It all fell apart so quickly. Theo Papadakis and his company were no longer on the offensive, seizing ground from the Japanese. They were the defenders now, in a desperate fight for their lives.
He’d lost contact with Squibb’s platoon at the captured corner bunker.
Worse, he was taking brutal fire from that direction—the one direction from which, just a few moments ago, he’d felt safe.
Something’s fucked up with Charlie Company, I’ll bet, Theo told himself. There should be nothing but GIs behind us, not Japs.
Something else I’ll bet…that never would’ve happened if Lee Grossman was running Charlie, instead of that greenhorn Havers.
He was taking brutal fire from another direction, too. It had to be coming from bunkers deeper in the plantation.
The wails of his wounded men—a growing chorus singing a song of mortal fear—wove around and through the constant racket of gunfire.
Most of the men still able to fight were sprawled in the mud at the bottom of the commo trench, crammed shoulder to shoulder. The rest scuttled behind trees, darting back and forth, not sure in which direction to seek cover from the crossfire.
It no longer mattered how well Tony Colletti’s Baker Company was keeping the Japs in the next bunker occupied. Theo Papadakis—and what was left of his Able Company—would never be able to seize it now. They’d never get there alive.
Papadakis keyed the walkie-talkie and said: “ALL TRENCHFOOT UNITS, THIS IS SIX…PULL BACK. REPEAT, PULL BACK.”
He didn’t realize how loud he had spoken until he looked down the trench: he was the only man still there. The rest had heard and heeded his command long before their platoon and squad leaders could relay it.
Charlie Company’s sweep from the north progressed at a snail’s pace—it had covered only a few hundred yards so far. Surprisingly, it had met no resistance.
“We’re not moving fast enough, sir,” Hadley told Lieutenant Havers. “At this pace, Christmas will be come and gone before we make contact.”
Havers replied, “You’re mighty eager, aren’t you, Sergeant? Didn’t your mother ever teach you haste makes waste?”
Tom Hadley remembered another expression his tough-as-nails mother—a West Virginia miner’s wife—had often told each of her many sons, something quite different than the lieutenant’s cliché: Son, she would say, don’t fuck up.
He decided to keep that piece of wisdom to himself. They were already past the point of prevention and well into the fuckup.
Over the chatter of distant gunfire, another sound made itself known: the dull poom poom poom of cannons firing from a mile or more away.
They weren’t the Aussie cannons—their sound was coming from the opposite direction. The wrong direction.
Within seconds, the whine of incoming shells drowned out every other sound—even the beseeching voices of the combat-experienced men like Tom Hadley, who were screaming, “INCOMING! HIT THE DECK!”
The rounds’ impact shook the ground like an earthquake, shattered some trees, and loosed the bladders and bowels of Charlie Company’s rookies. As the rain of debris from the explosions subsided, First Sergeant Tom Hadley made a decision: it was time to take command of this idiot circus before they got wiped out to the last man.
“CHARLIE COMPANY, PULL BACK,” Hadley roared. “MOVE IT! ON THE FUCKING DOUBLE!”
A few yards away, several green troopers huddled on the ground, paralyzed with fear.
“GET UP AND RUN,” Hadley bellowed at them.
“Fuck that,” one of the troopers said, his trembling voice at least an octave higher than normal. “We need to take cover.”
“NO, DUMBASS,” Hadley replied, kicking the speaker firmly in the backside, “WHEN THE ROUNDS ARE COMING DOWN ON YOUR HEAD, YOU TAKE COVER. WHEN THEY’RE NOT, YOU RUN LIKE HELL OUT OF THE KILL ZONE.”
The dull poom poom poom sounded in the distance once again…
And this time, every man who still could ran like hell.
It wasn’t much of a run to the rally point, only a few hundred yards. Once there, Charlie Company’s men would have been content to keep running all the way to the airfield at So Sorry, but First Sergeant Hadley corralled and quickly reorganized them. A headcount was not encouraging: there were fifteen wounded, six of them stretcher cases that had been dragged out of harm’s way by their comrades. The lieutenants who led 1st and 3rd Platoons were among the badly wounded.
There were eight men missing. Among them were the other two company officers: the leader of 2nd Platoon and the company commander, Lieutenant Havers.
Dammit, Hadley told himself, that puts me officially in charge. Those junior officers don’t last too long, do they?
He called four names: “Wozniak, Simms, Mukasic, McCleary…saddle up. You’re coming with me.”
PFC Wozniak raised his hands to the sky as if beseeching heaven and asked, “Why are we so fucking lucky, Top?”
The first sergeant grabbed him by the web gear, jerked him to his feet, and replied, “Because, wiseass, I need experienced people. I ain’t got time to wipe some rookie’s ass right now. Come on…we’re going to go find our missing guys.”
Corporal Bogater Boudreau had long since run out of ammunition for his Thompson. But it didn’t matter—as long as he was stuck in that corner bunker, he had a seemingly inexhaustible supply for the Nambu machine gun.
And them dumbass Japs keep walking right up and let me cut ’em down. They ain’t figured out it’s a GI behind this gun—and it’s pointing right at them.
But this little ruse de guerre of mine is about played out. Maybe it ain’t such a swell idea to be rear guard after all.
And I don’t remember volunteering to do this alone…but I’m the only son of a bitch in here who’s still drawing breath.
He was expecting the grenade that sailed through the bunker’s entrance.
A pile of dead Japanese provided ample cover.
But the explosion finished off whatever hearing Bogater had left.
As he pulled himself from under the shelter of the corpses, he tried without success to shake off the awful ringing in his ears.
But I’d rather be deaf than dead any day, the Cajun told himself as he picked up a Japanese rifle and dropped the two soldiers who entered the bunker with one shot each. Each squeeze of the trigger made nothing but a muted, mechanical clank in his crippled ears, more felt than heard.
Pretty good shooting…considering you gotta cycle the fucking bolt on these Jap rifles after each shot. Ain’t they heard about semi-automatic yet?
But it’s time to get the hell out of here.
Hoisting a Japanese corpse before him like body armor, he burst out of the bunker.
Nobody fired at him.
He didn’t stop to wonder why. He dropped the lifeless shield and ran.
That’s when Mother Nature decided to open her faucets once again.
The deluge took the sprinting Bogater Boudreau by complete surprise: Usually, you hear it coming, that shisssh of rain sweeping across the jungle is hard to miss…
Trouble is, I can’t hear nothing but that high C note in my ears…and now, with this rain pouring down, I can’t see shit, neither…
Where the hell am I?
He wasn’t the only man lost in the rain.
Out of the curtain of falling water walked another soldier.
He might have been 100 feet away…
He might have been 10.
They saw each other at the same time, hesitated for just an instant as they processed whether friend or foe.
Both decided foe.
Both squeezed their rifle’s trigger.
Neither weapon fired.
“Fucking Jap piece of shit,” Boudreau spewed as he cycled the Arisaka’s bolt.
Damn. It’s empty.
Never taking his eyes off his adversary, the Cajun searched his trouser pocket for another clip.
Don’t tell me I lost the son of a bitch…
The Japane
se soldier found his new clip with little fanfare. He loaded it into his rifle with a chop of his open hand…
Slammed the bolt home…
And caught the stock of Boudreau’s rifle squarely against the side of his head.
Just like Babe Ruth swinging for the fences, Bogater told himself. I believe I killed the little bastard. Split his head open like a melon dropped off a truck.
“So sorry about that,” he said out loud, “but, you know…it’s kill or be killed, mon frère.” Snatching the loaded rifle from lifeless hands, he added, “Tell you what…I’ll trade you.”
Now all I gotta do is figure out which way’s east…
The Japanese artillery was silent now as First Sergeant Tom Hadley and his four-man detail searched for their company’s missing along the plantation’s edge. The sounds of the fight for the corner bunker—so tumultuous a few minutes ago—had dwindled to sporadic gunshots that seemed more like afterthoughts than signals of battle.
“How come the Jap artillery shut off?” PFC Wozniak asked as he tried to wipe the rain from his face.
“They’re probably just as low on ammo as we are,” Hadley replied. “Shut the fuck up and stay alert.”
They entered a grove where the trunks were scarred as if they were the artifacts of some demonic whittler. There were more signs of the artillery’s handiwork, too: the drops of viscous pink painting the terrain—some small, some in fist-sized globs mixed with scraps of olive drab fabric—the detritus of a life’s sudden and violent end refusing to be flushed away by the downpour.
“Well,” Hadley said, his voice flat, “looks like we found at least one of them. Okay, split up and spread out. See if you can at least come up with dog tags. But keep on your toes, dammit—this is still Indian country.”
Under a pyramid of broken trees, Tom Hadley found Lieutenant Havers.
He was still alive…barely.
A broken but stout tree branch, sharpened like a spear when sheared from its lofty home, had run the lieutenant through.
Now, its tip impaled in the ground, it held Havers face-up in mid-fall, his lifeblood slowly trickling down its shaft in rivulets of deep red to mingle with the rainwater puddling below.
He’s as good as dead, Hadley knew, just like my big brother was when that boiler blew up and ran a pipe right through him. Take that branch—that spear—out of him, and he’ll bleed out in a second or two.
“Get me the medic,” Lieutenant Havers commanded.
The tone of Havers’s voice—so demanding, so entitled, so full of the patrician arrogance Hadley had endured as a boy from the offspring of bankers, lawyers, and coal mine bosses in his West Virginia town—dissolved whatever compassion he might have had for his dying commander.
Just like that asshole platoon leader who got himself killed up on the mountain back at Port Moresby—who was it? Oh, yeah…Lieutenant Wharton. Shit, I damn near forgot his name already.
“The medic,” Havers demanded. “Where the hell is he?”
“He’ll be along in a minute, sir,” Hadley lied. “Let me help you out in the meantime…Sorry, sir, but this is going to hurt a bit.”
Before Havers could sputter another word, Tom Hadley wrenched the branch—with Havers still attached—sideways and out of the ground.
Then, his foot firmly against the lieutenant’s chest, he yanked it out of Havers’s body…
God forgive me.
It was all over quickly: the arrogance in the lieutenant’s eyes faded, replaced by a blank stare that seemed focused on some other dimension.
In his last seconds of life, he seemed to be saying something, an inaudible whisper Hadley felt sure he understood:
Fuck you, Tom.
As he took one of the dog tags from Havers’s neck, Tom Hadley remembered an old poster he had seen on a barracks wall back in the States. It said: Death Comes Quickly…Treat Immediately.
Chapter Twenty-Two
General Hartman was red-faced with annoyance. They could imagine smoke pouring from the general’s ears as he said, “In other words, gentlemen, you’ve failed again.”
Jock and Colonel Molloy winced for just an instant before placing the appropriate expressions of contrition on their faces. They well understood how the army game of blame assessment was played: it was their fault the attack on Duropa Plantation had failed, and that’s all there was to it.
“Major Miles,” the general continued, “I’m going to put a stop to this attack through the plantation obsession of yours. It’s getting us nowhere.”
The general stepped to the map and, stabbing a finger repeatedly into the shaded area representing Buna Village, said, “You’re going to shift your focus to a direct attack on Buna.”
Colonel Molloy decided this was the time to speak up. “But that’s an attack across nothing but swamp, sir, it’s—”
“It’s what, Colonel?” Hartman interrupted. “I hope you weren’t planning to say it’s suicide.”
“No, sir,” Molloy replied. “I was going to say extremely difficult.”
What Molloy wanted to add but didn’t: and extremely unlikely to succeed.
It was obvious from Hartman’s expression he didn’t care how difficult Dick Molloy or Jock Miles thought it would be.
“I’m going to tell you gentlemen what MacArthur told me,” Hartman said. “Take Buna…or don’t come back alive.”
Jock and Colonel Molloy exchanged a fleeting, worried glance: this is crazy talk. If MacArthur actually said those words, he was nuts. If General Hartman believed them, he was nuts, too…
Because it ain’t the generals who do the dying.
“May I make a suggestion, sir?” Molloy asked.
“By all means, Colonel,” Hartman replied, his tone not in the least bit cordial.
“This campaign has, so far, taken a frightening toll on Eighty-First Regiment. Major Miles’s battalion is—after only a week of combat—down to fifty percent of its fighting strength—”
“Much of that is from sickness, not wounds in action,” Hartman interrupted.
“That makes no difference, sir,” Molloy replied.
“I’m well familiar with your regiment’s casualty figures, Colonel,” Hartman said. “Get to the damn point.”
“Those casualty figures are my point exactly, sir. One could say we already are, to a very great degree, not coming back alive. Now that the other two regiments of this division have finally joined us here on the north coast, it would be greatly appreciated if they could help in assaulting this stronghold which, to our collective shame, we greatly underestimated.”
General Hartman couldn’t have looked less sympathetic.
“And while we’re talking about reinforcements, sir,” Molloy continued, “where do we stand with getting the artillery and tanks we’ve been begging for?”
Finally, there was a slight smile on Hartman’s face. “Molloy, I’m glad you brought those topics up together,” he said, “because they’re joined at the hip. We can’t bring in tanks and artillery vehicles until we have a nearby harbor. It looks like the best candidate is a place down the coast called Oro Bay, about fifteen miles east of here. From there to here, we’ll need to build a wide road through the jungle, complete with bridges to cross the many rivers and streams along the way. Now, gentlemen, I’m going to share something with you that I do not—and I repeat, do not—wish to become general knowledge, lest it cause panic among the troops. MacArthur suspects that since we’re putting so much pressure on Buna, and the Aussies on Gona and Sanananda, the Japanese are—despite their weakened naval position—about to risk landing seaborne reinforcements of their own. Perhaps as much as a division. Therefore, I must ensure that all our coastal installations—the airfield at Fasari and the one under construction at Dobodura, any port we may establish, and any roads connecting them all—are well protected. I’ve assigned that vital task to Eighty-Third Regiment.”
Molloy asked, “What about Eighty-Second Regiment, sir? What’ll they be doing?”
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“MacArthur feels it’s best that they augment the Aussie division. It’s time we finally gave our steadfast allies a bit of a helping hand.”
Jock and Colonel Molloy exchanged another quick glance, one of frustration this time. They were both thinking exactly the same thing: As usual, politics is dictating tactics...and we’re going to take our lumps for it. Again.
General Hartman had one more point to make: “You gentlemen already know MacArthur’s position on the artillery—as long as you have the support of our Air Force, they’re all the artillery you need. Learn to employ it better. Now, do you two gentlemen have any further questions?’
Neither Jock nor Colonel Molloy said a word.
“Good,” Hartman said. “You’re dismissed. Go and bring me a victory.”
As they walked from Hartman’s CP tent, Jock said, “Learn to employ it better, my ass. Colonel, I don’t believe the general’s been paying attention.”
Through clenched teeth, Molloy muttered, “Affirmative, Jock. Operation Easy Street, my aching ass. Hasn’t been a damn thing easy about it.”
Andoom Clipper was making good time as she sailed along the Papuan coast. “Fifteen knots, on average, I reckon,” Jillian Forbes said to the US Army captain standing beside her on the bridge. Easing her helm left to glide past the shallows of a reef, she added, “We’ll make Oro Bay before sundown.”
The captain—Marcus Concavage, US Army Engineers—had nothing to say in reply.
Jillian found the whole situation amusing: Leave it to the Yanks to send an army man for a navy job. Look at that frown on the wanker’s face…I don’t think he believes we’ll be there when I say we will. Bloody hell, it’s only a day’s sail. He’s been a nervous wreck ever since he came on board. Wound a bit tight, I’d say…
And he’s not happy about a sheila driving the boat, that’s for bloody sure.
Something else was bothering Captain Concavage, too. Pointing to the Aborigine man ministering to the Clipper’s engine, he said, “I’m still not sure why that abo needs to be on board, Miss Forbes.”
Operation Easy Street (Jock Miles WW2 Adventure Series Book 3) Page 12