Dragon of the Mangrooves (10 page)

Showing off their stout bodies—as big as two-storey houses and kicking dust up frantically—three tanks came dashing down the road. Judging from the seventy-five-millimeter main gun protruding from the body, it was not an M4, but an M3 type. Whichever it might be, the Japanese’s humble armor-piercing ammunition was no match. Hostile infantries advanced in a queue behind the tanks, hiding them in the cloud of dust—no less than two platoons.

“Fix bayonets!” A sonorous voice of command came from the lower right, followed by many clinking sounds.

Eight soldiers crept out by ones and twos from a trench at the front row. The party was led by two men, each holding a bamboo pole on which a model ninety-three mine was bound. The other six men were carrying bundles of armor-piercing mines. Everyone was stealthily crawling in grass toward the road to blow the tanks up. The others worriedly saw the tank-busters off, with their rifles at the ready in the trench.

An armor-piercing mine looked like a tortoise. Each of its four legs had a magnet, to stick the mine directly on the armor. However, specifications showed that a bundle of five mines was the minimum needed to destroy an M3 middle tank effectively. No one knew whether it was possible to stick the bundle five times heavier than normal to a moving armor properly. If it didn’t work, a soldier’s body would substitute for magnets.

Busting with a model ninety-three mine was much the same. A buster must sneak up to a tank and make it stamp on the mine by sticking the pole forward.

The only thing protecting his life from the explosion was the distance of a few meters, earned by the length of the bamboo pole. Either way, it was close to a suicide mission, but the Japanese had no other options anymore.

Suddenly the leading tank opened fire. The shell burst in the middle of the hill with an earsplitting sound. From the hole, Kasuga saw innumerable clods of earth pouring down. A few seconds later, a second shell exploded. This time, it was much closer to their bunker. The negative pressure blew off the feeble ceiling, and the broad sky appeared overhead. Two young LMG men got rattled. “Sergeant, do you want us to fire?” one of them asked.

Hirono answered back instead of Tomita. “Stupid! We’re still safe. Only a recon in force! They’ve not found this bunker yet.” Although scared, each member of Tomita Squad kept his composure.

As soon as Kasuga heard another kind of cannon’s roar rip the air from the direction of mountain banana, a sharp metallic sound reverberated ahead. The antitank gun, lurking somewhere in the east of the military road, had opened fire, though everyone had forgotten its existence until then. With low-pitched whizzes, armor-piercing, high-explosive shells hit the targets, one after another. The thick tank armors repelled them all, but this strike might have surprised them to some extent, since three tanks came to a sudden stop. Attendant infantries fled beyond the military road. Trying to find the position of the antitank gun, the leading tank sluggishly began turning to compensate for the narrowness of its firing angle. In the number two tank, an Indian man sticking his head out of the hatch was giving directions to the leading one in a loud voice. He was close enough to guarantee a perfect hit if somebody tried sniping from the bunker.

This gave the tank-busting soldiers a rare opportunity. As long as the tanks were stopped, they could carry out their mission much easier. Kasuga watched the scene in breathless suspense. Tomita spoke to him from behind. “Did you sight the gun on the road, Kasu?”

“Yes, I did,” replied Kasuga.

“Good. Be sure not to hit any friends. Aim higher than the bogie wheels of the tank.”

Kasuga held grips and stared at the road through the gun sight. Soon he saw the helmets of several Japanese tank-busters moving stealthily in the undergrowth of the grove. The spearheadhad already reached the foot of the first tank.

Quite unexpectedly, the enemy soldiers around the rearmost tank went into action. Almost all of the Indian soldiers kept squatting or lying on the ground, but some dared to thread their way through tanks and tree trunks. Pointing to the grove clearly, the leading guy was throwing his arm about. The enemy might have discovered the tank-busters. They shouldn’t allow the Indians to storm into the grove, so quick as a flash, Ban bellowed an order: “Fire!”

Each rifleman in the trench opened fire, jerking a bolt in a flurry. The Indians were frightened at the fusillade of Ogino Platoon and hurriedly fled in all directions.

“Don’t shoot yet!” Tomita warned.

Kasuga looked back. Tomita’s cool look indicated that he was seeking the best time to strike. He was holding back LMG men with his left arm stretching horizontally.

“If we fire rashly and by any chance those damned tanks retreat, our tank-busters will come to a standstill. They’ll die on their feet without success,” Tomita said.

The enemy, once panicked, had recovered its balance to find Japanese fire limited to mere not-so-fierce rifles. Hiding themselves behind tanks or the edge of the road, Indians started striking back vehemently with automatic rifles. A din of gunfire prevailed over the field. A painful scream burst out from the Japanese trench ahead, followed by a comrade’s frantic voice, calling out for a medic.

Taking advantage of every short pause of fire, several Indians came rushing to get into the grove. Everyone had a submachine gun, the superb weapon for a charge. It was the very moment Tomita had been waiting for, and he allowed them to attack. “Now! Let them have it!”

Kasuga silently pushed the trigger with both thumbs.

The ninety-two HMG howled again and again. The light machine gun also opened fire. High-pitched, lively clatters mixed with the bass stuttering of the HMG. Countless streaks of bullets crossed the field and descended upon the road.

Kasuga saw one of the Indians who had rushed toward the grove fall over, and the rest flew off in a hurry to hide themselves behind tanks. Then he whisked the muzzle a little and adjusted the line of fire on the turret of the second tank. While hearing the clinks of ricocheting bullets, he saw the Indian tank man falling down into the turret.

Kasuga continued pressing the trigger desperately.

The combined sweep from two machine guns was crushing. Hostile return fire stopped in a moment. The leading tank, which the antitank gun had diverted, seemed to notice them and began resetting its stance. The moment it turned back to them, something flashed at the foot of it, and an earth tremor traveled to the bunker. The tank didn’t stop turning around, trailing a streak of smoke from the mine blast. Wriggling like a gigantic serpent, the cut Caterpillar was coming off its bogie wheels. The tank had lost control of itself. It slithered down into a hollow beside the road and toppled over, crushing many saplings.

A great cheer went up from the soldiers of Ogino Platoon.

“Charge! Charge!” Ban’s command reached the bunker. It wasn’t certain how many tank-busters were wounded, but it was likely that at least the one buster who had succeeded in stalling the tank had been killed. They must capture the tank and deliver the finishing blow to the enemy to make his self-sacrifice worthwhile.

Kasuga turned his eyes to the field of dead grass.

“Hachiman!”

Chanting the name of ancient war god, Ogino Platoon charged. Many figures emerged from the trench. Led by Ban, who had already drawn his sword, the soldiers with bayonet-attached rifles made a dash for the grove in rows. But their destination had already gotten hazy with smoke; apparently an enemy soldier toward the rear, having witnessed his tank stall, had fired smoke shells into the grove.

On the left, the flames of incendiaries were getting stronger. If they dallied there more, they would be consumed by flame before the engineers came to their rescue with flame throwers.

It didn’t take long for the hostile fire to start again. Reinforced with Bren guns and Vickers water-cooled machine guns, which had rushed in to the front, it was more fierce than ever. A ruthless barrage breaking through the smoke screen mowed down many charging soldiers in an instant. The survivors could do nothing but hit the dirt and freeze on the spot. The thickening smoke now swallowed up all the grove and came creeping down to the field.

Tomita shouted, “Hang in there! Shoot back, men!”

Kasuga swept the gap between the tanks with his gun in haste. The rearmost tank started reversing with the roar of an engine. Now the smoke blurred his vision, so he couldn’t sight the enemies clearly anymore. Even the huge figures of tanks had become hazy.

“Hey, you kids! What the hell are you doing?” Tomita was snarling now.

The model ninety-six LMG had fallen silent beside him. It seems that glitches always occurred when they must not. However carefully a gun was maintained, it was far from perfect, due to shortage of spindle oil. One of the young gunners moaned. “Barrel jammed, Sergeant!”

“Fix the problem right now!” Tomita snapped.

Kasuga found the HMG had run out of bullets on its strip, as well, and he didn’t have a spare strip. Kasuga and Hirono looked at each other in puzzlement.

Neither of them had anticipated that they would consume such a large amount of cartridges. Just when they beckoned the ammo bearers to bring them new ones, a strange sound, like a call of a kite, descended on them from somewhere above in unfathomable ghastliness.

“Hit the dirt! Mortar!” Tomita warned.

But before he could finish the order, the shell burst behind the bunker. As the scenery around him turned white, Kasuga witnessed the faint image of a soldier’s body, torn in two, flying in the air. Just then he lost his hearing. All seemed like a silent movie, weirdly lacking in reality.

Shells stormed the Ogino Platoon’s position, one after another. Razor-sharp splinters zinged this way and that overhead in the billows of dust. A blast propelled one of their heavy, bulky Type Ko ammunition boxes toward the corner of the bunker. Beside it, Kasuga found the glossy intestines hanging outside the ripped-up abdomen of one of the ammo bearers sitting in the middle of scattered cartridges. He could smell the blood mixed with gunpowder.

Hirono edged to the injured ammo bearer and frantically shouted something.

Likely, he was calling for a medic. But Kasuga didn’t sense someone coming; the medic himself might have gotten injured or killed somewhere.

Abruptly he felt his temple knocked hard and saw the white light wrap him up again. In the corner of his fading consciousness, he barely recognized that their machine gun position had received a direct hit.

When Kasuga finally came to his senses and raised his head, he didn’t know how much time had passed. One of the young LMG men down on his stomach

was the first thing he saw. With the profuse blood on his back, it was obvious he was dead. Beside him, a first class private named Tada, their short and agile number one gunner, was attending to their ninety-two HMG, turned over with its tripod and covered with dirt. Tada looked like he was detaching a gas cap from the gun. If he does that, the machine gun would lose its rapid-firing ability. What on earth is Tada doing? Do they abandon the precious gun bestowed by the emperor here and now?

Suddenly Kasuga regained his hearing. Tomita’s shout pierced his ears.

“Hirono! Hirono!”

Tomita was raising Hirono in his arms behind Tada. Hirono was still breath-ing as blood bubbled up regularly from an incision on his breast. But his complexion had already gone white, like a wax doll face.

The shelling had completely blown off the ceiling of the bunker and not a trace remained. The sky overhead was hazy with smoke. Kasuga couldn’t figure out what had caused that. Was it a smoke shell, an incendiary, or the explosion of the mortar shell?

“Oh, shit! Hirono! Come on!”

Hearing Tomita holler, Kasuga again lost consciousness.

The Sumi rescue party had broken through Hill 306 and reached a flatland. But the tropical rainforest went on further. Countless rows of gigantic trees well over ten meters high stretched as far as the eye could see. The grandeur of the huge trunks lining both sides reminded Second Lieutenant Yoshihisa Sumi of a cloister of some solemn sanctuary. High up at the crown of the forest, branches and leaves interwove in every direction. And the ground was dappled with many thin rays getting through them.

Vines and bushes came out abruptly and gradually increased in density, probably something to do with how much sunshine they received. Then the whole scene turned into a jungle. Sometimes Sumi could see small settlements and farms, but he seldom saw human figures.

Pagodas stood everywhere throughout Burma, and Ramree Island was no exception. No matter how deep inside the island it might be, every village had its own pagoda, or stupa, enshrining Buddha’s ashes—although big, expensive ones were few. Local Buddhists had built every holy tower in such a splendid, elaborate manner that Sumi felt them ill-matched to that remote place. Getting a send-off from those towers shining under the blue sky, they went on the road leading into the next dark forest. Such a scene repeated itself time and again.

Sumi led the party, consulting with his compass and the map, and shortly they came across another hamlet. Humble rice paddies spread along a tricklet, and several small stilted houses were scattered along the ridges of the paddies. Sumi could hear bellows of cattle and sense the presence of someone. He stopped the party and called Pondgi and a first class private named Murakami together.