Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [124]
It proved a terrible journey. They wandered uncertainly, lacking maps and compasses. Most of their wounded died. When at last the survivors reached the town, they found it under air attack. “Enemy planes appear, but ours do not,” Ogita wrote gloomily in his diary. “I wonder why.” On 13 November, they had yet to fire a shot: “We have not received orders to start the attack because many of our troops have not yet landed.” He whistled to keep his spirits up: “There are only thirty-four men in our company338, but we have confidence enough to take on an enemy battalion.”
This was typical of the manner in which Japanese reinforcements reached the Leyte battlefield, losing many men and much equipment before even encountering American troops. It is astonishing, in such circumstances, that they achieved as much as they did. MacArthur’s Sixth Army faced an intensity of resistance beyond anything SWPA’s supreme commander had anticipated. By 7 November339 the Japanese 16th Division, original garrison of Leyte, had lost all its battalion commanders and engineer officers, together with most of its company commanders and half its artillery. But much of 1st Division had arrived from Luzon, and more was coming. Suzuki was hopeful of driving the Americans back across the central plain.
Again and again, Krueger’s units found themselves caught off-balance by Japanese entrenched on higher ground. The 1/382nd Infantry were in the midst of a rice paddy when they came under intense fire which killed or wounded every officer of two companies: “Men threw away their packs340, machine guns, radios and even rifles. Their sole aim was to get through the muck and get onto solid ground once more. Some of the wounded gave up the struggle and drowned in the grasping swamp.” Captain George Morrissey, a doctor with the 1/34th Infantry, wrote: “We had just begun to dig in341 when an artillery shell lit in the forward part of the perimeter. I ran up there to find three killed, eight seriously wounded. Just then the rain began to pour furiously and it got dark. The first man I saw was bleeding from a jagged hole in the neck. It was a hell of a thing there in the rain not being able to do anything but having to try anyway. This man died on the way in and another next day. No supper. Foxhole full of water. Our artillery thunders and cracks all night…I have never been so filthy before.”
The campaign yielded its share of heroes. It is often the case that men distinguish themselves in combat who are an embarrassment everywhere else. Before the Leyte landing, infantrymen confined to the stockade for punishment had been returned to their units. The commander of G Company, 2/34th Infantry, strongly objected to accepting back Private Harold Moon, a persistent troublemaker. He got Moon anyway. On the night of 21 October, the regiment faced a series of violent, almost overwhelming enemy attacks. Dawn revealed foxholes surrounded by enemy dead. Several lay near the body of Private Moon, killed after fighting to the last with rifle and grenades. He received a posthumous Medal of Honor, which roused both admiration and bewilderment among his comrades. “I only knew him as a G Company screw-up342,” wrote Private Eric Diller wonderingly.
Diller was himself an interesting study—the son of German Catholic immigrants who fled to the United States in 1936 because of his mother’s Jewish blood. In a machine-gun squad on Leyte, the twenty-year-old carried papers which still classified him as an alien—indeed, notionally an enemy one. Diller was squeamish about many manifestations of war in the Pacific. When comrades set about extracting gold teeth from dead Japanese, he declined to keep his