Pacific Sniper

Deke worked the bolt and looked in the direction of the attack. He could see more screaming Japanese running behind the tanks, coming for them with their bayonets and their frenzied hatred of the Americans.

“Sir!” The soldier pointed, and they all looked behind them, in the direction of the beach.

Deke and the rest turned, half expecting to see more Japanese attacking from what was supposed to be their own beachhead. Instead, what he saw gave him a sense of relief.

A line of Sherman tanks was approaching.

“I guess they didn’t unload all those tanks for nothing,” Lieutenant Steele said with satisfaction. However, they soon saw that they were about to find themselves in the middle of a tank fight. “Everybody down!”

The GIs didn’t need to be told twice to hit the deck. They stayed there until the Shermans had advanced past them.

Krang! The lead tank fired its gun. More tanks fired. The tank guns were high-pitched and oddly muted, sounding like a hammer blow against a big iron pipe. Krang! Krang!

For the tanks, it was almost point-blank range. The Shermans moved much faster than the Japanese tanks and quickly closed the distance between them.

A round hit one of the Japanese tanks, and fire poured from every crack and seam in the armored beast.

Nearby, Philly whooped at the sight. “Give ’em hell, boys!”

Krang! Krang! More rounds struck the Japanese tanks. One or two rounds hit at an angle and glanced away into the jungle, but the direct hits were devastating. Deke watched another Japanese tank burst into flame, halted in its tracks. He found it more than a little amazing to be witnessing a tank battle on a tropical island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. War was a strange thing to wrap your head around, all right.

One of the Shermans rolled to a halt nearby. The hatch opened and a head popped out to reveal a grinning tank commander.

“I heard you boys needed some help,” he said.

“Yeah, we were about five minutes away from making a swim for it back to the ships,” Lieutenant Steele admitted.

“We didn’t come all this way for nothing,” the tank commander said. “Fall in behind me, will ya? Make sure these sneaky yellow bastards don’t come at me with any grenades.”

“You got it.”

The Jap tanks were not helpless victims. They fired back with telling accuracy, but for the most part their rounds exploded uselessly against the more heavily armored Sherman tanks. The Japs did get in a lucky shot now and then that knocked off a tank track and disabled it. Just as the tank commander had feared, a few brave Japanese soldiers hid in the long grass and then launched attacks at the tanks, trying to wedge grenades into the tank tracks or crawl beneath them with satchel charges. Deke and the rest of the squad shot them down before they could do any harm.

The Japanese were outmatched and outgunned. One by one, their tanks were destroyed. Then the tanks pressed on, going to work against the second wave of banzai attackers. The heavy machine guns cut the enemy to pieces.

More troops came from the beach, rushing to reinforce the line. These weren’t regular combat troops, but clerks, maintenance crews, even cooks. But they all had rifles, and they were full of fight. In a frenzy, they fell upon the groups of Japanese who were now finding themselves isolated behind the Sherman tanks that had pushed the line of battle back.

As Deke watched, a big man with his sleeves rolled up and black grease on his hands—clearly one of the tank mechanics from the beach—swatted aside a bayonet heading for his belly and punched his attacker so hard that the Jap was lifted clean off the ground.

He grinned. Now it was the Japanese who were on the run.

Deke lifted his rifle and started picking off the retreating soldiers. At this point, he didn’t care about shooting a man in the back. It just meant one less enemy soldier to fight later.

The desperate Japanese attack had faltered, but their destruction was not complete. Overhead came the scream of incoming shells. The fleet offshore had finally gotten into the act.

“Incoming!” Lieutenant Steele shouted. “Everybody down!”

The shells from the navy guns instantly turned the jungle boundary—the jangle—into a hell of smoke and flame. Chunks of trees, rocks, and the remaining tanks were blown sky-high. Whatever Japanese had retreated into the jungle were now in a world of hurt.

Once the barrage had ended, the mopping-up action began. There were wounded everywhere, both Americans and Japanese. The courageous medics did what they could for the Japanese, but it soon became clear that most were eager to take their own lives rather than surrender. Some shot or even stabbed themselves, but by far, the favorite means of ending their misery seemed to be the grenade. Across the battlefield, there were small explosions as grenades went off—ending the lives of the wounded Japanese and taking any nearby Americans with them.