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By Root 9157 0

repulsed was only one of many similar assaults that sputtered up and down the river for hours, and ended at last in a breathless and dreary stalemate. Almost every one of the line companies was involved at one time or another, and each time the pattern was repeated. A group of thirty or fifty or a hundred Japanese would try to cross the river against a squad or platoon of American soldiers, entrenched in foxholes with automatic weapons. That night the Japanese had struck first at Cummings's left flank near the water, and then at dawn had engaged the two companies near the mountain bluffs where recon held the extreme right flank. After both had failed, Toyaku attacked in early daylight the center of the line, and succeeded in giving one company a bad mauling, and forced another to retreat almost back to 2nd Battalion headquarters. The General, still at headquarters battery of the 151st, made a quick decision, confirmed the tactics he had decided upon the preceding night, and sent out orders that the center of the line was to hold its positions.

Toyaku was able to send four hundred men across the river and four or five tanks, before the General's artillery and counterattacks by companies on the edge of the gap made it too expensive to continue. At the most dangerous moment for Cummings, it was still no worse than the problem of ejecting the rump of a fat man who had broken a hole through the stuffing of a couch, and was not spluttering and wriggling his backside in an effort to escape. The General attacked with his reserves, concentrated all the division's artillery on a natural clearing into which the Japanese behind his lines had been forced, and with the aid of his tanks, which had been held in readiness at a point only a quarter mile from the Japs' deepest penetration, succeeded in puncturing the rump. It was the biggest battle of the campaign to date, and the most successful. By late afternoon of that day the Japanese striking force was shattered, and the survivors disappeared into the jungle again, and were either pinched off one by one during the week that followed or succeeded in making their way back across the river to their own lines. This was the second time the General had routed a force which had penetrated his lines, and he gave Hearn a little lecture about it. "This kind of thing is what I call my dinner-table tactics. I'm the little lady who allows the lecher beside me to get his hand way up under my dress before I cut off his wrist."

Tag ends of the battle spouted for a few days, and there were many local fire fights and patrol clashes, but the General, with what Hearn had to admit was unerring instinct, had cut through the subsidiary clashes, the confusing and contradictory patrol reports, to understand that the battle as far as Toyaku was concerned was over after his smash at the middle of the line had been absorbed. The General spent the next day in re-establishing the hole in his lines, and diverting again his reserve to its work on the road. Two or three days later, after a lot of patrol activity, he made an unopposed advance of over a mile, which brought his front elements within a few thousand yards of the Toyaku Line. He estimated it would take him another two weeks to bring the road up to his front, and in another week the Toyaku Line should be breached. He was exceptionally easy to get along with the week after the battle, and as a symptom of that, he was continually feeding Hearn his private military maxims. "Toyaku's through in an offensive sense," he told Hearn. "When the over-all strategy of your campaign is defensive you can figure on losing about a fifth of your force in counteroffensives, and then you've just got to dig in. Toyaku frittered it away. The Japanese brood their way through campaigns; they sit around restless until the tension gets too great and then they erupt. It's a fascinating paradox. They have that game of theirs, go, which is all feverish activity, all turning of flanks, and encirclements, and then when they fight they act like wounded animals who roar down clumsily when