Leyte. It was a place he’d never heard of until a few weeks ago, and now he was never going to forget it.
Deke had said that he would gladly have traded his seasick state for another stint in the jungle, and it looked as though he was going to get his wish. Leyte was hardly in their rearview mirror. Instead, it was their destination once again, this time with several thousand other troops. It was a good thing those guns had been knocked out.
Almost every man on the ship had seen action in some way, and nobody was looking forward to more of it. Not that they had any choice. As usual, the GIs had been told as little as possible, which meant that the rumor mill was going full tilt.
“I hear we’re going to some place called Leyte,” one of the soldiers on deck had said to Deke and Philly, like he was letting them in on a big secret.
“Leyte, huh?” Philly turned to the soldier and said, “Take my word for it, buddy, when I say that we don’t recommend it.”
“What would you know about it?” the soldier asked, but at a look from Deke, he suddenly remembered that he needed to be someplace else.
“There you go again, scaring the neighbors,” Philly said.
“All I did was look at him.”
“Exactly.”
One good thing about being on the transport was that they recognized several people they did want to talk to. One of those was Egan. He had been left behind on Guam because his main skill had been as a war dog handler — not a scout or sniper. At the time, he hadn’t even had a dog.
But that was then and this was now. They had reunited earlier with Egan, right after coming aboard.
What they hadn’t seen before was his new dog. He was now walking a large, blondish dog on deck. It was hard to say what the dog’s lineage was, but there was definitely some German shepherd in there. One of the dog’s ears sagged, like maybe he’d already seen some action.
There were a handful of similar war dogs that would be going ashore to sniff out hidden Japs and protect against enemy incursions at night. The dogs were being kept in shape, like the men themselves, with as much exercise and training as the cramped quarters aboard ship allowed. There was one strip of sod that had been laid out on deck for the dogs, the only bit of greenery on the ship. That grass had a distinct purpose.
“Believe me, you don’t want to go walking on that grass,” Philly said.
“No worries about that.”
Egan approached, leading the dog. Philly whistled. “Where’d you get the pony?”
“This is Thor,” Egan said, grinning. It had taken him a long time to smile again after Whoa Nelly had been killed in the fighting on Guam. “Best damn dog in the Pacific.”
Thor growled when Philly tried to pet him.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Egan said, keeping a firm grip on Thor’s leash. Philly didn’t need to be told twice but had taken a couple of steps back. “These guys aren’t trained to be lapdogs, you know.”
Deke always did have a soft spot for dogs, having grown up around them, and the big German shepherd mix didn’t scare him any. He knelt and scratched the dog’s ears.
Thor responded by wagging his tail.
“I’ll be damned,” Egan said. “He likes you.”
“You’re all right, ain’t you, boy?” Deke said quietly. “Those Japs are going to take one look at you, and they’re gonna run the other way.”
He gave Thor a final rub and straightened up. As useful as it was to have the dogs guarding them, he felt that it wasn’t right to bring a dog into combat. Too many of the dogs had died on Guam when the Japs began to target them out of fear and hatred.
“I’ve got to say, Deke, that you’re about the last person I would have taken for an animal lover,” Egan said.
“Sure, I like dogs. It’s mainly people I don’t like.” When Deke saw the expression on his buddies’ faces, he added, “Present company excepted.”
Philly snorted. “After the war, I’ll bet you’re gonna go live in a shack in the woods somewhere.”
“No,” he said. “I’m going to get my family’s farm back from the son-of-a-bitch banker who stole it from us, that’s what.”
“You want that farm back so you can bale hay and milk cows all day? It sounds like maybe he did you a favor,” Philly said.
Deke just shook his head. “City folk wouldn’t understand.”
“I guess not. Listen, I heard Ernie Pyle is somewhere on this ship. I’d like to talk to him and get my name in the newspaper.”
“If you want to make a fool out of yourself, then go right ahead,” Deke said, but he was grinning. “Go on, then.”
Deke watched him go off in search of the famed newspaper reporter. Alone at the ship’s rail, he looked across the sparkling sea. He stared at the horizon, a trick he had learned to help with the seasickness. Their ship was just one of many, a convoy heading to kick the Japs out of the Philippines, although the Japs didn’t have plans to go anywhere.
I reckon we’ll see how that turns out, Deke thought.
Ikeda stood near Major Noguchi, both men looking out to sea. He lifted his hand to his eyes to shield them from the glare off the water. A few Japanese vessels were visible near the shore, on patrol. They had been on high alert since the raid a few days ago. Overhead, planes patrolled the skies. There seemed to be constant dogfights between the Japanese planes and the American fighter pilots. Still, some of the enemy planes broke through and managed to bomb or strafe the Japanese defenses.
It was for naught — Major Noguchi had engineered the defenses so well that even the most well-placed bomb or rocket scarcely had any impact on what he had built here.
The deep-blue surface of Leyte Gulf remained empty of enemy ships, but not for much longer. The growing number of planes was a sign that the Americans were coming, and when they arrived, the Japanese would be ready.
“Perhaps we cannot win,” Major Noguchi had admitted in a moment of candor. However, he did not appear gloomy or defeated as he said it. Noguchi was simply being pragmatic, as usual. He was a builder, after all, not a warrior. The major had a bandage on his head where a chunk of stone had struck him when the American raiders exploded the bunker. Absently, he touched the bandage. “Rest assured, we shall make them pay dearly.”
“And we shall die gloriously,” Ikeda added.
The major sighed. “Yes, I suppose that is a possibility.”
Neither man had spoken directly of the raid, which they found personally embarrassing. Despite their best efforts, the raiders had managed to destroy the gun battery on Guinhangdan Hill.
However, the shoreline was far from undefended. Even in the days since the raid, more rifle pits and hidden machine-gun nests had been added near the beach. The hill itself was close to an impregnable fortress. The raiders had taken them by surprise, but there would not be much of an element of surprise once American forces stormed the beach.
Although the battery of massive guns had been destroyed, Major Noguchi had lost no time in bringing in more artillery to occupy the same bunker. To be sure, the replacements were smaller, but they would still rain destruction down on the beach and assault craft. It was just the big ships that would now be out of reach.
The rest of the hill remained honeycombed with trenches, tunnels, and firing pits. Again, this was the result of many months of effort.
Ikeda’s own team of sogekihei marksmen was ready to occupy these fortifications, both here on the hill and closer to the beach. He had worked tirelessly to train these men well, even if one of his best men had been shot and killed at the ravine where they had almost cornered the enemy raiders. The poor man had been hit in the belly and plunged over the side.