MacArthur's War: A Novel of the Invasion of Japan

by Douglas Niles

  He had relished the assignment. He recruited set designers from the British movie industry to build inflatable rubber tanks, wooden landing craft, and giant empty fuel tanks. He arranged for His Majesty George V and Ike to tour his command. But at the end of the assignment, he’d gotten command of the U.S. Third Army and made history.

  “I think a deception operation is a fine idea, and I’ll be happy to take it on,” Patton said with a heartiness he didn’t feel. But what about the invasion? Do I get a command?

  “The original plan involved a pincer around the two sides of Tokyo Bay. We’ve decided that’s impractical. We’re going to send your dummy force about sixty miles north, let you raise a ruckus, then land in the south as they move units up to deal with you.”

  “How big a dummy force?” Patton asked.

  “The real part will be a corps—most of a corps, anyway. The fake—well, as big as you can make it. I hope you can make the enemy believe you are coming with a reinforced army.”

  “I can do that. Just how much of a corps are you talking about. Sir?” The SOB wants me dead. Dead men can’t steal credit.

  MacArthur frowned. “Well, we have two armored divisions that will land side by side—after a marine RCT goes in and takes the beach. Of course, if that’s not a force worthy of—”

  A marine regimental combat team was smaller than a division. The whole force was not even equivalent to a corps, Patton saw, but it was better than nothing. Much better.

  “I’ll take it.”

  MacArthur smiled triumphantly. “Good. Now that we’ve got that settled, how about joining me at the residence this evening for bridge? We can bore the youngsters to sleep telling them how much more heroic things were in the Big One.”

  “I’d be delighted.” I’ve got a command. A tiny fucking command, but a command. And it only cost me my dignity.

  “2000 hours?”

  “2000 hours it is.”

  Now I have to lose to that fucker at bridge, Patton thought.

  • WEDNESDAY, 1 AUGUST 1945 •

  KASHIMA CANYON, EAST OF KAGOSHIMA, KYUSHU, JAPAN,

  0700 HOURS (OPERATION OLYMPIC, X-DAY + 135)

  Brevet Captain Pete Rachwalski, Charlie Company, 1st Brigade, 3rd Marine Regiment, 3rd Marine Division, V Amphibious Corps, United States Eighth Army, had just defeated Ming the Merciless and was about to make love to the beautiful Dale Arden (who looked disturbingly like Trisha Malone, his first love, the first girl he’d gotten to second base with) when he felt a tap on his shoulder.

  He came instantly to a state of semiawareness and reflexively grabbed for his Thompson. It was never far from his side. In the slit trench he occupied with ten other men, there wasn’t a lot of room to put it anywhere else.

  “Cap’n?” a voice said softly.

  It didn’t sound like a combat emergency, so he relaxed his grip on his weapon and sank back into dreamland. Dale/Trisha had just taken the chewing gum out of her mouth and stuck it under the control panel of the spaceship and was letting him unhook the brass brassiere she was wearing. As their rocket took off, they sank to the floor in each other’s arms, but the floor wasn’t metal, but dirt and gravel, and his back hurt. He could feel every pebble by the indentation it had made.

  “Cap’n? It’s 0700.”

  They were back on the planet Mongo, which looked like a hillside in Dundalk, and he realized he had been trying to make it with her on a dirty, muddy, rocky canyon wall. She shook her head in disgust as she faded from view.

  “Cap’n? You said to wake you at 0700.”

  Like it or not, he was awake. He was on the eastern side of Kashima Canyon, on the road to Kagoshima, one road picture he was sure Hope and Crosby would never make. The night had provided a little relief from the muggy heat, but even the little bit of light penetrating his closed eyelids let him know that today was going to be another steam bath.

  “Yeah?” he replied groggily.

  “You said to wake you at 0700. It’s 0700.”

  “I must have been out of my fucking mind.” Pete tried to open his eyes, but they were glued shut with sleep. He felt around for his canteen, poured a little water into his hands, and sloshed it on his face to melt the eye gunk. The world around him slowly started to come into focus. He looked at the person talking to figure out who it was.

  “Brigade headquarters meeting starts at 0830.” It was Private Schalles.

  “Now I know I was out of my fucking mind.” Pete removed his helmet to scratch his head. “Every goddamn bug on this island has decided to set up housekeeping under my helmet.”

  “Not all of them, Cap’n,” Schalles said. “I got a little colony going myself. Bugs I never saw outside of one of those ‘Quick, Henry, the Flit’ ads.”

  Pete laughed. “I could use a little Flit myself.” He slapped at a weird-looking beetle climbing up his arm. Flit, a popular bug spray, had turned “Quick, Henry, the Flit” into a national catchphrase with its ubiquitous ads. “Hey, you want to know something really strange? The guy who draws those Flit ads does Private Snafu, too.”

  “No shit,” Schalles said. He didn’t sound impressed.

  Pete was desperate for coffee. He could dissolve some instant from his K rations into the tepid water from his canteen, which is what he did most mornings. The one good thing about the brigade meeting, though, was that they had hot water. That meant a cup of real coffee. In the meantime, he settled for a cigarette and eyed the bleak, rugged surroundings while he smoked.

  Kashima Canyon had the virtue of being the only reasonably flat and more or less direct route from the landing beaches to the city of Kagoshima. It had the liability of being a genuine death trap for the marines who had been fighting their way, foot by bloody foot, along the canyon bed toward the city that was their objective. Pete’s company was currently hunkered down among the jumbled rocks that had fallen from the canyon heights in previous eons. The rocks made good cover, and they had cleared the Japs out of every hidey-hole in the area. The canyon floor was swampy, impassable in many places even to men on foot. Across the swamp, at the base of the opposite wall, Bravo Company was similarly entrenched. Other marines held the high ground above them, on each rim of the canyon. As they advanced, they had used grenades and flamethrowers to clean out every cave, each shallow rifle pit or fortified machine gun nest they encountered.

  It had been another long night. The Japs tended to attack under cover of darkness, as they’d done last night, a hit-and-run designed for maximum casualties. Last night they’d taken it on the chin—a raiding party of a dozen men knocked out with no marine casualties. The night before, Pete had lost two men killed and three wounded.

  From time to time they succeeded in capturing an American. You could hear his screams as he was tortured, but you knew—from bitter experience—that any attempt to rescue him meant walking into a deadly trap. Most of the men had made death pacts, agreeing to shoot one another rather than let the Japs capture them alive. Pete always thought of Johnny when the subject came up. Johnny Halverson had been a Jap prisoner for three years and two months now…if he was still alive.

  “Where’s Sergeant Townley?” Pete asked.

  “Two rocks over, Cap’n.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Schalles. Back to your post, and keep your eyes open. Townley’s in charge till I get back. Pass the word.”

  “Got it, sir.”

  Pete’s understrength Charlie Company consisted of two platoons instead of three, each with a lieutenant (one real, the other a brevet sergeant) and a sergeant (one real, the other a brevet corporal). One platoon only had two squads. Overall, he had fifty-six men—not quite half strength. Replacements had been trickling in, but it took a little while to learn how to survive under these conditions. Most of the replacements lasted a few days. If they survived two weeks, they were veterans. Charley Company had been in Kashima Canyon for two weeks, during which time they had advanced less than a half mile.

  Pete put his helmet back on and crawled carefully out fr
om behind his rock. He crawled twenty feet and slid into the hole behind the next large, square boulder.

  “Hey! Watch where you put your fuckin’—oh, sorry, sir.”

  “Don’t sweat it.” Pete kept crawling, trying to wake up as few marines as possible. His boys needed their sleep.

  Sergeant Townley, a tech sergeant now acting as gunnery sergeant, was the company’s senior NCO. He was on his feet, looking carefully between two boulders, scrutinizing the ground in front of them. Although the lieutenants outranked Townley, Pete trusted the sergeant more than his young officers. “Townley, I’m going to brigade headquarters. Keep them safe until I get back.”

  The stolid and imperturbable Townley nodded. “The usual wish list, Cap’n. If you can bring anything back with you.”

  Pete knew it by heart: ammunition, fresh socks, grenades, rations, first aid supplies, and more ammunition—the normal needs of a company but damned difficult to get when you had to haul it by foot up this damned canyon. “I’ll do my best. If I can’t get it officially, I’ll try to steal it. But you know what they’re going to say.”

  “Yeah,” said Townley. “‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’”

  Pete grinned. A momentary twitch at the edge of Townley’s mouth might have been a smile. It was hard to tell.

  Townley looked down the line of men in his trench. “Coad. Go with the captain.” When Pete started to protest, Townley added, “You’ll need somebody to help carry back all those supplies.”

  “Okay, Townley,” Pete said, surrendering. “Coad, come on. They have hot coffee, you know.”

  “In that case,” Townley said, “maybe I should go instead.”

  “Sorry,” Pete grinned. “Somebody’s got to mind the store.”

  Getting out of Kashima Canyon meant following a foot trail along the base of the wall. The path was mostly dry, but in several places you had to wade through calf-deep water. At least the Japs had been cleared out of the area—or so they said. The rear zone was only about a mile away, and it would have been an easy twenty-minute walk—except that they had to crawl for a half hour just to get around the first bend, where it was judged safe to stand upright. As much as men wanted a hot cup of real coffee, it wasn’t worth dying on the way to the percolator.

  Most of the vegetation in the canyon bed was fernlike, big, wide, flat, leafy plants with thick stalks instead of real trunks. The two marines, with Pete in the lead, passed a tall clump of these fronds and emerged onto a short, wide open stretch of trail.

  “Shit!”

  Pete heard Coad’s curse a split second before he heard the sound of the rifle shot. Immediately he dropped to his belly and turned around to see the corporal lying on the path, grimacing in pain.

  “Goddamn fucking shit, that hurts!” Coad groaned through tightly clenched teeth.

  Pete scanned the heights, realizing that a goddamn Jap sniper had crawled back into position overhead—or maybe he had been laying low for the last week, ever since these cliffs and caves had been “secured.” There was no sign of him and no second shot. Pete hoped the low brush along the trail was enough to give them cover, now that they were prone.

  “Where are you hit?” he asked.

  “Leg—high up, in the thigh,” grunted Coad. “I’m bleeding like a stuck pig.”

  “Let me take a look,” Pete said. Cradling his Thompson in his arms, he crawled back to the corporal, pulled out his K-bar, and slit Coad’s trouser leg up to the thigh—and got a squirt of bright red blood in his face for his trouble. He couldn’t remember how to tell if it was a vein or an artery, and he didn’t care. He cut away the rest of the pant leg, took Coad’s knife and sheath, and used the material to make a tourniquet almost as high as the man’s crotch. The flow of blood eased, but crimson continued to soak through the rudimentary bandage.

  “Can you crawl?” Pete asked.

  The corporal nodded, sweat shining on his forehead. “Yeah, I can crawl. Don’t leave me. Don’t let the Japs get me, Cap’n,” Coad whispered.

  “Don’t worry,” Pete replied. “I’ll get you to an aid station.”

  “How about the leg?” Coad asked. “Am I going to lose it?”

  “I’m not a doc, but I don’t think so. This may just be your million-dollar wound.”

  “Shit, I hope so. Damn! It hurts.”

  Using the low shrubbery as cover, they crawled slowly along the path. It seemed to take forever until they eventually moved around a jagged shoulder of rock. Pete decided to chance standing up.

  “Damn, Captain. It’s bleeding again.”

  “Shit.” Pete knelt and cinched the tourniquet as tight as he could. He was no stranger to wounds, but it seemed that the young corporal was losing a lot of blood.

  Pete knelt down. “I’m gonna carry you, okay? Put your arms around my shoulders. We’ll do it just like we did in Boot. It’s not too much farther.”

  Carrying Coad on his back was tricky. Mud and uneven terrain seemed to clutch at his boondockers, maliciously trying to trip him up. Pete could tell he was only one step away from overbalancing and falling on his face.

  As the heat and humidity climbed, so did the strain on Pete. Each step sent fresh waves of pain through Coad. Every few minutes Pete checked the tourniquet, saw that the wound was continuing to soak through the bandage. Not good. Pete could also feel the blood coming through his uniform. His body felt extra sticky.

  Finally he staggered up to the mouth of the canyon, where armored bulldozers had made some semblance of a road. This was as far forward as the supply jeeps could come, and the captain was relieved to see one of the little green vehicles rumbling up to him, and he waved it over.

  “Need a lift, sir?” the driver asked.

  “Goddamn right. My corporal needs to get to the aid station, and I’m late for the brigade meeting.”

  “Emerson, McKinley, unload those crates and get that wounded boy into the jeep. You guys are gonna have to walk back; sorry,” the driver said. “Captain, let’s get your boy to the medic and you to the meeting.”

  Pete turned to the two privates. “There’s a damned sniper up on the canyon wall, just around that last bend. Be careful.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” one of them replied, looking up the canyon with a complete lack of enthusiasm.

  Getting into the passenger seat of the jeep, Pete turned to the driver. “Thanks, Sergeant…”

  “Couch.”

  Pete looked at him quizzically.

  “Yeah, yeah, like in sofa. Get in, already, Captain…”

  “Rachwalski.” Pete grinned.

  Couch laughed. “And you think I got a funny name? Hang on.” He put the jeep in gear and gave it as much gas as he dared on the rutted road. Coad lay crossways on the small rear seat. Pete turned around to keep a hand on the tourniquet, pulling it as tight as possible. The corporal was looking fainter by the minute. “Hang on, Coad,” Pete said. “Not much longer.”

  Ten minutes of heavy jolting brought them to the aid station. Couch honked the horn and two bored-looking orderlies meandered out. “Whatcha got?” one of them said.

  “Advanced case of hangnails,” Couch said. “Move it.”

  When the orderlies got a good look at Coad, they got a bit more serious about their work. As he was being moved inside, Coad said weakly, “See you around the campus, Captain.”

  “Say hello to America for me,” Pete said.

  Brigade Headquarters was inside what looked like a Japanese temple of some description. It had that distinctive witch’s hat layered roof and the center was big and open, great for meetings. There was a dais at one end that now contained a lectern, and there were GI-issue folding chairs.

  “—bogged down along this entire line. We’ve got to get to Kagoshima and get those airfields under our control in a matter of weeks, no matter what it takes,” the brigade intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel John D. Berry, was saying as Pete tried to sneak in the back. Unfortunately, the colonel spotted him. “Ah, Captain Rachwalski.
Good of you to find time in your busy schedule to join us this morning.” Colonel Berry was a “squared-away marine.” Everything about him was impeccable.

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir,” he said, moving to his seat.

  “Wait a minute. I do understand the difficulty of keeping clean under field conditions, but you are rather abnormally filthy. What is that all over your uniform?”

  Pete looked down. “Blood, sir.”

  “Whose? Yours?”

  “No, sir. One of my privates.”

  The colonel paused. “Dead?”

  “No, sir. Well…not when I left him at the aid station, sir. Sniper fire on the way out of Kashima Canyon.”

  “You carried him the rest of the way?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The colonel paused. “I don’t think there are many excuses for an officer being late to a command meeting. But this is one. I’ll see your man after the meeting.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  He turned back to his notes. “Gentlemen, we’re all familiar with the problem in fighting an enemy who doesn’t seem to care if he lives or dies. That’s why our strategy changed from cleaning the Japanese out of every cave to defending the airfields and key positions leading into the city of Kagoshima. The airfields, not killing Japanese soldiers, are the mission. Killing Japanese is a means to an end and we must not confuse that with the end itself.”

  The way Pete felt, killing Japanese soldiers seemed like a perfectly fine objective. On the other hand, crawling into caves against suicidal armed Japanese wasn’t exactly a pleasant alternative.

  Betty continued, “However, the Japanese have had more success than we like at infiltrating our lines and making supposedly rear areas more dangerous than they should be.” He paused. “A fact to which Captain Rachwalski can attest, as can many of the rest of you.” There was a murmur of agreement. Pete was impressed the colonel could not only remember but also pronounce his name.

  “Our situation will shortly be made more challenging. Some of you and many of your men will be transferred to the Coronet operation. Those who remain will have to work harder and under more dangerous conditions to keep the airfields operational. Therefore, before our forces begin to shrink, it’s time to clear a wider swath around our lines. Gentlemen, I give you Operation Anthill.”