Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [170]
“It was a long, slow and costly operation479,” said Maj.-Gen. William Gill, commanding the 32nd Division. “Morale was poor, because the men were tired—they’d been in there in combat for months…We killed a lot of [ Japanese], of course, killed many more of them than they killed of us, but we lost too many…Our engineers that were building roads often came under machine gun fire.” On the steep mountains, progress was painfully laborious. Gill watched admiringly one day as a soldier driving a bulldozer worked under fire beside a sheer precipice, manoeuvring his blade to deflect bullets which whanged off the steel. The fruits of such labour were often doubtful. “We sometimes reported480 enemy losses as ten times our own when we did not know the correct number,” admitted an American officer.
BY APRIL, some infantry regiments were reduced to half strength. Salvatore Lamagna returned late from a home furlough in Thompsonville, Connecticut, an offence for which he found himself busted from sergeant to private. When he reached his old unit, he sought out his comrades from the New Guinea campaign: “I looked around to see481 if I could find anyone I knew. Most of the guys were new to me. ‘Where’s Tietjen?’ ‘He was killed by a Jap artillery shell,’ Farmer says. I felt bad. I asked if any of the original 4th Platoon guys that left from Hartford, Ct. were left. ‘Just you and I,’ he says.”
Discipline lapsed badly in some units. Maj. Chuck Henne was walking beside a train one day in April when he heard shooting from the cars. Soldiers were firing at buffalo in the fields. He identified himself as a battalion executive officer: “They laughed and kept on482 shooting…I then shouted up to the men and told them to get their asses back in the car or I would shoot them off the roof…They came off the roof handing their rifles down butt first…I asked the lieutenant if he could now control his men…He sulked and vowed he could handle his troops. If he had been mine, I would have relieved him on the spot.”
The struggle to cut and hold Yamashita’s principal supply route, the Villa Verde Trail, became one of the most bitter of the campaign. “The price that the…trail cost483 in battle casualties was too high for value received,” said Gill of the 32nd Division. There was heroism. Lt. Van Pelt and a platoon of the 3/148th Infantry tried to work forward to deal with a Japanese 150mm gun. Pelt fell mortally wounded by machine-gun fire, which also hit two others beside him. One of these, Private Fred Ogrodkick, dragged himself into a cave, then realised that his buddy still lay in the open. He struggled out again, braved the fire to drag his friend into shelter, then sat trying to bandage both their wounds. Private Melvin Kidd, a K Company truck driver, saw what had happened. He jumped onto the engine deck of an M4 tank, rode forward under fire, jumped down and began to treat the wounded men in the cave. A Japanese shell blew down the entrance, trapping all three inside. An American infantry squad followed the tanks forward, and hacked open the cave mouth with bayonets and entrenching tools. Others rushed the Japanese positions. An officer later asked Kidd why he had joined a fight that was not his business. He shrugged: “It seemed the right thing to do484.”
Higher commanders had worries of their own. Col. Bruce Palmer485, chief of staff of 6th Division, was dismayed by the conduct of his general, Edwin Patrick, who behaved recklessly when sober, and worse when drunk, which was alarmingly often. A Japanese machine gunner solved this problem by killing Patrick when he exposed himself while visiting a battalion observation post. Soldiers were startled to discover how cold it became at night, when the sun dropped behind the mountains. There were mornings when they found water buckets covered with