The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [193]
13
Cummings put in a busy week after Hearn was transferred to Dalleson's section. The final and major assault on the Toyaku Line, which Cummings had been postponing for almost a month, had become virtually a necessity. The character of the messages he had been receiving from Corps and Army permitted no further delay and Cummings had his informants in higher echelons as well; he knew he would have to produce some success in the next week or two. His staff had developed the attack plan through its final variations and details, and the assault was scheduled to start in three days.
But Cummings was unhappy with it. The force he could muster would be relatively powerful for the few thousand men involved, but it was a frontal attack and there was no reason to assume it would be any more successful than the attack that had preceded it and failed. The men would advance, and halt probably to a crawl at the first serious resistance. There would be no compulsion for them to keep moving.
Cummings had been toying with another plan for several weeks, but it depended on receiving some naval support, and that was always doubtful. He sent out a few cautious feelers and received some contradictory answers which had left him undecided; the secondary plan had been sidetracked in his mind before the need to produce something tangible and effective. But it was this other plan that intrigued him, and at a conference of his staff officers one morning he decided to draw up an additional set of plans which would incorporate the naval support.
This other plan was simple but powerful. The extreme right flank of the Toyaku Line was anchored on the water's edge a mile or two behind the point where the peninsula joined the island. Six miles to the rear of that was a small cove called Botoi Bay. The General's new plan was to land about a thousand men at Botoi and have them drive inland on a diagonal to take the center of the Toyaku Line from the rear. At the same time his frontal attack, reduced in strength, of course, would drive forward to meet the invading troops. That invasion could work if the landing was successful.
Only that was the doubtful part of it. The General had enough landing craft assigned him for ferrying supplies from freighters off the island to be able to transport his invasion troops in one wave if necessary, but Botoi Bay was almost out of range of his artillery, and air reconnaissance had shown that fifty or perhaps even a hundred Japanese troops were entrenched in bunkers and pillboxes on that stretch of beach. Artillery couldn't drive them out nor dive bombers. It would take at least one destroyer and preferably two firing at point-blank range, perhaps a thousand yards offshore. If he were to send a battalion in without naval support a bloody and disastrous massacre would occur.
And the beach at Botoi Bay was the only place where he could land troops for at least fifty miles down the coast. Past Botoi some of the densest jungle forests on Anopopei grew virtually into the water, and nearer his own front line were bluffs too steep to be scaled by invasion troops. There was no alternative. To take the Toyaku Line from the rear they would need the Navy.
The thing that appealed to Cummings about this flanking invasion was what he called its "psychological soundness." The men who would land at Botoi would be in the enemy rear without any safe way to retreat, and their only security would be to drive ahead and meet their own troops. They would have to advance. And, conversely, the troops attacking frontally would do so with more enthusiasm. Cummings had found from experience that men fought better when they believed their share of an assignment was the easy part. They would be pleased they missed the invasion, and even more important, they would believe that the resistance before them would be softer, less decisive, because