Shadows In the Jungle (22 page)

“Suppressing fire! Blaise, go.”

Weiland, Coleman, and Sumner laid down covering fire as Blaise, lugging the thirty-five-pound radio with the handset still to his ear, took off across the sand and into the water after his two comrades.

The Japanese were doing everything they could to prevent the escape. Waterspouts from bullets kicked up all around the men.

“Weiland, you're next,” Sumner said. “Reverse marching fire! Go.”

As Coleman and Sumner laid down covering fire, Weiland stepped out of the vegetation and walked backward, sending three-round bursts from the BAR at the concealed enemy. Sumner marveled as Weiland, emptying one clip, expertly removed it, jammed it into his fatigue jacket, took a new one from his ammo pouch, rammed it home, and continued firing.

As Weiland entered the water, spraying lead to the left and front, the .30-caliber rounds buzzed by his team leader's head. Sumner called to Coleman, “Pull back on me, diversion fire to the front and right.”

The two broke cover together and ran for the water, with Coleman laying down suppressing fire in all directions with short bursts from his submachine gun. Sumner thanked God for the hard, sandy ocean floor, which afforded good footing. In addition, the water got deeper the farther out they went, but not so deep that the men could not wade. In fact, the depth was perfect, since it left the men with only their heads and shoulders exposed, giving the Japanese small, hard-to-hit targets. Still the Japanese tried, and hot lead whirred and hissed into the water all around them. The fire seemed especially hot from the nine-man patrol on the right. Sumner ordered Weiland to direct his BAR in that direction.

As he waded backward, Sumner glanced over his shoulder. Jones and Renhols were just reaching the rubber boat, which was about a hundred yards offshore, and were being hauled into it by Aguilar and the sailor.

“We might make it after all,” he thought.

* * *

Watching the watery escape from the PT boat, McGowen grinned.

“Outstanding,” he said to himself.

The radio crackled. It was the Aussie pilot.

“I see six men in the water. Is that everyone? Over.”

“It is,” McGowen radioed back. “Give 'em hell, my friend. Over and out.”

The Beaufighter winged over to the left and Morgan gunned his engines as he made his run toward the beach.

* * *

Waist-deep in the water, still facing the shore, Sumner was unaware of the air cover until he heard the whine of the two Bristol Hercules engines. Raising his eyes skyward, he saw the plane screaming down, lining up on the tree line. Then the Beaufighter's six heavy .50-caliber machine guns and four nose-mounted 20mm cannons opened fire, tearing up the vegetation just twenty-five yards in front of Sumner. To cut the margin of safety that close, Sumner knew, this guy had to be good.

A hundred feet off the ground, the Beaufighter, its engines roaring, raked the shore, sending clouds of dust and debris high into the air and diminishing the Japanese fire by half. The plane then climbed into the sky.

The PT boat held its fire until Sumner reached the rubber boat, then the eager gunners squeezed their triggers. Brightly burning tracer rounds streaked overhead and disappeared into the jungle. Between each tracer, Sumner knew, were five unseen rounds.

In the sky, the Beaufighter had completed his turn and came screaming down for a second pass. Again his guns hammered the Japanese positions, their heavy slugs shredding the vegetation as the men in the rubber boat cheered.

“God bless that Aussie,” Coleman said, voicing the team's praise. “He saved our sorry asses.”

Arms reached out and pulled Sumner into the rubber boat. Bullets from shore now had ceased, but not before a few struck home. Portions of the rubber boat had been hit and deflated, but the craft's internal compartmentalization kept it afloat. Manning every available oar, the men rowed the wounded, sluggish craft toward the PT boat, coming around the seaward side and out of the Japanese line of fire. Scouts threw their gear on board before climbing up themselves with the help of the contact team.

As Sumner reached the PT deck, he heard McGowen's radio crackle to life.

“Are all aboard? Over,” Morgan asked.

“Recovery complete, no casualties. Over.”

“Good show, Yanks. Tell your swagmen to keep their peaches up! Any sign of your other ranks? Over.”

McGowen turned to Sumner, who shook his head.

“Apparently not,” McGowen relayed. “Thanks much for your help, we are in your debt. If you get to Sixth Army HQ, look us up. The name is Lieutenant McGowen, and the beer's on us. Over.”

“Right-o. Glad to help out. Cheerio,” he said, and the plane faded away.

Once all were aboard and the damaged rubber boat recovered, the PT skipper opened his exhausts.

“Guess they know we're here now,” he said.

He headed the eighty-foot Elco out beyond the reefs. The other two PT boats had by now returned, and the three opened fire on the island again. The skipper of the frigate, cruising about five miles out, came over the radio and asked for instructions.

“Near the southern end of the island are a cluster of shacks,” Sumner said. “It's a supply base. You should be able to see the roofs.”

Scanning with his binoculars, the frigate commander said, “Yeah. Got 'em.”

Almost instantly, 40mm fire from the ship was directed at the experimentation station, followed by the loud boom of the five-inch guns. The shells tore through the air and burst among the buildings. Sumner watched in grim satisfaction as the huts seemed to dissolve under the heavy fire. The hidden sailboat, too, was blown into kindling. Then, at Sumner's direction, the frigate turned her guns on the officer's house, which was soon smothered by high-explosive rounds.

“I pity them poor, damned chickens,” Jones said.

Despite the pounding they were taking, the Japanese sent small-arms and mortar rounds at the PT boats.

“Plucky bastards, aren't they?” Weiland said.

As the PTs lessened their fire, McGowen and Sumner descended below to the wardroom.

“That was by far the best show I've ever seen,” McGowen said. “And your withdrawal from the island was brilliant. It took guts.”

“There was no other way,” Sumner said.

“True,” McGowen agreed. “I know it made Aguilar unhappy. He was crappin' his pants at the prospect of rowing that rubber bull's-eye to shore.”

“But he still came,” Sumner observed.

McGowen said, “The PT boats are going off in another direction, so we will be transferring to the frigate at twelve hundred—that's about an hour from now. Meanwhile, tell me what you found onshore.”

Sumner proceeded to brief McGowen on their movements after reaching the island, up to and including the moment they were spotted by the Japanese.

“I'm convinced General Patrick was right,” he concluded. “Those men are dead. Had they been alive, they'd have tried to contact us, especially after we began mixing it up with the Nips.”

An hour later, the team scrambled up cargo nets onto the frigate and, they felt, into the lap of luxury. Billeted in the sick bay for the eighteen-hour cruise back to Noemfoor, they had clean sheets, air-conditioning, showers, and the best food they had tasted in weeks.

After dining and cleaning up, the men turned in and slept soundly.

Not long afterward, the Australian fliers, Morgan and Cassidy, dropped by the Alamo Hotel, where they and the Scouts got happily sloshed.

* * *

Several nights after the Pegun Island mission, the propagandist Tokyo Rose broadcast that, “Imperial Marines have repulsed an Allied attack on the Mapia Islands with losses.”

Jones guffawed at the report.

“Hey, baby,” he said to the sultry voice on the radio. “We had no casualties, so it musta been your side who had the losses.”

Three months later, on November 15, elements of the 2nd Battalion, 167th Infantry Regiment, Sumner's old unit, landed on Pegun Island with no enemy resistance. The Japanese were gone.

The commander, Lt. Col. Leon L. Matthews, reported that his troops had discovered the bodies of three enlisted men in a common grave. Two of them had their hands tied behind their backs with telephone wire and had been shot in the back of the head. Although none of them had dog tags, their uniforms bore markings of the army air corps.

* * *

On New Year's Day 1945, in a ceremony on Leyte, Sumner's men were each awarded the Bronze Star for their rescue attempt on Pegun Island.

CHAPTER 9

 

 

 

 

O
n September 9, the ASTC graduated its fourth class, two teams under Lt. William E. Nellist of Eureka, California, and Lt. Thomas J. Rounsaville of Atoka, Oklahoma. Nellist, who had served with the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 11th Airborne during the fight at Buna, was an easygoing man. An avid duck hunter and fisherman since he was seven years old, he was at home in nature and had earned the nickname “the White Indian.” A California National Guard rifle champion, he was the best marksman among all of the Alamo Scouts.

“Stud” Rounsaville, twenty-five, was also a rugged soldier, coming to the Scouts from the 187th Glider Infantry Regiment of the 11th Airborne. Tall and gangly, with a contagious sense of humor, the all-arms-and-legs Oklahoman was an exceptionally fine leader and tactician, as he was about to prove.

Rounsaville was justly proud of the tough and diverse team he had assembled. There was the Hawaiian-born Tech Sgt. Alfred “Opu” Alfonso and Sgt. Harold N. Hard, a schoolteacher from Coldwater, Michigan, and Pfc. Franklin Fox of Dayton, Ohio. Pfc. Francis H. Laquier was a Chippewa Indian from the White Earth Reservation in Early, Minnesota, who, like Rounsaville, had been a paratrooper. Laquier had served with the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment and, to Rounsaville's delight, had a keen eye for detail and could draw a map as well as any engineer. And last was Pfc. Rufo V. Vaquilar. Bearing the nickname “Pontiac,” the outbreak of the war had found Vaquilar in a Pontiac, Illinois, jail. He won a pardon when he volunteered for the military and served, for a while, with the 1st Filipino Regiment until, at the ripe old age of thirty-four, he joined the Alamo Scouts.

Late September found the Rounsaville and Nellist teams attached to the Netherlands East Indies Administration on Roemberpon Island, three miles off the eastern coast of the Vogelkop. The Scouts had been keeping an eye on Japanese barge traffic and supply bases operating near the Maori River south of Manokwari. The duty had been relatively uneventful. They had spent the few weeks since their graduation “conducting small patrols on the mainland and with the navy riding around in PT boats,” Nellist recalled. Then, on September 28, Rounsaville was approached by a Dutch lieutenant decked out in jungle fatigues topped by an Australian bush hat with the brim characteristically turned up.

Following up on Alamo Scout Bill Littlefield's mission from August, Lt. Louie Rapmund of the Netherlands-Indies Civil Administration was using Roemberpon as an evacuation point for Indian prisoners and natives who had been released by the Japanese on the Vogelkop. Rapmund had been told by one of the native men that the former Dutch governor of the area, along with his family and a number of native servants, was being held by the Japanese in a small village at Cape Oransbari, near the Maori River. Rapmund, accompanied by the ex-prisoner, passed the information to Rounsaville, who was in daily contact with 6th Army G2.

Although operations in New Guinea were nearing an end, so far as MacArthur and the top brass were concerned, there were still some 200,000 Japanese stranded on the big island and on smaller isles offshore in bypassed pockets of resistance. In several of these pockets the enemy held hostages, mostly Dutch, Melanesian, and Australian, usually serving as laborers for the emperor.

Some two thousand of these stranded Japanese were holed up around Cape Oransbari, and about thirty of those were in a small village-turned-prison-camp near the Maori River, two and a half miles inland from the coast.

Shortly after relaying the information to his headquarters, Rounsaville and his team, along with Rapmund and the former hostage, were paddling ashore at Cape Oransbari, landing at the mouth of the Wassoenger River, about six miles north of the village. The jungle terrain was difficult and it took several hours to pick their way through the tangled growth. Having finally arrived at the edge of the village, the Americans lay concealed as they observed and took notes. With his sharp eye and training, Rounsaville noted the approximate number of the enemy, the location of the huts, covered approaches leading to the village, and other details. Moving toward the coast, he mapped out an evacuation point, but found it guarded by a Japanese machine-gun emplacement. When Rounsaville felt he had all the information he needed, the men withdrew.

This would be a two-team job.

* * *

Like Rounsaville, Bill Nellist was an excellent soldier and tactician. One of the few married Scouts, he and his wife, Jane, had wedded shortly before shipping out. He was “rough and tough,” she recalled in 2007.

Nellist originally planned to become a sniper because of his excellent marksmanship. He could hit rocks thrown into the air, as well as targets, by shooting backward over his shoulder with the aid of a mirror. Instead, he volunteered for the Alamo Scouts, and he and Rounsaville had been the only two officers retained from the fourth training class. They knew each other very well—how the other man thought, his abilities and talents—and they had formed a close bond.