“If we’re wounded so we can’t pull duty, they’ve got to evacuate us,” the first PFC—the more accomplished shithouse lawyer of the two—said. “And nobody’s ever going to be able to tell how the wound happened.”
“And even if they suspect you did it yourself,” the other PFC—a lesser genius—added, “they can’t prove nothing, right?”
“Absolutely correct,” the lawyer said, swept away in righteous logic. “Just make sure you break a bone. That’s the way out of this shithole forever. Flesh wounds won’t get the job done.” He pulled the Nambu pistol he found after last night’s attack and asked, “Are you ready?”
The lesser genius nodded. They began to lay down a theatrical volley of fire with their M1s. It was a deception aimed at nothing in particular, since there were no Japanese anywhere to be seen. The lawyer threw a grenade for good measure.
As soon as it burst, he pointed the Nambu at his lower leg, closed his eyes…
And pulled the trigger.
He expected it to hurt. But he wasn’t prepared for the blinding pain as the bullet scorched a path along his tibia and into the thick muscle behind. It was like being stabbed with a blowtorch.
He hadn’t expected so much blood, either.
There was nothing theatrical about his screaming. He meant every agonized word:
“MEDIC! MEDIC! HELP ME. OH GOD, HELP ME…”
The Nambu pistol had fallen to the ground. The lesser genius decided not to pick it up. Watching the lawyer writhe on the ground was fast changing his mind about the wisdom of self-inflicted wounds:
It wasn’t supposed to hurt that bad.
Struggling to get his words out, the lawyer moaned, “Come on! Do it already! Before help gets here.”
The lesser genius shook his head and tossed the Nambu into the swamp. He’d take a pass.
He would’ve been better off if he hadn’t. When he raised his head from the hole to hail the approaching medic, a sniper’s bullet struck his helmet at the perfect perpendicular, punching cleanly through thin steel as if it was no sturdier than an eggshell, spraying his brains out the other side.
They weren’t back at the battalion CP more than a few minutes when Melvin Patchett said, “Sir…you gotta take a look at this.”
Approaching the CP tent was a ragged, stumbling column of GIs, perhaps two dozen in number. New fatigues hung on their skeletal frames as if they were department store mannequins. Their heads didn’t seem wide enough to fill their helmets. They didn’t seem fit enough to put one foot before the other.
“Detail, halt,” the sergeant-in-charge commanded, his reedy voice weak and barely audible. On his next command—“At ease”—the men of the detail collapsed to the ground. The only things keeping them from falling flat on their backs were the bulky packs they wore.
As the sergeant walked toward Jock, his steps were so uncertain it looked like even odds he wouldn’t make it.
“Sergeant Overton reporting, sir,” the man said, offering a wobbly salute.
These men don’t look strong enough to stand up in a stiff breeze, let alone fight the Japanese, Jock thought. Where the hell did they come from?
Then it hit him: they were survivors of 2nd Battalion. The men of the Kapa Kapa.
Jock asked, “Who on earth sent you men down here, Sergeant?”
“Orders from Division, sir. They said you needed replacements.”
Jock’s silent reply: Yeah…and you ain’t them.
“Get these men under shelter, Sergeant Major,” Jock told Patchett. “I’ve got to find Colonel Molloy.”
Over the telephone line, Dick Molloy’s voice was anything but enlightening. “I didn’t know anything about it, either, Jock. Just see if you can find something for those men to do. Maybe they can man some observation posts or something.”
“They’re so wrung out they can hardly stay conscious, sir,” Jock replied. “Putting them in an OP just risks getting us all killed. And it’s hard enough to keep the men I already have fed. I don’t need more useless mouths.”
Even the poor acoustics of a field telephone couldn’t mask Molloy’s frustration. “I know, Jock…I know,” he replied. “But we’ll figure something out.”
“I’m not so sure, sir. We’ve got enough going on here already. We don’t need to be playing convalescent home to troops who should have already been evacuated—just to make Division’s manpower figures look better down in Port Moresby.”
Another thing the phone couldn’t mask: the tone in Molloy’s voice that meant he considered this conversation over. “Tell me something I don’t know, Major Miles,” he said.
And then the colonel rang off.
The rest of 2nd Battalion’s survivors—some 75 in number—were still languishing at 81st Regiment’s aid station. Even by the relaxed standards for combat-ready troops General Freidenburg had imposed, these men still weren’t fit for duty. It would take a considerable amount of nutritious food and uninterrupted rest to rehabilitate them. Neither commodity was readily available at Buna.
They may have been physically weak, but their minds still worked just fine; the ordeal of the Kapa Kapa hadn’t blinded them to the realities of the stalemate they had finally joined. One of those realities was on full display in the person of a new arrival, his stretcher lying on the ground outside the triage tent.
“That guy over there,” a corporal who survived the Kapa Kapa said, “I heard the docs talking about him. His leg…that’s a self-inflicted wound, they say.”
“Oh, yeah?” his fellow survivor—a sergeant—replied. “Let’s go have a word with him.”
They staggered over to the stretcher, looming over the recumbent, immobile GI with the heavily-bandaged shin.
“Hey, bud,” the sergeant said, “I hear tell you shot yourself.”
“That’s a bunch of crap,” the shithouse lawyer replied. “They dug a Nambu slug out of me.”
Shaking his head, the corporal said, “That dog ain’t gonna hunt, fella. They say the angle that bullet went in, a fucking Jap would’ve had to be holding hands with you. And I hear there are Jap weapons laying all over the place out there.”
“You don’t know shit, my friend” the lawyer said. “While you assholes were fucking off in the jungle, I got wounded in combat. Leave me the hell alone.”
“I ain’t your friend, Private,” the corporal said. “You know, we learned something while we were fucking off in the jungle, as you say…a little something about emergency first aid. Let us show you how we cleaned out wounds…”
The two survivors proceeded to urinate all over the lawyer. He couldn’t escape—all he could do was squirm on the stretcher. That wasn’t enough to stay dry.
“You’d best close your lying mouth, now,” the sergeant said, enjoying himself as he redirected his stream at the man’s face.
When they were finished, they buttoned up and started shuffling back to their tent. The sergeant had one thing to say in farewell:
“Fucking coward. I hope they shoot your worthless ass for good this time.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Aside from the daily bombing raids on Buna by 5th Air Force, it had been quiet all along 81st Regiment’s positions for the third day running. As a new day dawned on Charlie Company, 1st Battalion—Tom Hadley’s outfit—the men were starting to get used to this new level of inactivity. But they knew it couldn’t go on forever: higher headquarters was cooking up a new way to get them killed, they were sure.
But until those plans—whatever they were—came into play, the men were very happy to cool their heels. “I could get used to this,” a GI named Joey Rossetti said, sprawled in a low hammock he had rigged between two trees from a supply-drop parachute.
His buddy Jimmy Quigley—seated on an ammo box that was gradually sinking into the soggy ground—warned, “You’d better not get used to it. When you drop your guard, that’s when a bullet’s gonna find you.” He took a long swig from his canteen cup and then plunked it down on the crate the t
wo troopers used like a coffee table.
“Cut the crap, Jimmy. When your number’s up, your number’s up, and you can’t do nothing about it.” Joey sat up in the hammock and lit a cigarette. “Hey, ain’t tomorrow night New Year’s Eve? You got any plans?”
“Oh, sure. I suppose I’ll do the usual stuff—take my girl out dancing, watch the ball come down in Times Square, then take her home and put it to her like usual.”
“You can’t,” Joey said. “I heard there ain’t no ball this year. Blackout, you know.”
“No problem. I don’t need no lights to get laid.”
“Nah, you can’t do that, neither. She’s screwing some 4-F now.”
Jimmy Quigley took another long drink from the cup, set it back on the crate, and—laughing at himself—sighed, “Fuck me…”
There was a sharp CLANK—when their eyes fell on the coffee table again, the canteen cup was gone.
What the hell?
It only took a second for them to crack the mystery of the vanishing cup: SNIPER!
They flung themselves to the ground and began crawling for cover.
Along the way, they came across the cup; its journey had ended in a thicket a few feet from the coffee table. There was a neat bullet hole punched in each side, the holes aligned as if drilled by a master machinist.
The whole company got the word in no time flat. Complacency vanished; every man was jumpy. Crouched in a fighting hole, Tom Hadley and a trio of his best sharpshooters peered across the swamp to the treeline marking the plantation’s eastern edge. Treetops still supported the upside-down Japanese plane and its dead, dangling pilot. Even using binoculars, no one could pick out the sniper.
“He’s got to be up in those trees on the edge somewhere,” Hadley said. “If he was any deeper in the plantation, his field of fire wouldn’t be worth a damn.”
“Why don’t we just rake the treetops with the thirty cals, Sarge?” a sharpshooter asked. “We’re bound to hit him that way.”
Without a hint of uncertainty, Hadley replied, “No. Our machine guns are in perfect defensive positions. We need them to stay hidden right where they are. If we start using them as tree-trimmers, we’ll give their positions away. Then we’ll have a lot more than some sniper to worry about.”
“So what’re we gonna do, Sarge? If we ever needed a tank, it’s—”
Hadley interrupted, “We ain’t got a damn tank. But I just got an idea.”
His men didn’t like the sound of that.
“What kind of idea, Sergeant Hadley?” another sharpshooter asked. “Don’t tell me you want to send out a patrol, so we can get picked off one by one.”
“No,” Hadley replied, “better than that. I’ll be right back. In the meantime, everybody keep their asses down. Don’t do anything stupid.”
Esme was sailing with the sunrise out of Milne Bay, rounding East Cape for a day’s run up Papua’s north coast to Oro Bay. It would be the vessel’s first trip there—and her captain’s second. From her bridge, Jillian took in the stockpiles of military hardware being amassed in and around that harbor. The sheer amount of it all made her think:
It’d take weeks for the mob of us coastal traders to move all that stuff up to Oro Bay…and the big ships from Australia just keep bringing more and more. Too bad they can’t make that bloody trip. It would save us all so much time.
Her ship’s load was like all the others she had carried since signing on to the Allied merchant navy: the hold was crammed with ammunition and rations; lashed to the deck were a few light vehicles—jeeps and light trucks the Yanks called three-quarter tons—and 55-gallon drums of gasoline and oil. She couldn’t carry the tanks Jock and his men needed so badly; the vehicles already on board taxed the lifting ability of Esme’s small deck cranes to the limit. Beatrix Van Der Wegge’s Java Queen was the only ship in the coastal trader fleet that could handle the tanks. On her reinforced deck, she had space for three, plus the sturdy cranes to lift them.
There were half a dozen light tanks lined up on shore at Milne Bay: Stuarts, they were called. Jillian didn’t find them particularly awe-inspiring: Sixteen tons of armor plate wrapped around a puny gun. A steel coffin on treads.
But she knew the Yanks at Buna were desperate for them. Unfortunately, the bigwigs in charge of logistics considered construction equipment far more important at the moment. So the Stuarts sat, while bulldozers and earth-moving trucks were loaded onto Beatrix’s Java Queen.
Esme was steaming west in the Solomon Sea now, making 15 knots for the 12-hour run to Oro Bay. Her ship’s company had been enhanced by four, courtesy of the Royal Australian Navy: the crew of the Oerlikon 20-millimeter cannon freshly mounted to her foredeck. Jillian patted the ship’s wheel as she thought, You’re really a warship now, old girl. Maybe the next Jap plane that tries to sink us will get a right thrashing.
The gunners had been disgusted, at first, to learn they were assigned to a ship captained by a woman. One young seaman even had the gall to spit on Esme’s deck. Two facts changed their minds, though. First, they learned their skipper had just escaped several days in Japanese captivity. Her first mate hadn’t hesitated to embellish the story: “Captain Forbes has already killed—single-handedly—a bunch of Japs both at Cape York and Papua. More than all of you lot put together, I reckon.”
The first mate could tell from their faces he had reckoned correctly: the most combat any of the gun crew had seen, most likely, was brawling in a Brisbane pub, where bruised prides were the only casualties.
“In other words,” the first mate continued, “the captain’s not to be trifled with or her ship subjected to any disrespect.”
Second, there was a significant cache of Australian beer on board, some 60 cases destined for an American unit at Buna as a New Year’s surprise. “But if you behave yourselves like good lads,” the Aussie gun crew was also told, “a case of that delicious brew can be yours.”
Tom Hadley returned to Charlie Company in short order, riding the hood of a jeep towing two .50-caliber machine guns on a common wheeled mount. He pointed to a spot at the edge of the treeline and called to the driver, “Set up over there, pal.”
The jeep sloshed to a stop at the appointed spot. The three men crewing the weapon disconnected it from the vehicle, manhandling it the last few feet into position.
“There,” Hadley said, “you’ve got a great field of fire. This will only take a minute. Then you guys can high-tail it back to Division.”
“Okay, great,” the buck sergeant in charge of the twin .50s said. “Now what is it that you want us to do, exactly? We’re an anti-aircraft unit, you know? We’re not trained to do ground combat.”
“That’s just why I called on you guys,” Hadley replied. He pointed across the swampy clearing to the far treeline and asked, “See? What’s in those trees over there?”
“It’s a fucking wrecked airplane,” the buck sergeant said.
“Right. Now shoot it down. And while you’re at it, take the tops off the trees fifty yards to either side.”
“Are you shitting me, Top?” the buck sergeant asked.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Hadley replied. “But if I were you, I’d make it snappy. We’ve had a little problem with snipers around here.”
The twin .50 mount came complete with a steel shield to protect the gunners. At the word sniper, its entire crew scrambled to huddle behind it.
“Oh, what the hell,” the buck sergeant said as he swung the sights onto the suspended airplane and pressed the trigger button.
Tom Hadley covered his ears and smiled: The racket of a couple of fifties alone is enough to scare you to death.
The gun crew did what was asked of them. It was all over in less than 20 seconds. The machine guns sat silent and smoking, their ammo drums empty.
“We’re getting the fuck out of here,” the buck sergeant said as he hurled himself into the driver’s seat.
“Thanks a bunch,” Hadley replied. “Come back anytime.”
; The men on the perimeter were breathless with excitement. As Hadley walked up, a GI told him, “You should’ve seen it, First Sergeant. Three of those Jap bastards fell out of the trees. One of them was hiding in that fucking airplane. Only trouble is, before those fifties showed up, one of them got Jimmy Quigley. He tried to take a peek and they shot him dead, right through the neck.”
“Shit,” Hadley said as he surveyed the now-altered far treeline. What had once been tall coconut palms looked like well-chewed toothpicks. The wrecked airplane no longer dwelled in the trees; it was in pieces on the ground.
“Major Miles on the horn, First Sergeant,” a runner reported.
When Hadley picked up the phone, Jock asked, “How’d the landscaping go, Tom?”
“Pretty good, sir. I don’t think we’ll be having much trouble with snipers for a while. Those fifty cals did the trick.”
“I’m glad they’re good for something,” Jock replied. “As far as I can tell, they haven’t hit an airplane yet…and they can’t get close enough to try and split those bunkers open, either.”
Esme was halfway to Oro Bay when a lookout shouted, “PLANES OFF THE STARBOARD QUARTER—ABOUT A MILE AND CLOSING.”
Jillian fixed them in her binoculars. It didn’t take but a second to realize they were Japanese fighters—two of them, low in the sky…
And they’d be upon the ship in much less than a minute.
We’re a bloody sitting duck. Not much room to maneuver in these waters.
Easing the ship’s wheel to port, Jillian said, “Let’s show them her skinny arse, lads.”
The planes flashed along her starboard side, their bullets splashing wide off her bow.
The Oerlikon gunner tried to track them as they sped ahead and broke hard left.
Operation Easy Street (Jock Miles WW2 Adventure Series Book 3) Page 20