Pacific Sniper

The lieutenant sent a detail to Yigo with orders to bring back several drums of gasoline. Meanwhile, the rest of the platoon guarded the tunnel entrances to make certain that none of the Japanese escaped. All the while, the deep, manly singing continued. Deke thought it sounded spooky.

When the men returned with the fuel drums, they flooded the tunnels with gasoline. Still, no effort had been made to ask the Japanese if they wanted to surrender. Some of the men knew what was coming next, and they looked sickened by it.

“Fire in the hole!” Thibault shouted, hurling a satchel charge into a tunnel entrance. The other tunnel entrances were treated in similar fashion. “Everybody down!”

The explosion was enormous. Deke felt the ground heave under his feet, reminding him of the bucking deck of the landing craft that had carried him to Guam in the first place.

Gouts of flame erupted from the mouths of the tunnels as the gasoline caught fire.

Deke thought that there was no way anyone could have survived the blast. Yet no sooner had the dust and debris settled than they could hear the singing again. The sound was muted but sounded more determined than ever to Deke, or maybe that was just the vestiges of the blast ringing in his ears.

The lieutenant looked angry. “Roll some stones over here and block up these tunnels,” he said.

Considering that the explosions had caved in some of the entrances, the soldiers made short work of closing up the remaining tunnels. The Japanese were soon sealed underground, and the GIs trudged on toward Mount Santa Rosa.

It was clear that the attack on the stronghold would not be nearly so easy. The mountainside bristled with artillery positions. With nowhere else to go, the Japanese there clearly planned to fight, not hide. Uneasily, the soldiers glanced up at their destination, knowing that it was going to be a bloodbath.

But first they had to get there. A swath of jungle stood between the advancing troops and the mountainside. As they entered the heavy growth, it became clear that the Japanese planned to make them fight for every inch of progress. Every few minutes, they were greeted with grenade attacks, machine-gun fire, or snipers.

“I thought the Japs were beaten,” Philly complained, sprawled out beside Deke on the jungle floor.

“You saw that hillside up ahead,” Deke replied. “Do they look beaten to you?”

They both tried to ignore a large centipede, around the size of a man’s thumb, that scuttled past under their noses. Tracer fire zipped overhead. A centipede bite packed a wallop, but bugs were the least of their worries.

“Got a grenade?” Deke asked. “One, two, three—”

Both men hurled their grenades and ducked low as the resulting shrapnel shredded the foliage ahead. They heard a scream of pain—but they weren’t done yet. They poured several shots into the brush ahead. A few paces off to their left, Yoshio joined in from where he also lay sprawled in the underbrush.

That was the strategy that quickly evolved for the advancing troops. With the heavy jungle infested with handfuls of Japanese defenders, the Americans would advance, throw grenades, pepper the area ahead with gunfire, and then advance again.

Off to their right, another squad was equipped with a flamethrower painted with stripes of green-and-black camouflage. The flames sprayed the foliage and burned everything in its path to a crisp.

“Lucky bastards. We need one of those.”

“If you say so. It’s a hell of a thing.”

As they slowly advanced, they crisscrossed swaths where the flamethrower had taken its toll. The flamethrower was effective, but it was a brutal weapon. What it left behind was the stuff of nightmares that would haunt the men the rest of their lives.

Soldiers had to advance through a blackened landscape, past the still-smoking corpses of the enemy. The dead enemy soldiers were left curled in positions of pure agony, teeth bright white against shriveled and blackened lips. The flamethrowers also claimed more innocent victims, and they passed the burned corpses of forest creatures, birds, and even the humanlike remains of monkeys.

They were all too glad to get clear of the jungle, even if it meant that they were that much closer to the assault on the main Japanese defenses.

As it turned out, they received a reprieve.

“We’ll hold up here for the night,” Lieutenant Thibault announced, having received new orders by radio. “The navy is going to give us a little help.”

Aside from the dangers posed by submarines and a few stray enemy ships and planes, the US Navy was free to maneuver in the Philippine Sea. Coordinating with the land assault, ships moved into position and unleashed a bombardment against Mount Santa Rosa.

After a while, the navy guns fell silent, and they could hear the drone of bombers coming in. These were the big boys, B-29s out of Saipan, which the US had wrested earlier that summer from the Japanese and turned into a major airfield and base of operations.