Operation Easy Street (Jock Miles WW2 Adventure Series Book 3)

by William Peter Grasso

  He didn’t finish the sentence because the rest of it would have been and half them sumbitches died.

  Instead, Patchett said, “But I’ve gotta ask…how the hell did a company commander, of all people, get laid low like this? I figured some dumbass private would be the first one drinking water he shouldn’t.”

  Too busy to consider an answer, the medic said, “Who knows, Sergeant Major? Who the hell knows?”

  I think I know how he might have gotten it, Jock told himself. That head-dunking I gave him in the swamp a couple of days ago to duck those bullets…

  Shit. You save a man’s life…but the saving might kill him anyway.

  Patchett asked the medic, “You give him any sulfa yet?”

  “Not yet, Sergeant Major. Dehydration’s the biggest danger right now. I’m waiting on this shit-blast to finish, then I’ve got to get the lieutenant rehydrated and up to Doc at battalion so—”

  Patchett cut him off. “Save it, son, we all know the drill.” Looking to Jock, he asked, “What do you want to do about Charlie Company’s command, sir?”

  “I’ll bet Lieutenant Grossman’s already taken care of that,” Jock replied. “Am I right, Sergeant Hadley?”

  “Yes, sir,” Hadley said, “Lieutenant Havers has already stepped up to acting company commander.”

  “Very well,” Jock replied. “Get Lieutenant Grossman to the battalion aid station as soon as you can. Doc will want him shipped back to Port Moresby, I’m sure.”

  Despite his pitiful state, Lee Grossman heard every word. He managed to sit up and, his voice a dry, harsh croak, say, “No, sir…no evacuation…please…I’ll…I’ll be okay.”

  Jock tried to offer a comforting hand to Grossman but the medic stopped him. “Better not, sir,” the medic said. “It’s a mess around here right now…fecal matter everywhere…and dysentery’s highly contagious.”

  Shrugging off the medic, Jock said to Grossman, “We’ll see, Lee. We’ll see. Right now, you just rest. Don’t worry about a thing.”

  Turning to Hadley, Jock added, “First Sergeant, fill in this latrine as soon as they’re done here. Dig a new one for the healthy men and another for the sick. Keep them far apart. Make sure any man who touches a shovel washes up real good.”

  “Good plan, sir,” Patchett said. “Couldn’t have put it better myself.”

  As they once again began their walk back to the battalion CP, Jock added, for Patchett’s ears only, “The last thing in the world we need right now is a whole bunch of our men dying from the shits.”

  “Amen to that, sir,” Patchett replied.

  “And where’d you pick up this nancy-boy stuff, Top? Are you trying to learn the King’s English from your Aussie girlfriend, too?”

  Patchett smiled. “Among other things, sir.”

  Chapter Twenty

  The Japanese sergeant took comfort in one—and only one—fact: Our officers are very brilliant men.

  They designed this network of fortifications we cower in—these bunkers of logs, steel, and earth. So efficiently laid out, so resistant to enemy detection and fire even sick, starving, and exhausted men like us can stop our adversaries in their tracks.

  All we have to do is point our weapons out the firing slits when ordered and pull the triggers. The enemy drop like flies. They never see us. We see only fleeting glimpses of them just before they fall.

  Not long ago, this beautiful patch of land was a coconut palm plantation.

  Now, it’s a killing field.

  My men and I were never at Port Moresby, never fought our way triumphantly over the mountains only to flee back. We’ve been in Papua only a month.

  We’re lucky: it takes longer than a month for a man to starve to death.

  But it only takes a moment to lose your mind when the bombs and shells start to fall.

  Already, two of my men are locked in that moment forever. Call it shell-shock, combat fatigue—whatever you wish…

  Insanity is the same no matter what name it hides behind.

  The sunrise began to cast its rays through the firing slits, slicing across the interior of the bunker like the beams of searchlights, blazing a row of neat rectangles along the rear wall.

  A new day, the Japanese sergeant told himself. I wonder if the enemy will—

  The muted poom of artillery fire answered his unfinished question. He and his men had barely an instant to exchange looks of panic before the rounds came screaming in.

  Jock had watched the Australian artillery at work long enough. He put down his binoculars and told Lieutenant Fairburn, “Okay…one more volley at that corner bunker, then cut it off.”

  Patchett’s face registered agreement. He asked, “How many rounds will that leave us, Lieutenant?”

  “Six per gun, Sergeant Major,” the Aussie replied.

  Patchett grimaced as he calculated: Six rounds times four guns…twenty-four rounds total. Just barely enough if we need to exploit a success…or cover a retreat.

  “Get Able and Baker Companies moving,” Jock told his radio operator. “Let’s take a bunker or two from these bastards while their heads are still spinning.”

  Lying flat on his belly, Lieutenant Theo Papadakis felt he could reach out and touch that corner bunker—the one Charlie Company had failed to take in their attack two days ago. Crawling forward with the lead squad of his company—Able Company—Papadakis was close enough to see the bunker for what it was: a long, low earthen mound, overgrown with vegetation, with narrow firing slits carved just above ground level.

  Although the artillery fire had shattered wide swaths of coconut palms and heaved up mounds of earth all around, the bunker didn’t seem to be damaged at all. But no shots had come from it.

  They were only 50 feet away.

  “I’m gonna put a grenade through one of them shooting holes, sir,” the squad leader whispered to Papadakis.

  He pulled the safety pin…rose to a kneeling position, his arms splayed like a baseball pitcher delivering a killer fastball…

  And that was as far as the sergeant got. The Nambu machine gun opened up from the bunker and cut him down.

  The grenade fell to the ground at Papadakis’s feet, its safety lever gone, its fuze burning. If he hadn’t felt it bounce off his boot, he might never have noticed: his head, like everyone else’s, was pressed tight to the ground, hiding from the machine gun bullets.

  Four to five seconds until detonation, a voice in his head recited like a drill instructor. That clock had started ages ago.

  Four to five seconds…

  Had that interval of time ever seemed so long…or so short?

  Pivoting his prone body, he grabbed the grenade and flung it with all the awkward strength he could muster toward the bunker.

  It exploded halfway there—still in midair—claiming nothing and no one as its victim, leaving only tiny vortices of uplifted dirt and shredded vegetation where the fragments struck.

  Theo Papadakis pulled the walkie-talkie to him. “ONLY ONE NAMBU FIRING,” he shrieked to 2nd Platoon on the left. “IT CAN’T COVER OUR WHOLE FRONT. GET AROUND AND BEHIND IT…NOW!”

  Second Platoon’s leader—Lieutenant Squibb—was thinking the same thing even before his company commander’s voice spilled from the radio:

  If we can get behind this fucking bunker, that could be all she wrote for the Japs. One Nambu shooting through one little slit ain’t got enough field of fire to stop us all.

  He ordered his men forward.

  Squibb was startled when the point man of the lead squad—moving on the dead run—suddenly dropped from sight.

  What the fuck? Nobody shot him, did they?

  The point man wasn’t shot. He was lying in the mud at the bottom of a shallow trench, alive but in much pain.

  “My fucking knee, Lieutenant,” the point man moaned to the platoon leader. “I think I tore it up. Where’d this fucking hole come from, anyway? Better not be some Jap latrine.”

  It wasn’t a latrine. They’d found their fi
rst communications trench: furrows that allowed the Japs to crawl from bunker to bunker unseen and under cover. In one direction, the trench sketched a beeline to their objective: the bunker guarding the southeast corner of the plantation.

  In the opposite direction could only be another bunker—one sitting on the southern edge of the plantation. That bunker hadn’t fired a shot at them yet, as near as they could tell.

  Now or never, Lieutenant Squibb told himself. Motioning for his men to follow, he dashed to the corner bunker.

  From inside, the Nambu kept on playing its staccato rhythm of death.

  There was an opening on the back side, framed with timbers…

  This must be the way in…

  He made a grenade his calling card:

  Fire in the hole, you sons of bitches!

  There was a muffled, uninspired thud as it detonated inside the bunker.

  Why do grenades always sound so damn disappointing when they go off?

  But the Nambu stopped firing.

  The lieutenant stepped through the entrance into the dim interior of the bunker. He was surprised—it seemed so much smaller inside than out, its roof so low he couldn’t stand straight.

  Claustrophobic…that’s the word.

  The stench greeting him made him lurch backward—a nauseating mix of spent gunpowder, excrement, decay…and death.

  Unable to see much—and not wanting to—Squibb slammed his eyes shut and emptied the magazine of his Thompson into the bunker’s interior. The sound of his weapon firing in that hellish echo chamber assaulted his body like the blows of a mallet.

  Fumbling in his web gear for a new magazine, he opened his eyes…

  Shit! They ain’t dead!

  But they weren’t fighting back, either.

  He tried to guess how many…a dozen, two dozen?

  They squirmed like a tangled mass of worms in the muck of the bunker’s floor…

  Half-naked, sickly, swimming among their own dead, their skin ghastly white canvases for the brushstrokes of blood and mud, trying to get away…

  But with nowhere to run.

  It looks like that painting of asylum inmates I saw once.

  Their mouths were moving but made no sound. Nothing Squibb could hear, anyway—his ears rang like sirens from the blast of his Thompson in these close quarters.

  It’s like they’re begging...but for what? Life? Or death?

  He leveled his Thompson but couldn’t pull the trigger. Bile was burning its way up his throat.

  He lurched for the exit.

  Outside the bunker on all fours, the meager contents of his stomach now a small, mucousy puddle on the ground beneath him, Lieutenant Squibb heard the weapons of his GIs finishing what he had been unable to do.

  It took Theo Papadakis just seconds to run to the bunker Squibb’s 2nd Platoon had just seized. That run ended with him hugging the bunker’s front face for dear life: there was withering fire from deeper in the plantation raking its rear side.

  These fucking bunkers are laid out in depth, he realized. The next row is killing us.

  Now what?

  He could hear men—his men—shouting from inside the bunker. He slid down to a firing slit and yelled: “SQUIBB…YOU IN THERE?”

  “Yessir, I’m here. What do we do now?”

  Wish I had a quick answer to that question, Papadakis thought.

  “We’re pinned in here, Pop,” Squibb said. “I’ve got about half my platoon with me, the rest are in the commo trench to the south. We can’t go near the exit…bullets are coming through there like fucking sideways rain. I think I’ve got at least five men down already.”

  Papadakis asked, “Does your radio work?”

  “Don’t think so. I’ve been trying to call for artillery, mortars, anything. No one’s home.”

  “I’ll call it for you,” Papadakis replied. “How far out there you figure the next line of Japs are?”

  “No fucking idea, Pop. Take a guess.”

  “Okay, I’ll do it. Sit tight.”

  Jock had the artillery on the way within seconds of Theo Papadakis’s call.

  Studying the attack diagram, Jock picked up the mic and said, “Trenchfoot Six, this is Dry Rot Six. Can you move down the commo trenches to the adjacent bunkers, over?”

  “Not real sure, Dry Rot,” Papadakis replied. “I’ve got guys in the south trench but they’re pinned down. Looks like the next bunker—behind this one—finally woke up, over.”

  “Are there other trenches? Over.”

  “Not that I can see…but I can’t see a whole lot right now. My head’s up my ass. We’re getting creamed here, over.”

  The four Aussie howitzers let fly their first salvo.

  Patchett mentally clicked off the ammo count: Twenty rounds left.

  The artillery rounds screamed over Able Company’s heads and impacted about 50 yards deeper into the plantation.

  Cutting it a little close there, Papadakis told himself.

  But the Japanese fire seemed to wane.

  “Repeat,” Papadakis said. “I say again, repeat, over.”

  Four more rounds screamed over Able Company.

  Sixteen rounds left…

  The Japanese fire thinned to sporadic rifle shots.

  “Okay,” Papadakis said, “I think I’ve got an opening. I’m gonna hook up with Mildew Six on my left and push toward the south, to that next bunker, over.”

  “Roger, Trenchfoot. I’m committing Green Mold to exploit on your right, over.”

  “Roger…and thanks. I could use some cover from Green Mold on that flank. Better give me one more volley from the cannon-cockers, too, over.”

  Jock asked, “You sure you need that? We’re tight on rounds, over.”

  “I’d feel a whole lot better if I had it.”

  “Twelve, dammit,” Patchett mumbled as the Aussies let the rounds fly.

  Charlie Company—call sign Green Mold, with Lieutenant Havers now in command —was the battalion reserve for the attack. Major Miles had just committed them to exploit Able Company’s gain; Havers was scrambling like a chicken with his head cut off to put his company into action.

  Tom Hadley, his first sergeant, took Lieutenant Havers aside. “Are you sure you want to do it this way, Lieutenant?” Hadley asked. “You’re sending in one platoon at a time. That’s asking for trouble. All the platoons should attack at once…you know, massing of force and all that.”

  “We need to be cautious, Tom,” Havers replied. “Let’s probe first to see what we’re getting into.”

  Hadley bristled; he didn’t know Havers very well. Certainly not well enough to be on a first name basis:

  And his tone—like I should be grateful he’s lowering himself to be my buddy. Pretty snobby for a rookie C.O. fresh out of the box.

  Worse, several GIs had overheard the way the new company commander casually addressed him. That sort of informality could cripple a unit’s chain of command in no time flat. If he’d learned anything at all from Melvin Patchett, it was to never let a slip of discipline go uncorrected—not even for a second.

  “With all due respect, sir, it’s Sergeant Hadley. Even Top would be okay…if you don’t mind.”

  Without looking up from his map, Havers replied, “Sure, Sergeant. Whatever you like. Now let’s quit screwing around and get this show on the road.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Able Company owned the bunker in the southeast corner. Theo Papadakis—Trenchfoot Six—left Squibb’s platoon to defend it. With his other two platoons, he moved south along the commo trench toward the next bunker. Tony Colletti—Mildew Six—and his Baker Company would distract the Japanese in that bunker by feigning a frontal attack from the swamp. Once Colletti had the attention of the Japanese, Able Company’s two platoons would slip around and behind the bunker…and take it, too.

  It was the best chance they’d had so far.

  But the battalion radio net began to tell another tale:

  Trenchfoot Two-Six—
Squibb’s platoon at the corner bunker—was being overrun. The Japanese counterattack was coming from their right flank—exactly where Charlie Company—call sign Green Mold—was supposed to be covering.

  “We’re dropping the ball real bad, sir,” Tom Hadley told Lieutenant Havers. “Able Company’s getting the shit kicked out of them because we ain’t where we’re supposed to be. We’ve got to push forward—right now—with the whole damn company on line.”

  “You heard what First Platoon said after they got pushed back,” Havers replied. “The Japs are already there in force. We can’t cut them off now.”

  “In force, my sweet ass, sir. Couldn’t be more than a platoon or two of Japs doing the counterattack. If it was, we wouldn’t have a First Platoon anymore. They’d all be dead…instead of milling around here with their thumbs up their asses like the rest of us.”

  Lieutenant Havers didn’t seem to be listening. “Our only chance,” he insisted, “is to go around and behind the Japs hitting Able Company—”

  “That ain’t gonna help anybody, sir,” Hadley said. “It’ll be too little, too late. If we’re gonna pussyfoot around, we might as well save our energy and just call in the artillery and mortars on them.”

  Havers smirked and shook his head. “You do remember Battalion cautioning that we’re low on artillery and mortar ammo, don’t you, Sergeant?”

  “Yeah…but as long as we’ve still got it, using it’s better than getting everyone killed, sir. I’m pretty sure Battalion would want it that way.”

  “Negative, Sergeant…we’ll do like I said. Let’s get the company swung around to sweep from the north, platoons in column. Third Platoon will lead.”

  “No, sir…not in column. We’ve already made that mistake enough today. We need platoons on line…more firepower up front that way.”

  “Sergeant, did I not make myself clear?”

  “Please, sir…at least two platoons up and one back, then?”

  Havers shook his head. “Negative. I want my platoons in column. No more discussion. Now let’s get moving.”