Battle Cry - Leon Uris [204]
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: WE CAN’T HOLD. Headquarters came back with: YOU 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