Grunts (7 page)

So, on the night of July 25, as periodic thunder showers pelted frontline Marines, filling their holes with water, the Japanese exchanged good-byes with one another and said final prayers in preparation for their sacred assault. The mood among them was one of sadness laced with grim determination. The word
gyokusai
(meaning death with honor) could be heard passing from the lips of many of these men. “Some took out photographs of their parents, wife, or children and bid farewell to them,” Lieutenant Colonel Takeda wrote, “some prayed to God or Buddha, some composed a death poem and some exchanged cups of water at final parting with intimate comrades. All pledged themselves to . . . meet again at the Yasukuni Shrine [in Tokyo].” The men believed that their spirits would live on forever at this great national shrine. Most fortified themselves with generous quantities of sake. A few might even have dulled their fears with narcotics. Forward they went, into the night, in groups small and large, noisy and quiet.
¹⁶

A few hundred yards—and another culture—away, many of the Americans could sense that something was afoot. Most expected the same sort of limited banzai attacks that they had absorbed, and defeated, the last few nights. This soggy, humid evening would be no different, or so they thought. The rain ended, leaving only the sounds of occasional firing along the front. Beads of water dripped from trees or the edges of foxholes. Young Americans settled in for yet another frightening evening of keeping watch for enemy infiltrators. One of those Americans, Frank Goodwin, an eighteen-year-old kid from Malden, Massachusetts, was sitting in a shallow fighting hole, atop a small hill, peering into the darkness. Around him other men of I Company, 21st Marines, were doing the same thing. At his elbow, his buddy was sleeping since it was Goodwin’s turn to keep watch.

Goodwin was huddled behind the protection of several coral rocks that he and his buddy had stacked for protection around their hole. In front of the position, Marines had placed empty ration cans on sticks in hopes that anyone sneaking up on their holes would bump into the cans, thus making noise. Overhead a flare bathed the area in half-light. Goodwin looked down the hill and caught sight of what looked like four tree stumps a couple hundred feet away. He did not remember them being there in the daytime, but he knew the mind could play tricks at night. He woke his buddy and told him to take a look, but he saw nothing. “I stared out in that direction for a long time,” Goodwin said, “and as nothing seemed moved I guessed he was right.” Besides, if they were that close, they would surely run into the cans. Exhausted from several days of existence on the front lines, Goodwin dozed off with a pistol in his lap.

A couple thousand yards to Goodwin’s left, Private First Class Ed Adamski was in a machine-gun nest that served as a forward outpost for F Company, 9th Marines, a unit that had spent the day in bitter combat to capture a patch of high ground known as the Fonte Plateau. The company belonged to the 2nd Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Robert Cushman. They had been detached from their parent regiment and plugged into the 3rd Marines’ sector because the latter regiment had suffered so many casualties.

Tonight was Adamski’s twentieth birthday. He had once been an amateur boxer on the South Side of Chicago. Now he was a dog handler. He and about ninety other Marines and sixty dogs comprised the 3rd Marine Division’s Provisional War Dog Company. The dogs and their handlers were sprinkled among the division’s infantry units. Most of the dogs were Doberman pinschers, Labrador retrievers, or German shepherds. They were intensely faithful companions, superbly trained to detect the presence of the Japanese. Marines liked having them around because, during daylight attacks, they helped locate where the Japanese were. At night, they had an uncanny knack for knowing when infiltrators were approaching. For handlers like Adamski this meant round-the-clock work with little sleep. His Doberman, Big Boy, was fearless. On W-day, he had steadied the young Marine during an intense enemy mortar barrage. Since then, Adamski’s stomach had been tied in knots (a common symptom of fear), but Big Boy’s friendship and fearlessness had kept him going.

Just before midnight, Big Boy suddenly jumped up and alerted them, pointing in the direction of the Japanese lines. The machine gunners with Adamski knew what that meant—the Japanese were coming. Big Boy settled down and then alerted them several more times. Adamski told the machine gunners to expect an attack any minute. With dilated pupils and racing hearts that pumped adrenaline-rich blood, they tensed and waited for the onslaught.

On the right flank of the 21st Marines’ position, Private First Class Roger Belanger and his buddy Joe Babitz were walking warily through the dark, carrying out a contact patrol in the gap that existed between their regiment and the 9th Marines. Their job was to find where, exactly, the left flank positions of the 9th Marine Regiment were and then report that information back to their own unit. Before leaving for their dangerous patrol, they had smeared mud on their faces to hide their white skin at night. Up ahead they could see the 9th Marines trading shots with an unseen enemy unit. Knowing now the location of the 9th, they decided to turn around and go back to their own unit. They began to descend into a ravine. All at once, Belanger heard Japanese voices in the night. He and Babitz did not know it, but they were right in the pathway of Takashina’s lead troops, who were carrying out the general’s plan to exploit the gap between the two American regiments.

With every passing second, the Japanese were getting closer. Terrified, Belanger turned and whispered to Babitz: “Joe, take a couple of hand grenades, stick them in the mud with the pin off. Take your .45 [pistol], put it in your hand and have it cocked. I’ll watch your back. You watch my back.” Ever so quietly, they lay down on the grenades, pistols ready, watching the approaching enemy. There were about thirty or forty of them. Closer they came until they were almost right on top of the two Marines. Belanger’s heart was beating so violently that he was sure the Japanese could hear it. “Then, all of a sudden, they stopped. One of ’em started pissing all over us. Then they were laughing. One of ’em gave a kick that hit me on the side of the . . . left rib. I was saying my prayers, to tell you the truth.” Another one of the enemy soldiers was holding a bayonet. For a split second, it looked like he would drive the bayonet into Babitz’s back but he did not. Belanger was tensed and ready to shoot him. “Then they went by. They kept chattering and chattering, Japanese lingo, and they went down that draw.” When the voices died down, Belanger stood up, hollered, “Tojo eats shit!” and hurled all of his grenades into the ravine. Still shaking from their close call, he and Babitz made their way back to their 60-millimeter mortar position in support of C Company, 21st Marines.
¹⁷

In these last few moments before the great attack, other Japanese were nowhere near as stealthy. Private Bill Karpowicz, who was peering into the night, aiming his Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) in the general direction of the Japanese lines, could hear them “yelling, making noises like beating of metal drums, whistle blowing etc.” Another Marine heard the enemy “laughing like shrill hyenas, clanging sabers against bayonets shouting ‘The emperor draws much blood tonight.’ ” Other Americans heard the sounds of bottles shattering amid slurred bellows, shrieks, and screams. The Japanese soldiers hollered many chilling phrases: “Wake up, American, and die!” “Marine, you die tonight!” One even cried “Fuck Babe Ruth!” Sometimes they parroted the Americans, hurling grenades and yelling “Fire in the hole!” or “Corpsman!” The yelling was a classic example of posturing. Human beings, when facing a fight, will often scream, carry on, and strike an aggressive pose in hopes of forcing their opponent to flee. In this instance, though, the Americans were far from intimidated. Although the roaring enemy voices were eerie, most of the Marines were well used to this kind of thing. “It sounded like New Year’s Eve in the Zoo,” one of them sniffed. There was not one recorded instance of a Marine running away at the sound of the enemy screams.
¹⁸

Supported by an intense mortar barrage, a wave of disjointed attacks hit the American lines just after midnight. Saber-wielding Japanese officers led the way. Enlisted men carried rifles, grenades, knives, bayonets, explosives, and even, in a few instances, pitchforks and baseball bats. Screaming “banzai,” they hurled themselves across open ground, into ravines and gullies, over the tops of ridges and up hills, straight into American machine-gun fire. They went down in droves but, in no time, the frenzied survivors were among the American holes. Frank Goodwin was awakened by the bloodcurdling scream of a Japanese soldier who jumped right into his hole. Startled and terrified, he rolled onto his back and pointed his pistol, “firing at the same time, hitting the Jap in the face and he fell right on top of me.” All at once, another enemy soldier was in the hole attacking Goodwin’s buddy, a large man named Jernberg. The big Marine grabbed the smaller Japanese soldier, “picked him right up by the crotch . . . and threw him out of the hole and then went after him. Somehow or other, he found a rock in the middle of this and smashed his head in. All along our lines the screaming Japs were making their assault. We fought . . . with anything we could get our hands on, entrenching tools, pistols, rifles, fists, and rifle butts as they were right in the holes with us.” Some of the Japanese had explosive demolition kits strapped to their chests. They tried to jump into the American holes and detonate the explosives. “There were pieces of flesh flying all over the area” as Japanese soldiers detonated their kits.

Ed Adamski, the dog handler, saw Big Boy spring to full alert and emit a snarling bark. A split second later, the Japanese were running right at his machine-gun positions. As Big Boy lunged to attack them, the machine gunners opened up, mowing down rows of enemy soldiers. Adamski aimed his carbine at one man and hit him twice in the chest. But there were many more, all over the place, screaming, shooting, and trying to jump into Marine holes. “You could hear ’em popping the grenades on their helmets [to arm them] . . . then the explosion.” Adamski was shooting at them with one hand and dragging Big Boy back into the hole with the other. A grenade exploded close, showering his chest with fragments, knocking him out from concussion. Big Boy somehow remained unscathed.

The same could not be said for Private First Class Dale Fetzer’s dog, Skipper. When the Japanese attacked Fetzer’s foxhole, Skipper obediently remained in the hole while his master fought hand to hand with a Japanese soldier. Another enemy soldier dropped a grenade into the hole. The explosion sent shrapnel into Fetzer’s legs, knocking him into the hole. Skipper had massive shrapnel wounds. As the fighting raged around them, Fetzer tried to administer first aid to his beloved dog, but to no avail. The young Marine had his head pressed against Skipper’s chest and listened as his companion’s heart stopped beating. Rage engulfed Private First Class Fetzer. “I went crazy. I stood up there like a wild man shooting. Around my foxhole, there must have been eight or ten Japs laying there. They shouldn’t have killed my dog. That was just like a piece of me.”
¹⁹

The situation was beyond chaotic. The fighting was personal, intimate. It was warfare at its most elementary and nasty. Baker Company of the 21st Marines was especially hard hit, and nearly wiped out, because the unit was right in the path of Takashina’s main attack. Private First Class Mack Drake, a BAR man in the company, was on the unit’s right flank, atop Bundschu Ridge, blazing away at Japanese shapes in the shadowy half-light of flares. A grenade exploded a few feet to the right, breaking his assistant’s hip and lacing Drake’s right ear, shoulder, and face with fragments. Still, the eighteen-year-old from Hendersonville, North Carolina, kept reloading twenty-round clips into his BAR and shooting. “I . . . shot several of the enemy in front of my position and their bodies were lying in front of me.” A sword-wielding Japanese officer saw Drake and charged at him. “He tripped while swinging the sword and fell toward me. I was able to finish him off aided by my K-bar knife.” Drake’s use of the euphemism “finish him off” is revealing and typical. True, he did end the officer’s life, but finishing him off really meant stabbing him to death, a traumatic method of extinction for killer and victim alike, so much so that it is hard for the killer to describe it without the emotional distance afforded by a euphemism.

Not far away, Private First Class Roger Belanger, the mortarman who had earlier bumped into the Japanese as they were infiltrating the American lines, was desperately fighting for personal survival (similar to every other American that night). “My carbine stock was broken [from using it as a club]. I bit one Jap’s nose right off his face and spit it out. I had [a] Bowie knife and I used that. I took that Bowie knife and I grabbed him in the stomach and stabbed. We were using rocks or anything. I was taught to chew tobacco and I got to like it and I was spitting in their eyes. I did a lot of atrocious things. It was my life or theirs. It sounds like a movie, but it wasn’t.” Nearby, an enemy officer sliced open the abdomen of another Marine. The American lay badly wounded, his guts hanging out, creeping down his leg. The Japanese soldier went down in a hail of bullets.
²⁰

But the Japanese were still coming in ranks four deep. Private First Class Jim Headley, a member of an artillery forward observation team, mowed down several enemy soldiers with accurate carbine fire. He noticed a Marine just ahead, almost in the line of fire, and he kept yelling at him to move, but he would not. Just as Headley was about to run out of ammo, someone from another foxhole passed him a sock full of clips. Alongside Headley, Corporal Elwood Richter was firing with impunity at the approaching figures. “It was like shooting fish in a rain barrel,” he later said.