“I suppose we were lucky to get a prisoner, even just the one,” Honcho said. “Over in Europe, the push across France toward Belgium and Germany is in full swing. I heard they’ve taken hundreds of thousands of German POWs, maybe even close to a million German prisoners. We’ve captured around half a million Italians.”
“Maybe they’re all a bunch of cowards,” Philly said. “Especially the Italians.”
Honcho shook his head. “The Wehrmacht doesn’t allow any cowards into the ranks, let alone the SS. Just ask our boys who have gone up against them. As for the Italians, didn’t you ever hear of the Roman Empire? Italians make good soldiers. We’ve got any number of Italian Americans in our army. The ones over there are just poorly led. Anyhow, my point is that the soldiers we’re fighting in Europe know better than to keep fighting when the odds are against them.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Philly conceded.
“Altogether, that’s far more than a million prisoners of war who have been captured in Europe,” Honcho continued. “You know how many Japanese we’ve captured so far in the Pacific? Last I heard, it was about thirty thousand. You don’t have to be a math wizard to know that’s a whole lot less than a million. Say what you want about the Japanese, but they sure as hell don’t like to surrender.”
“That’s not news to me,” Philly said.
The company had lost just five men, and another handful had been wounded. While the soldiers keenly felt the loss of each fellow soldier, it was also clear that this fight in the village had been a lopsided victory.
“That is a ratio of sixteen to one,” Yoshio noted. “That is quite impressive.”
“Yeah? Ask our guys who got killed how impressed they are,” Philly pointed out. “They’re dead all the same.”
Nobody had a response, because it was true. In the minds of the soldiers, dead Japanese didn’t count no matter how many there were — only dead Americans mattered. Maybe it was wrong to think that way, but that was the way it was.
More shells began to arc overhead. The US battery was back in business, intending to clear a path for the company’s advance. To their surprise, a few Japanese guns responded. The enemy still had operative artillery and was sufficiently organized to return fire, albeit sporadically. Overhead, the dueling shells crossed back and forth as the men looked up nervously.
It had become clear that the Japanese hadn’t simply run away. Nor had they all been killed. That was just wishful thinking on the part of the American troops. Instead, the Japanese had fallen back to new defensive positions. The Japanese prisoner appeared to have been telling the truth during his brief interrogation by Yoshio before being sent back to the rear area.
They had won the skirmish, but there promised to be plenty of fighting ahead.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The company rolled out on the trucks, although some men were still on foot, which slowed the pace of the advance down the dirt road. Swaths of forest bordered the road, intermixed with various crops growing in the Filipinos’ fields. These trees and crops would provide good cover to any Japanese looking to ambush them on the road. All eyes scanned the roadside nervously.
The men riding in the captured trucks couldn’t help but feel that the vehicles were something of a double-edged sword.
“We’re sitting ducks in this truck,” Philly complained.
“You want to get out and walk?” Deke wondered. “I don’t. Hell, I’m not sure I could. I hope this truck can carry me all the way to Tokyo.”
“Not unless it can float, you dope,” Philly said. “We’re on an island.”
“I know we’re on a goddamn island,” Deke said irritably. “It’s a figure of speech. Anyhow, keep it up and you ain’t gonna have to worry about gettin’ to Tokyo.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Philly said, but refrained from adding insult to injury where Deke was involved, even if he was sick.
“We are in Japanese trucks,” Yoshio pointed out. “The Japanese might hold their fire, thinking that they would be firing on their own men.”
“Let’s hope that’s the case.”
As it turned out, they were headed toward Camp Downes, designated as the rallying point for US forces before the big push for Ormoc. The camp was, in fact, what remained of a former US military outpost left over from the years leading up to the Japanese occupation. The camp was named for a young officer from Texas who had died heroically while fighting insurgents not long after the Spanish-American War. Camp Downes had been in existence long enough to be shown on local maps, and the name was reassuringly American on maps dotted with mostly foreign names.
The collection of barracks and outbuildings had been taken over by the Japanese during the occupation. They had since cleared out to fortify their own defensive ring around Ormoc.
It wasn’t long before they encountered those defenses. The convoy of captured trucks was moving up the road when they began to draw fire.
“Everybody out!” Lieutenant Steele shouted.
The trucks rolled to a stop. Men didn’t need to be told twice to get out of the vehicles. As Philly had predicted, the trucks were sitting ducks. It sounded as if the Japanese had brought some of their twenty-millimeter antiaircraft guns into play, using them as ground defense weapons.
Chewed to bits by these heavy machine guns and tracer fire, the lead truck began to burn. This was a blessing in disguise, considering that the thick, black smoke created a smoke screen for the soldiers running for cover at the edges of the road. The remaining trucks backed up until they were out of sight around a bend in the road, leaving the soldiers on foot.
They could see a concrete bunker around the bend ahead, and soldiers began to return fire. However, rifles were no threat to the enemy soldiers behind thick concrete walls. Each bunker vaguely resembled a concrete jack-o’-lantern, with a low horizontal firing dugout, much like the pumpkin’s smile, that accommodated the larger weapons, including the nasty Nambu machine guns and vertical firing slits for riflemen.
It was clear that the Japanese had been planning this defense for a long time, and the company had finally stumbled into it. The enemy had been waiting patiently for the appearance, but judging by the fire that poured from the bunkers, their fingers had been itchy on their triggers.
Seeing the situation, Steele had already waved Rodeo over and was on the handset. It was too close to their own men for an artillery strike, but Steele had another plan.
“We need some tanks up here!” he shouted into the handset. “They can bust right through those bunkers if they need to!”
Steele could shout all that he wanted, but that wouldn’t make the tanks move any faster. It also didn’t mean that whoever he was talking to at division headquarters would agree or that tanks were even available. Only a handful had arrived so far on the beach, but the sight of all that armored plating and firepower was always welcome.
For now, it was just infantry facing the heavily fortified Japanese position. They were good and truly pinned down.
Captain Merrick had reached the same conclusion. He ran over to Steele’s position, dodging fire all the way. The man must have lived a charmed life.
“We need to get some grenades into those bunkers and clean them out,” he said.
“Agreed,” Steele responded. He turned to the members of Patrol Easy, who crouched nearby. “Come on, fellas. Let’s show ’em how it’s done.”
The patrol moved forward, slithering on their bellies, hugging the ground and using whatever cover they could find — piles of rocks, blasted logs, shell holes that they slid down into and crawled back out of.
They took fire the whole way. Most of it came from the Japanese machine guns, which seemed to cut the air above their heads or churn up the ground nearby. Lucky for them, the machine-gun fire was not aimed with any real precision.