Go for Broke Page 6

  Colonel Hutchins had disengaged from the battle when he realized the Japanese vastly outnumbered his men. He remembered he was supposed to be the regimental commander, not a front-line private first class, and he pulled back to give direction to his soldiers and also to call for help.

  Japs had tried to shoot him in the back as he ran away, but they missed and he found the jeep near the Driniumor River. The Engineers had constructed a pontoon bridge across the Driniumor, and Colonel Hutchins drove the jeep over the bridge, making his way to his own headquarters.

  But no one was there. His headquarters tent had been blown to shit. Confused, wondering what had happened to his reserves, he sped toward the headquarters of the Eighty-first Division to get some answers.

  He drove around a palm tree and through a shell crater. He was rip-roaring mad because he could see no reinforcements on the way to the Twenty-third Regiment’s lines, and the longer it would take reinforcements to arrive, the more of his men would become casualties. His heart ached with the pain of defeat as he barreled through a mass of bushes, ducking his head behind the windshield so that no branches would scratch him.

  Soon he saw soldiers, jeeps, and trucks. He passed ammo dumps, artillery emplacements, and a field kitchen where beans and hot dogs were being cooked. Soldiers looked at the bloody apparition behind the wheel of the jeep and couldn’t believe their eyes. Colonel Hutchins saw the Eighty-first Division command post and steered toward it. The MPs guarding the front of the tent saw him coming and didn’t know what to do. They thought he might drive right through the entire goddamned tent, so they unslung their carbines, but Colonel Hutchins braked in front of the tent and hopped out of the jeep.

  “Where the hell you think you’re going?” said one of the MPs, who didn’t recognize Colonel Hutchins underneath all the blood.

  “You’d better say sir when you talk to me, young soldier!” Colonel Hutchins bellowed as he pushed the MP out of the way.

  The MP recognized Colonel Hutchins’s infamous voice and said: “Yes, sir!” but Colonel Hutchins already was inside the tent by then and couldn’t hear him.

  Seated behind his desk, Master Sergeant Abner Somerall, the sergeant major of the Eighty-first Division, looked up at the blood-soaked nightmare charging past him. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded.

  “You better get your rifle ready,” Colonel Hutchins growled, “because the Japs’re gonna be here any minute now!”

  “What!”

  Colonel Hutchins pushed aside the tent flap and entered the office of General Clyde Hawkins, who was stroking his blond mustache and looking down at his map, still trying to figure out where the main Japanese effort would be concentrated. Also in the office were General MacWhitter, Colonel Jessup, General Sully, and a few other Eighty-first Division staff officers, including General Hawkins’s aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Jack Utsler.

  General Hawkins looked up and saw Colonel Hutchins enter the office, the bloody machete rammed into Colonel Hutchins’s belt.

  “My God!” expostulated General Hawkins.

  Colonel Hutchins marched toward General Hawkins, stopped in front of him, and saluted. “Sir, my men have been overwhelmed and probably overrun! Reinforcements are needed urgently and immediately to plug the hole!”

  General Hawkins stared at Colonel Hutchins as if he were looking at a ghost. All he could say was “What?”

  “Sir, my men have been overwhelmed and probably overrun! You’d better send reinforcements up there right away to plug the hole and maybe save them!”

  When in doubt, General Hawkins looked at his maps, and that’s what he did then. “Where is this attack taking place?” he asked.

  Colonel Hutchins drew the bloody machete and brought its tip to rest on the spot where Headquarters Company of the Twenty-third Regiment had been. “Here!”

  “Just in that sector?”

  “That’s all I saw, but I assume the attack was taking place on a broader front.”

  General Hawkins blinked. “You assume? I cannot commit thousands of men to a battle based on your assumptions! What about the rest of your regiment?”

  Colonel Hutchins took a step backward, because he knew he was on thin ice as far as the rest of his regiment went. “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I happened to be up front with my reconnaissance platoon when the fight broke out. I’ve been out of touch with my headquarters. Have they been in touch with you?”

  “We’ve been unable to raise them by radio or telephone.”

  “That’s because the Jap bombardment must have blown up the telephone wires and fucked up radio communication as well. Don’t you know that we were under a shelling for a half hour?”

  “Of course I knew,” General Hawkins replied. “We’re not deaf.”

  “But you must be dumb, you son of a bitch!” Colonel Hutchins could hold in his frustration and rage no longer. “Why haven’t you reinforced my regiment?”

  Everyone stared at Colonel Hutchins in dismay. His uniform was torn to ribbons and he was as bloody as a bull butchered in the Chicago stockyards.

  General MacWhitter cleared his throat. “I think you’d better get ahold of yourself, Colonel.”

  “Fuck you, MacWhitter!” Colonel Hutchins replied. “You’d better get ahold of your own damn self!”

  “At ease!” said General Hawkins, getting pissed off.

  “Why haven’t you reinforced my regiment?” Colonel Hutchins demanded.

  “I don’t have to answer your questions, Colonel! I realize you’ve been through an ordeal, but this is still the United States Army, and I still command this division!”

  “There won’t be a division left unless you plug that hole!”

  Colonel Hutchins’s eyes glowed like hot coals set in his blood-covered face. General Hawkins looked down at his map, because he was in doubt again. It certainly sounded as if there was a serious problem in the Twenty-third Regiment, but he didn’t want to commit his reserves to that segment of the line just then, because if he did, it would appear as though he’d been coerced by Colonel Hutchins. But if he didn’t, the Eighty-first Division might be split apart by the Japanese attack, and that would be a very undesirable thing. Also, he didn’t know how many Japanese soldiers had broken through.

  Colonel Hutchins’s anger boiled over again. “What the hell are you waiting for?” he screamed.

  “At ease!” said General MacWhitter.

  “At ease yourself!” replied Colonel Hutchins, raising his sword in a threatening manner. “What is this, a goddamned debating society? The Japs are headed this way, and all you fucking bastards can do is talk! The time has come to act!”

  “Now see here!” said General MacWhitter. “You’re being insubordinate!”

  Colonel Hutchins was so mad, he could have spit. “We’re gonna be run over by Japs if somebody doesn’t do something! Wake the fuck up, you stupid bastards!”

  “You’re going too far!” General MacWhitter said.

  Colonel Hutchins had lost a lot of blood, and now, on top of that, his agitation was making him dizzy. “I need to sit down,” he said, looking around for a chair, but he couldn’t see one. His knees buckled and he fell to the ground.

  Colonel Jessup rushed toward him and knelt down. “We’d better get a medic in here,” he said.

  “Call a medic!” General Hawkins yelled.

  Just then they all heard sounds like a popcorn machine in the distance.

  “What the hell is that?” General Hawkins asked, his eyes widening.

  “Sounds like gunfire,” General Sully replied.

  A phone rang and a clerk picked it up. The clerk listened a few moments, then held out the phone to General Hawkins. “It’s for you, sir!”

  General Hawkins raised the phone to his face. “What the hell’s going on?” he yelled.

  It was Captain Tracy from George Company of the Fifteenth Regiment. “Sir,” he shouted, “all I can see are Japs in front of me, and they�
�re swarming toward my headquarters right now!”

  “How many?” asked General Hawkins.

  “Lots!” Captain Tracy calmed himself down and tried to be more precise. “Maybe a battalion!”

  General Hawkins swallowed hard, because he knew that George Company of the Fifteenth Regiment was right in front of him, and that meant that Japs were headed toward General Hawkins’s headquarters, just as Colonel Hutchins had indicated. General Hawkins could hear gunfire and explosions over the telephone connection.

  “Sir!” said Captain Tracy. “I think you’d better send reinforcements up here! We can’t hold off all these Japs for long!”

  General Hawkins thought quickly and reached a fast conclusion. He was, after all, an American general and not a retarded birdbrain. “Don’t try to hold them off!” he ordered. “Conduct a fighting retreat! Help is on the way! Any questions?”

  “No, sir!”

  “Over and out.”

  General Hawkins hung up the telephone and strode toward his map. He looked down and decided what units to bring up on the line. “General MacWhitter!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Direct the first two battalions of the Fifteenth Regiment to deploy here and here.” General Hawkins pointed to two spots on the map. “Move the first battalion of the Eighteenth Regiment here.” He pointed to another spot. “That ought to stabilize our line. Hurry.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  General MacWhitter rushed to the phones and made the calls. General Hawkins continued to gaze down at the map, although now his doubt was gone. He believed he knew where the Japs’ main effort was coming now. They were coming through where they had first been reported to be coming. They were attempting no complex double-envelopments or other fancy tactics. It was just an all-out, go-for-broke frontal attack, typically Japanese, and the first thing to do was stop it.

  General Hawkins glanced toward the corner, where the radios and telephones were set up. He saw General MacWhitter talking on one of the telephones. General Hawkins hoped the replacements would arrive before the Japs took too much ground. General Hawkins now wished he’d acted sooner, but he still believed he’d behaved properly, from a military point of view. It had been necessary to wait until the enemy’s full intentions were clear. Then and only then could the appropriate response be made.

  General Clyde Hawkins stroked his blond mustache as he looked around at his subordinate officers, who in turn were looking at him. He saw Colonel Hutchins still lying on the floor, a medic bending over him. In the distance, rifle and machine-gun fire could be heard, and it wasn’t that far away. It was possible that the Japs would advance much farther before they were stopped by the reinforcements that had been called up.

  General MacWhitter, his face pale, hung up the telephone. “Your orders have been passed down, sir.”

  General Hawkins knew it was important for him to act calmly and decisively, so that he could instill confidence among his subordinates. “Excellent,” he said in an ordinary conversational tone, without any trace of panic or even excitement. “Now I suggest that we all arm ourselves and pull back toward Aitape, just in case.”

  The medic looked up at General Hawkins. “What should I do with him?” he asked, indicating Colonel Hutchins.

  “Have him taken to the field hospital.” General Hawkins turned to Lieutenant Utsler. “Call for transportation.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Lieutenant Utsler picked up a telephone, but the line was dead. He picked up another, but could get no dial tone there, either. Meanwhile, officers filed out of the office, so they could round up their men and prepare to move them back toward Aitape. Only General MacWhitter and a few others remained with General Hawkins.

  “Sir,” said Lieutenant Utsler, “I can’t get through on the telephone. Evidently the wires have been cut.”

  General Hawkins held his Colt .45 in his hand and was checking it to make sure it was loaded and ready to shoot. “See if you can find a spare jeep and a driver to carry Colonel Hutchins to the field hospital.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Just then everyone heard a peculiar tearing noise. They looked around and saw the blade of a knife sticking through a wall of the tent. The knife made a quick downward stroke five feet long, and then a Japanese soldier burst through the hole.

  “Banzai!” screamed the Japanese soldier, carrying a rifle with a bayonet attached. He thrust the bayonet toward General Hawkins.

  General Hawkins raised his Colt .45 and pulled the trigger. Blam! The pistol kicked violently in General Hawkins’s hand, and the bullet struck the Japanese soldier in the chest, hurling him backward toward the hole he’d cut in the tent. Just then a Japanese hand grenade came flying through the hole. It bounced off the Japanese soldier’s back, which was a mass of blood and gristle, due to the passage of the .45-caliber bullet. The hand grenade dropped to the ground, and the dead Japanese soldier collapsed on top of it.

  “Hit it!” hollered General Hawkins.

  Everybody inside the tent dived to the ground, and two seconds later the hand grenade exploded underneath the dead Japanese soldier, blowing him into thousands of bloody little chunks. The interior of the tent filled with smoke, and the concussion blew out the walls of the tent.

  General Hawkins’s ears rang with the sound of the explosion. He knew that if the body of the Japanese soldier hadn’t muffled the worst of the blast, he, General Hawkins, might have been killed. Covered with dirt and some of the Japanese soldier’s blood, General Hawkins staggered to his feet.

  “Let’s get out of here!” he said.

  He lurched toward the exit, holding his Colt .45 at the ready, in case more Japs were in the vicinity. He was beginning to realize that maybe he’d waited much too long before responding to the Japanese attack. Next time he’d take action sooner, and he hoped he’d be alive when the next time happened.

  Outside he saw GIs running in all directions, but no Japs. Evidently the Japs who’d attacked his tent had been infiltrators, not part of the main Japanese advance. Colonel Jessup jogged toward him, his Colt .45 in his right hand.

  “Are you all right, sir?”

  “I’m all right!” replied General Hawkins, reaching for his canteen. “Be on the lookout for Jap infiltrators! Where’s my goddamn jeep? Let’s get the hell out of here!”

  The medic and Lieutenant Utsler carried Colonel Hutchins out of the devastated tent. General MacWhitter followed, and then came Sergeant Somerall, carrying a tin box full of important documents in each of his hands. A jeep headed toward them, and a symphony of mortar explosions could be heard in the distance.

  General Hawkins sipped from his canteen and returned it to its case as he waited for the jeep. Now he realized that he’d fucked up badly by not stopping the Japs sooner. His heart sank when he realized he’d be called on the carpet to answer for his mistakes, and maybe he’d even be relieved of command—if he lived that long.

  FOUR . . .

  It was a hectic morning, and the tides of battle rolled back and forth many times. The screen of GIs in front of the Japanese soldiers conducted a fighting retreat, slowing down the Japanese soldiers, but some Japanese soldiers broke through in several spots and raised hell behind American lines, blowing up ammunition dumps, cutting wires, and shooting cooks and quartermasters, in addition to a few high-ranking officers.

  Meanwhile, over a period of two hours, General Hawkins’s reserves moved into the area, slowing down the Japanese advance; but they couldn’t stop it. General Hawkins was forced to call General Hall for help, and finally one more battalion from the Persecution Task Force reserve solidified the line. The Japanese soldiers were stopped cold approximately one mile west of the Driniumor River. The Japanese soldiers found that they were unable to advance farther, but neither could the Americans push the Japanese back. For the time being, a stalemate between both sides existed in the jungle west of the Driniumor.

  Meanwhile, pockets of GIs had been left behind by the Japanese advance. They were c
ut off, isolated from each other, and faced the grim prospect of being annihilated by the Japanese once the Japanese decided to get rid of them.

  One of these pockets of resistance was the recon platoon, or what was left of it, along with a few stragglers from the headquarters company of the Twenty-third Regiment. They huddled behind a wall of devastated trees and tangled vegetation, where the Japanese could not easily see them, while Lieutenant Breckenridge roamed alone through the area, trying to figure out how bad their situation was.

  Frankie La Barbara sat cross-legged on the ground as Pfc. Gotbaum, a medic from Headquarters Company, knelt behind him, touching his fingers to the back of Frankie’s head. “How does that feel?” Gotbaum asked.

  “It hurts!”

  Pfc. Gotbaum poked again.

  “Ouch!” yelled Frankie.

  Sergeant Cameron turned toward him. “Keep your voice down!”

  “Suck my dick!”

  “You’re gonna get us all killed!”

  “Fuck you,” Frankie said in a voice barely above a whisper.

  Pfc. Gotbaum continued to feel the back of Frankie’s head. “I don’t think anything’s broken,” he said, “but it’s impossible to tell for sure without an X ray.”

  “I know something’s broke back there,” Frankie said. “It wouldn’t hurt so much if it wasn’t broke. Gimme another shot of something, willya?”

  “I just gave you a shot, Frankie.”

  “Well, it wasn’t enough. Gimme another one.”

  Pfc. Gotbaum didn’t know what to do, because he didn’t want to shoot up Frankie with too much morphine. Pfc. Gotbaum looked toward Sergeant Cameron, who winked at him. The wink seemed to say Give him a shot and maybe then he’ll be quiet.

  “Okay,” Pfc. Gotbaum said. “Take down your pants and lay down on your stomach.”

  “What’re you gonna do, fuck me?”

  “I’m gonna give you a shot in your ass.”

  “Why don’t you gimme the shot in my arm.”