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| Manning a .30-caliber heavy barrel machine gun M1919A4, flexible on Bougainville. |
by Captain Steve Cibik, USMC as told to James D. Horan and
Gerold Frank
Bougainville—to most
pre-war Americans who had ever heard of the place at all, a name conjuring
exotic and sensuous visions. An island of travel poster beaches and perfumed
flowers, of smiling maidens and languorous moonlight breezes. Yet, to the young
Americans from Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Nevada who fought for this
island, the thoughts will always be different. They’ll be of murky heat, of
mosquitoes big as a penny, of primeval slime into which a man could disappear
and never be seen again… and of the enemy, ever-present and relentless.
American forces landed
on Empress Augusta Bay, Bougainville, on 1 November 1943, in order to secure an
airfield site within effective striking distance of the big Japanese base on
Rabaul, key to the southwestern Pacific area. But to operate an airfield, the
surrounding jungle had first to be cleared of swarming enemy defenders. This
was to be the Marines’ job and one small part of that job is described by a
Marine captain who was probably one of the first soldiers of the war to have a
battlefield named after him.
•
It was The Fox who found the ridge. A lesser man would never
have seen it, for it was a geographical freak, a knob of stone and earth lost
in the green fury of the Bougainville jungle. The Fox—Lieutenant William Kay,
of Baltimore, a scout’s scout, a wizard in bushcraft—came trudging out of a
wall of rain, his sharp nose sniffing, his thin utility almost transparent with
water as it clung to his lean body. “You going up the ridge?” he asked, shaking
the water from his eyes like a dog. “Okay, Steve; come along.”
It was late afternoon of 20 November 1943. Only a few
minutes before, our battalion had taken time out to rest. The odor of the
jungle, warm and humid, was in our nostrils when Major Donald C. Schmuck, of
California, appeared, coming up the line.
“Steve,” he said without preface, “there’s a knoll up ahead.
Lieutenant Kay found it. He’ll lead you to it. Take your men and occupy it for
the night.” He spat water and grinned. “We don’t want the Japs to get on top of
us tonight, and there are plenty of them out there. Keep your fingers crossed.”
Then he was gone, and The Fox was emerging from the curtain
of rain. I turned to my platoon sergeant, Charles B. Kenneday, of Winter
Garden, Florida, and said, “Let’s go.”
We were a veteran company, with Guadalcanal behind us, and
we thought we knew jungle. But here on Bougainville we were battling jungle
such as we had never dreamed of. For nineteen days we struggled in miasmal
swamps, fought vines that wrapped themselves about our necks like a whip, birds
that dived at us like screaming Stukas, bats whose wings whirred like falling artillery
shells, and snakes, lizards and insects without name or number. For nineteen
days we attacked this natural enemy with our machetes and knives, hacking our
way through almost solid barricades of vegetation run riot.
It rained daily from noon to dusk—fierce, pounding tropical
rains. If we had been lucky to hit fairly dry ground, we slept in foxholes six
or eight inches deep. During the night, water seeped up through the earth. We
invariably awoke drenched. Snakes ten feet long, with brown and sickly yellow
markings, came out of the jungle one night to be our bedfellows, curling up
with us for warmth. Next morning was loud with shouts of “Snakes! Snakes!” and
the sounds of thuds and thumpings as the men frantically beat them to death.
Now, on the twentieth day, we moved single file along the
trail in the downpour and gathering darkness.
“What kind of a knoll is it?” I asked Kay.
“I’ve never been up there. I spotted it by luck,” he said
over his shoulder. “Stand fifty yards in front of it and you don’t see it.
We’ll hit there in a few minutes.”
We moved slowly, fifty-one of us in all, and at the tail end
of the column our sixteen machine gunners struggled and swore under the weight
of their two machine guns and ammunition cans. I carried a telephone, and
behind me two scouts carefully let out a spool of combat wire for communication
with our commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Hector de Zayas. We pushed on,
and after a while the rain stopped.
Shortly before 6:30, The Fox halted. He pointed to the left.
“See it?” he asked.
I stood at his side and followed his finger. I made out a
slight rise in the terrain.
It was the ridge. Nature had camouflaged it with surpassing
skill; if it had not been for a nakedly white tree, it would have escaped us
completely.
“That’s it,” he said. “All yours. To-fa!” he said cheerily,
and with that Samoan good-bye, he turned back.
We moved on. Suddenly I was brought up sharply against a
wall of hard earth. I hacked at it with my knife, and the blade struck rock. It
was an almost perpendicular wall with an outcropping of stone, impossible to
climb. We had reached the base of the ridge. Moving like blind men, we
investigated. Finally, we found a good layer of earth covering the rock. I
gripped a tangle of roots as thick as my wrist, and began to climb. After half
an hour’s heartbreaking work, we reached a small saddle where the ridge leveled
off for a distance of fifteen feet, just as our communication wire gave out. We
threw ourselves down to rest.
Better dig in here for the night, I thought. No knowing how
much farther we have. And then, are we climbing into a trap? Are the Japs up
there, hearing us, waiting?
I nudged Kenneday. “Tell them to dig in,” I said. “We’ll
pull out before dawn.” I heard Kenneday’s whispered order go down the line. The
men set to work in the darkness, scooping up the soggy earth with their knives
and helmets. I cranked the telephone and whispered “CP. CP.”
I had to inform Colonel de Zayas that we were pitching in
here for the night. Our artillery had been hammering this ridge with everything
it had. If they opened up before we left, we would be wiped out. “CP. CP,” I
repeated.
No answer.
After ten minutes of fruitless calling, I turned the phone
over to the man next to me and began to dig my own foxhole. The whispered “CP.
CP,” went on. I had the men take over the phone in turn. It grew deadly quiet.
In this lull, even nature seemed to be listening, as we were, for that voice,
to be reassured that we were in communication somehow with our front line. At
five a.m. I told Kenneday to take an eight-man patrol and see how far it was to
the summit. He and his men vanished. There was nothing to do but wait. A
splatter of mud announced Kenneday’s return. it was at least two hundred more
feet to the summit, he told us, and there, on a small knoll hardly big enough
to turn around in, he’d found more than a dozen Japanese foxholes. He’d seen no
Japanese, but they couldn’t be far away. I woke my men. One by one they climbed
out of their foxholes, rubbing their red-rimmed eyes, moving stiffened bodies.
We started up once more.
As we climbed, the jungle awoke too. We heard the raucous
caw of the bird that screeched for all the world like wood being sawed, the
weird woman-like scream of the “banana cat”—half cat, half anteater, as near as
we could make out—and the endless buzzing and whirring of insects.
We climbed for nearly two hours, dragging ourselves up by
the vines, and lashing ropes around our guns to pull them up, like Alpine
climbers. Finally we reached the summit and lay there, our hearts pounding.
There were fifteen foxholes. Some were well constructed, large enough to hold
four men, covered with a lean-to of bamboo, thatched with banana leaves. We
found chopsticks, cigarette butts, scraps of paper, food cans, the remains of
fire. Apparently the Japanese used the crest as an observation post by day, and
at night retired to their bivouac area at the base of the far side of the hill,
to get away from our artillery fire.
I walked to the edge of the ridge and almost gasped. What a
view of Bougainville! We were on the tip of a thumb of earth five hundred feet
high, an oasis in a sea of mist-covered jungle, the only high ground for miles
around. In the distance towered the Emperor Mountain Range, and in its center,
marked by wisps of dark, curling smoke, brooded the volcano of Mt. Bagana, and
far out across the jungle roof top were the sparkling waters of Empress Augusta
Bay.
We moved about the ridge slowly, examining our position.
“Look here!” called Kenneday suddenly. He was standing at
the head of a narrow trail which led down into the concealed depths of the
gorge below. Twenty yards away, we stumbled on a second trail. One led north,
the other east. Both had been used recently. Kenneday and I talked things over.
What was our job now, and what had we to do it with? Our
forces were small—there were fifty-one of us—we had only eleven belts of
machine gun ammunition, which would be used up in a few minutes of concerted
fighting. We’d have to depend principally upon the BARs [Browning automatic
rifles] and rifles. Each of us had three band grenades, and in emergency we
would have to make the best use of these. We had no food. But no matter what
the cost, we had to bold this ridge. Five hundred yards behind us were our
front lines. In the valley below, on the other side of the Piva River, were
several thousand Japanese troops. We all knew that a big battle must be fought
when the two forces met at the river’s fork. When we attacked, this ridge would
be invaluable. From here, we could spot Japanese positions and direct our heavy
artillery fire; from here, we could drive down into the valley, engaging the
Japanese while our main forces fought their way across the river. On the other
hand, were the Japanese in control of this ridge, the tables would be turned.
This ridge could be the key to success or failure in this phase of the battle
of Bougainville.
We had to hold it. We established the two machine guns, each
with a crew of six men; one covering the east trail, under Sergeant Richard
Murphy, who had grown a reddish beard that gave him an appearance of raffish
gaiety; the other, covering the north trail, under Slim Tierney, a taciturn
Westerner. I had only one order to give the boys: “Don’t fire until you must.
We’re saving all the ammunition we can.”
We started to construct a perimeter defense, using the
foxholes the Japanese had already dug. Suddenly, as I scooped up a double
handful of earth, I heard pounding feet. I wheeled around. Murphy was racing up
the trail, BAR in his right hand, signaling frantically. He had heard the
Japanese working their way upward, apparently ignorant that the hill had
changed hands.
We flung ourselves in our holes and waited. From behind the
shelter of a huge banyan tree, I made out the first Japanese. I waited until
they were within range.
“Let ’em have it!” I shouted.
Our BARs came to life; our riflemen, forced to sit up to aim
because the hill was so steep, fired like a picked team of marksmen. The
Japanese screamed and vanished into the jungle. But they left behind them four
still bodies. That was four for our side.
Kenneday grunted. “Might as well sit around till they come
back again,” he said.
I knew they would too. The Japanese must have known every
blade of grass, every quivering leaf here. They’d made good use of the terrain.
If they succeeded in destroying the two guns, we’d be lost.
Ducking low, I ran back to Murphy’s machine gun nest,
leaping the last few feet and landing in their midst. Murphy, a rugged, stocky,
ex-baseball player from the Ohio sandlots, was sitting behind his gun, peering
into the jungle below.
“Have the boys move this gun about twenty feet to the left,
Murph,” I said. “If the Nips come back, let’s be where they ain’t.”
He nodded assent, and I made it back to my foxhole. The men
redoubled their digging. As the morning wore on, the heat grew. It must now
have been nearly one hundred degrees. The men worked, drenched to the skin by
perspiration. They were drinking water at an alarming rate, and I passed the
word to go easy. Each man had only what remained in his canteen.
At noon, our artillery began. The first shell burst less
than one hundred yards from us on the Japanese side of the ridge. The earth
shook and the shrapnel whistled through the air. We lay in the foxholes and
prayed that our artillery would not shorten range. If they did—one well-placed
shell could wipe us all out.
The shelling lasted fully half an hour, and when it stopped
we climbed cautiously out of our foxholes.
Kenneday prowled about and returned to announce, “Nobody
hurt. So far, so good.”
Suddenly a figure appeared low on the crest of the ridge. I
jumped for my rifle, only to discover that it was Lieutenant Kay, unperturbed
as ever.
He crouched there, a coil of wire strung over his left
shoulder, and drawled, “You sure moved since the last time I saw you!”
I didn’t have any time to agree with him. I grabbed the
coil, and the three of us climbed down the ridge to the saddle where we’d spent
the night before. What we saw made us pause.
Kenneday pointed. “Look at that!” he said.
It was as though a cyclone had whirled through what had once
been our foxholes. The earth was churned and plowed by direct shell bursts. Had
we remained there, we would have been blasted to bits.
We had been bracketed by our own fire!
I hunted for the phone and found it covered with earth. We
spliced the wire quickly and paid it out as we climbed back to the knoll. I
plugged in the phone, cranked it, pressed the butterfly, and said, “CP! CP!”
A voice answered sharply, “Hello?”
I took a deep breath. “This is Cibik,” I said. “Give me—”
A cool voice broke in, “Hello, Steve!” It was Colonel de
Zayas himself. “Damn glad to hear you.”
Kay grinned at me, and I grinned back.
“We’re sitting on the top of the world, sir,” I replied.
“This ridge is a wonderful observation post. It’s the only high land in the
entire area.”
“Very good, Steve,” he said. “Now—” He had no sooner said
“now” than our artillery opened up again. Shells tore over our heads, screaming
like banshees. Fragments of steel nipped and tore at vegetation. A shower of
splintered bark, broken twigs, ripped vines, tatters of banana leaves descended
on us. It was impossible to talk while the thunder of shells rolled over the
valley. I took advantage of a brief pause.
“Hear that, sir?” I said. “We’re right in the middle of that
barrage.”
Colonel de Zayas was still on the phone. “What’s your
height?”
I had never made guesses for artillery before, but I tried
it. “About four hundred feet, sir.”
“We’ll take care of it. Anything else?”
Again the thunder of Japanese fire. “Yes, sir. We need more
ammunition. We’ve only eleven belts. If they attack in force, we’re sunk. And
we need food, sir.”
“We’ll send the ammunition and food up as soon as we get
some down here, Steve,” he said.
There was a click and silence.
Kay pushed his cap to one side. “Well, I guess you’re all
taken care of now. I have to get back. I’ll pass the word to hustle up that
ammunition. To-fa,” he said, and vanished over the side of the ridge.
Suddenly, one of Murphy’s BAR men dashed up. “Japs coming up
again, Steve,” he said, and I saw the bush trembling about one hundred yards
away.
“We’ll do it with rifle fire and grenades,” I ordered. I
waited half a minute more, then yelled, “Now!” pulling the pin of my own
grenade and lobbing it over.
At the same time, Kenneday’s men opened with rifle fire. The
brush was peppered. There were screams and the sound of men rushing down the
trail. Then a pause, and from everywhere below, the Japanese answered us with
furious rifle fire. They were there in force. All that long morning we heard
the shrill chatter of Japanese voices and even the clanging of their shovels
and the sound of wood being sawed. They were apparently preparing some sort of
defensive position.
Through the early afternoon we heard the battle
orchestration from the valley—the spatter of rifle fire, the tat-a-tat of
Japanese Nambu light machine guns, merging with the hoarse staccato of our
machine guns and the cough of our mortars.
It was now about three o’clock. A blue haze covered the
valley, at once luminous and pale, and suddenly I realized it was raining down
there. But here on our little knob, our waiting army was still dry. In the hope
that the rain clouds would blow over us, the boys made cups of banana leaves
and placed them on the rims of the foxholes. But only the valley lay drenched
and steaming, and no rain fell for us.
An hour and a half before dusk, our reinforcements
arrived—ten men under Lieutenant Herbert G. Young, with three mortars and
enough C-rations to go around once for every man.
Lieutenant Young, a tall, matter-of-fact virtuoso of the
mortar, dropped his field telephone and announced, “Well, general, here we are.
Where are your Japs?”
“I’ll show you the Japs, but let’s have some of these
rations.”
We distributed them around and the men had their first food
in fifty hours. After we had licked the cans clean, I turned to Lieutenant
Young and waved toward the north trail.
“Listen,” I said.
Faintly, we heard the echoes of chopping and sawing.
“Okay,” he said, and he and his men swiftly set up their
mortars and unloaded the miniature torpedo-like shells.
At five p.m., Lieutenant Young’s men went into action with
an earsplitting cacophony of sound. The pom! pom! pom! of the mortars
punctuated the hot afternoon, and it continued while the swift twilight rushed
across the sky and darkness fell. Then the rain came and the temperature
dropped. Somehow, despite the cold and the wet and the acute discomfort, some
of us slept.
Those of us who could not sleep lay wondering. Would we be
alive tomorrow? Would we get food and ammunition? If the Japanese attacked in
force, could we hold them? Thank God we had got that telephone in.
My thoughts were interrupted by a new sound—the sound made
by two bamboo branches struck together. Then a rustling. I glanced at my watch;
a globule of rain lingered on the crystal, making the figure “3” grotesquely
large. It was nearly four a.m. I crept through the cream-smooth mud to
Kenneday. He was awake too. “Japs.” He formed the word with his lips. I nodded.
They were down the trail, waiting for us to give ourselves away.
The night passed, and as dawn lit up our bivouac on the
morning of the twenty-second, the rain stopped.
At 8:05 a.m. Sergeant Murphy suddenly raced up the trail,
yelling, “Japs! Japs!” We stiffened into position, and a moment later the voice
of Pfc. Steve Rider came.
“I’m hit!” he cried. A burst of Japanese fire punctuated his
words.
Corporal Jeffra, standing next to me, swore under his
breath. “I’ll go down after him,” he said.
I looked at him. “Go ahead,” I said.
He vanished down the north trail, and it was a long three
minutes before he reappeared, helping Rider through the underbrush. Rider was
limping.
“They’re out there, Steve,” he said. “A whole shebang of
them.”
Blood showed faintly on his right thigh. I ripped the leg of
his utility and uncovered a small black puncture. A corpsman came up on the
double, examined the wound, sprinkled sulfa powder on it and covered it with a
battle dressing. I sent a man to accompany him back to our own lines.
Sergeant Peter Henzi, a tall youngster with a thick black
beard, who hailed from Union City, New Jersey, was in earnest conversation with
Lieutenant Young a few yards away. After Rider left, he hurried over to me.
“Suppose I go down there and spot the mortar fire,” he
suggested.
Tierney, still eager for a Japanese, chimed in. “I’ll go
with you,” he said. There was a gleam in his eye and the lines of his jaw were
hard.
I said it was all right with me. They picked up Lieutenant
Young’s field phone and crawled toward the Japanese lines. I took up a careful
position in my foxhole.
About fifteen minutes later, Pete’s voice came over the
wire, clear and calm. “I’m hooked up and in position now, Steve,” he said.
“Let’s have one on the range.” I turned to Lieutenant Young, who was directly
behind me, and repeated, “Fire one round; same range—”
There was a violent, ripping explosion.
Pete’s voice came over again, “Bring it over twenty-five
yards.”
Again the roar.
“Right twenty-five yards.”
Young and his men worked fast. The shell was dropped in and
the men stepped aside.
Henzi’s voice, “Getting closer. Make it twenty-five again.”
This time I heard the crash of the explosion come tinnily
over the wire. A moment later, Pete’s voice, “Right in there, Steve! You hit so
close, Tierney got it in the hand.”
“Pull out, Pete,” I told him. “We want to lay down a
concentration there.”
“Okay,” he said.
Ten minutes passed, and then we saw Tierney and Henzi coming
toward us from the east trail. Tierney had been hit in the left wrist.
Now Lieutenant Young and his men were pouring a steady
stream of shells into the Japanese position. Tierney refused to leave, and
because he was a good man, I kept him with me. Henzi explained that he’d got
within fifty feet of the Japanese and our shells then almost grazed their heads
as they came over.
Above the burst of our fire, the Japanese machine guns
sounded. The screaming commands of the Japanese officers came faintly to our
ears. It was a hot, steady exchange. Presently, the firing died down to a few
ragged rifle shots.
Kenneday climbed out of his foxhole. There wasn’t much
ammunition left, he said. I rang up Colonel de Zayas and asked again for
ammunition. As I spoke, the Japanese snipers began pinging. The men stared
watchfully from their foxholes. They showed the effects of twenty-two days on
Bougainville. They were dirty, bearded and hollow-eyed. Those who were too
weary to sit or lie down stood about; sorry figures, their arms hanging limply,
their shoulders drooping. They expressed fatigue in every limb.
Shortly after noon, the sniping died down. And with the
heat, the air brought us the sickening odor of Japanese bodies—those who had
been killed in the first attack during our first few hours on the ridge. By
mid-afternoon, it was almost nauseating.
Finally, Kenneday said, “I can’t stand it any longer. I’m
going down and see what I can do about those dead Japs.”
He was back shortly, his clothes reeking. He shook his head
ruefully.
“I feel like a morgue keeper,” he said. “Give me some hunks
of wire.”
He went back with six men, and when he returned the second
time, he was white under his stubble of black beard.
“They’re spread all over the place,” he said. “They must
have walked right into our fire.”
He and his patrol had carefully examined the Japanese
graveyard. They found machine guns ripped apart by shrapnel. The Japanese were
coming up the ridge to make a stand. Some of them apparently were trying to put
their guns in place not only on the ridge but in trees. Had they succeeded,
their troops could have advanced under a sheltering umbrella of their fire, and
our situation would have been perilous.
Kenneday and his men used the wire to drag some of the bodies
into a large foxhole and used that as a common grave. They’d found a small
black book with a tan paper cover, post cards with nature scenes, and
photographs of Japanese pin-up girls.
Kenneday produced what appeared to be a mechanical pencil.
“Look at this,” he said. “I was going to open it, but I figured it might be a
booby trap.”
We decided that the wisest thing was to send everything down
to the Intelligence officers behind our lines. It was a good idea. We learned
later that the pencil contained sufficient explosives to blow up a squad of
men.
Before dawn we had reinforcements, drifting in by twos and
threes. I spread them along the crest of the ridge, closing the gaps in our
defensive line. They hadn’t come a minute too soon. The Japanese attacked with
knee mortars and artillery fire. It was a full-scale offensive, with Japanese
infantry advancing steadily toward us in the face of everything we could hurl
at them. Our guns never paused for breath. Shell after shell whistled over,
moaning and crashing across the ridge, while we crouched below, pinned under a
murderous crossfire. The brassy cordite was bitter in our mouths. Discretion
was the better part of valor, I decided, and grabbed the phone. “CP! CP!”
A voice answered.
I shouted, “Tell the colonel to raise the elevation fifty
feet, will you? Listen to it!”
A shell roared overhead. I held up the phone, so that the
shell’s wine wailed into the mouthpiece.
There was a quick “Okay, fella,” from the other end. “We’ll
take care of it.”
All that night, I was constantly on the phone, directing the
fire. The shelling ceased at dawn. At nine o’clock, the phone rang.
It was Colonel de Zayas. “Can you move in fifteen minutes?”
he demanded.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Fine,” he said. “At ten a.m., your mortars and A Company’s
mortars will lay a five-minute concentration on the Japs’ strong point at the
base of the ridge. At ten-five, your platoon will attack down the east trail
and move along the base of the ridge and join A Company.” He paused, and then
he added, “Steve, if it gets too hot, pull out. Don’t lose too many boys. Pull
back to the ridge. We need you and your men tomorrow when we hit the Piva
River.”
I hung up and looked about for Lieutenant Young. He was
examining one of his mortars. “How much stuff you got?” I asked.
“About nineteen rounds,” he said. “What’s the scoop?”
“We’ve got to start moving,” I said. “They want us to attack
the Japs at the base. We’ve only got thirteen minutes left.”
I outlined the plan of attack swiftly. The men gathered
around, listening quietly. I singled out Mitchum, told him to build up a firing
line and spot targets while we moved down. “Pass the word along, so the men
know exactly what we’re doing.”
Then we went over the side and down, crawling through thick
vegetation, smelling the Japanese dead before we saw them. The signs of our
artillery shelling were everywhere. Finally, we reached a point of vantage. At
the stroke of ten o’clock, we heard the first mortar roar down below us. Again
and again, our shells hit the Japanese position. I counted them—sixteen,
seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. Lieutenant Young had no more shells. It was now
10:18. Company A’s mortars had not yet opened fire. For a moment, I hesitated.
If we went down, we might be caught in A’s fire. Thirty seconds passed. No
fire. We had to advance. We moved on cautiously, made about forty yards, and
then the Japanese struck, just as I gained the protection of a large banyan
tree. I huddled at its base as Japanese rifle and machine gun fire from what we
later learned were scores of machine gun nests buried in tangled banyan roots,
raked the trees over our heads.
To my left, a huge fellow so quiet that he was hardly ever
noticed, gasped and moaned, and seemed to fold up. Mitchum, to my right,
started to crawl toward him. I gauged the distance to the wounded man. I was
about ten feet away, but that area was almost completely denuded by shellfire.
He was on one side of a square clearing, and the three of us, Mitchum, Mathews
and myself, began to converge on him from the three other sides. Japanese lead
spattered all about us. He slowly began dragging himself back up the ridge, his
right thigh a mass of bloody flesh. A Japanese machine gun burst had nearly
ripped off his leg. He made no sound, but under the grime and perspiration, his
face was white as chalk. As he pulled himself along, he left a red trail on the
matted jungle floor. Painfully, he began to crawl across the edge of the
clearing less than four feet from me, when another machine gun burst sounded
above the sharp snapping of rifle fire. He was caught directly in the chest. He
slumped over and lay still. Mitchum stared at me, and I shook my head
helplessly. Mathews stopped and said nothing.
A Nambu light machine gun suddenly chattered alarmingly
near. The Japanese had succeeded in getting one of their guns up into a tree,
and were spraying us. The bullets grazed our heads. We’d have to pull out. I
crawled to Mitchum, who was working his gun furiously.
“Mitch—” I began, and he uttered a sharp cry.
“I’m hit!” Blood poured from a wound in his wrist.
“Get back to the ridge,” I said. Mathews now sat like an
avenging Buddha with his BAR, waiting for a Japanese burst from one of the
trees.
We had to get back up the ridge. The wounded had to be
brought up. I had to cross that clearing. I said to myself, Steve, perhaps your
number’s up now, and with that I rose and leaped across it. Bullets kicked up
the earth before and behind me in that endless second, but I fell unhurt at
Mathews’ side.
“Get back,” I said. “Get away from this clearing.”
Another burst of gunfire. Mathews grunted. He rolled over on
his back for an instant, the breast of his utility torn and bloody, and on his
face was a look of surprise. His body remained in that curious position for a
moment.
“Are you hit, boy?” I shouted. “Are you hit?”
His body began rolling over and over down the steep slope.
And as it rolled, Japanese fire riddled it as though it were a cloth dummy
rolling down a hill and this was rifle practice.
Rage rose in me. I wanted to charge screaming down the hill,
firing my rifle until it could fire no more. I wanted to kill Japanese, to
plunge my knife into their bodies, to strangle them with my bare hands. My face
was covered with grime, perspiration burned in my eyes, my nostrils smarted
with the acrid fumes of gunpowder. A hand touched mine. It was Pfc. Charles M.
Skinner, of Franklin, Ohio, a BAR man, and while the rest of us worked our way
upward, Skinner sat with his BAR, keeping the barrel of his gun hot as he
covered our retreat. He deliberately drew the Japanese fire upon himself.
To the first man I saw above, I said, “Send word back to get
three BAR men down here, so we can get our wounded.”
The BAR men came. They sat up, guns to their shoulders, and
fired. The first gun jammed. So did the second. The two men swore.
The third was Arkansas Rowe, a tall, gangling Westerner with
a wad of tobacco in his cheek.
“Give it a try!” I said. “Spray ’em!”
Rowe squinted into the jungle, twisted his face to one side,
let go a stream of yellow tobacco juice, and aimed. His BAR chattered and
stopped.
He turned around, cool as ice. “I didn’t think this damn
thing was going to work either,” be drawled, and returned to his firing. Under
his protection, our men began to crawl back up the slope. But Mitchum was still
down there.
I sent word up for a machine gun crew, and Sergeant Murphy
showed up, dragging his weapon after him.
“Keep up a steady fire,” I said. “We’re going to try to
reach Mitchum.” Then we set off, but, after a few yards, came upon Pfc. Jacob
Solomon, helping a bloody figure stagger along. It was Skinner, and he was
badly hurt, his eyes glassy.
Solomon, scarcely able to walk himself, managed to gasp, “I
found this guy firing even after the Japs got him. They hit him in the leg and
one of the bullets went up the back of his helmet, made a circle right around
his scalp, and then fell out.”
I helped carry Skinner up to the crest, and there we laid
him down. He needed plasma. Solomon left without a word to bring back Mitchum,
going down the slope in the face of Japanese fire. I knelt beside Skinner. He
was breathing hard. His face was pale. His hair was plastered against his
forehead.
A corpsman hurried over, ripped off Skinner’s pants leg and
sprinkled sulfa into the gaping wound. He dressed it swiftly. Then he raised
Skinner’s head and gently removed his helmet. Sure enough, there was a bloody,
telltale crease about the boy’s head, cut cleanly by the bullet.
I took Skinner’s hand; it was cold and clammy. He was trying
to whisper. I leaned over to catch his words. “I’m sorry, Steve,” he was
saying. “I tell you, I couldn’t help it. Damn, I’m sorry I couldn’t do better.”
All I could say was, “You did a great job down there, fella!
A real job!”
Now Solomon was back with Mitchum, who lay gasping, weak
from loss of blood. But he managed to say, “I’m okay, Steve.”
The runner came, out of breath, with the plasma. As it
flowed into Skinner’s veins, life seemed to creep back into his body. He smiled
weakly when one of the men leaned down to wipe the perspiration from his face,
and when a corpsman came up with a bottle of brandy, which he put to Skinner’s
lips, Skinner swallowed a few drops and even managed a feeble joke.
“That’s swell,” he whispered, licking his lips. “Let’s have
more of that medicine.”
Two corpsmen placed him carefully in a stretcher and set off
with him toward our lines. I found my foxhole and slid back into it. Kenneday
wandered over. He offered me a cigarette from a dirty pack. It had been
rain-soaked and now the cigarettes were dry and brittle. I inhaled deeply.
“Guess we’ll be relieved this afternoon,” he said.
“I hope so,” I said.
We smoked in silence. The firing had died down, save for the
occasional snap of a sniper’s rifle. We seemed all right. With our
reinforcements, the Japanese would have a tough fight to dislodge us.
In mid-afternoon, the phone rang. It was Colonel de Zayas.
“All right, Steve,” he said. “Move your men back down here.
We want you in tomorrow’s attack.”
I gathered my men together and we moved off the ridge the
way we had come. The men who followed me in single file were shaky scarecrows,
fouled with mud, stained with sweat and gunpowder, their eyes sunken from lack
of sleep, their skin showing through their tattered utilities. We climbed down
almost as circumspectly as we had climbed up, and finally reached the original
trail. Someone was coming up it. It was The Fox. He held a short bowie knife in
his hand.
“Hi, ya,” he said. “Congratulations. You boys did a swell
job.” I felt a strong hand clasp mine. “Here,” said The Fox. “This is for you.”
He gave me the knife.
I looked at it, then at him. “What’s this for?”
He pointed to the handle. He’d carved on it, “From The Fox
to Steve.”
“Hell,” he said, “maybe you can use it.” |
| Members of a patrol crossing a river on Bougainville. The bamboo poles on the right in the river form a fish trap. |
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| Firing a mortar located on one side of a bitterly contested hill at Japanese positions on the other side of the hill. The mortar is a 60mm M2 on Mount M2. |
