The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [119]
When Satonao writes of “bullets of flesh,” he is referring to the suicide squad. Later in the war, as the Japanese turned to acts of desperation, suicide squads, of which the kamikaze was a manifestation, became common. Early on, the suicide squad still served a practical purpose—to incite terror in the hearts of the enemy. At Buna, as elsewhere, the suicide squad or “Kesshi Tai” (literally “Determined-to-Die Unit”) had no shortage of volunteers.
The sun dropped fast on the evening of December 8, and Captain Yasuda made one last attempt to reach Buna Village. As a diversion, he had a force of forty attack from Buna Village. Then he sent out a hundred men from the Government Station, hoping they might slip into the village without being detected. But Bottcher, Odell, and their troops caught them moving on the beach and gunned them down, finishing off the wounded with their bayonets. Inland, Boice’s troops repelled them, too. With machine guns and mortars, they drove the Japanese back.
On the afternoon of December 9, Lieutenant James Downer, who was now commanding Company E, volunteered to lead a patrol against the main Japanese bunker position at the southern edge of the village: the one that the flamethrower had failed to reduce the previous day.
Downer’s plan, though, was the same one that had failed time and time again—he would storm the bunker and try to stick a grenade through the firing slit while the rest of the patrol covered him. Downer bravely set off through the jungle but was picked off by an enemy sniper. Two of his men crawled out to get him, pulling themselves along on their elbows. But when they reached him, they realized he was dead and dragged him back. For the rest of the day, Company E tried to maneuver around the bunker, drawing blistering fire from the Japanese defenders. That night the shooting stopped and Downer’s patrol managed to get close enough to see that the bunker had been abandoned. Perhaps their constant pressure had worn down the Japanese. Whatever the reason, the important thing was that the bunker fell at last to Downer’s patrol.
Eichelberger was heartened by the news. To his eye, the men were fighting now like real soldiers.
One Japanese soldier noted the change. Early on he’d written that “The American is untrained, afraid, and stumbles about in the jungle…. They fire at any sound or shadow, wasting ammunition, giving their positions away…. They are like scared children who cannot learn…. We can kill them all….” By mid-December he wrote, “The enemy is very hard to see in the jungle…. Enemy tactics are to hurl heavy mortar fire on us and rush in close behind.”
While the Red Arrow men had “learned their business,” as the official army historian said, three weeks of constant fighting had exacted a toll, especially on the men at Bottcher’s Corner.
On December 11, twenty-six soldiers from the 127th U.S. Infantry fought their way to the beach to relieve Bottcher, Odell, and their men. For soldiers new to the front, the sight of decomposing corpses lying strewn across the sand must have been deeply unsettling. The stench, according to Odell, was “unendurable.” The new men buried the bodies and then took over Bottcher’s position.
Before leaving the beach, Bottcher had to make good on an order he had received. Allied Intelligence, G-2, wanted a prisoner to interrogate. Bottcher and Corporal Mitchell discovered a wounded Japanese soldier huddling in a foxhole. When the man reached for his gun, Mitchell