“Keep it down, dammit,” Wharton replied, his voice apprehensive and whiny. “They could still be real close.”
“Nah,” McMillen said. “If they were, we would have been hit with knee mortars already. The rest of them are still way down the mountain.”
His men would have felt much better if their lieutenant had something to say right now—in something resembling a command voice—but there was nothing except silence from Bob Wharton.
McMillen’s voice rang out once more: “So what do we do now, Lieutenant, now that they know we’re not Japs up here?”
Wharton wished he had an answer, but his mind was still occupied, churning out reasons why he hadn’t screwed up. He didn’t even notice Captain Miles looming above him, kneeling on the timbers giving overhead cover to his fighting hole.
“Something wrong with your radio?” Jock asked, pointing to the walkie-talkie lying in the mud at the bottom of the hole. “We’ve been calling you.”
“It was real dicey down here, sir…real bad. Looked like a whole platoon coming at us. But we beat them off.”
“Really? It didn’t sound like that much of a fight from where I stood, Lieutenant. Any casualties?”
“Just Japs, sir. I had my men dug in real good.”
“Well, keep them that way, Lieutenant. In fact, be ready to crawl inside your helmets, too. We’re going to get hit with artillery and mortars real soon.”
“Yes, sir,” Wharton replied, making a comical attempt to stiffen his body to attention even though flat on his back.
As he began his running crouch back to the OP, Jock spit out one more instruction: “Stay on that fucking radio, Wharton.”
The Japanese artillery crews positioned near the base of Astrolabe heard the shooting, too, so they weren’t surprised when the fire mission came, targeting a spot on the mountain’s peak a mere 1500 yards away as the shell flies. It would be a textbook-simple exercise but for one thing: they weren’t ready to shoot. Too close to the mountain, they couldn’t crank their tubes quite high enough to engage the lofty peak. Ever since moving into this position—the only one in the area flat enough and sparsely treed enough to give them a clear shot at the mountain—their lieutenant had them constructing firing pedestals for their 75-millimeter guns to gain more elevation for direct fire. Logs were felled to go under the wheels and deep pits were dug for the trails. The work was exhausting for the cannoneers. They’d been at it for over two hours and only one of the four pieces was finally ready to fire.
That one piece would have to do; their infantrymen up the mountain had been screaming for fire for far too long. A shell was rammed into its breech. But the gunner was confused. “What exactly is the target, Lieutenant?” he asked.
“The highest point of the peak, you idiot,” the lieutenant replied, pointing impatiently up the slope before them. “Stop wasting time and shoot.”
That instruction didn’t help the gunner at all: the highest point…it looks like one continuous ridge to me, one point no higher than any other.
The lieutenant slapped the gunner’s face and, spraying spittle on his victim’s stinging cheek, said, “FIRE, YOU IMBECILE!”
The firing lanyard was given a quick jerk. The round was on its way.
Chapter Fourteen
Day 4
At the OP, they never heard the Japanese gun fire; the projectile outraced the sound of its launch to Astrolabe’s peak. The first thing the people of Task Force Blind Eye heard was the shattering THOOMP of the round’s arrival, its echoes wrapped in a chorus of cracks and thuds as a few shattered trees tumbled to the ground. When those sounds died away, the brief, anxious silence was filled with the BOOM of another explosion. Tongues of flame and thick black smoke began to rise above the trees well outside the perimeter.
It was Theo Papadakis, with his platoon on the mountain’s backslope, who provided the eyewitness account. “It hit wide of the perimeter,” he reported from his walkie-talkie. “It was low-angle...had to be artillery. But some fragments must’ve set off that downed Zero’s gas tank because it’s burning like a son of a bitch. My men are okay, but we’re probably gonna be sitting in a forest fire real soon. A bunch of trees are burning already. I’m gonna pull my men back just a little.”
Melvin Patchett peeked over the edge of the hole where he sought cover and watched as flames spread through the treetops. The blaze was still a few hundreds yards away—but he’d watched wildfires spread before. Recently, at that. “Don’t tell me we’re gonna get burned to a crisp here, too,” he mumbled to himself, “just like fucking Cape York.”
At the Japanese artillery battery, they didn’t need the dust to settle to know the gun wouldn’t be firing again anytime soon. They had dug in its trails deep but not well. When it fired, the entire weapon reared up and slipped backwards, the wheels rising off their log platform and then slamming back down. The left wheel shattered the logs beneath it, and the gun was now dangling to one side from what was left of the pedestal. Its trail spades were mangled and useless, rammed deep into the ground and then violently twisted by the gun’s chaotic, asymmetric recoil.
Worse, the gunner and one of his cannoneers were pinned beneath the piece, badly injured.
The artillery lieutenant informed the infantry captain his guns must relocate. They could not accomplish the mission from this location. He’d have to find a better one, and that would take some time—not before daylight tomorrow, at the very least. The infantry would have to rely solely on the fire support of their mortars for the time being.
Trevor Shaw ducked instinctively—as did all the others around him—as shell fragments thumped for the second time into the log revetment shielding his radio set. He offered a silent wish: Drop them around me all you like, lads…just no direct hits, please. The bombardment had been going on for almost an hour at the leisurely pace of one or two rounds a minute. It covered a wide sheaf; most impacts were well outside the perimeter. A few, though, like this last one, were painfully close.
“These ain’t no li’l ol’ knee mortars,” Melvin Patchett said to Jock, examining a shell fragment that was finally cool enough to pick up. “Looks to be eighty-one millimeter, I reckon. Standard Jap infantry mortar.”
“What on earth is a knee mortar?” Shaw asked.
“It’s a small-caliber mortar, Commander…about fifty millimeter…more like a grenade launcher,” Patchett replied. “Jap infantry companies are lousy with them. Don’t know why we call it a knee mortar, though…you’d bust a leg if you tried to fire it that way.”
Eyeing the wildfire the downed Zero’s fuel had set off, Patchett looked at Jock and added, “We gonna risk a move while we’re getting shot at, sir…or wait until those flames start cooking us?”
Jock had been asking himself that same question ever since the crashed plane started to burn. He had come to a decision, though. “Let’s get our lieutenants up here for a little chat,” he said. “We need to make sure everyone’s on the same track.”
Papadakis, whose men were closest to the blaze, appeared unfazed by his current predicament. Wharton, on the other hand, seemed to have dancing feet: “We’ve gotta move right away, Captain. Maybe we’d better get off this mountain altogether.”
“Whoa…go easy, Lieutenant,” Jock replied, surprised by Wharton’s barely subdued panic. “This ain’t exactly the Siege of Vicksburg we’ve got going on here. Our mission is to be on this mountain. We can take a little mortar fire if we have to. We’re dug in about as good as we can be.”
Protesting, Wharton said, “But they’ve got us zeroed in, sir. They can drop this shit on us all night.”
“Bullshit,” Jock replied. “Judging by how these rounds are falling all over the place, they don’t have anything zeroed in. They’re just fishing…and I’m betting they’re as short on mortar rounds as we are. Besides, as long as these rounds are piddling in, they won’t be attacking us on the ground.”
“But what if they do come, sir…in force, this time?”
/> “Then more of them are going to die, Lieutenant. We’re well dug in on a mountaintop. Can you think of a harder position to attack, even with superior numbers?”
“We’re not on a peak, sir. We’re on top of a ridge. They can flank us, and if they do, we’re finished.”
Theo Papadakis burst out laughing. “The only way to flank us is to come down that narrow little trail along the peak. We’ve got that route covered pretty good…just ask that bunch of Japs we ambushed out there. Oh, wait…you can’t. They’re all dead.”
Patchett found himself chuckling: I’m starting to like this greaseball looey a whole bunch.
The logic sputtered out of Wharton’s argument like air from a balloon. “But what about the forest fire, sir?” he asked.
“Have you looked at the sky lately, Lieutenant?” Jock said. “The wind’s shifted away from us…and I’m betting it’s going to rain pretty darn soon.”
The rain shower struck at twilight, turning the mountain’s slopes into a cascade of water and mud. Those who had dug and covered their fighting holes as First Sergeant Patchett instructed stayed relatively dry. Those who didn’t were soon up to their waists in mucky water.
The few mortar rounds that fell after the start of the downpour did little more than heave geysers of soggy soil high into the air. Soon the only thing falling on the OP was rain. It felt like refreshing rods of cool water, dispensed from some heavenly showerhead, powerful enough to extinguish the wildfire.
The men of the second Japanese probing attack made it to the top of the ridge just as the deluge began. Far down the peak’s trail and well wide of Task Force Blind Eye’s perimeter, the platoon-sized force found they had to stay on the trail, in single file, as they advanced to attack the Americans or risk sliding back down the steep, slippery slope. In the fading light, Theo Papadakis’s men saw them when they were still 100 yards away, as they tried to sneak through the charred area that had been ablaze only a few minutes ago. Each GI shared the same thought: They don’t know we’re here. Let ’em get closer…
Burrowed under his raincoat, Papadakis whispered into his walkie-talkie, “Six, this is Two-Six. Permission to use mortars with H-E, over.”
Jock’s reply hissed from the earpiece: “How many coming? Over.”
“A shit-load, over”
“Permission granted. Six out.”
The Japanese were still 30 yards from the perimeter—and still oblivious to it—when the first plumff of American mortars announced their rounds were on the way. Papadakis’s men heard it, but the Japanese didn’t—the loud, steady hiss of the rain conspired with their greater distance from the mortar section to drown it out.
“NOW,” Papadakis commanded, and his men raked the lead elements of the Japanese column. The American machine guns interlocked their grazing fire at a point 100 yards down the trail, forming a narrow, deadly V that trapped half the Japanese platoon within its killing field. A dip in the trail placed those Japanese farther back in defilade; they dove to the ground, awaiting commands, frantically trying to make sense of the chaos they heard before them—until the mortar rounds began to land in their midst, precisely where Theo Papadakis had targeted. Their choice became very simple: flee or die.
Thirty seconds later, when Papadakis commanded his men to cease fire, half the Japanese platoon—nearly 20 men—lay dead or dying on the trail. Those who managed to escape the shooting gallery ran, stumbled, and fell headlong down the muddy slope in the gathering darkness.
In a few more minutes, the rain stopped and night fell.
Around midnight, an illumination round fired from a Japanese mortar popped its flare over the OP, causing the trees to cast their jittery shadows as it swung from its parachute. It landed atop the ridge while still alight, in the area already burned out by the wildfire. For a few seconds more, eerie fingers of brilliant white light blazed through the trees. No one on the OP moved a muscle. They remembered Top’s words: It’s the movement they see, not the thing doing the moving.
The flare extinguished—and then there was nothing but a darkness deeper than before.
“They’re just trying to rattle us,” Patchett said. “They ain’t coming again. Not before sunrise, anyway.”
Chapter Fifteen
Day 5
Nobody appreciated the quiet of this night more than Ginny Beech. There was no Japanese gunfire or mortar rounds: they were safe to come out of their holes in the ground. She could finally wash her body clean and change into dry clothes. It was a quick and easy affair; all it took was a helmet-full of rainwater—the helmet being Melvin Patchett’s, which he insisted she borrow—and a towel from her kit. The privacy necessary to disrobe was provided by the darkness. Feeling refreshed, she chomped happily on a D bar and began her 0400 shift monitoring the radio.
She had only been at the console a few minutes when a burst of traffic in her headphones startled her so thoroughly she nearly toppled from the stool. After two days of silence, the command channel was suddenly alive again. As she copied the Morse Code hammering in her ears, there was no mistaking its importance: This is it. Operation Long Jump is about to happen. She prodded the dozing runner awake and told him, “Get your captain…Now!”
In the glow of his red-lensed flashlight, Jock poured over the message forms Ginny continued to shovel at him. Everyone was awake now, even those not on watch. Excited GIs peered into the blackness where the Coral Sea would reveal herself in a few short hours. “I’m telling you…it’s gonna look like a fucking armada’s sitting out there once the sun comes up,” Sergeant Mike McMillen told his squad, his words expressing the excitement and relief that overrode the exhaustion they all shared. “All those big, gray ships, with their big, gray guns, giving us all that sweet fire support…” Nobody felt the need to say, Those bastards didn’t desert us after all. They were too busy envisioning their fellow GIs sweeping ashore, squeezing the Japanese out of Port Moresby and all the way back to Tokyo.
Across the perimeter, Bogater Boudreau took a more visceral view: “Maybe we can finally get some decent chow. But if I hear them mess sections got sunk coming over, y’all gonna have to restrain me from getting all violent.”
Theo Papadakis’s thoughts were more logistical: “At least we can finally resupply…and get Sergeant Brody some real medical help.” Immediately, he realized one of the men standing nearby must be the company medic; the silhouette of the bulky medical kit slung from his shoulder was unmistakable, even in the pre-dawn darkness. The Mad Greek scrambled to qualify his statement: “Not that you ain’t done a hell of a job for him, Doc.”
“No offense taken, Lieutenant,” the medic replied. “Let’s just hope there’s not going to be a lot more Sergeant Brodys real soon.”
Once he read each message form, Jock passed it to Melvin Patchett, who, in turn, passed it to Trevor Shaw. It took almost 15 minutes for all three of them to get through the reading.
Shaw flung the message stack down on the radio console like he was throwing them in the trashcan. They could tell he was fuming. When he finally spoke, it was with an annoyed tone the Americans had never heard from him before. “It appears your general still thinks we can see in the dark, and much of this information they’re asking for…the anchorage locations, the shore battery coordinates…I provided bloody weeks ago, long before you blokes even got here. Do they think fixed installations move around?”
“Don’t take it personal, sir,” Patchett said, playing the amused conciliator. “They’re just looking for confirmation. They like to do that. Makes them feel all up to date.”
Ginny Beech felt the need to play conciliator, too. “Steady on, Trevor,” she said, “it’s no problem to send the information again. It’s all in your book.”
Jock couldn’t make out the expression on Shaw’s face, but he wanted to believe it was one of embarrassment. The Aussie’s tall body seemed to slump for a moment before it returned to its normal, ramrod-straight posture.
“I suppose you’re right,” Shaw
said, as he scooped the messages up and began sorting them. “I just can’t shake the feeling that something so simple is turning into a bloody cock-up.”
Jock couldn’t make out the expression on Patchett’s face, either, but he was pretty sure it was the same as his in the wake of Shaw’s comment: one of astonishment. With an uneasy laugh, he said, “I’m sure glad you think this is simple, Commander. I just wish I shared your opinion.”
“Amen to that, sir,” Patchett added. “I’m just praying our own flyboys don’t bomb our asses like they did on Cape York.”
Shortly before the sun poked its head over the horizon, those on the OP could see the bright flash of ships’ guns firing somewhere offshore, followed some seconds later by their boom. The bombardment of Port Moresby’s defenses had begun.
“Listen to that!” Mike McMillen said. “They’re close…and there must be a thousand of ’em out there.”
As the grayness of pre-dawn turned to the pale orange of daylight, something became distressingly clear. “A thousand, my ass,” Lieutenant Wharton said. Then he mumbled, “We’re screwed.”
There were a dozen warships sitting five miles offshore, well beyond the coral reefs shielding the beaches. Eight of those warships were destroyers orbiting the four cruisers whose big guns were pounding Port Moresby. From the OP, the destroyers looked like wind-up bathtub toys, waiting for some bather’s hand to point them in the right direction or sink them with mischievous glee. Even when the destroyers’ circular paths took them closer to shore and they added their five-inch guns to the bombardment, they looked comically ineffectual.
A score of transport ships sat just off the reefs, disgorging the first wave of GIs onto landing craft for the three-mile dash to the beach. Melvin Patchett put down his binoculars but kept his steely gaze on the sea. “Correct me if I’m wrong, sir,” he said, “but wasn’t that transport convoy a whole lot bigger when we got put on them PT boats?”
Operation Long Jump (Jock Miles WW2 Adventure Series Book 2) Page 8