The warning was unnecessary. The men gazed uneasily into the darkness for fifteen minutes before the next attack came. This time, they distinctly heard a single word being shouted, “Banzai!”
They had all heard of banzai attacks before. The word alone struck fear into their hearts.
Another flare was lit, illuminating the landscape with its harsh light like a lightning bolt hanging in the sky.
Framed against the light, a soldier had managed to get right up on top of them. While the other small group of attackers was busy shouting Banzai!, this Jap had been so stealthy that they hadn’t heard him at all.
To their surprise, he was not carrying a rifle, as were the other attackers.
Instead, the light glinted off a sword.
“It’s a Jap officer!” Philly shouted. “He looks like a goddamn samurai!”
The Japanese officer waved the blade wildly as he shouted and ran at the foxholes as if sheer fury could drive out the Americans. Maybe it could. Still green, the GIs were so stunned by the sight of the screaming, sword-waving Japanese that nobody fired at the attacker.
Finally, a soldier jumped up to confront him, brandishing his own rifle and bayonet. Expertly, the Japanese sidestepped the GI and struck at him with the sword. Screaming, the man went down.
The Japanese officer continued his one-man attack.
Standing above the foxholes, he slashed down at the GIs below. Caught by surprise, some raised their hands and arms to stop the blade. They were cut badly by the razor-sharp sword.
“Just shoot the bastard!” Lieutenant Steele shouted, trying to get his shotgun into play. The problem was that the attacker was already in among them, and firing meant risking hitting one of their own.
Meanwhile, the Japanese officer continued to hack and slash.
Deke was having the same problem getting a clear shot. He crawled out of the foxhole. His plan was to get the muzzle of his rifle right against the Jap if he had to — if he could even get that close with that blade whirring around.
The swordsman wasn’t the only attacker. The other Japanese ran among the defenses, shooting down into the foxholes.
Quickly, the situation was turning into a bloodbath.
As Deke ran toward the samurai, or whatever he was, another soldier jumped up to confront the Japanese swordsman. In the light from the flare, Deke saw that it was Ingram, one of the members of the new sniper squad. He was a big man, seemingly twice the size of the Jap. The sword bit at him, but Ingram kept going and grappled with the Jap.
The man fought back furiously. Ingram was forced to get his hands around the sword blade to keep from being cut to pieces. Meanwhile, streaks of blood ran down his forearms as the edge cut into his hands and fingers.
“Hold on, that’s a Jap officer. Take him alive if you can!” Lieutenant Steele shouted. He had abandoned his own foxhole and charged at the Jap, his shotgun at the ready. Reaching the two struggling men, he reversed his shotgun, the butt ready to strike.
Deke stood nearby, rifle at the ready.
But it was too hard in the tussle to tell who was who.
Finally, the bigger figure slumped. The pain and the loss of blood had been too much for Ingram. The Japanese officer stepped back and watched Ingram drop to his knees.
Then he raised the sword for a killing blow.
Deke didn’t give him the chance. He darted forward and swatted the Jap right in the head with the rifle butt. Stunned, the officer fell, dropping his blade. Deke kicked the sword away and hit the Jap again for good measure.
Lieutenant Steele settled one boot on the Jap’s chest and put the muzzle of the shotgun in the officer’s face, but there was no need. The man was unconscious.
“Philly, get some rope and tie him up,” Steele said. “Headquarters would like nothing better than to interview a Jap officer. Nice work, Deke. You might be another one to keep around.”
Deke felt a swell of pride. Something about Lieutenant Steele made Deke glad to be singled out. Steele was the first officer whom Deke had felt that way about, but it wasn’t just his rank — his age gave him a fatherly air. He was what the mountain folks back home called a “good man.”
But there was no time to dwell on that. Several shots rang out up and down the line, finally finishing off the other Japanese attackers.
Once again, the night settled into an uneasy silence.
But the GIs felt shaken to a man. There had not been more than a half dozen Japanese attackers, but the whole defensive line had been in danger of being routed.
If the GIs had run, what then? There was nowhere to go but back into the sea. The dire reality of their situation began to sink in.
“They’re crazy,” Philly said, looking down at the trussed-up Japanese officer in the dying light from the flare. “Who attacks anybody with a sword? Who do these guys think they are?”
“Some of them still think that they’re samurai,” the lieutenant said nearby. “They have a code of honor that’s hard for us to understand. It’s called Bushido.”
“Looks like a death wish to me,” Deke said.
The lieutenant nodded. “That sounds about right,” he said. “The trouble is that they want to take some of us along with them.”
“They killed Ben. I hate ’em. I hate these Japs.”
Deke thought about how he had lost control and stabbed that Jap over and over again. He knew exactly what Philly was saying about the enemy.
The endless drills and exercises that they’d had right up until the moment of landing on the island had still left the war seeming distant, like something from the pages of a training manual.
That wasn’t the case anymore. The war was far too real. Each one of them had lost a buddy or someone from their unit. For Deke and every other GI and marine on the island, the war was now personal.
Kill or be killed — with a little revenge mixed in for good measure.
Chapter Eight
Everybody was glad to see daylight arrive, but the hour or so of predawn twilight proved to be the worst time of all. The soldiers felt tired and jumpy, worried that the Japanese had one more trick up their sleeves while it was still somewhat dark.
“Hey, what’s that!” someone shouted, then started firing. Several other soldiers opened fire — what they were shooting at was anybody’s guess.
“Cease firing, you dumbasses!” a sergeant shouted. “I don’t see any Japs.”
Still, the men remained jumpy. The problem was that the gray tropical dawn revealed strange shapes and forms. In the minds of the GIs, each one of these shapes had to be a Jap soldier creeping up on them, or maybe even a tank. The longer that they stared at a vague shape, the more it seemed to move. Despite the sergeants’ and officers’ best efforts, occasional bursts of fire broke out from the foxholes.
In the foxhole beside Deke, Philly said, “Everything I look at seems to be a Jap.”
“It’s just your eyes playing tricks on you,” Deke said. “It happens all the time when you’re hunting, right before it gets full daylight.”
“Where are the Japs, then? Why aren’t they attacking us?”
“I expect they’re dug in around the airfield, waiting for us. Last night they attacked us in our foxholes. Now it’s our turn to attack them.”
As the light increased, giving the threatening shapes clarity, the soldiers sheepishly realized that what they thought had been a Jap was a tree trunk, after all, or a clump of jungle ferns.
However, the morning light did reveal several dead Japanese, scattered in front of the American position. These were the men who had tried to infiltrate their lines last night, throwing grenades and launching small banzai attacks in groups of three or four men.