The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [89]
Keast’s feet were burning and a dull ache had settled into his knee. The rest in Laruni had helped, but the knee was still weak.
Then, two shots. Gunfire exploded from the line. To pull the trigger after waiting for so long gave the men a giddy sense of release. Soldiers shot in the general direction of the enemy and hoped that their bullets struck flesh. Japanese troops returned fire. The volley was loud, theatrical, but brief. Medendorp heard the sound of empty clips popping out of rifles. He turned to Keast.
“Sure,” he said, “Only half a dozen sick Japs!”
After ten minutes of artillery, with Medendorp assisting Lieutenant Daniels, the Australian Artillery forward observer, in registering the shots, the telephone operator got on the phone. “Guns off,” he said.
Medendorp and Daniels stepped in front of the lines to assess the damage. Company I, under Captain Shirley, was ready now. Company I and the Antitank Company under Captain Keast moved forward supported by fusillade from Medendorp’s men.
“Follow the sun,” Shirley shouted. “Follow the sun.”
Medendorp watched as the “advancing men crawled over wounded and dead.” He was startled by the fury of the Japanese response. They “gave back every bit they received.” The .25 caliber Japanese Arisaka rifles had a peculiar, high-pitched sound—like the “crack of a bull whip.” Each of those cracks was answered by the coarse bark of American .30 caliber M-1 rifles.
While bullets ripped through the jungle and dense kunai grass, Medendorp leaned against a large, rotten tree stump, consulting his compass and trying to get bearings on the Japanese locations. Enemy bullets hit the tree stump, splattering wood chips all around him. Somewhere in the jungle a Japanese Juki machine gunner opened up. Medendorp could tell it was a Juki by its slow, heavy thud.
Just behind the front line, Lieutenant Segal worked, according to Medendorp, “as calmly as in a hospital at home.” His aid station was nothing more than a thatched hut with a mud floor and assistants with flashlights.
On the battlefield soldiers improvised stretchers of balsa wood or split bamboo, wrapped them with telephone wire or denim jackets, and went out to recover the wounded. They had to act fast; it did not take long for open wounds to become infected, even gangrenous. Once off the line, they carried their comrades into slit trenches to protect them from rifle fire and mortar fragments. There, the wounded lay wrapped in dirty, blood-soaked battle dressings until Segal could attend to them. Though Segal was sick himself—over the past two months, Medendorp had watched him grow thinner and paler—he worked mightily to stabilize the wounded before they were carried back to the regimental station. There were times, though, when even a talented medical doctor like Segal was powerless. That is when Father Dzienis took over. Dzienis had buried his first man—Colonel Quinn—at Natunga, surrounded by the mountains and the green solitude of the jungle. Here, he walked along the slit trench, holding his rosary, administering last rites to the dying while the battle raged around him.
Back at the front, Shirley and Keast’s assault was stalled after four hundred yards by withering enemy fire. Notified that the advance had bogged down, the battalion executive officer rushed to the front to rally his troops and led the way across a large kunai field. When the attack slammed up against a wide stretch of swamp through which the Japanese had cut lanes of fire, the jungle vibrated with the sound of machine guns, and the executive officer was killed. Realizing that the only way across the swamp was through the machine gun nests, one of Shirley’s sergeants assembled a patrol—ten men with two automatic rifles, a tommy gun, and a bunch of grenades between them.