by War;Bluegrass If Trouble Don't Kill Me: A Family's Story of Brotherhood
• • •
The trip from Hawaii was long—ten days to the small island of Enewetak. That was to be the staging area for the Yap invasion, for which the troops had studied and prepared during the voyage. Trouble was, once the Deadeyes arrived at Enewetak, they were ordered to forget about Yap because that invasion had been canceled. The Deadeyes had a new mission: the Philippines. The division was seasick not just from ocean travel but from being jerked around. In the past year, the Deadeyes had trained to fight Germans in the desert and Japanese in the jungle, and they had wasted time learning about an island upon which they would never set combat boots. Just who was running this war?
The Deadeyes sweated out their time in boiling heat and humidity while waiting aboard ships for their specific target. Not a comfortable spot could be found above decks or below. Men engaged in calisthenics and weapon inspections until, finally, they learned the specific target—the island of Leyte, right in the bowels of the Philippine chain.
Americans were returning to the Philippines, just as MacArthur had promised two years earlier when the Japanese chased him out and captured the islands less than a year after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Deadeyes became immersed in crash courses about what to expect and do. More than twenty thousand seasoned Japanese troops would be dug in. Philippine guerillas had maintained an insurgency against the occupiers. Men should take daily doses of Atabrine to ward off malaria. Halazone tablets were needed to purify water. Other dangerous parasites and diseases were present, so the men were warned to avoid rice paddies and bogs. Clayton and most of F Company boarded USS LST 1024, where a scale-model sand carving of Leyte was displayed on deck, revealing the island’s topography and landing sites. On board, men stayed up late sharpening bayonets and trench knives. The time had come to fight.
In two days, Clayton would be helping to lead the charge on a beach in the Philippines, part of a mighty armada about to make good on McArthur’s promise.
• • •
Could he really do it? Could he really kill a man? When the bullets were flying and the blood was pumping, would Clayton find it in himself to shoot another human being like he was nothing more than a squirrel, or gig him like a frog, or slit his throat? When Clayton drifted off into fitful sleep the night before his first battle, he did not know the answer. He would know it before he slept again.
The men aboard LST 1024 awoke to reveille at 0400 hours.
The sea was calm but the clear sky thundered with steel and rockets. Shells and bombs pounded the small island of Leyte as Clayton climbed into an amphibious vehicle that would carry him and more than twenty other men to shore. The LVT—or landing vehicle tracked—churned through the surf until it was stopped by a seawall. The men poured out and over the wall and ran in zigzagging patterns to avoid enemy bullets that popped in the sand and water.
For the sixty-some years since the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the opening phase of the Philippines invasion has been officially described as having met “light resistance” from the Japanese defenders. But “light resistance,” like other army-speak, is just coded mumbo-jumbo that twists the truth. American soldiers died on the beaches of Leyte, killed by small-arms fire and shell bursts. It wasn’t Normandy and the Saving Private Ryan–style chaos of beaches strewn with the blood and guts of dead and dying men. But Blue Beach No. 2 on Leyte Island shook with the arrival of war. Two hundred thousand soldiers crashed the island in a matter of hours, and men died.
Clayton’s squad pressed on into the palms that had survived the naval bombardment. It needed to advance 2,500 yards inland to make room for all the troops landing behind them. Impeding the squad’s progress were thickets of brush and broken trees that looked like they had been felled by a mighty typhoon. Some men fell into deep Japanese-dug trenches and had to climb out the other sides over walls of crumbling sand. All the while, the heat and humidity sucked their strength. Within minutes of hitting the beach, soldiers shed thirty-pound packs stuffed with gas masks, clothes, Bibles. They dropped anything that wasn’t a weapon, food, or water.
Clayton plowed ahead and soon was separated from his squad among the brush and coconut trees. Bursts of machine-gun fire from invisible enemy positions sent him ducking and diving. Where were the twenty thousand Japanese? All he saw were dead Japanese soldiers, killed by the navy bombardment, their bodies piled like firewood. Fearful that he might be spotted by an enemy soldier, Clayton dropped to his belly and crawled toward what looked like the foundation of a small building or house that had been flattened by the shelling. With his rifle extended in front of him, Clayton crab-walked on his elbows and knees along the foundation’s right side and peered around the corner—and almost bumped heads with a Japanese soldier, this one very much alive.
It took only a second to kill him, but the scene seemed like it lasted five minutes. The enemy appeared discombobulated, perhaps even injured. He was dirty and missing his helmet. He was just as surprised to see Clayton coming around the corner of the foundation as Clayton was to see him. He made a panicky reach for something—a weapon, maybe—but Clayton blasted him with his M1 right in the heart. He fell dead instantly.
The war stopped for just a moment. Clayton’s hands and arms began to shake and his legs turned to jelly. He looked at the dead Jap and felt his stomach flip. He gagged and heaved. Yes, he could do it. Clayton Hall could kill a man.
After he regained his composure, Clayton reassembled with his squad and reached his destination near a village called Dulag. The men dug their first foxholes and tried to sleep in the rain. Steady, soaking tropical showers made for a miserable first night of combat. If only they had known how easy it had been so far.
• • •
The Deadeyes had a name for all the dead enemy soldiers they stumbled over as they headed inland.
“Good Jap,” they said as they pointed their rifles at bloated, mutilated bodies.
“Good Jap … good Jap … good Jap …”
F Company met no “bad Japs”—live enemies—as it continued to push inland. The entire division progressed steadily on foot and in armored vehicles until the land beneath the soldiers’ feet gave way to mud, muck, and, finally, water. Avoid swamps, the commanders had told them. Yeah, right. The only way the men could have avoided swamps was to sprout wings and fly. Clayton slogged through watery muck up to his waist and then his chest, but he and the rest of the men pushed forward.
Trouble was, you couldn’t dig a foxhole in the swamp. Clayton crouched in the bog and waited for morning.
The Philippines had become a life-or-death proposition for Japan’s fading dreams of empire. American victories at Midway and Guadalcanal had turned the tide against the country. Now, the Japanese were fighting a defensive war, battling desperately to retain what it had and to stave off an inevitable Allied incursion into its homeland. The Deadeyes would learn that a man fighting to protect his homeland was a supremely vicious foe.
The Americans who invaded Leyte Island had already heard a few accounts of bloody Japanese atrocities. They knew that thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of American prisoners of war had died during the Bataan Death March. Victims had been beheaded, shot, disemboweled, or burned alive. Some of the beheadings had required multiple chops. They heard reports about the inhumane treatment of prisoners, who were summarily starved, beaten, and forced into labor. Allied prisoners of the Japanese faced a nearly one in three chance of dying. Asian peoples fared worse. The Japanese had slaughtered more than two hundred thousand civilians in Nanking, China, and raped thousands of women. By the end of the war, Japanese forces had killed as many as thirty million people, most of them defenseless civilians and prisoners. The Deadeyes might not have known the statistics, but they knew the stories. They had cornered a brutal, bloodied enemy.
The early days on Leyte revealed none of the savagery that lay ahead for F Company. Japanese snipers fired on them, once, on October 23, 1944. Otherwise, they slogged ahead, already running low on K rations and water because supply l
ines couldn’t be established in the swamps. Filipino natives loaded up herds of carabao—Philippine water buffalo—with supplies for the soaked, muddy Americans.
F Company received even better assistance from Filipino guerilla fighters, who provided the Americans with intelligence regarding Japanese positions. They informed the 382nd Regiment that the nearby village of Tabontabon was buzzing with Japanese. A platoon was sent to investigate and returned with information that the village was circled with Japanese emplacements that had been evacuated. An attack on Tabontabon was planned for October 26, 1944. The mission would be quick and easy if the Japanese had truly abandoned the small town.
They had not.
• • •
Sixty years later, Papa Clayton’s eyes flashed at the name “Tabontabon.”
“That was altogether a new day in our lives,” he said. “A new chapter.”
The mission did not start well. Relying on outdated maps, the Second Battalion, which included F Company, wandered aimlessly in tall grass until they found their way back through the swamps. Precious hours were lost. Even worse, they did not know that across the Guinarona River, trouble awaited them in the form of an entire Japanese regiment.
This was what they had trained for. F Company crossed the river and took cover beneath the riverbanks, then moved out to search for an invisible enemy. Intelligence had informed them that the Japanese were well dug in just over the top of the bank, perhaps not ten feet away. Artillery had bombarded the tiny village. Maybe nothing or nobody was left standing. The men up front walked into the open where they could see what was left of the town. That’s the instant the “new chapter” began.
Humphries, the Arkansas ridge runner, was one of the first to get hit, but survived. F Company walked face-first into a hornet’s nest of lead. Japanese machine guns poured merciless fire onto the Americans. Mortars dropped practically on their heads, as though the Japanese knew the precise moment they would walk into view. The well-placed guns threw up an impenetrable shield of crossfire that stopped F Company cold. Humphries was only wounded and was able to backtrack for cover beneath the bank with the rest of his buddies.
Clayton avoided the bullets and crouched beneath the embankment. Men ran along the riverbank and sloshed back across the river. The ground exploded with bullets and shells. The noise made it impossible to communicate verbally. F Company was about to be routed, but the men fought back. Forward troops located enemy gun emplacements and were able to open up on the positions. Clayton, still hugging the bank, pulled the pin on a grenade and lobbed it over the top of the hill. The grenade landed near a stash of Japanese explosives hidden in a foxhole that detonated ferociously. The Japanese firing ceased, and enemy gunners dived for cover. Still, Clayton and company realized their position exposed them to additional fire, and after nightfall that position would prove impossible to defend, so they backpedaled across the river (“withdrew” in army parlance). F Company had met the enemy and had been driven back. But there would be a new fight tomorrow.
• • •
That night, a typhoon of American shells slammed the hapless village. The bombing softened the resistance, at least initially. The next morning, F Company hit the outskirts of the village and split in half. The men saw mind-boggling devastation. Almost every building had been flattened, save for a few dilapidated houses and the Catholic church, from which a Japanese sniper fired upon Clayton’s company.
Clayton’s squad broke for the church. Their mission was to charge the Japanese lines in the center of town and break the enemy’s stronghold. The Japanese had to hold Tabontabon if they were to stop the Americans from controlling all of Leyte. If the Americans controlled Leyte, they could wipe the Japanese from the Philippines. If they did that, they’d be on their way to Japan. The Japanese could not let this first domino fall.
When F Company attempted to roll up the streets, the murderous guns struck with withering fire. Clayton’s Second Platoon was pinned down so tightly that whenever a man so much as lifted a rifle or even a radio to summon help, Japanese bullets popped all around. Everything was subjected to Japanese sniper attacks. Every block disintegrated into maddening, industrialized violence. This tiny speck of a town, which would have made Bassett, Virginia, seem like a burgeoning metropolis, no longer existed except as a crucible for men to murder one another with staggering effectiveness.
F Company crawled up the street, knocking off a machine gun only to learn bloodily that another gun was protecting it. This went on all afternoon, a slow, inexorable march, one gun emplacement at a time, until two platoons—including Clayton’s—made it to the outskirts of the village. But before the men had a chance to breathe easy, they were hit yet again by more Japanese machine guns well hidden in tall grass and shacks. As darkness fell, Clayton and his buddies dug in along the decimated streets and blocks of Tabontabon, surrounded by an invisible enemy. A counterattack was expected. Sleep was not an option.
The soldiers had heard about Japanese nighttime attacks—hordes of men running and screaming, charging ahead waving swords and bayonets, firing guns. The Yanks came to call them “banzai charges” for the Japanese battle cry “Tenno heika banzai,” which loosely translates to “Long live the emperor!” For the Japanese, the charges were a vestige of the ancient Bushido warrior culture, almost always a last-ditch effort to stave off certain defeat. The men of F Company were about to be on the receiving end of such an attack.
Clayton was still digging his foxhole when the whispery skiffs and clicks of entrenchment tools and shovels were interrupted by a most curious sound—the peal of church bells from the steeple of the lone standing church. Men stopped digging and heard more bizarre sounds—the clarion call of bugles from the village outskirts, followed by piercing human howls.
The Japanese attack was on. Men dived into foxholes as bullets and hand grenades ripped the ground. Flares fired by American mortar companies lit up the sky as if noon had arrived twelve hours early. Dozens of Japanese soldiers ran toward F Company, firing from the hip, throwing grenades, and shouting like Rebel soldiers during Pickett’s Charge. American machine guns poured bullets by the thousands into the zealous attackers, who were mowed down the way a scythe slices through a summer hayfield. Still, they came. Clayton’s squad set up crossfires, firing at angles, eliminating clear lanes for the attackers to charge.
After the flares burned out, Clayton could still see the forms and silhouettes of Japanese running toward him. He would never forget the sight of enemy soldiers who were so close, he could see them illuminated by bursts of machine-gun fire and tracer bullets. Clayton smelled the sickening stench of burning flesh and realized it wasn’t coming from dead, shot-to-pieces Japanese in front of him, but from the scorched hands of a young private in the next foxhole trying desperately to change a machine-gun barrel that had melted.
The firefight went on for ten minutes before the surviving Japanese hightailed it back to the tall grass. All night long, F Company could hear Japanese soldiers dragging dead and wounded comrades into the weeds. The next day, a private in F Company recorded in his journal that he saw “twelve good Japs,” but he suspected that many more dead had been dragged away.
The next day, the Deadeyes moved freely as bulldozers rumbled through the village and shoveled dead Japanese soldiers into enormous pits for unceremonious burial. Clayton had survived his first real battle of the war.
Thank goodness there was no lull in the fighting. Clayton might have broken down into guttural sobs if he had had time to think about how dramatically his life had changed. Just two years earlier, he was in Roanoke, playing the banjo, singing on the radio, and dating pretty girls. Life was joy. Now, he was miserable as he sat in a foxhole, dodging grenades, soaked to the bone with nary a pretty girl or banjo for miles around.
• • •
A week after the fight for Tabontabon, Clayton’s battalion headed north toward the village of Dagami. Along the way, Clayton ran into a couple of his old buddies from, of all plac
es, The Hollow. Rex Willis, Clayton’s former teenage friend and bandmate from his first group, the Blue Ridge Buddies, was in the Ninety-sixth Infantry Division’s 381st Infantry Regiment, as was another childhood pal by the name of Bill Smith. Clayton had not seen his old friends in several years, and he had to laugh when he considered the odds against three country boys reacquainting themselves in the steamy jungles of the Philippines. The reunion didn’t last long, because Rex and Bill were soon grievously wounded in the battle of Mecham Ridge.
Mecham Ridge had been named by the Americans for Lieutenant Colonel Jesse Mecham of the First Battalion who had died early in the campaign. The Japanese owned the high ground, from where they harassed advancing Americans in early November. All Clayton’s battalion had to do was knock ’em off, which it did with brutal effectiveness. Clayton’s men climbed the hill toward pillboxes, underground emplacements from which the Japanese poured fire on the Americans. Clayton’s squad destroyed the enemy’s protective guns and pitched grenades into the doomed soldiers’ lair. The killing never stopped. Nearly eaten alive by leeches and mosquitoes, Clayton and the rest of F Company dug in for the night and fought off another crazed charge. By morning, he could have used dead bodies as steps and climbed the hill without touching the ground. In the daylight, American tanks smashed pillboxes as if they were a little boy’s cardboard-box forts. As frightened Japanese soldiers ran like rabbits for higher ground, the men of F Company shot them down dead.
Whatever they had been before—truck drivers, college students, factory workers, or banjo-playing hillbillies who used to dress up like women on stage—these American men were now something completely different. After just a few weeks of war, they were killing machines, men who could kill other human beings as easily as they had done any job.
