There were no further comments from the grim-faced artillerymen.
Patchett wasn’t finished. “Since the very clever doggies of Recon Platoon done already took out four of them guns, all we gotta do is knock out the other eight. That’s four shots per gun, y’all. Now load your first round.”
Shells were rammed into both tubes. Breeches slid closed and locked shut with the metallic click of their handle locks.
They could feel the warm morning sun on their faces now.
“I’m going to light them up,” Captain Grossman said. “Gunners, stand by.”
Twenty seconds later, four illumination rounds—spread wide apart—began their synchronized parachute descent down the face of the cliffs. The caves appeared as little more than black pockmarks. Patchett pulled the section chief of one of the howitzers close. Grossman did the same with the other gun chief.
“Okay,” Patchett told him as he sighted with an outstretched hand, “first target is down three fingers from the top right cave…got it?”
The section chief held out three fingers, formed the sight picture in his mind, and replied, “Yeah…I got it.”
“Then do it, son.”
Within seconds, both howitzers roared and bucked like angry dragons as they jerked violently from recoil. A cloud of coral dust was sucked off the ground and mingled with the gun smoke. Time of flight would only be a few seconds.
Eyes pressed against binoculars, Patchett and Grossman could see the impacts a heartbeat before hearing them. Nearly in unison, they yelled, “TARGET!” Both shots had achieved their first-round hits.
Just as the light of the first volley of illumination rounds was about to drop out of sight, a second volley began its glide down the cliffs. At the howitzers, new targets were being sighted and rounds loaded.
“So far,” Patchett told the gunners, “y’all are on the right side of this kill or be killed shit. Let’s keep it up.”
It took twelve shots of direct fire from the 105-millimeter howitzers to silence the remaining eight guns embedded in the cliffs. The Japs had managed to get off two shots from the last caves to be targeted but they both landed wide, hurting nothing but trees and rock. Patchett suggested, “I’m betting they couldn’t traverse far enough to get us, sitting in them caves like they was.”
Lee Grossman nodded in agreement. “Probably right, Top.”
“I’d better go find where golden boy is hiding,” Patchett said, “and make damn sure he gets us those tanks back on the double.”
“Amen to that, Top.”
Patchett had to laugh. “Amen to that? Begging your pardon, sir, and no offense meant or nothing, but when the hell did a Jew-fella from New York City start saying things like that?”
“None taken, Top. I guess I’ve just been around you crackers too long.”
They broke into grins as they headed their separate ways.
Colonel Billingsley proved difficult to find. After several radio calls, he finally came on the air. When asked his location, his reply—decoded—said, I’m with Able Company. Consolidate the battalion’s position and await my return.
Patchett snickered as he read the message: With Able Company, my ass. I just talked to Captain Pop…they ain’t seen hide nor hair of the man since they went up the high ground. Just like him to make hisself scarce when the shit’s hitting the fan.
Another thirty minutes passed before Billingsley finally drove up in his jeep. “I’ve got good news, Sergeant Patchett,” he said in greeting. “I’ve pulled Able Company off the cliffs. They’ll be here in about an hour, and then the entire battalion will be moving out. We’re heading west, along the coast.”
“Whoa…hold on a minute, sir. Who’s covering our right flank, then?”
“That’s Third Battalion’s responsibility, Sergeant. Captain Papadakis has already coordinated the new boundaries with them.”
“Begging your pardon, sir, but I spoke with Captain Pop not too long ago. He says Third Battalion’s got one platoon wandering around up there, acting like they couldn’t find their asses with both hands. Did Regiment okay this?”
“I don’t need Regiment’s approval to mass my own troops, Sergeant. I’ll fill Colonel Molloy in on the details as soon as we get organized here and—”
“Begging your pardon again, sir, but we are organized here. Organized as all hell, as a matter of fact. And I’m just a little bit worried we’re giving up the ground over our heads we just spent a day, a night, and the next sunrise getting under our control.”
“You’re not seeing the big picture, I’m afraid, Sergeant Patchett.”
No, sir…I’m seeing it pretty clearly, and it looks like another fucking disaster waiting to happen.
“What about the Stuarts, sir? We getting those tanks back ASAP?”
The blank look that came across Billingsley’s face could only mean one thing: He ain’t even thought about that.
“Yes, yes…of course. I’ll bring that up with Regiment.” Then he stretched like a man who’d just awoken from a long nap. “But first, nature calls, Sergeant.”
Billingsley started walking toward the only building on the airfield, a squat wooden structure some thirty yards away that had, no doubt, served as the airfield operations building. “I’m betting there’s a proper officers’ latrine in that facility,” he said, “and I plan to enjoy it.”
Patchett wrestled with informing the colonel they’d already been through every inch of that building: And much of nothing in there, let alone a shitter. I guess Jap officers crap in a hole like everyone else. But he decided, Let him find out the hard way.
Then the world went dark for a moment as if a harsh wind blew out all the light.
When Melvin Patchett came to, he was flat on his face. His helmet lay on the ground beside him like an overturned turtle. He looked behind and saw the building was a pile of smoking rubble.
I never heard me a damn thing. What the hell just happened?
His question was answered immediately: he could see the puff from a tank’s main gun barrel, sitting atop the cliffs.
The round slammed into the ground between Patchett and the shattered building, barely missing Billingsley’s empty jeep.
Looks like them Jap bastards are playing a card out of our deck now.
He began to curse himself that he’d let the howitzers leave.
But there was a flash from the top of the cliff. The turret of the tank was flipped off its chassis like a cap being popped off its bottle.
Then he heard the dull, time-delayed poom of the exploding tank.
Was that Captain Pop’s boys did that? Or did Third Battalion finally get their shit together? That tank didn’t blow itself up, that’s for damn sure.
When Patchett got to the shattered building, Lee Grossman and a few of his men were already there. They were pulling Billingsley’s lifeless body from the rubble.
Grossman asked, “What the hell was he in the building for, Top? It’s the only good target out here…and he walks right into it?”
Patchett replied with a nonchalant shrug. But a nagging voice in his head kept repeating, Let him find out the hard way, like an accusing finger pointing right at him.
Praying to silence that voice, he finally said, “I reckon he did find out the hard way.”
Grossman replied, “What the hell are you talking about, Top?”
“Oh, nothing in particular, sir. Maybe he was just looking for some Jap maps. Gotta be better than the crap we got.”
“But we already looked. There wasn’t shit in there.”
“I know, sir. Dammit, I know.”
Major Homer Rowe fancied himself a paperwork kind of officer: a behind-the-scenes administrator more comfortable at a desk than bearing the burden of command. One of the original National Guard officers in this division, he was forty-one years old, chubby—although the New Guinea GI diet had shed some twenty pounds from his short, stocky frame. Rowe cursed that weight loss because as the pounds dropped, so did his blood pressure readings.
They’d been high, the medics told him—high enough to be sent home if the condition persisted. But twenty pounds lighter, his BP dropped to “borderline,” and Homer Rowe would have to continue slogging through the swamps and jungles with the rest of the division, on their way to MacArthur’s dreamed-of return to the Philippines. Try as he might, there just wasn’t enough food to eat in this tropical sweatbox to maintain weight, let alone gain it back.
He’d done a competent job as battalion XO under the now-deceased Kit Billingsley, just as he had for the previous commander, Jock Miles. Now, as he stood in front of Colonel Molloy, the regimental commander, he sensed his position in this man’s army was headed for a drastic change.
“Colonel Billingsley’s been killed in action,” Molloy said. “I need you to step in and take the battalion, Homer.”
Rowe swallowed hard and asked, “Will this be a temporary assignment, sir? Until you can get somebody more—”
Molloy cut him off. “Why, Homer? Do you have somewhere else you need to be?”
“No, sir. I just thought—”
“For cryin’ out loud, Homer, everything around here is temporary. Hell, life is temporary. I realize you’ve never had a combat command. In fact, you haven’t had a command at all since running a National Guard company stateside before the war, have you?”
“That’s correct, sir.”
“At the moment, though, you’re senior. I need you to step up and do the job.”
“But what about Lee Grossman, sir? He’s eminently promotable to major…and he’s got plenty of combat command time.”
“Major Rowe, listen to me, and listen good. As far as I’m concerned, First Battalion has some of the finest company commanders and NCOs I’ve ever had the honor to command. I don’t want to alter their chemistry right now. All they need is someone to set priorities for them and show them some leadership. And that’s going to be you.”
Rowe still seemed as if he was searching for something to say that might change the colonel’s mind.
Moving to close the deal, Molloy added, “Besides, you’ve got the finest battalion top sergeant in the entire theater in Melvin Patchett. You know him well. He’ll be of great help to you.”
Homer Rowe did know Patchett well—and he was scared shitless of him:
That cutthroat could kill me and not give it a second thought if I gave him half a reason.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Jock had ripped through the dispatches from Hollandia for the past three days, searching for an answer from Jillian. He couldn’t be sure if she’d even seen his message, the one asking her—no, begging, really—to get that lady mapmaker from Biak on his team.
Maybe she has seen it and already tried to reply…but it’s tied up in the same “low-priority” bullshit I had to bluff my way through.
Either way, he still needed the mapmaker’s help—there was a big snag in creating the maps the GIs on Biak needed so badly. The photo recon squadron flying out of Wakde Island was doing a great job providing aerial photographs of the island. Those images would be the blueprints for the maps those GIs needed as they advanced through rainforests so dense they might not be able to see twenty yards in front of them. But aerial photographs, shot from an aircraft looking straight down, made the world look flat. Sometimes there were telltale signs that indicated the terrain was rising or falling—the meanderings of steams, rivers, and roads; shadows falling across lower ground—but you were still left with a picture of a world without accurate vertical relief features. Oblique aerial photography—side or angular views of the earth below—could be of some help, but the information they provided could only yield estimates of terrain height, not the exacting figures needed for efficient land navigation, precise artillery fire, and coordinating air support.
To get those exacting figures, you needed surveyed information from the perspective of the ground, and that’s what Jock and his team of mapping specialists were not getting. A sergeant who’d been trying all morning to correlate aerial photos with survey data finally threw down his plotter in disgust.
“I don’t know what planet this survey team thinks they’re mapping, sir,” the intel sergeant told Jock, “but they’re a day late and a dollar short—again. Somebody needs to straighten their asses out.”
“Give me the down and dirty, Sarge.”
“It looks to me like they’re shooting their plots too close to the instrument, sir…like the guys with the barber poles are afraid to walk out too far away and run into some bad guys. Their data’s all over the place. Look here…if you believe the numbers, this tableland’s got almost a quarter-mile overhang at its edge. You know that’s gotta be bullshit. The best I’m getting is goose eggs on the chart, and I should be getting pinpoints. It’s all fucking worthless.”
“I’ve seen this before,” Jock said. “The survey teams get real fond of plotting where you’ve already been and not where you need to go.”
“So what’re you going to do about it, sir?”
Jock had been considering the answer to that question ever since this problem first reared its ugly head. He kept thinking of the promise he’d made to Jillian at Hollandia as the noise and propwash of the plane taking him back to Wakde swirled impatiently around them. He remembered how she’d responded, too:
Don’t make promises you can’t keep.
Still, he wished with all his heart he could keep that promise.
But there was another promise he wanted to keep, too: the pledge he’d made to Duty, Honor, Country when those gold bars were pinned on his shoulders nine years ago at West Point. Even though the obscenities of war and politics had been doing their best to pervert its meaning, the visceral knot tying him to that pledge hadn’t been broken. He felt sure that for a man to do less than he could would only dishonor the dead, the maimed, and those survivors with minds and souls irreparably shattered. Worse, it would give new life to the maniacal dreams of demagogues.
To break that pledge now would be like deciding not to breathe.
The sergeant was still waiting for his answer.
“I guess someone’s got to go and give those boys some direction,” Jock said.
The sergeant replied, “You, sir? You sure you’re up to going back there? I mean, your leg and all…”
Jock smiled and said, “Don’t worry about me, Sergeant. How hard can it be to ride around in a survey team’s vehicle for a couple of days, anyway?”
Jillian had received Jock’s message the night it was sent. But she hadn’t replied for one simple reason:
I don’t have a bloody answer for him yet.
For those three days since receiving that message, she’d been trying to track down Greta Christiansen. It hadn’t been easy: without advising Allied Headquarters, the Red Cross had decided to move the Dutch refugees at Aitape someplace else. Jillian had only sorted out this morning where they were going:
Port Moresby. Nearly six hundred miles as the crow flies across the mountains of New Guinea. The Red Cross was looking to consolidate their efforts to care for their growing collection of refugees in a more civilized locale.
Not bloody surprised, Jillian told herself, after the disgusting spectacle the Yanks put on at Aitape. But they could have at least given me a timely “heads up” about what they were doing. Mocking herself, she added, After all, I am the Assistant Australian Adviser for Civilian and Refugee Affairs.
The refugees wouldn’t be flying to Port Moresby, though. They were going by boat, all the way around the eastern tip of New Guinea. It would take almost five days on the slow coastal traders available.
They’ve already been at sea for three. If I can hop a flight to Port Moresby first thing tomorrow, I can get there ahead of her. I just need to tell that wanker I work for where I’ll be.
Standing outside his office door, she thought there was a party going on inside. Her boss, the fat captain—the wanker himself—was loudly proclaiming the brilliance of MacArthur to half a dozen of his bootlicking underlings.
With great exuberance, the captain was telling his audience, “He’s done it again. The Biak invasion has not only put us within easy reach of the Philippines, but it’s stolen the limelight from that little puddle jump they call The Invasion of France. Not to mention the Navy’s tiresome and wasteful island-hopping campaign in the Central Pacific, too. Only a man with the stature of our Supreme Commander can achieve something so masterful. Eisenhower and Nimitz are mere schoolboys—babes in the woods, I tell you—compared to the genius that is Douglas MacArthur.”
Jillian was surprised the captain’s enthralled listeners didn’t burst into applause. But it was time to interrupt their naïve, rear-echelon idolatry. She stuck her head in the door and said, “Begging your pardon, Captain, but may I have a word?”
Clearly annoyed by her intrusion, the captain replied, “Go ahead, Missus Miles. What word would you like to have?”
“In private, if you please.”
He huffed and fumed for a few moments before sending the others out of the office. “Now what’s so all-fired important, Missus Miles?”
She told him.
“Absolutely not,” he replied. “I need you here in this office, not traipsing all over New Guinea. Wasn’t that little trip to Aitape enough for you?”
She decided not to bother with a rebuttal. It would be lost on this blockhead, anyway.
“Actually, Captain, I’m just paying you the courtesy of telling you I’m going.”
“I beg to differ, Missus Miles. I’m ordering you—”
She cut him off with a laugh. “I don’t wear your uniform. You can’t order me to do anything.”
“Perhaps not, Missus Miles, but I can fire you.”
“You can try, I suppose…but if I convince this woman to help you Yanks, everyone from your bloody MacArthur on down will be thanking me, not sacking me. And unfortunately, I’m the only one who has a chance to convince her. She holds you Americans on a par with the Japanese. And she has good reason.”
Operation Fishwrapper (Jock Miles WW2 Adventure Series Book 5) Page 17