“Are you going to shoot him?” Yoshio asked.
“That’s what Lieutenant Thibault and Sergeant Hawley wanted, ain’t it? But no, I ain’t gonna shoot him. Tell him to run.”
“Run where?”
“Explain to him that his best bet is to head for the beach. There’s a chance that he might be able to catch a boat off this island. If the Japs have any boats, they’ll be on that beach.”
Yoshio babbled something to the prisoner in Japanese. The prisoner stared at Deke in disbelief. Maybe he thought Deke still planned to shoot him, considering that he still held a rifle. The prisoner remained rooted to the spot.
“Yoshio, what’s the Japanese word for run?”
“Hashire!”
Deke gave the prisoner a poke with the muzzle. “Go on now. Hashire!”
Finally, the young prisoner turned and ran, disappearing into the jungle.
Deke fired a single shot into the air.
“Why didn’t you shoot him?” Yoshio wondered. “I thought you hated Japs.”
“We killed plenty of Japs already. I figure there’s no harm in letting that one get away.”
Nearby, the men of Patrol Easy waited tensely, not wanting to look at one another. None of them loved the Japanese, but it was clear that the young prisoner had been harmless enough. Shooting a prisoner seemed to cross the line into murder. The seconds stretched out. Finally, they heard a single shot from the copse where the sergeant had led the prisoner.
Deke and Yoshio walked back out alone.
“The prisoner tried to escape, sir,” Deke said.
“You did what you had to do,” Thibault replied. “From here on out, we are not taking any more prisoners.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Now that US forces had arrived in strength, it was time to move against the fortified Japanese positions. The first big push started at Yigo, an enemy outpost in the shadow of Mount Santa Rosa.
“I’m nervous about this,” Yoshio admitted. “We all know that the Japanese are going to fight to the last man standing. Anyhow, what use am I if we aren’t supposed to take any prisoners.”
“Stick close to me and Philly, and keep your head down,” Deke said. “No matter what the lieutenant says, there might be a few prisoners.”
What really rankled Deke was the fact that Lieutenant Thibault already had a sniper, Corporal Conlon, who had gotten his rifle with its telescopic sight mainly by virtue of being a kiss-ass since basic training. You couldn’t really blame Conlon — it seemed to be in his nature to do what he was told and please others. In Deke’s mind, these were not the qualities that made a good sniper, no matter how many shooting matches Conlon had won or how much ass he kissed. Fighting the Japanese was not the same as a day on the rifle range. Deke reckoned that being a sniper was about one part shooting and two parts animal cunning.
Thibault had other ideas. He had relegated Patrol Easy to sentry duty, assigned to watching the supply depot while the rest of the squad joined in planning for the attack.
What had started out as the final push to end enemy control of Guam soon evolved into a quest for revenge, after an unfortunate incident earlier that day.
On the outskirts of Vigo, Colonel Douglas McNair, the chief of staff of the division, had been riding in a jeep when the vehicle was ambushed by a Japanese patrol that had been lying in wait for this very purpose. McNair and three other men had died in a blaze of machine-gun fire. The Japanese had melted back into the jungle. McNair had been popular with the men, and they had taken his loss hard.
“Colonel McNair was all right,” Deke said when he heard the news. He always seemed as though he was going to bat for his soldiers. “I just hope to hell they don’t promote Thibault now. That would be a good way to lose the war.”
“Those low-down dirty Japs,” Philly muttered.
That summed up about how everybody felt. They would welcome a chance to get back at the Japanese.
As the focus of the attack, Yigo was essentially a supply depot on the fringes of the stronghold built into the mountain. Quietly, all roads leading toward Yigo were sealed off. The dense jungle served to hem in the Japanese soldiers in the outpost.
The attack was two-pronged. Fighters hit the outpost from the air, strafing the Japanese with gunfire and dropping bombs. Unlike on the mountain, the Japanese here didn’t have bunkers and tunnels but only hastily dug foxholes and grass huts. When the aircraft attacked, all that the Japanese could do was run for cover. Some escaped into the jungle, but others funneled into the narrow roads leading away from the outpost.
This was just what the Americans had expected. All the roads had been covered by fields of fire. A few tanks had been brought up, along with mortars. Machine-gun emplacements covered all the angles. When the fleeing Japanese appeared, running away from the aerial attack on the outpost, all that firepower opened up on them.
It was nothing short of a slaughter. The Japanese had been running for their lives, many of them not so much as carrying a weapon.
“My God, it’s a massacre,” remarked one of the American pilots, who had a bird’s-eye view of the Japanese scurrying like ants — directly into the guns waiting for them. Bodies littered the ground where they had been cut down by the strafing attack. The grass huts caught on fire and burned furiously, sending pillars of black smoke into the blue tropical sky.
Within minutes, it was all over. The planes continued to swoop overhead, but there wasn’t anything left alive to shoot at. The GIs advanced up the path, stepping around the bodies of the dead.
Somehow, a few enemy soldiers had managed to survive. They hid themselves in the jungle or climbed into trees, firing down at the advancing Americans.
Deke and the rest of Patrol Easy had been assigned to bring up the rear. Nervously, Deke watched their flanks as they advanced, his eyes roving the tight walls of greenery. It was perfect cover for an ambush. The Japanese seemed to have a natural-born talent for sneakiness. They liked to wait for a group of soldiers to go by and then attack them from behind, once they had let their guard down. Thankfully, the fleeing Japanese didn’t seem to have had much time to prepare many surprises along the trail. They had been too busy being slaughtered.
A few enemy troops had survived, however, and weren’t letting the Americans advance unmolested.
But it was Conlon, not Deke, that Lieutenant Thibault called upon to clear the way forward.
“Conlon, get your ass up here and clear out these snipers,” Lieutenant Thibault ordered.
“Yes, sir.”
But it was easier said than done. Conlon made a show of taking aim and firing several shots, but there was no telling if he had hit anything.
None of that mattered to Thibault, who seemed pleased by the performance.
“That’s six for Conlon!” the lieutenant shouted, never mind the fact that they had yet to see a single dead body as a result of Conlon’s shooting. “Hey, Cole, try not to shoot any of us in the ass back there!”
As they entered the clearing that had served as the main staging area for the outpost, Lieutenant Thibault stood near the base of a tree that a Japanese sniper had climbed into. His single-shot weapon was no match for the incoming flood of GIs, and he seemed to have run out of ammo, anyhow. They could see him up there, only partially obscured by the palm fronds. The soldiers were having a good time taking pot shots at him.
Just like a treed coon, Deke thought.
“Lieutenant, do you want me to tell him to surrender and climb down here?” Yoshio asked.
“Oh, he’s coming down, all right. We’re just going to skip the surrender part. Sergeant, bring that Thompson up here,” Thibault said.