It was a great throw. The grenade went right through the open window and exploded. The car kept going until the gas tank ignited. Even then it kept rolling, setting the dry grass on fire as it went, but the shooting had stopped. The car was no longer a threat, but there were still plenty of Japanese to deal with.
They climbed a bit farther and reached an observation post in a house that was elevated on stilts with a thatched roof.
“I don’t like the looks of that place,” Philly warned.
Sure enough, they heard the crack of a rifle, and they all ducked as the noise echoed and rolled across the knobby peaks. But it wasn’t just a rifle that was situated in that hut, because moments later there was the dreaded sound of a machine gun opening fire with the steady tap, tap, tap, tap of the deadly Nambu machine gun.
“Everybody down!” Honcho shouted. Although the warning wasn’t necessary, because the men were already hugging the ground, as the bullets flashed and flared overhead, the tracers visible even in the daylight.
“Deke!” somebody shouted.
He already had the rifle lined up on the muzzle flash in the shack. He fired, worked the bolt, and fired again. For his trouble, a bullet snapped past his head. Deke had damn near forgotten about the sniper in there too. Off to his left, a rifle fired, and the sniper in the shack fell silent.
“That’s one for me,” Philly said with a grin.
Understanding the situation in the Philippines required going all the way back to December 8, 1941. Within hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces had begun their invasion of the US territory. The enemy had quickly overwhelmed the defenders, ending with the capture of more than seventy-five thousand troops and the cruel Bataan Death March that had resulted in so many deaths.
The commander of the defeated forces, General Douglas MacArthur, had left only on the direct orders of the president, vowing that “I shall return.”
Nearly three years later, on October 17, 1944, with the landing on Leyte, MacArthur had made good on his promise. Since then, the fighting had continued unabated.
The fierce fighting was a result of the Japanese decision to make a stand in the Philippines. The Japanese poured more men and supplies into the fight for Leyte, intent on hurling the Americans back into the sea.
However, the situation did not go as planned for General Tomoyuki Yamashita, hailed as the “Tiger of Malaya” for his defeat of British forces early in the war. The Americans and Australian forces had proved to be a tough nut to crack. As it turned out, it was the Japanese themselves who were cracking. For the men fighting on the beaches and hills and forests, that wasn’t happening fast enough.
The Philippines and Okinawa weren’t the only military operations taking place. As Patrol Easy made their way through the jungle, the US Navy and Marines were steaming toward Iwo Jima. There, the Japanese had turned the entire island into a fortress. More than twenty thousand Japanese troops were waiting for the Americans to arrive. Nobody expected it to be an easy fight.
All that anyone had to do was look at a map to be reminded of the vast arena that was the Pacific theater, spreading across more than 20 percent of the earth’s surface. To be able to fight a war in two spheres of the world, and supply men and materials to remote islands across thousands of miles of ocean, demonstrated the growing power of the United States.
In the Pacific, everything now seemed to be happening quickly and on a grand scale, even if each day passed much too slowly for the average soldier, sailor, marine, nurse, WAC, or WAVE. Those last two were the acronyms for Women’s Army Corps and Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service. For these men and women, home seemed far away and long ago.
Even after months of fighting, there was still plenty of mopping up to do on Leyte, which was just what Patrol Easy and the rest of the 77th Infantry Division were finding out. After all, an enemy ambush had just made mincemeat out of one of their supply convoys. The back of the Japanese defense had been broken, but the arms and legs and fingers and toes were still engaged in fighting. It didn’t help that the rugged terrain favored defensive fighting.
Once Leyte and its airfields were taken from the Japanese, the US plan of attack was to move on to Luzon, the largest island in the Philippines and the location of the capital city of Manila. General MacArthur wanted this crown jewel of the Philippines, and the Japanese were not eager to give it up.
By early 1945 the Japanese had more than one hundred thousand troops on Luzon, nearly a thousand artillery units, plus aircraft and ships at sea — although the Japanese Navy had taken a beating and was no longer the power that it had been. Even so, the combined Japanese forces seemed to be more than enough to meet the invasion.
Or so they thought.
