Pyle may not have written those actual words, but he had written similar ones about so many of the young men fighting in the Pacific. Sure, he was doing his job as a reporter, but it was also clear that he cared deeply about these men who were so far from home.
They fought in the streets, they fought in buildings, they took up positions on rooftops. But the strangest place that Patrol Easy fought turned out to be a baseball stadium in the heart of Manila.
In happier times, the Rizal Memorial Baseball Stadium, named for a national hero of the Philippines, had hosted the likes of Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth, playing exhibition games in the more innocent days before the world had been plunged into war. Local baseball fans still spoke of those games with dreamy eyes and a distant smile on their faces. Filipino boys had taken to the American sport with enthusiasm, playing barefoot and barehanded in vacant sandlots across Manila.
But like peace itself, those days were a distant memory. The place now resembled the sort of baseball field where the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse might pause for a game of catch. Since the start of the war, weeds had grown up and covered the field. The painted scoreboard had faded and flaked, with a few bullet holes showing where the numbers should have been.
Even worse, the baseball stadium was now a fortress, having been taken over by the Japanese. The concrete structures of the stadium made a solid defensive position. The dugouts had been turned into machine-gun nests. Snipers occupied the stands where fans had once rooted for the home team. A runner trying to steal a base risked being tagged out permanently.
“My best guess is that there are at least a hundred Japanese dug in here,” Lieutenant Steele explained. “We have armor on the way, planning to sweep out the Japanese, but they need infantry support. That’s where we come in.”
“What good is a tank if it needs us?” Philly wanted to know.
“They don’t want to get blindsided by some Japs with a sticky bomb,” Steele said.
On Leyte and now on Luzon, more than one Sherman tank had been knocked out by these bombs, known by the Japanese as
One fatal drawback for the Japanese using these lunge mines was that these attacks were essentially suicide missions due to several pounds of HEAT (High Explosive Anti-Tank) charge exploding within a stick’s length of the attacker.
“I wouldn’t touch a tank with a ten-foot pole, but I guess a Jap would,” Deke said.
“With all that steel, you’d think it would take more than a Jap with a stick to take ’em out,” Philly said.
“When you attack it from the side, a tank might as well be a tin can. All the armor is up front. You know they don’t have a lot of visibility inside those tin cans,” Honcho added. “We’re going to be their ears and eyes, and tell ’em where to shoot.”
Orders being shouted to their right came from an infantry company forming up to attempt a frontal assault on the Japanese, hoping to simply push them out of the dugouts and stands. Farther away, tanks rumbled in the background, assembling for the attack. However, it would be the snipers who went in first, scouting out the enemy defenses.
The Americans were entering the stadium from the outfield — from the direction of the third base line, to be exact. One advantage of fighting at a baseball field was that it used familiar landmarks and features. In the annals of military history, it was probably the only time that a combat action had taken place on a baseball field. Somehow, it felt like an affront that the Japanese had taken something as American as a baseball field and cleverly transformed it into a fortress to use against them.
The lieutenant looked around at his team. For days now, Patrol Easy had been working in coordination with the guerrilla snipers that Father Francisco had brought them. Shortly after bringing them the sniper recruits, the priest had moved on to other corners of the city where his faith and organizational skills were needed. Father Francisco held no rank, but among the guerrillas he was as good as a general.
“I don’t know where he found these people,” Honcho said, referring to the Filipino sharpshooters. “But I’ll take another bunch just like them.”
After giving the new recruits a crash course in sniper warfare, Honcho grouped his troops into twos or threes, trying to pair at least one of the Filipinos with the more experienced Americans. More often than not, Deke had found himself paired with Juana. That was just fine by him. She was an excellent shot, she didn’t say much, and he had to admit that she was easy on the eyes.
