• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4630 0

if they miss the mines, they'll be lucky." He saw the plans for defending the river itself, which presented one of the most formidable obstacles any army could encounter, and whereas Goro a few minutes before had been guessing as to where the mines and machine guns were, Seigl knew, and he knew that even his own soldiers, the finest in the world, could not penetrate that defense. And west of the river, of course, lay the exposed road which could be cut to shreds with mortar fire, and beyond that the cliffs of Monte Cassino up which no troops could move. At midnight Colonel Seigl concluded: "They'll try, but they'll never make it. Here is where we bloody the nose of the traitor Japanese. Tomorrow we'll watch them wilt under fire."

January 24, 1944, began with a cold, clear midnight and it was greeted with a thundering barrage of American gunfire which illuminated the bleak river but which did not dislodge the Germans. For forty minutes the barrage continued, and a beginner at warfare might have taken heart, thinking: "No man can live through that." But the dark-skinned men of the Two-Two-Two knew better; they knew the Germans would be dug in and waiting.

At 0040 the barrage stopped and the whistles blew for advance. Goro clutched his brother by the arm and whispered, "This is the big one, kid. Take care of yourself." Progress to the first ditch was painful, for the Germans launched a counter-barrage and the first deaths at Monte Cassino occurred, but Goro and Tadao pushed stolidly ahead in the darkness, and when they had led their unit across the dangerous ditch and onto the edge of the marsh, they told their captain, "We'll take care of the mines," and they set out on their bellies, two brothers who could have been engaged in a tricky football play, and they crawled across the marsh, adroitly cutting the trip wires that would otherwise have detonated mines and killed their companions, and when they reached the second ditch Goro stood up in the night and yelled, "Mo bettah you come. All mines pau!" But as he sent the news his younger brother Tadao, one of the finest boys ever to graduate from Punahou, stepped upon a magnesium mine which exploded with a terrible light, blowing him into a thousand shreds of bone and flesh.

"Oh, Jesus!" Goro cried, burying his face in his hands. No action was required. None was possible. Tadao Sakagawa no longer existed in any conceivable form. Not even his shoes were recoverable, but where he had stood other Japanese boys swept over the marshy land and with battle cries leaped into the next ditch, and then into the next.

It took five hours of the most brutal fighting imaginable for the Japanese troops to reach the near bank of the Rapido, and when dawn broke, Colonel Sep Seigl was slightly disturbed. "They should not have been able to cross those fields. They seem rather capable, but now the fight begins."

Against the troops for which he had a special hatred he threw a wall of bombardment that was almost unbelievable, and to his relief, the advance was halted. No human being could have penetrated that first awful curtain of shrapnel which greeted the Two-Two-Two at the Rapido itself. "Well," Colonel Seigl sighed, "at least they're human. They can be stopped. Now to keep them pinned down. The Japanese cannot absorb casualties. Kill half of them, and the other half will run."

But here Colonel Seigl was wrong. Half of Goro Sakagawa had already been killed; he had loved his clever brother Tadao as only boys who have lived in the close intimacy of poverty and community rejection can love, and now Tadao was dead. Therefore, when the German shelling was at its most intense, Goro said to his captain, "Let's move across the river. I know how."

"We'll dig in," the captain countermanded.

But when Colonel Whipple arrived to inspect the battered condition of his men, Goro insisted that the river could be crossed, and Whipple said, "Go ahead and try." At this point one of the lieutenants from Baker Company, Goro's commanding officer, and a fine young officer from Kansas, said, "If my men go, I go."