The Persimmon Tree (76 page)

‘You’ll use it every morning to shave. If you have a bad shave then it’s not sharp enough, boyo,’ he’d said gruffly. ‘Stay sharp in everything: fitness, attitude, awareness, caution, circumspection, respect, brains, but above all these, keep your blade sharp and ever at the ready. Half of one second of carelessness may be the difference between dying and staying alive. The whetstone is your dagger’s best friend.’ He’d reached over and patted me on the shoulder, smiling. I’d never seen him smile. ‘The knife is yours for the duration of the war. Then I want it back. I want you to personally hand it back to me. Righto, Duncan, it’s your shout, boyo.’

And so I found myself in the radio dugout with my Owen submachine-gun and wearing my Australian jungle greens, with the little brass plate resting in the pocket above my heart. I can’t say the fatigues hadn’t attracted attention in the week I’d been wearing them since Wainwright’s parcel arrived. ‘Thou shalt be fit, fitter than anyone else in the army, navy or air force’ was the first mantra of our training on Fraser Island. I had promised my instructors that I’d keep up what we’d come to know as the ‘morning death bash’; that is, running five miles in army marching gear carrying an Owen with a light pack containing two hundred rounds of ammunition and four thirty-three-round magazines. I’d do this in the cool of every morning, resting on Sundays. At first there were a good few wolf whistles and chiacking from the marines, but eventually they got accustomed to seeing me jogging through the plantation, around the airfield and back along the beach from Lungga Point. Young blokes like me react to the standards set by men they respect, blokes who are better than them in every department. I felt, despite the sedentary radio job I’d been given, that I wanted to stay combat fit and razor sharp, the way we’d been conditioned on Fraser. One or two marines had come along with me a couple of times and I guess I’d earned their respect. They stopped calling out ‘Robin Hood’, ‘Joe Palooka’, ‘Charles Atlas’ or even once ‘Hey, Tarzan, where’s Jane? I needa get laid bad, buddy!’

The Japanese assault arrived that night led by Major General Kiyotaki Kamaguchi. The first attack seemed tentative and I quickly picked up on their radio that elements of their force had been delayed; they were having trouble getting troops into position for a coordinated attack. I couldn’t believe it when I heard the Japanese general screaming abuse at his officers directly, without using code. This inability to mass his troops would clearly prevent a major assault that night.

However, this didn’t mean the Japs were a pushover, far from it. My first taste of combat, even if only as a witness from the relative safety of our dugout, was horrendous, beyond anything I’d imagined. All night the Japs attacked the perimeter of our positions in small groups. The noise was unbelievable and reporting back to base during the night was almost impossible. I took to jotting down notes within a time frame for later use. Any commentary I would make would have to be done by using recall. The almost continuous cracking of rifles and streams of tracer bullets from our machine-guns, together with the ‘crump-crump’ of grenades exploding, seemed to make the air fizz with sound. But most of all, the concussion of shells landing left us virtually deaf. Yet through all this hellish cacophony, amazingly, you could hear the screams of dying and wounded men.

Some Japs managed to penetrate in between our foxholes where desperate hand-to-hand fighting took place. But by dawn the marines had held firm and the enemy had all but withdrawn. I handed Beljo his grenade belt. ‘Go on, mate, throw one so you can say you fought at Guadalcanal.’

‘Jesus, thanks, Nick,’ he said, taking the grenade, pulling the pin and hastily hurling the grenade into the battlefield. ‘Take dat, ya dirty yellow slant-eyed sonofabitches!
Banzai
and fuck ya too!’ he yelled.

As none of the enemy had come within fifty yards of the radio dugout the grenade landed harmlessly. Belgiovani had just boosted his eventual grandpa-to-grandchildren ‘How I won the war in the Pacific’ bullshit factor by 100 per cent.

The slopes of the ridge back to the edge of the jungle two hundred yards away were strewn with bodies, many more Japanese than ours, but we’d copped more than our fair share and several of the officers I’d got to know and like lay dead. One of them was Brutus Brokenhorse, an American Indian who’d jumped the colour divide and been made lieutenant:
‘
Hey, buddy, I’m coming over to ride a big old kangaroo in your mesa desert when this goddamn war is
finished!’ He was the only bloke who’d managed to stay with me on a morning run and we’d become good buddies. I was pretty choked but was about to learn that grief has to be reserved for a private moment.

All morning a stream of the wounded left the ridge for the forward hospital at Henderson Field. Burial details removed the bodies of the dead marines from the ridge and placed them in white cotton shrouds, loading them carefully into trucks, then the bodies of the Japs were manhandled and piled in heaps at the bottom of the slope to discourage the enemy if they thought to come back for another go at us — as we expected they would. By early afternoon they had begun to smell in the heat. Dog tired, I spent the morning and half the afternoon collating and translating documents taken from dead Japanese officers for our tactical intelligence report.

Despite the fact that I’d managed almost no on-the-spot commentary, Colonel Woon — who’d come to our dugout in the mid-morning and had a bit of a listen to the wire recording — reckoned the experiment to get radio commentary recorded on the battlefield into the homes of America had the potential to be a big success.

Our early report that Major General Kiyotaki Kamaguchi wasn’t able to mount a full-scale attack was, as Colonel Woon put it, ‘A fucking triumph, Nick!’ This accolade was delivered despite the fact that we could probably have picked up the broadcast by the Japanese field radio and made the same report while remaining at the base. He probably knew this, but it was possible Colonel Edson didn’t. On the ridge we were technically under the same orders as the marines, who were told to clean their weapons and remain in position for the night to come. While I would have given anything for a shower and a clean uniform, Beljo and I were obliged to do the same.

We spent the late afternoon checking our equipment and went through the usual routines. I’d taken the precaution of again forbidding Belgiovani to touch his grenades. ‘Stick to your Springfield if we need to go into action,’ I advised, ‘but for fuck’s sake, Beljo, remember why we’re here: commentary, not combat.’

We were both pretty whacked. Between us we’d edited the sounds of the previous night’s battle and dubbed in my voice, using the time-frame notes I’d made, and the results seemed plausible. Anyway, with Greg Woon top-and-tailing it, I reckoned we probably had a goer. After this, I’d managed about an hour’s sleep in the dugout.

Although we’d kept the faith and (except for Beljo’s bullshit-factor early-morning hand grenade) we hadn’t personally been involved in the fighting, nevertheless, I felt, despite a night with only an hour’s sleep, a huge sense of relief that I’d survived. I can tell you for a start, Nicholas Duncan was beginning to seriously modify his previous gung-ho, let me at ’em,
Boys’ Own Annual
attitude. War was shit and I’d already had a gutful without having fired a shot.

The marines were looking pretty tattered around the edges; they too had had almost no sleep, a great many of their officers were dead, there were no reinforcements and they were outnumbered by Japanese on a ratio of at least two or three to one. If anyone ever decries the Yanks’ ability in battle in front of me they’re likely to get an unexplained punch on the nose. The American marines, after I’d observed just one night of fighting, would always have my utmost admiration. These blokes were as good as you can get on a battlefield.

However, the battle was far from over. With a depleted force and many of the foxholes on the ridge unmanned, the shit really hit the fan on this night, the 13th of September 1942, in a battle that would become known as ‘Bloody Ridge’.

There is a half-light in the tropics, a short period between dusk and dark, when the eyes have to adjust, and it was precisely at this time that the Japanese attack began. Screaming, blowing whistles and banging gongs, they came out of the jungle into the small valley beyond it and started to climb the ridge. The first part of the battle was much the same as we’d recorded on the first night so I let it pass, but by ten o’clock with no moon, the tempo started to change. Wave after wave of Japs came screaming across the open valley and storming up the ridge, and in a matter of minutes they were all over our front positions. The hellish noise accompanied by the horrific sight of men locked in battle seen in the white glow of flares and star-shells, of men dying, the glint of bayonets seen in the flash of the heavy shells being fired from Henderson Field and landing in amongst the Japs, was like looking through the gates to hell.

There were more Japanese than ever there’d been in the previous attack and they just kept coming, like ants around an ant heap before a storm. While the previous fighting was perhaps one hundred and fifty yards away from our dugout, it was now much closer and coming towards us. Then, illuminated by a burst of star-shells, a group of six, led by an officer who was brandishing a sword, broke through into our perimeter and came directly towards us. ‘Sorry about this, Colonel,’ I said into the noise, tapping Belgiovani on the shoulder and pointing to his Springfield. In moments he was crouched over his rifle firing blindly into the air with his eyes closed. In my mind I heard the little bloke’s voice:
‘I want yer ta unnerstan’, I ain’t no fuckin’ hero.’

A single blue–white parachute flare hung in the sky and amongst the flashes of shells landing I saw that the six Japs and the bloke with the sword were still coming at us. I stepped out of the dugout to get a clear shot. I could hear Wainwright saying,
‘Now listen, boyo, this may be a submachine-gun, but it’s best used as a semi-automatic, one shot at a time. It’s an extension of your arm, laddie. Wait until the enemy is at around twenty-five yards, then it’s one in the chest and one just above the bridge of the nose — accuracy is life. We don’t want the enemy to suffer, do we? Don’t think, just let your body and your eyes do the work.
’

I guess I fell into some sort of neutral trance. I felt nothing and seemed unaware of what I was doing. Twenty to thirty or so yards in front of me each Jap in turn seemed to be acting as if they were puppets in slow motion with the strings suddenly loosened above them — there’d be a slight check as the first Owen bullet hit them in the chest, then almost instantly a sharp snapping back of the head as the nine-millimetre slug tore into their brain, whereupon they simply collapsed. In twenty seconds all seven were dead, the whole violent few seconds punctuated by the bucking of the Owen. Some popgun!

‘Holy shit! Did I see that?’ I heard Belgiovani shout.

Our position was at the base of the last knoll. Quite how the battle had skewed toward us I can’t say, but now the marines fell back and took up new positions, jumping into empty foxholes around us. I don’t know how you know these things, you simply do; perhaps it’s because you sense you have only moments to live, but I instinctively knew that this was close to being the last stand. There were no officers amongst the marines — they were probably all dead — and with one lousy pip I held the senior rank in that part of the battlefield.

I emptied my magazine at a group of Japs, breaking up their charge. One of them got through and I didn’t see him coming at me in a furious bayonet charge until almost too late. My magazine being empty, I dropped the Owen in great haste and reached down to my ankle and slid my dagger out of its sheath. What happened next was a story that was to grow out of all proportion in the next few days. But Wainwright had been correct — the way the Jap was charging at me, he was as good as ‘fookin’ dead’. The whetstone had done its work. Pivoting sideways and using my left hand, I grabbed his Arisaka rifle behind the long bayonet and pulled him off balance and towards me. The commando dagger sliced into him just above the belt, a rounded lightning slash, and then I pushed slightly upwards so that his entrails would spill onto the ground; using his momentum as he started to pivot over my hip, I withdrew the blade a fraction and then ripped it up under his sternum to shred his heart. The only sound from the Jap was a small surprised gasp. He was dead before he hit the ground. Jumping back into the dugout I realised that I was shaking. At the time I couldn’t have explained how I felt precisely, but I later realised it was a mixture of adrenalin, fear and disgust. But I have to be honest and confess that I also felt a fierce exhilaration. There is something very personal about killing a man with a knife and I was to learn that one never quite gets over it — those four seconds would haunt me all my life. I would also always remember the peculiar coppery smell, mixed with cordite, where the Japanese soldier’s blood had soaked my jungle greens.

‘Jesus, Harry H. Truman! Did I
also
see that?’ Belgiovani cried. Later several marines claimed to have witnessed the incident and swore they hadn’t seen a knife and that I’d ripped out the Jap’s entrails with my bare hands.

But there was no time to dwell on anything except the battle. The next group of what was to seem like a never-ending wave of Japanese was coming at us, illuminated by the flares that festooned the ridge. Changing magazines on the Owen, I joined the stygian chorus of deafening small-arms fire that was cutting down the Japs. But still they came. During the remainder of the night I fired nearly all of the three hundred rounds I’d lugged into our dugout. As the pale light of dawn (a hackneyed phrase, I know!) finally arrived we realised that the Japs were retreating, although by no means in an orderly manner. They’d turned their backs on us and were running down the slope, many dropping their weapons on the way. The marines surged out of their foxholes and chased after them. I’m ashamed to say I was amongst them. What followed was a frenzy of killing, but we were halted short of the valley fronting the jungle by the snarl, the roar, of aero engines as our fighters swept low over the ridge, strafing the frantically retreating enemy. They were closely followed by bombers who dropped high explosives on the periphery of the jungle and beyond. We would later learn that a further six hundred enemy had been killed as they attempted to flee and hide in the jungle.