Deke stood on a munitions crate and looked over the side, out at the ocean, and immediately wished that he hadn’t. All that he could see was the endless dark chop of the Pacific, with a few shadows nearby of other landing craft. The motors were all running at low speed to avoid making too much noise or kicking up a wake that would show white against the dark sea.
It was no secret that the Japanese Navy was prowling these waters, looking for a chance to blow them all to hell before they got anywhere near the island. From above, Jap planes sought to do the same. So far, they had dodged both. But how long could their luck hold?
“If anybody lights a smoke, I’ll throw his ass in the water,” growled the sergeant, just loud enough for his squad to hear. Knowing Sergeant Hawley, he meant it. He was a brutal man who often took his authority too far. When that happened, Lieutenant Thibault simply looked the other way. “If the Japs spot us, it’s all over.”
Although they felt alone on this heaving ocean, their landing craft was just one of several carrying the army troops toward the enemy guns awaiting them on the island. Nearby, several destroyers ran interference, screening the vulnerable fleet of landing craft.
They were going to join the United States Marines who had been fighting on the island, trying to wrest Guam from the Imperial Japanese Army. Capturing the airfield would bring American planes that much closer to striking the heart of Japan itself, which was why the Japanese were willing to fight to the last man to keep the island.
It was a speck of an island in the vastness of the Pacific. Before it had been invaded by the Japanese in 1941, Guam had been a United States territory for nearly fifty years, one of the spoils of the Spanish-American War. Just under thirty-five miles long and anywhere from five to nine miles wide, comprising 228 square miles, Guam was almost exactly the size of Deke’s mountain county back home. Guam was part of the Mariana Islands, named after an otherwise unmemorable seventeenth-century Austrian queen. This chain of islands stretched like the beads of a pearl necklace toward Japan.
One thing for sure: the place was crawling with Japs.
Other than the airfield, there wasn’t much to recommend the island. Rugged, mountainous, thick with jungle, surrounded by sharp-edged coral reefs, Guam was no tropical paradise, but it was where they were headed, and their job was to take it from the Japanese.
Aboard the landing craft, time passed in an agonizing blur.
Suddenly, the horizon came alive with flashes of light. Deep booms reached their ears. This was no tropical thunderstorm. The navy destroyers whose mission it was to screen the landing force from the enemy must have encountered the Japanese Navy. They would do what they could to keep the enemy ships off them. From a distance, they were witnessing a naval battle. The sight would have been awe-inspiring if it hadn’t meant that they were in danger.
The Japs had found them.
There was no more time for stealth. Deke felt the vessel beneath him surge ahead with new speed. The invasion fleet was racing away from the battle, just in case any Japanese ships slipped through.
The fleet crashed through the waves, leaving a white wake, like a bright slash on the dark surface of the sea, for whatever enemy plane might be circling above. But there was no helping it now. The flat-bottomed vessel slammed up and down, jarring their very bones. As the tropical dawn grew, they raced toward the shores of Guam.
“Get ready, boys!” the sergeant shouted. There was no longer any need for quiet. “We’re going in!”
Someone began to pray, and nobody thought any less of him: “Our father, who art in heaven—”
From the darkness off the bow, flashes of red and orange stabbed the dawn. Alerted by the naval battle, Japanese artillery had opened fire. It was light enough now for the invasion fleet to be a target. Shells splashed into the sea, raising geysers of spray. One splash hit so close that water came in over the gunwales and drenched them all. The dog yelped.
Then came a blinding flash and earsplitting explosion. Deke thought at first that a Jap shell had struck them. But their luck had held. Instead, one of the landing craft nearby had taken a direct hit. Deke glimpsed debris framed against the sky. Chunks of something soft and ragged. Pieces of ship? He didn’t want to think too much about it.
Now tracer fire skipped over the waves. Some fool looked over the lip of the gunwales to see the sights and fell back dead, shot through the head. Blood and brain matter oozed out and mixed with the slurry in the belly of the vessel.
The others stared in horror at their first dead man.
The forward motion of the landing craft slowed.
“What’s happening?” Ben stammered.
“Get ready, that’s what. This is it.”
Deke was a little surprised. He had pictured them running right onto the beach, the ramp coming down for them to run out onto soft sand, but that wasn’t to be the case. The coral reef surrounding the island prevented the landing craft from getting any closer, even at high tide. They had been warned about this in training, and he knew what would come next.
The vessel bobbed in the shallow water at the edge of the reef. Bullets clanged against the sides. Karang!
“Let’s go!” the sergeant shouted. “Everybody over the side!”
Deke clambered up and over along with everybody else. They had practiced this what seemed like hundreds of times. Even men whose minds were frozen by fear had been conditioned to go through the motions, which they did now.
He got up and over the side, then came down with his boots splashing into water. Above him, Ben lost his grip and fell, falling headlong into the sea. Deke reached down and dragged up the sputtering man.
“Go! Go!” an officer shouted.
Tracers and bullets zipped across the surface of the water. On the landing craft, somebody started to shoot back with the big.50 caliber. But not for long. The landing craft were too vulnerable out here and were needed to carry yet more soldiers and supplies ashore. The engines roared and the vessel began to back away, leaving the men.
The soldiers remained several hundred feet from the shoreline. They would be forced to cross the coral reef between their location and the shore.
“Move it!” the sergeant shouted. “Get to the beach! Don’t bunch up!”
“Stick with me, Ben.”
Ben kept pace with Deke, moving parallel to him and staying several feet away, as ordered. It was bright enough now that they could see the shoreline clearly: surf breaking, sand, and beyond the sand thick vegetation like a wall. The navy had shelled the beach last night, and not even one of the trees still had all its fronds, most of which looked broken and twisted. The vegetation beneath looked dense as ever.
Wading through the water was a real slog. Sometimes the water was only knee-deep, and two steps later they were up to their chests. They struggled to keep their rifles dry.
Only the dog didn’t seem to mind. She swam toward shore, barking with excitement, oblivious to the bullets pocking the water around her.
Just ahead of Deke, a soldier from another squad labored through the surf beneath the weight of his pack, gear, and rifle. He vanished beneath the water.
The soldier had stepped into a gap in the surface of the reef, known as a kettle. For the heavily laden troops, these were as deadly as a land mine. He was suddenly in water way over his head. Trapped and unable to get out, weighted down with gear, the man was drowning. Nobody stopped to help.