Sergeant Hawley approached and handed the submachine gun to the lieutenant, who aimed it up into the tree and proceeded to empty the magazine. The Japanese soldier fell to the ground with a heavy thud and didn’t move.
“Good shooting, sir.”
“That’s what I call a Jap coconut,” Thibault said. He called over a combat photographer and had him snap a photo of himself standing over the dead soldier while striking a pose with the submachine gun. A group of soldiers gathered to see the show.
Watching, Deke felt a little sick. It wasn’t that he was opposed to killing the enemy, but he didn’t care for the way the lieutenant was making a spectacle of it. He turned away.
Unfortunately, the lieutenant spotted him and noticed the look of disapproval on Deke’s face.
“What’s the matter, Deke?” Thibault wanted to know. “We’re here to kill Japs, in case you didn’t notice.”
“You sure killed the hell out of that one,” Deke said.
“What’s that?”
“You sure killed the hell out of that one, sir.”
Deke moved off before he said or did something that he’d regret later.
A short distance away, Philly had been watching the whole thing. “You sure like to push it, don’t you?”
“He’s taking pictures of Japs he shot like it’s a hunting trip or maybe he’s gonna show his grandkids someday,” Deke said. “Don’t that seem wrong to you?”
“He’s an officer. He gets to do what he wants.”
As it turned out, the wholesale killing of Japanese was just beginning.
Soldiers began to ransack the shelters that hadn’t caught fire. There wasn’t much left, but the GIs let out a whoop when they found several cases of canned crabmeat and even a couple of bottles of Japanese rice wine.
What the officers were mostly interested in were stacks of fuel barrels that had somehow escaped the incendiary strafing fire. While Americans used big fifty-gallon drums for fuel, the Japanese barrels were smaller. Nonetheless, there was enough gasoline to keep the tanks going for a while longer, and it was that much less fuel that would need to be carted over the jungle trail from the beachhead. The Japanese had apparently intended the fuel for use by their own tanks, most of which had been destroyed by the handful of Shermans or in aerial attacks.
With the outpost secured, the next object was Mount Santa Rosa itself. The squad that now included Patrol Easy headed out once again. The Japanese had spent the months leading up to the attack on the island that they had known was coming by preparing their fallback position. The closer they got to the Japanese bastion, the more that the rugged landscape became dotted with tunnels and bunkers.
Up ahead, Conlon spotted three Japanese soldiers making a run for it. He raised his rifle but didn’t manage to get off a shot before the enemy soldiers slipped into a hole in the ground and disappeared from sight.
Excited, Lieutenant Thibault broke into a run. He reached the spot where the Japanese had disappeared and used the muzzle of his carbine to flip open a hatch made from woven sticks and grass. It was so cleverly made that they could have walked right past it and never noticed. The hatch revealed the entrance to a large tunnel.
As the men gathered around, they could hear the echo of many, many voices singing down below.
“It sounds like there are hundreds of them down there,” Thibault said in surprise. He looked at the interpreter. “What the hell are they singing, anyhow?”
“Sounds like patriotic songs.”
“Spread out and see if there are any other entrances,” the lieutenant said. “I don’t want these Nips sneaking out and attacking us from behind.”
Within minutes, now that they had an idea of what to look for, the squad had found two more entrances, all leading down into large tunnels.
“I’ll bet the whole underside of this hill is filled with Japs.”
It was an unsettling thought. They’d heard so many voices that it indicated the Japanese far outnumbered the Americans aboveground. But with the tunnel entrances covered, the Americans had the Japanese trapped.
“Sir, do you want me to shout down there and see if they will surrender?” To Deke’s ears, it sounded as if Yoshio already knew what the lieutenant’s answer would be, but he had to ask.
“No, I’ve got a better idea.”
The lieutenant sent a detail to Yigo with orders to bring back several drums of gasoline. Meanwhile, the rest of the platoon guarded the tunnel entrances to make certain that none of the Japanese escaped. All the while, the deep, manly singing continued. Deke thought it sounded spooky.
When the men returned with the fuel drums, they flooded the tunnels with gasoline. Still, no effort had been made to ask the Japanese if they wanted to surrender. Some of the men knew what was coming next, and they looked sickened by it.
“Fire in the hole!” Thibault shouted, hurling a satchel charge into a tunnel entrance. The other tunnel entrances were treated in similar fashion. “Everybody down!”
The explosion was enormous. Deke felt the ground heave under his feet, reminding him of the bucking deck of the landing craft that had carried him to Guam in the first place.
Gouts of flame erupted from the mouths of the tunnels as the gasoline caught fire.
Deke thought that there was no way anyone could have survived the blast. Yet no sooner had the dust and debris settled than they could hear the singing again. The sound was muted but sounded more determined than ever to Deke, or maybe that was just the vestiges of the blast ringing in his ears.
The lieutenant looked angry. “Roll some stones over here and block up these tunnels,” he said.
Considering that the explosions had caved in some of the entrances, the soldiers made short work of closing up the remaining tunnels. The Japanese were soon sealed underground, and the GIs trudged on toward Mount Santa Rosa.
It was clear that the attack on the stronghold would not be nearly so easy. The mountainside bristled with artillery positions. With nowhere else to go, the Japanese there clearly planned to fight, not hide. Uneasily, the soldiers glanced up at their destination, knowing that it was going to be a bloodbath.
But first they had to get there. A swath of jungle stood between the advancing troops and the mountainside. As they entered the heavy growth, it became clear that the Japanese planned to make them fight for every inch of progress. Every few minutes, they were greeted with grenade attacks, machine-gun fire, or snipers.
“I thought the Japs were beaten,” Philly complained, sprawled out beside Deke on the jungle floor.
“You saw that hillside up ahead,” Deke replied. “Do they look beaten to you?”
They both tried to ignore a large centipede, around the size of a man’s thumb, that scuttled past under their noses. Tracer fire zipped overhead. A centipede bite packed a wallop, but bugs were the least of their worries.
“Got a grenade?” Deke asked. “One, two, three—”
Both men hurled their grenades and ducked low as the resulting shrapnel shredded the foliage ahead. They heard a scream of pain — but they weren’t done yet. They poured several shots into the brush ahead. A few paces off to their left, Yoshio joined in from where he also lay sprawled in the underbrush.
That was the strategy that quickly evolved for the advancing troops. With the heavy jungle infested with handfuls of Japanese defenders, the Americans would advance, throw grenades, pepper the area ahead with gunfire, and then advance again.
Off to their right, another squad was equipped with a flamethrower painted with stripes of green-and-black camouflage. The flames sprayed the foliage and burned everything in its path to a crisp.
“Lucky bastards. We need one of those.”