Pacific Sniper

Keeping low, Deke watched as the overloaded floatplanes labored to take off. Finally, they lurched into the sky. The boats changed their heading and pointed their bows to the sea. Deke gazed out at the boats growing smaller and smaller in the vast Pacific.

The beach below was now empty, save for scattered gear and weapons that had been abandoned at the last instant.

The Japanese had fled, but he was sure that he hadn’t seen the last of them.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The battle for Guam was over, but there was still plenty of mopping up to do. US troops now held both ends of the island, from the beachhead where they had initially come ashore to what had been the final Japanese bastion around Yigo and Mount Santa Rosa.

“They were dug in, all right,” Philly said, shaking his head at the vast network of tunnels and caves that the defenders had built.

“Like ticks on a coonhound,” Deke agreed.

“What a hayseed.”

“Keep it up, Philly Boy,” Deke said, but he was grinning.

Clearing the Japanese defenses of holdouts had been a dangerous task that meant going over every inch of the caves. Only a very few survivors were found, most of them cowering in the dark. With the battle lost, they had lacked the conviction to fight to the death or to take their own lives. Deke thought that they might be the only Japs with any sense. Shell-shocked and starving, the few survivors were treated gently by the GIs who found them. Yoshio was put to work interviewing the prisoners, but they had little information to offer because these were almost always enlisted men who didn’t know anything except that they were defeated, thirsty, and hungry.

In the caves, the soldiers made more than a few gruesome discoveries. Many of the Japanese had committed suicide using hand grenades, while others had shed their boots, put the muzzles of their rifles in their mouths, and used their toes to pull the triggers.

Deke saw it all and shook his head, growing increasingly immune to the horrors he saw. He struggled to understand the Japanese propensity for suicide over surrender.

But just when he thought that he had seen it all and that it couldn’t get any worse, he was with the group that found the remains of General Obata, commander of the Japanese forces. He had committed seppuku, the warrior’s ritualistic form of suicide. One of the officers had come along and explained the process, which had required the Japanese general to sit cross-legged, open his shirt, and use a knife to slit open his own belly. Deke cringed at the thought.

The general was then beheaded with a sword wielded by one of his staff officers, who, his task completed, had apparently shot himself.

All that the GIs could do was stare at the carnage.

“These guys did this to themselves rather than be captured?” Philly looked astonished. “I mean, he gutted himself like a fish and then they cut off his head!”

“Clean off,” Deke agreed, realizing that the ritualistic suicide was part of the Bushido or warrior’s code that Yoshio had described to him. He nudged the Jap’s head with the toe of his boot to get a better look at the face. Empty eyes stared up at him. He had seen so much death in the last few days that the sight didn’t bother him. “I’ve got to say, he was an ugly bastard.”

“But tough, all right. He cut open his own belly.”

Deke had a nagging thought. “How do you ever defeat an enemy like that?”

“I know how,” said the officer who had explained the business about seppuku. He reached down to claim the dead general’s sword. “You kill every last one of these Nips, that’s how.”

As it turned out, the worst discovery was yet to come. They returned to the Japanese bunker that, four days before, they had sealed after being unable to wipe out the enemy soldiers inside with gasoline and satchel charges.

They rolled the rocks aside and were greeted with a god-awful smell of death and decay.

The same officer who had claimed the dead general’s katana was there again. He said, “All right, we need to go into that bunker and make sure there’s nothing important down there.”

“I can tell you what’s down there,” Philly said quietly to Deke. They had both edged away, out of the officer’s direct line of sight, to avoid being volunteered. “A whole lot of dead Japs, that’s what.”

Another soldier had the bad judgment to question the officer. “Sir?”

“There could be battle plans or something down there that could help us win this war,” the officer said. “I want you to go down and take a look.”

“Me, sir?”

“Yeah, you. Take along a flashlight. And you’d better wear a gas mask.”

The unlucky soldier made his way down into the bunker. He crawled back out a few minutes later, put his hands on his knees, and vomited.

“Get yourself together, soldier. What did you see?”

“Dead Japs, sir. Hundreds of ’em. Looks like maybe they all suffocated or died of thirst.”

“All right, close it back up,” the officer said.

On the beach, Ernie Pyle was putting the finishing touches on his dispatch.