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By Root 1342 0

blasts of fire down below. He aimed the carbine high, fired a burst, made a strange sound, calling out, not words, just a cheer, a mad hurrah. The grenades came now, a half dozen, bouncing around the man. Adams watched as he caught one in his hand, threw it hard back up the hill, the sound of a brief laugh, but the grenades were too many, and before the man could fire the carbine again, the ground around him erupted into a burst of fire. Adams ducked low, felt impacts against his legs, his helmet, heavy wet slop. All along the hill the grenades kept falling and the Marines answered by tossing up their own, up and over the hill, the two sides only yards apart, spread along opposite sides of the muddy ridgeline. There was almost no rifle fire, no targets for the M-1s, the enemies too close for mortars, too close for artillery. Some of the fights erupted face-to-face, knives and bayonets, but when the two sides kept their distance, there was no effective weapon except the handheld bombs. Throughout the long night, men on both sides surged up and out of their hiding places, seeking any glimpse of their enemy, but few were adventurous enough to leave the fragile safety of their own side of the hill. While the supply of grenades held out, they flew back and forth over the hilltop, coming down on their unseen targets like rain.

The trench had been no trench at all, not in the way any Marine had hoped. Welty kept them in place, but less than an hour after full darkness, the mortar shells had come. They were carefully aimed, unusual, but the Japanese clearly had the range on this particular part of the hill. The mortars came down on both sides of the snaking trench, and then, dead center, men shredded and cut apart, Welty immediately pulling the survivors back down the hill. From the right flank Mortensen had sent word that the Japanese had come up from behind, a hidden tunnel the Marines still couldn’t locate. Adams had heard the thirty caliber offer bursts of fire for long seconds at a time, and then silence, only the pops of the rifles, the dull eruptions from grenades from both sides. The thirty caliber machine gun Welty had sent to the left had never been heard from again, and there was no time to investigate that, no hope of finding anyone in the dark. It had to be bad, no one optimistic that any gunner who suddenly stopped firing had done so by his own choice. The chaos was absolute, any Marine who could was waging his own war, seeking targets from bursts of fire, or emptying magazines and tossing grenades in a desperate hope that the enemy was there. The wounded were many and loud, the voices drawing more fire, grenades mostly, from Japanese troops who had slipped in among the American positions. With Welty forced to bring the men down, Mortensen did the same, and in the muddy defiles and ragged rocky heights, men began to slide and tumble and scamper back down through the places they had climbed the day before. Some did not stop until they made the bottom of the hill, and even then, the fire from Japanese guns on the far hills took aim at landmarks already established in daylight. As the Americans pulled down and off Sugar Loaf yet again, the vicious fire from what remained of the enemy’s artillery spread flashes of light over the mud and wreckage of the bare landscape, and showed the retreat for what it was, a desperate escape for the Marines.

On the hill, men still hunkered low, lost, digging into softer dirt, wallowing in the filthy mud, the smells of the corpses not nearly as pungent as the smells from the explosives and the smoke that surrounded them. Some of those men tended wounded, would not leave them behind, strangers offering whatever help they could give, help that more often was a ripped shirt or a syrette of morphine. The dead offered one last gift, ammunition, men forced to tear through the horrifying remains, stiff or bloody corpses that might still be holding ammo belts and grenades. Throughout the night the fight continued, the Marines who remained on the hill engulfed in a blind war with an enemy who