Battle Cry (62 page)

A crazy thought repeated itself over and over: I hadn’t brushed my teeth that morning. I didn’t want to die with a bad taste in my mouth. It annoyed me, I didn’t know why. I wanted to brush my teeth.

My pent-up tension vanished as our harrowing wait on the landing craft lengthened. I didn’t want to avenge anyone or anything. All I knew was that I was Mac and wanted to live. I didn’t want to get shot in the water…I must have been mad to think of a thousand enemies. I wanted them all gone.

A numbness crept over me. Coward…coward…coward, I said to myself. After all these years…. I tried to shake it off as the boats pushed close to Bairiki.

But I was wrapped in fear, fear that I had never known before. I felt that any second I would have to stand up and scream out the horror inside me.

The boat bucked furiously, throwing me flat and sending me skidding over the slippery deck. The front ramp buckled with a clang of lead on steel. The Japs were gunning us!

I felt urine running down my leg…I was afraid I was going to vomit. The red glint of a tracer bullet whizzed over the water in our direction. The boat reared and crashed hard, flinging me into the ramp. I turned around. Half the men were puking. Then I saw Huxley…he was sallow and trembling. I had seen men freeze before and had had contempt for them. But now the stiffening fear was taking me too…I must not let it happen!

“Get the control boat!” Huxley ordered. “Have them contact air cover and get that machine gun.”

In less than a minute there was an ear-splitting roar. We raised our eyes. Navy flyers were swooping in, their wing guns blazing. I began barking orders automatically. A billow of smoke rose up from the beach.

“They got them!”

The ramp dropped. I plunged waist deep into the whitish water and was no longer afraid.

We plodded in. Over the water came a steady whine of rifle bullets. The lagoon spouted little geysers. The Japs were still their usual lousy selves at marksmanship. Someone in front of me suddenly dropped. As a pool of blood formed, for a moment I thought it was Andy. The dead Marine bobbed up and rolled over. He was a machine gunner from How Company. I brushed past him as the water dropped to knee depth. I began sprinting zigzaggedly. My feet suddenly went out from under me. I had stepped into a pothole. A hand on my back pulled me upright.

“Come on, Mac, keep your powder dry,” Seabags shouted as he raced past me.

Max Shapiro’s Foxes were already inland and at work. They had moved in quickly and accurately on the enemy. The Captain had developed a deadly team.

I hit the beach and wheeled about…. “Come on, goddammit! Move in and set up that TBX and get in with Rocky.”

Spanish Joe, Danny, and me set up the radio hastily between two palms. A sharp report and a singing whizz peeled the bark from one of the trees. We all fell flat. I caught a glimpse of a form racing through the clearing before us, and emptied a clip of my carbine at him. The Jap dropped and rolled over a half dozen times. Danny was on his feet…. “Cover me,” he shouted.

He ran a couple of steps, stopped cold, and backed up. A vision came to him of standing over a Jap on Guadalcanal blowing loose his bayonet…the spray of blood and insides over his dungarees…

“What’s the matter, Danny?”

“Nothing,” he said and continued. He bent down quickly, threw the Jap’s rifle away, and frisked him. He signaled us forward.

“He’s still alive,” Danny said. Spanish Joe leveled with his carbine. I grabbed him.

“Hold it. They might want to question him. Find Doc Kyser and LeForce.”

Sporadic rifle fire crackled as our boys went about cleaning up the resistance. We were in a hard, sun-baked clearing. The dying Jap lay flat on his back and the blood spilling from him was blotted up by the coral ground. Danny and I crouched over him. He opened his eyes. There was no look of anger as his hand felt for a hole in his belly. His eyes met Danny’s. He must have been a young kid, like some of my squad. His face was round and smooth and he had a short black crew cut. He smiled at me and indicated he would like a drink of water.

Danny’s eyes were glued to him. He reached for his canteen, uncapped it and raised it to the Jap’s bleeding mouth. The liquid trickled down slowly. He coughed and blood and water squirted from a half dozen holes in his chest. He nodded a feeble thanks and asked with his hands and eyes if we were going to kill him. I shook my head and he smiled and made motions for a cigarette. I lit one and held it as he puffed. I wondered what he could be thinking of.

Danny arose. Somehow he could feel no hatred, though he had wanted to kill, to avenge the men who had died in the lagoon. This Jap seemed harmless now—just another poor guy doing what he was ordered to do.

Kyser, LeForce, and Huxley raced to the clearing behind Spanish Joe. LeForce began pumping questions a mile a minute.

“Hold it,” Kyser said. “His larynx has been ruptured. He can’t talk, even if he could understand.”

“Did you men frisk him?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He’s just a private,” LeForce said.

“He’ll be dead in a few minutes,” the doctor said.

“Keep an eye on him, Forrester. When he goes out, put a slug through his head to make sure,” Huxley ordered and left.

The sun beat down. The Jap waited calmly for death. He rolled over and went into a spasm. His eyes closed. Danny raised his carbine, aimed a shot carefully and squeezed it off.

The First Battalion of the Sixth had blooded itself badly in its furious drive from Green Beach. Past the airstrip, leaving bypassed bunkers to the engineers, they squeezed the frantic enemy back into the tapering tail of Betio.

There would be no surrender by the fanatic little yellow men. In sheer desperation they hurled themselves at the First Battalion’s line in wave after wave of saber-wielding officers. They screamed the old cries: “Marines die!” and “We drink Marine blood!”

As dusk fell on the second day of the invasion, the lines of the First Battalion began to buckle under the repeated onslaughts. They were reinforced by Marines from a dozen different outfits who straggled up and threw a slim picket line across the island. The Japs made banzai charges again and again, each attack coming closer to a breakthrough.
Lincoln White
radioed to
Violet:
W
E CAN’T HOLD
. Headquarters came back with: Y
OU HAVE TO
.

Those were the orders. From Bairiki, the howitzers of the Tenth Marines pumped salvo after salvo over the water into the compressed Jap area, their guns bouncing with each angry bark. Destroyers entered the lagoon once more and poured their five-inch flat trajectiles into the packed enemy.

The Jap was in a nutcracker. To try to retreat to Bairiki meant to be cut down by Huxley’s anxious Whores awaiting them. Only through the picket line of the First Battalion could they possibly break through.

The Marines dug in, fighting fiercely against the waves of human battering rams. When their ammunition ran low, they poised their bayonets and hacked back the wall of flesh. Then the black night came again and the firing faded to a crackle.

Dawn of the third morning ended another suspenseful night filled with cries and trickery. The Marine line held. The first show of light brought the Third Battalion of the Sixth ashore through Green Beach and they raced hellbent for election up the airstrip to reinforce the faltering men embedded there in coral foxholes.

Another wild Jap charge on the line and the fresh new men cut them down. Another and another fell short. Then the Third Battalion stood up and moved in to drive them into the water. With all hope gone, their unconquerable bastion falling, the Japs began taking their lives by their own hand. The battle for Betio was drawing to a close less than seventy-two hours after it had started.

The ramps of our boats dropped at the end of the pier on Betio. We had been wandering about in the lagoon all night awaiting decision as to whether to attempt a night landing to reinforce the hard-pressed First Battalion. Through the dark hours came reports that the line was weaker but still intact. Then, before the decision to send us in, the Third Battalion was on the way to Green Beach. The new day found us still going in aimless circles in the water. We were all dog tired but as we jumped into shoulder-high water, the sight that greeted us rudely awakened us.

It was ghoulish. As we waded in through the potholes from a mile out, the lagoon was filled with bobbing bodies. There were hundreds of them. Marines of the Second and Eighth Regiments. I felt sick and humiliated as I passed. They were bloated and distorted beyond recognition. Many lay face down, their hair weaving up and down on small ripples.

Others lay on their backs stiff with rigor mortis. Their faces were slick from the washing of water and their eyes stared blindly with the wild expression they had worn when the bullet cut them down. And others, whose eyes had been eaten away by the salt, had running, jellied masses over their faces and holes where eyes had once been. It was grisly to be alive in this watery graveyard where lifeless hulks danced on the crests of the waves.

Hundreds of rubber boats were moving in the opposite direction towards the landing craft that awaited them on the edge of the barrier reef. In the rubber boats lay bloody, moaning boys: the wounded. Behind the boats, in the water, shaggy corpsmen and stretcher bearers from the division band passed us by the hundreds, finding sanctuary at last from the island of death.

The stink was rancid as we set foot on Blue Beach. There was no breeze in the humid atmosphere. We jumped to the sea wall and saw devastation to defy description. Rubble on rubble, a junkyard of smoldering brimstone. Every yard brought to light a dead Marine or a dead Jap lying in stiff grotesque pose. I wanted to look up but my foot would touch flesh and I couldn’t.

We split up to recheck the bunkers that had held from three to three hundred Japs, working with the engineers to flush out any that could possibly be alive now.

I stood atop some sandbags of a high fortification. From there I could see Betio from one end to the other. It seemed inconceivable that eight thousand men could have died there. I could have walked the length of the island in twenty minutes and could have thrown a rock across a greater part of its width. All that remained were a few dozen cocoanut trees erect in the shambles, standing eerily against the sky. Our victory was complete. There were only four prisoners and three of them were Korean laborers.

A radio was set up. We were all very quiet. Around us sat men of the Second and Eighth and our First Battalion. I wanted to go up and offer them cigarettes or some water or just talk, but I couldn’t. On the airstrip the Seabees had already started clearing the rubble with bulldozers to hasten the hour the first plane would touch its wheels on Lieutenant Roy Field.

Sam Huxley was on his haunches, his helmet off, his head lowered and his eyes on the deck. His face was pasty and his eyes brimmed with tears. Colonel Malcolm, the Sixth Marine commander, walked up to him.

“Hello, Sam.”

“Hello, Colonel.”

“Look, old man, don’t take it so badly.”

“I can’t help it. We were the only battalion in the whole damned—oh, what’s the use.”

“What is your casualty report, Sam?”

“Four dead, six wounded.”

“Would it have made it any better if you had been in the assault wave?”

“I feel like a cheater. I suppose you think I’m a sadist….”

“Of course not. We all wanted the assault assignment.”

“I guess I’ve been a Marine too long. Glory happy. General Pritchard told me I was glory happy. We’re laughingstocks now…. The hiking fools.”

“Sam, the Sixth doesn’t have to be ashamed. It was the First Battalion that broke their backs….”

“While we sat on our twats on Bairiki.”

“Cigarette?”

“No, thanks.”

“Anyhow, General Philips wants to see you at the CP in a half-hour.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Come on, man, snap out of it.”

“I just can’t look those kids in the face…mine or the others.”

Huxley, Colonel Malcolm, and Lt. Colonel Norman of the Third Battalion came to attention and saluted General Philips. He ordered them at ease and they seated themselves about the field desk.

“You people can be proud,” Philips said. “Your First Battalion performed magnificently in their charge yesterday. I’ve never seen them better and that includes Belleau Wood. Does anyone have a cigar? Thank you.” He lit up and puffed away contentedly at Malcolm’s offering. “You men are about to make up for your light duties.”

A smile spread across the faces of Huxley and Norman.

“Colonel Norman, your battalion is to board ship and go to Apamama atoll to the south, immediately. A platoon of Jasco men is already on the way down to scout it for you. We don’t know what you are going to hit but we presume it won’t be too heavy. As soon as we hear from Jasco we’ll arrange for your landing.”

Philips opened a large map of Tarawa atoll. “As for you, Huxley, I hear your men have an affection for hiking.” Sam laughed politely at the joke. “Well, you might not be laughing when you are finished. Tarawa has forty miles of islands. You are to debark to Bairiki again and move down the entire chain until you get to Cora and you are to destroy any enemy left.”

“Aye aye, sir. Any idea of their strength?”

“Hard to say, Huxley, hard to say. We will never get an accurate count of the bodies on Betio. There may not be more than a handful of Japs left…again, there may be a thousand. You have the only battalion left that is in condition to handle this assignment. We should get some reports from the natives. Remember this, you are on your own. We haven’t a spare bean left. We can give you a dozen planes and one destroyer for support. The supply dump is on Bairiki. We’ll assign an alligator to move ammo and medical stuff and rations up to you each day. I want this job done quickly. Travel light—no packs, just water and ammo, period.”

“What does the General suggest in regard to heavy mortars and radio and telephone gear?”

“Give the heavy weapons men rifles. Take only enough radio stuff to keep in contact with your support and with Headquarters on Helen. Use light telephone stuff. Move fast. I’m assigning a squad from Jasco to work in front of your battalion. Good luck to both of you.”