain Merrick. “I don’t want any more heroes. First Platoon, I want you to move around and flank that coconut grove. You boys in Second Platoon, see if you can get around there and hit them from the rear. These Japanese have got to go.”
“Yes, sir!”
The two platoons moved off, leaving the rest of the company to slug it out with the Japanese in the coconut grove.
His orders given, Merrick hunkered down with the rest of the men and returned fire. However, the Japanese were far from beaten. They kept up a steady fire of such intensity that bits of leaves directly above the GIs fell like green snow.
All that Deke could do was keep his head down and hope that it all ended soon.
He did not have to wait for long. Clearly there were not that many Japanese in the coconut grove. They had to spread out to meet the new threat on their flank. No sooner had they done that than they found themselves attacked from the rear.
“Move up! Move up!” Captain Merrick shouted.
Private Frazier led the way, blasting the Japanese with his BAR. It was an impressive display of firepower, bullets chipping chunks from the trees and knocking down Japanese defenders.
Hit from all sides, the return fire from the Japanese began to slacken. The GIs were close enough by now to use their hand grenades effectively.
Thump! Thump!
There was no hiding from the blasts, which were followed by screams of pain from within the grove.
Finally, the last few shots were fired as the enemy guns fell silent.
Philly was among those men who waded into the grove to make sure the job was done. There was a shot or two, and he emerged a few minutes later.
Deke raised himself up from the dirt long enough to watch Philly come out. In fact, there seemed to be not one, but two, versions of Philly. Deke blinked his eyes to clear his feverish imagination.
“I counted a dozen dead Japanese,” he reported. “They put up one hell of a fight.”
The battle of the coconut grove was over. They had lost Lieutenant Gurley, and four men had been killed, plus another handful of walking wounded. It was a heavy price to pay for passage past a coconut grove that none of them would ever see again. Yet there had been little choice but to fight. Even if the GIs had managed to bypass the grove, it would only have meant that the Japanese would have been free to attack them from the rear.
The American dead were quickly buried near where they had fallen. The enemy dead were left strewn on the ground.
“Let’s move out,” Captain Merrick said. “I want to link up with the rest of the division before nightfall, if we can. Let’s see if we can find the beach. I’ve had just about enough of these woods.”
Once again, Danilo and Philly took point. Yoshio helped Deke to his feet, and the diminished column made its way up the jungle path toward the smell of salt air.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Lieutenant Steele sometimes wondered how many beach landings he could make before his luck ran out. In the lieutenant’s opinion, luck wasn’t like a fountain, but more like a bottle of top-shelf scotch. In other words, there was a finite amount of it. You poured a few drinks, maybe spilled some here and there, or shared the bottle around, and before you knew it, the bottle was empty.
He knew from personal experience that there was nothing sadder than a bottle of empty scotch — except a bottle of empty luck.
He’d already been through the landing at Guadalcanal, then Guam, and twice on Leyte. Incredibly, he was about to take part in a third landing on Leyte as part of the task force intent on capturing Ormoc from the Japanese.
The question was, How full was that bottle of luck that he’d been swigging across the Pacific? He was sure it was down to the dregs, and there still seemed to be a whole lot more war to fight.