Battle Cry - Leon Uris [252]
Max Shapiro resumed his nap.
At the break of daylight they came on again. The Japanese command determined to break through the cut-off men on Red Beach One and they had five thousand troops to sacrifice. This time they were sent in in waves to avoid the destroyer fire. A fusillade of death poured from the Marines but that and the cold steel of their bayonets could not stop the enemy. They swarmed into the lines. Fanatic yellow men and fanatic white men locked in hand to hand combat.
The first wave of the battering ram had succeeded in its mission, a breach had been made, and the Second Battalion buckled back over fifty yards of blood-drenched ground. The second wave of Japanese came on to exploit the break. The situation seemed desperate.
As the stunned Marines braced for the death they knew must come, Two Gun Shapiro stepped in front of them, his two pistols smoking. He turned to his Marines and over the din they heard a grisly shriek from his lips. “Blood!” he cried.
Max Shapiro sank to his knees, his pistols empty. He threw them at the enemy. “Blood!” he screamed. “Blood!”
The men of Huxley’s Whores were petrified. A legend was broken! The invincible captain, the man bullets could not touch, the man they believed was almost divine, lay there writhing in agony the same as any human being. The blood gushed from his mouth and ears and nose and he rolled over defiantly, trying to crawl to his enemy to kill with bare hands, the same ghastly word on his lips.
Was he human after all? Did he not realize that something must be done to elevate his men to a task beyond human capabilities? Was it his God that sent him forward to sacrifice himself? Or was Max Shapiro merely a mad dog, full of a glorious madness?
Huxley’s Whores rose to the heights of their dead captain. They no longer resembled human beings. Savage beyond all savagery, murderous beyond murder, they shrieked, “Blood!”
“BLOOD!”…“BLOOD!”
The enemy, who were mere mortals, fell back.
HELLO, TULSA WHITE: THIS IS MCQUADE, FOX COMPANY. WE HAVE STOPPED THEM. WE HAVE STOPPED THEM.
HELLO, MCQUADE: REINFORCEMENTS ARE LANDING ON THE BEACH RIGHT NOW….
After the assault on Red Beach One and the stopping of the counterattacks, the rest of the battle of Saipan was anticlimax for the Second Battalion. After the first twenty-four hours there weren’t enough men left to constitute a fighting unit. The rest of the Sixth Marines were in the thick of it all the way. And so, at long last, the regiment had kept its date with destiny and taken its place beside its predecessors at Belleau Wood and Guadalcanal and Tarawa.
On the Second Battalion the fate of the operation had hinged and like a lot of kids on a lot of other islands they had apparently been licked. But nobody got around to telling them so and it was that extra something nobody can explain that pulled them through.
Command of the battalion had changed hands four times in twenty-four hours. Huxley, Wellman, Pagan, and Marlin. But in my book, it was always Highpockets who was the skipper. What he had taught them, what he had half killed them for, was there when it was most needed.
The conquest of Saipan was followed up when the Third Marine Division landed further south and reconquered Guam. Then we pushed over the channel to capture Saipan’s neighbor, Tinian. They called Tinian the perfect campaign. But it wasn’t quite perfect. I got wounded and was sent back to Saipan for a couple quarts of blood at the base hospital.
I walked into Chaplain Peterson’s tent. Peterson arose to greet me. “How’s the old salt?”
“They’re not going to beat me out of my thirty-year retirement,” I said.
“Good. I got your request, Mac. I think it is a fine thing to do. Father McKale is sending Pedro’s personal belongings over.”
“I’ll be shoving off for the States soon. If I knew Gomez’s address, I’d visit there, too.”
“It’s good of you