“Did you get him?”
“I reckon.”
“What are you waiting for?” Philly demanded. “Shoot some more of those bastards.”
Philly was right. Every sniper duel was so intense that it was easy to forget the bigger battle taking place.
Deke put his eye back to the scope and began to search for another target. Before he found anything to shoot at, he heard a sound behind him on the road and swiveled around to take a look.
Tanks. Two of them. Coming up the road toward Ipil. He turned to watch the behemoths approaching. The breeze carried the smell of exhaust as their powerful engines churned. Both tanks rushed forward, their treads clanking. To a man on the ground, the churning tracks appeared strong enough to pulverize anything in their way. The tanks were not buttoned up, but their commanders stood in the hatches atop the turrets, trying to size up the situation before them.
They held their fire for now. The fact that the tanks hadn’t even brought their machine guns into play seemed odd.
At the sight of the tanks, a few of the men even cheered.
“Here comes the cavalry,” Steele shouted. “I’m glad to see them, that’s for sure.”
“I don’t know what the hell they’re waiting for,” Philly complained. “Why the hell don’t they shoot?”
After coming up the road in a rush, the tanks took their time getting into position, like two bulls preparing to charge. When they began to draw fire, the tank commanders pulled the hatches shut, disappearing inside. They were soon seemingly oblivious to the rain of fire headed their way. Even the fire from the Japanese antiaircraft weapons that had been adapted to defend the bunker bounced off. The frustrated Japanese doubled their rate of fire, which made things only worse for the men on the ground.
Formidable as the tanks appeared, their guns were no match for the thick concrete of the bunkers, cleverly angled to deflect shells.
The tanks tried anyway, firing their main guns into the nearest bunker at almost point-blank range. Whang! With that awful sound, one of the shells bounced off without detonating and flew into the trees, where it exploded with an earsplitting release.
What the Japanese hadn’t planned on were the flamethrowers. One of the tanks pulled back slightly, pivoted on its tracks, and then advanced again until its main gun was practically touching the bunker. A stream of orange-and-red flame suddenly shot from where the machine gun was normally located.
“I’ll be damned. They’re Satans!” Philly shouted, using the nickname for tanks that had been rigged with flamethrowers to release hellfire against the enemy. These tanks had first made their appearance on Guam and Saipan. They were both hated and feared by the Japanese.
The Satans had been aptly named. The tank had been aiming for the bunker’s horizontal slit, from which the Japanese defenders were firing. Instantly the front of the bunker was covered in a fireball.
Deke shuddered at the sight of the flames. He could only imagine what it must be like to face a flamethrower. In fact, he didn’t want to imagine too hard. Deke had given himself over to violence — there wasn’t any other choice as a soldier if you wanted to survive — but some part of him remained amazed at the sheer cruelty of this weapon of war.
The scorching flame seemed so much more inhumane than a simple bullet. The fire would reach deep into the bunker, licking into every corner. The flames were sticky, in a sense, because they were fueled by a jellied gasoline that clung to whatever it touched. Those enemy troops who weren’t burned to death often suffocated as the hungry fire sucked the oxygen from the confined space inside the bunker.
All in all, the flamethrower was a horrible weapon but was highly effective when there was no other hope of rooting out the enemy.
The tank gave one last burst with its flamethrower. No sooner had the flames subsided than a couple of soldiers ran forward and lobbed grenades through the smoking, blackened gap. If anyone had managed to survive the inferno, the grenades would surely finish them off.
Nearby, Philly made a gagging noise. “Ugh, that smell! Makes me sick to my stomach.”
Philly was more than right. The stink of the burning fuel from the flamethrowers mingled with the smell of burned flesh. “I won’t mind getting out of this place and finding some fresh air,” Deke agreed.
But they weren’t done yet with Ipil. One by one, the tanks knocked out the bunkers and the enemy soldiers inside them, with teams of GIs following up with grenades. By the time that nightfall approached, the bunkers as well as the area surrounding the old US military base known as Camp Downes had been secured.
The next prize would be Ormoc itself, and they all knew that the Japanese would not give up the town easily.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
By nightfall, Camp Downes and the surrounding area were back in American control, at least for the time being. They all knew from experience that darkness would likely bring Japanese infiltrators, if not a full counterattack.
Consequently, the outcome of the fight might depend on the next few hours. The US line was spread thin, extending tenuously from the beachhead. Military doctrine stated that a beachhead should extend at least a quarter of a mile from the landing zone itself, creating a defensive bubble that would reduce harassing fire or mortar attacks by the enemy.
It wasn’t always possible to follow military doctrine. Sometimes the reality was that you had to hang on by your fingernails. The division barely had enough men to hold the beachhead. Fortunately for US troops, the Japanese had not tried to force the soldiers back into the sea but had fallen back to defend Ormoc and its airfield.
The situation meant that there would be no relief for Merrick’s company or for Patrol Easy. Whatever came their way at Camp Downes, they would have no choice but to face it and try to hang on.
Being little more than a collection of old wooden barracks and outbuildings, Camp Downes did not provide much in the way of a defensive position. It hadn’t been intended as a fortress. If it hadn’t been for the war, the waterfront location of the camp would have been quite pleasant, situated to capture both the view and the cooling breeze off the water. The outpost had been intended as a presence during the days of the Filipino insurrection more than thirty years before, a jumping-off point for patrols into the nearby countryside.
The Japanese had done little to expand the former American outpost, but had focused their attention on building the concrete bunkers and other defenses. Those bunkers were now blackened and blasted ruins, still smoldering from flamethrower attacks by the Satan tanks. Within the smoking bunkers were the remains of the Japanese defenders.
No one was eager to occupy the bunkers under the circumstances, so the soldiers dug foxholes in the open ground around Camp Downes.
“If I’d known that I’d be digging so much, I would have stayed on the farm,” Deke said, bent over his entrenching tool.
“Yeah, I’ll bet you miss the sheep too,” Philly said. He and Yoshio were digging nearby, their shovels loudly scraping into the dirt.
Deke snorted and threw a shovelful of dirt at him.
“Hey, you dumb cracker! Don’t go filling this hole back up, goddammit.”
It was enough to set a man’s mind whirling, to think that he had faced down death earlier in the day and lived to enjoy some minor high jinks. The sound of Philly muttering indignantly under his breath brought a grin to Deke’s face, and he realized that he must finally be feeling better.
This morning he wouldn’t have had the energy to dig a hole. Still, it had been one hell of a day, and every bone and muscle seemed to ache as the sweat oozed out of his pores. The physical labor reminded him of being a boy on the farm, where there had been no shortage of hard work.