Hawaii - James Michener [535]
In early December Hitler sent to the Italian front a fanatical Prussian colonel named Sep Seigl, unusual in that he combined a heritage of Prussian tradition and a loyalty to Naziism. Hitler told him simply, "Destroy the Japanese." And when he studied his maps he decided, "I shall do it at Monte Cassino." Colonel Seigl was a bullet-headed young man of thirty-seven whose promotion had been speeded because of his dedication to Hitler, and on three different battlefronts he had proved his capacities. At Monte Cassino he was determined to repeat his earlier performances. The Japanese would be humiliated.
So as December waned and as the Two-Two-Two slogged steadfastly up the leg of Italy toward Rome, they picked up many signs that their critical battle was going to be engaged somewhere near the old monastery of Monte Cassino, and belts tightened as they approached it. At the same time, from the north Colonel Sep Seigl was moving down to Cassino some of the ablest German units in Italy, but he did not intend to engage the Japanese on the slopes of the mountain. His troops were not permitted to construct their forward positions on that formidable pile of rock; they were kept down below along the banks of the Rapido River that here ran in a north-south direction, with the Japanese approaching from the east and the Germans dug in along the west. Surveying the German might he now had lined up along the Rapido, Colonel Seigl said, "We'll stop them at the river."
On January 22, 1944, Colonel Mark Whipple halted his Japanese troops along a line one mile east of the Rapido and told them, "Our orders are clear and simple. Cross the river ... so that troops behind us can assault that pile of rocks up there. The Germans claim a rabbit can't get across the approaches without being shot at from six angles. But we're going across."
He dispatched a scouting party consisting of Sergeant Goro Sakagawa, his brother Tadao, who was good at sketching and four riflemen, and at dusk on the twenty-second of January they crawled out of their hiding places and started on their bellies across the most difficult single battle terrain the Americans were to face in World War II. With meticulous care, Tadao Sakagawa drew maps of the route. Two hundred yards west of their present positions the Two-Two-Two would come upon an irrigation ditch three feet wide and four feet deep. As they crawled out of it, they would be facing German machine guns and a marsh some thirty yards wide, beyond which lay another ditch. Thirty yards beyond hid a third ditch, twice as deep, twice as wide. As the men climbed out of this one, they would face a solid wall of machine-gun fire.
When they got this far in the darkness Goro Sakagawa licked his dry lips and asked his men, "What's that ahead?"
"Looks like a stone wall."
"Jesus," Goro whispered. "You can't expect our boys to negotiate those three ditches and then climb a wall. How high is it?"
"Looks about twelve feet high."
"This is impossible," Goro replied. "You fellows split up. You go that way, we'll go this. Let's see if there's a break in the wall."
In the darkness they found none, only a stout, murderous stone wall, twelve feet high and with a jagged top. When they reassembled, Goro said in a rasping whisper, "Christ, how can anybody get over that damned thing? With machine guns everywhere. Sssssh."
There was a sudden chatter of German guns, but the men firing them must have heard a sound in some other direction, for the firing did not come close to Goro and his men. "Well," he said when it ceased, "over we go."
Patiently and with skill, in the darkness of night, the six Japanese boys helped one another over the terrifying wall, and from it they dropped into the eastern