With the Old Breed_ At Peleliu and Okinawa - E. B. Sledge [62]
The radioman handed the phone to Ack Ack. He requested a certain number of rounds of 75mm HE to be fired out to Company K's front. A Marine on the other end of the radio questioned the need for the request.
Haldane answered pleasantly and firmly, “Maybe so, but I want my boys to feel secure.” Shortly the 75s came whining overhead and started bursting in the dark thick growth across the road.
Next day I told several men what Ack Ack had said. “That's the skipper for you, always thinking of the troops’ feelings,” was the way one man summed it up.
Several hours passed. It was my turn to be on watch in our hole. Snafu slept fitfully and ground his teeth audibly, which he usually did during sleep in combat. The white coral road shone brightly in the pale moonlight as I strained my eyes looking across into the wall of dark growth on the other side.
Suddenly two figures sprang up from a shallow ditch directly across the road from me. With arms waving wildly, yelling and babbling hoarsely in Japanese, they came. My heart skipped a beat, then began pounding like a drum as I flipped off the safety of my carbine. One enemy soldier angled to my right, raced down the road a short distance, crossed over, and disappeared into a foxhole in the line of the company on our right flank. I focused on the other. Swinging a bayonet over his head, he headed at me.
I dared not fire at him yet, because directly between us was a foxhole with two Marines in it. If I fired just as the Marine on watch rose up to meet the Japanese intruder, my bullet would surely hit a comrade in the back. The thought flashed through my mind, “Why doesn't Sam or Bill fire at him?”
With a wild yell the Japanese jumped into the hole with the two Marines. A frantic, desperate, hand-to-hand struggle ensued, accompanied by the most gruesome combination of curses, wild babbling, animalistic guttural noises, and grunts. Sounds of men hitting each other and thrashing around came from the foxhole.
I saw a figure pop out of the hole and run a few steps toward the CP. In the pale moonlight, I then saw a Marine nearest the running man jump up. Holding his rifle by the muzzle and swinging it like a baseball bat, he blasted the infiltrator with a smashing blow.
From our right, where the Japanese had gone into the company on our flank, came hideous, agonized, and prolonged screams that defied description. Those wild, primitive, brutish yellings unnerved me more than what was happening within my own field of vision.
Finally a rifle shot rang out from the foxhole in front of me, and I heard Sam say, “I got him.”
The figure that had been clubbed by the rifle lay groaning on the deck about twenty feet to the left of my hole. The yelling over to our right ceased abruptly. By this time, of course, everyone was on the alert.
“How many Nips were there?” asked a sergeant near me.
“I saw two,” I answered.
“There must'a been more,” someone else put in.
“No,” I insisted, “only two came across the road here. One of them ran to the right where all that yelling was, and the other jumped into the hole where Sam shot him.”
“Well, then, if there were just those two Nips, what's all that groanin’ over here then?” he asked, indicating the man felled by the rifle butt.
“I don't know, but I didn't see but two Nips, and I'm sure of it,” I said adamantly—with an insistence that has given me peace of mind ever since.
A man in a nearby hole said, “I'll check it out.” Everyone sat still as he crawled to the groaning man in the shadows. A .45 pistol shot rang out. The moaning stopped, and the Marine returned to his hole.
A few hours later as objects around me became faintly visible with the dawn, I noticed that the still form lying to my left didn't appear Japanese. It was either an enemy in Marine dungarees and leggings, or it was a Marine. I went over to find out which.
Before I got to the prone body, its identity was obvious to me. “My God!” I said in horror.
Several men looked at me and asked what was the matter.
“It's