In the morning, Deke and the others were surprised to find that the enemy positions across from them were mostly vacant. There were a few potshots to harass them, but not the withering fire that they had experienced yesterday. Most of the Japanese defenders appeared to have vanished.
“What I’d like to know is, where did all the Japs go?” Philly wondered.
Deke nodded at the slope above, littered with bodies in brown uniforms. “That’s where they went,” Deke said. “Look at ’em all.”
Daylight had revealed the numbers of Japanese troops that had attacked during the night, only to be mowed down by the sheer volume of fire that had come from the US position. Most of the Japanese spread across the hillside were dead, but not all. A few of the men moved, badly wounded, crawling to who knew where. Shots rang out from the US position, putting the wounded out of their misery. Yoshio winced.
“So many dead. They have gone to meet their ancestors,” Yoshio said quietly.
Philly snorted. “Yeah? Well, good luck to them. I’m in no hurry to meet my ancestors, that’s for damn sure. I’ll bet my granddad is up there right now, getting drunk all day with Saint Peter. And I don’t want to spend eternity with my uncle Fred, who told corny jokes all the time.”
“Perhaps the Japanese have a different view,” Yoshio said.
“If you say so. Like I said, I’m in no hurry to meet up with any of my ancestors. As for the family I’ve got that’s still living, seeing them at Christmas and Easter is enough — never mind eternity. How about you, Deke?”
Deke thought about his father and mother, his grandparents, old neighbors he had known. Good people. Ben Hemphill dead on the beach in Guam. Just another kid who was never meant to be a soldier. He shook his head. “You know what, Philly? Sometimes you talk too much. You don’t know when the hell to shut up.”
Philly could see that he had touched a nerve. “All right, don’t get sore,” he said quickly.
With daylight, the order came to push up the hill. Nothing was easy about it. Although the number of dead enemy soldiers seemed to indicate that the defenders had been wiped out, there were many troops still facing them, but not in the numbers that had confronted them before.
The Japanese had hidden rifle pits and tunnel entrances everywhere, popping out to fire on the soldiers. Frustrated GIs soon began tossing grenades into any hole they could find. Satchel charges were used to seal up the larger tunnel entrances.
Nearby, a knot of soldiers was engaged in pouring gasoline down what appeared to be an air vent into an underground passage. They took a step back and tossed a lit match at the vent. Instantly flames raced underground.
It was hard to know whether the Japanese had an escape route elsewhere on the hill, or if they were trapped inside for good. Nobody gave a damn that they were burying men alive, or if they did realize it, they tried not to think too much about it.
After all, it was hard to have much sympathy for the Japanese. The butcher’s bill had been heavy. More than twenty men had died on the hill, with twice as many wounded. Most of those had been lost in the vicious nighttime attacks by the Japanese.
Patrol Easy had been lucky, but that luck hadn’t extended to the unit that they had accompanied here. Many of the dead had been replacements, and their war had been all too short. Back home, telegrams would soon be going out to shatter the lives of the fathers and mothers, or wives and children, of the soldiers who wouldn’t be coming back from Hill 522.
“You remember what the Filipinos call this place?” Yoshio asked. “Guinhangdan Hill.”
“Guinhangdan,” Deke drawled, stumbling over the pronunciation. “The name might be hard to say, but nobody is gonna forget that place anytime soon.”
As they pushed up the hill, there was little respite for the weary GIs. No one had gotten any sleep for a couple of days now, other than grabbing a few minutes here and there. They had been living off cold rations and tepid canteen water — and there was precious little of that as the heat of the day began building again.
Through the haze and smoke, they could see the accumulation of US troops on the beach, everything from makeshift tents to groups of tanks and trucks were now ashore. The beach was looking more and more like a parking lot.
Another welcome sight were the formations of planes overhead, on the prowl for any Japanese resistance. These were all navy flyboys. It had been a long time since anyone had seen a Japanese plane — most had long since been blown out of the sky.
By midafternoon, the last push for the summit came. Men stormed toward the battery in the cave, their rifles loaded and at the ready. By now the attackers had it down to a science. They hurled in grenades and charges, ducked and covered, and the earth shook with the force of the explosions. It took just a few minutes to finally wipe out the battery. At long last, the Japanese artillery on the hilltop was silenced. The surviving enemy soldiers had been buried alive underground. Except for a few stray Japanese soldiers, Hill 522 was now in American hands.
The soldiers spent the remainder of the day mopping up or wandering among the many Japanese dead, collecting weapons and other souvenirs. Not everyone wanted to participate in that, thinking it wasn’t right somehow — or maybe they just had an aversion to being around so many dead bodies starting to decompose in the heat. The smell grew more unpleasant as the sun rose higher. Swarms of flies appeared and settled over the bodies. When it came time to eat, the GIs desperately shooed flies off their food, knowing full well that those same flies had been resting on the body of a dead Japanese just a short time before.
Worst of all were the ants, which scurried across the faces of the dead in large numbers, making scavenging forays into ears and nostrils. The sight made more than one soldier shudder, thinking that if he’d been a little less lucky, that would be him out there covered in ants.
Even Philly contented himself with retrieving the sword from the Japanese officer they had killed the night before, and he didn’t venture into the killing field to search for more souvenirs.
“Why, Philly, I reckoned you’d be busy emptying the pockets of those dead Japs.”
“Just more to carry,” he said by way of an excuse.
No orders came to bury the dead.
“Let ’em rot,” said an officer. “Do you think that the Japs would have bothered to bury your stinking carcass if it had been the other way around?”
Nobody could argue with the officer’s perspective, but it still didn’t sit right with a lot of the men.
For the rest of their time on the hill, the men of the battalion looked for caves and tunnels that might be housing Japanese troops. They also killed a number of rats and snakes.
The men who had fought so hard for the hill were exhausted, their uniforms soaked with sweat and blood that was not their own. But they had won.
“I’ll be damned,” Deke muttered, looking around at the carnage. “I was halfway thinking that we wouldn’t be here today.”
“I hope you’re not disappointed,” Philly said. Like a lot of soldiers, he had embraced a black sense of humor. “Besides, the day is young. There’s still plenty of time for us to get killed.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
While the other Japanese troops awaited their fate deep underground on Hill 522, Ikeda and his band of sogekihei snipers melted into the jungle at the base of the hill.
“Isogashī! Hurry!” he ordered them. “We must be swift and silent as smoke. Isogashī! Isogashī!”
Ikeda kept a nervous eye on the skies. Though tattered by artillery fire, the forest canopy provided enough cover to hide them from the watchful eyes of enemy planes overhead. Meanwhile, they had managed to slip away without being spotted by the attacking force, which was now intent on going after the Japanese in their underground bunkers, like a pack of terriers after fleeing rats. Ikeda winced at that mental image.