“And when they come here? They’ll know Americans are here.”
“We’ll deal with that when it happens,” McCoy said. “And pray it doesn’t happen in the next two weeks. What we have to do now is buy time. You got all that straight, now?”
“I got it,” Zimmerman said.
“What I was hoping to get, Mr. Zimmerman, was the expected response of a Marine who has been given an order.”
Zimmerman met his eyes.
“Aye, aye, sir,” he said.
“Thank you, Mr. Zimmerman.”
“Jesus, Killer, all I was doing was asking.”
“I’ll leave you lovebirds now,” Lieutenant Taylor said. “With a little luck, I’ll be back in forty-eight hours.”
“With fresh eggs, chickens, and bread, right?” Zimmerman asked.
“With fresh eggs, chickens, and bread,” Taylor said.
He saluted, which surprised McCoy, and walked down onto the wharf, gestured to the crew of the Wind of Good Fortune to let loose her lines, and climbed aboard. The ebbing tide immediately started to pull her away from the wharf and toward the Flying Fish Channel, even before Taylor made it to the stern and started her engine.
“Can I say something?” Zimmerman said.
“Why not?”
“Remember Guadalcanal? The Navy dumped the First Division on the beach, and then they took off with the heavy artillery and the rations, leaving the Division on the beach?”
“I remember hearing something about that,” McCoy said.
“I used to wonder how those guys felt about getting dumped on some island and watching the Navy sail away. Now I know.”
[SIX]
U.S. NAVY BASE SASEBO SASEBO, KYUSHU, JAPAN 1500 5 SEPTEMBER 1950
LST stands for Landing Ship, Tank, which means the vessel was designed to deposit tracked armored fighting vehicles directly onto beaches. When approaching a beach, the less draft—the portion of the vessel extending underwater—the better. So the design for the LST had provided for a flat bottom. It was known by the Naval architects, of course, that a flat-bottomed oceangoing vessel was, in any but the calmest of waters, going to toss and turn and twist and otherwise move in such a manner that passengers aboard were liable to be very uncomfortable and possibly, even probably, suffer mal de mer, but passenger comfort was not a design criterion, and getting tanks as close to the beach as possible was.
The first Marine of B Company, 5th Marines, to suffer mal de mer became nauseous ten minutes after LST-450 left Pusan for Sasebo. By the time LST-450 tied up at Sasebo, all but three members of B Company had suffered mal de mer to one degree or another, including Captain Howard Dunwood, USMCR, the company commander.
He found this both depressing and professionally humiliating. A commanding officer tossing his cookies countless times hardly stands as an example for his men to follow.
The commanding officer of LST-450, Lieutenant John X. McNear—a thirty-year-old naval reservist who six weeks before had been the golf professional at Happy Hollow Country Club, Phoenix, Arizona—extended to Captain Dunwood the privilege of his bridge, and between bouts of nausea, Captain Dunwood learned from Lieutenant McNEAR that while this—the weather, the seas—was pretty bad, it was nothing like the weather he had experienced sailing the sonofabitch from San Diego, California, to Pusan.
He also informed Captain Dunwood that their destination was the U.S. Navy Base, Sasebo, Japan.
This caused Captain Dunwood to think that at Sasebo, his company would be brought back up to strength—Baker was down to 101 men and three officers, including Captain Dunwood—and that they would probably be participating in the supposedly secret invasion of some port—Inchon, he had heard—up the Korean peninsula.
He was very curious, however, about why—literally on the pier at Pusan, about to board one of the attack transports—Baker Company had been separated from the battalion and ordered aboard the LST.
It was only scuttlebutt, of course, but the word on the pier had been that the attack transports were headed for Yokohama, near Tokyo. If that was so, why was Baker Company going to Sasebo?
Captain Dunwood had unpleasant memories of Sasebo. It was at Sasebo that that candy-ass “Marine” captain who had done the job on his finger had debarked from the aircraft in his splendidly tailored uniform.
Lieutenant McNear couldn’t even hazard a guess about why Baker Company was going by itself on LST-450— which could have easily transported, for the relatively short voyage, four times that many men—or what would happen to them in Sasebo. His own orders were to remain in Sasebo until further orders; he had expected to be ordered right back to Pusan.
On docking at Sasebo, Baker Company was marched into an aircraft hangar that had been hastily converted to a temporary barracks by the installation of long rows of folding canvas cots, a row of toilets, and a row of showerheads.
The enlisted Marines were stripped, showered, and then given a rudimentary physical examination—which included a “short-arm inspection” to detect gonorrhea, which showed, in Captain Dunwood’s judgment, that the Navy had no fucking idea what was going on in Korea—and then were issued three sets of underwear and stockings and two sets of new utilities. Privates through corporal were then given a partial pay of twenty dollars, sergeants and up of thirty, and officers of fifty.
Baker Company was then informed that, due to the special circumstances, the Officer Commanding Sasebo Naval Base had waived the standing uniform regulations, and they would be permitted to have liberty in Sasebo from 1700 until 2330.
A Navy chaplain and a Navy surgeon then spoke almost emotionally about the dangers to body and soul the Marines would encounter in Sasebo, unless they remembered their mothers and other female loved ones who were waiting for them at home and trusted them to behave like the Christian—or Jewish, as the case might be—gentlemen they were supposed to be.
This was followed by a twenty-minute color motion picture of individuals in the terminal stages of syphilis, and of other individuals whose genitalia were covered with suppurating scabs. Captain Dunwood had seen the film before, at Camp Drake, when he had first arrived in Japan, and at Camp Pendleton, California, when he reported on active duty.
Then a bus appeared to take whichever of the Marines desired to avail themselves of a little local culture to town.
Captain Dunwood then debated whether it would be wiser to take dinner in the mess, which had a section for officers, but no intoxicants, or in the Officers’ Club, which did. If he went to the O Club, and had a couple of drinks, and that candy-ass sonofabitch who’d done the job on his finger was there, he was likely to get himself in trouble.
A couple of drinks and the sudden insight—If I do knock out some of the bastard’s teeth, which he deserves, the fucking finger’s still not right, what are they going to do to me, send me to Korea?—saw Captain Dunwood take both his dinner and breakfast the next morning in the Officers’ Club.
He did not see the candy-ass sonofabitch during either meal, and couldn’t decide whether that was a good thing or not.
At 0800 their first morning ashore at Sasebo, two Marine officers, a major and a lieutenant, and a technical sergeant, came into the “temporary barracks,” ordered guards posted at all doors, set up a blackboard and a tripod, and announced they were from the G-3 section of what was now the First Marine Division, and that they were here to brief Baker Company on its very special role in the first amphibious invasion by the United States Marine Corps since World War II.
Using maps—and the surprisingly skillful technical sergeant, who drew on the blackboard whatever needed to be illustrated—it was explained to the men and officers of Baker Company that to reach the landing beaches at Inchon, the invasion fleet would have to traverse the Flying Fish Channel, and that in the Flying Fish Channel were two islands, Taemuui-do and Yonghung-do.
These islands, the major went on in a manner that reminded Captain Dunwood of the district sales manager of the Chrysler Corporation urging the sale
smen to greater heights, were so located that any artillery on them could be brought to bear on ships of the invasion fleet moving down the Flying Fish Channel.
This situation, of course, could not be permitted. Commencing at 0400 14 September, both islands (and other islands in the immediate vicinity) would be brought under an intense naval artillery barrage by various vessels of the invasion fleet, probably including the battleship USS Missouri, which had been hastily demothballed and rushed to Japan from the West Coast.
Whether or not the Missouri actually turned its fifteen-inch naval cannon on the islands, the briefing officer had said, there was enough firepower on the other men-of-war, cruisers, and destroyers to wipe the islands clean. Company B should encounter virtually no resistance when they went ashore on Taemuui-do and Yonghung-do.
That was so much bullshit, Captain Dunwood believed. He had gone ashore at Tarawa and Iwo Jima, and on each occasion had been assured that following the massive pre-invasion barrages of naval artillery to be laid on those islands, resistance would be minimal.
He of course kept his personal—or was it, he wondered, professional?—opinion to himself, and went so far as to correct another Marine, who had also been on Okinawa, who said, “Bullshit, I’ve heard that before” aloud when told of the awesome resistance-destroying naval artillery barrage to be laid down.
The next five days, said the major from First Marine Division G-3, would be devoted to training Baker Company for, and equipping it for, the seizure of the islands of Taemuui-do and Yonghung-do in the Flying Fish Channel.
Then they would reboard LST-450 and sail for the channel itself.
The training was good—Captain Dunwood had to admit that—and it was necessary. It had been a long time since anybody moved from an LST into a Higgins boat, and some of his men had never done so.
Captain Dunwood took dinner every night in the O Club, but he never saw the candy-ass sonofabitch who’d done the job on his finger so long as he was at Sasebo. But he often thought about him, and hoped he would.
XXII
[ONE]
TOKCHOK-KUNDO ISLAND 1530 13 SEPTEMBER 1950
The last message from General Pickering to McCoy—with the date and time stamp 1200 12 Sep—had included the cryptic line “will be out of town for the next few days,” which McCoy correctly interpreted to mean that he was leaving Tokyo to board the command ship USS Mount McKinley.
That suggested the invasion was still on, that there had been no delays. Taylor had told him that because of the tides, the only time and date the invasion could take place was in the early-morning hours of 15 September.
With that criterion, if there had been serious problems in mounting the invasion, the options available had not included a delay while the problem was being solved. Rather, the options had been to solve the problem, live with it, or call the invasion off. The invasion, McCoy was sure, was on.
And, in the absence of word to the contrary, that meant the D Minus 1 assault on Taemuui-do, Yonghung-do, and Tokchok-kundo itself was on.
Over the past week, as Major Kim had infiltrated national police onto Taemuui-do and Yonghung-do, he had exfiltrated the militia. That hadn’t been nearly as difficult as McCoy thought it would be. The militia had been local fishermen before being issued Arisaka rifles and bandoliers of ammunition and told what was expected of them.
With the arrival of the national police, they had become local fishermen again, turned the weapons over to the national police, and left. For example, the small local fishing boats that touched ashore during the day at Nae-ri with two fishermen aboard left with three. Or four.
McCoy had been personally uncomfortable with militia, since he thought of them as—knew they were—civilians, and his entire life in the Corps had taught him to keep civilians out of the line of fire.
Now he was personally uncomfortable with the notion of just over 120 national policemen on the three islands they held. Intellectually, he understood they were more like gendarmerie, a paramilitary force, organized and trained more like soldiers than policemen, but emotionally, Captain K. R. McCoy, USMCR, thought of them as “Kim’s Cops.”
And if the artillery started landing, as it inevitably would unless Pickering could get MacArthur to call it off, Kim’s Cops were going to get blown off Taemuui-do and Yonghung-do. Major Kim’s assurances to McCoy that he had instructed his men precisely what to do if they came under naval gunfire, and that he was sure they would be all right, did absolutely nothing to reassure McCoy.
Privately, he agreed with what Zimmerman had to say after Kim had given his “I have given the men precise instructions” speech and then gone off somewhere.
“Step Three,” Zimmerman had said, “bend over, with your hands over your ears and your ears between your knees. Step Four, kiss your ass goodbye.”
“Come on, Ernie,” McCoy had said. “Kim’s a good officer. He’s done a good job.”
“Yeah,” Zimmerman admitted. It was true.
By the time the North Koreans had made their first investigation of the village of Nae-ri, for example, Kim had managed to infiltrate enough national policemen and exfiltrate enough of the militia so that seventy percent of the “fishermen” the North Koreans had seen as they nosed their thirty-five -foot power launch into the harbor were in fact national policemen—
—who knew how to use their Japanese Arisaka rifles, and killed or wounded three of the twenty North Korean soldiers on the launch before it could be turned around and gotten out of the line of fire.
The launch didn’t come back for two days, and when it put troops ashore, it found Nae-ri deserted.
The launch left a six-man squad under a corporal at Nae-ri, and then went to the village of Oe-ri, at the southern end of the island, where they landed unopposed. They left another six-man squad at Oe-ri, and sailed off confident of having restored Socialist Rule.
Kim’s Cops had had the North Korean troops at Nae-ri disarmed and trussed and bound for shipment out aboard the next small fishing boats before the power launch had reached Oe-ri, and the NKs left at Oe-ri disarmed and trussed and bound fifteen minutes after the power launch left the harbor.
It took the North Koreans three days to discover that all was not right in Nae-ri, and when they sailed back into that port, they were brought under a hail of fire that killed three more of their troops before the lieutenant in charge withdrew to reassess the situation.
With slight variations, the same scenes had played at Taemuui-do and Taebu-do. Both islands provided sufficient resistance for the North Koreans to have to really consider whether massing enough troops to overcome it would be worthwhile, or—since all it seemed to be was a group of misguided capitalist lackeys—whether it would be best to wait and see what happened.
It had been what McCoy had told Major Kim he wanted to happen, and it had happened, almost entirely because of Kim’s control of his men.
And now, unless the D Minus 1 assault on the channel islands was called off, the national police were going to get blown away by a phrase Zimmerman confessed he never understood: “friendly fire.”
The other thing that was worrying McCoy was that there had been no North Korean investigation at all of Tokchok-kundo. Not one boat, of any size, had nosed into their harbor, much less one of the thirty-five-foot power launches.
There were, McCoy decided, several possible reasons for that. One was that Tokchok-kundo was the farthest island from the NK positions on the mainland, except for the lighthouse island, and that was really not an island but a large rock jutting out of the water.
It was also possible that Tokchok-kundo was on a list, to be investigated, and if necessary—from their point of view— neutralized and pacified after Taemuui-do, Yonghung-do, and Taebu-do.
And it was also possible that one, or two, or a half-dozen of the friendly local fishermen who had been selling Kim information—or giving it to him—had also sold—or given—to the NKs the information that not only were there a bunch of Americans on Tokchok-ku
ndo, but that they had a boat, and were, among other things, using the island as a temporary holding pen for North Korean prisoners.
McCoy made a joke of it, always smiling when he said, with great pomposity, “I devoutly believe that bad things inevitably happen, and when they happen, happen at the worst possible time, and therefore, we have to do thus and so.”
But the truth was, he devoutly believed just that.
The bad that was inevitably going to happen was a North Korean investigation of the island of Tokchok-kundo, and the worst possible time for that to happen was right now.
So far, they had been lucky. Luck runs out.
The D Minus 1 assault of the islands was apparently on for first thing in the morning. If it wasn’t on, there would have been word from General Pickering. The USS Mount McKinley had as good a commo center aboard as—probably better than—the one in the Dai Ichi Building. If he had something to say to them, George Hart would have heard it.
In this case, no news was bad news.
There was only one slim chance to avoid the gunfire: When the warships steamed up to the Flying Fish Channel in the early hours of tomorrow morning, the lighthouse had to be showing light.
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