World War II – The U.S. Marines in the Pacific

“We’ll dig in here for the night,” Lt. Karam said. “Thompsons and BARs on the flanks, machine guns and stovepipes (mortars) in the middle. Smoking lamp is out. Let’s keep the chatter down.”

The jungle didn’t follow orders. Birds cawed, monkeys barked, insects screeched. A jungle symphony welcomed the new arrivals. It made the men jumpy. Karam patrolled the line. “Maintain firing discipline, guys. Stay loose and alert.”

Night fell, as it does in the tropics, swiftly. It was an impenetrable darkness. “Damn, this is the darkest night I ever saw. Don’t they have a dusk period here?” Paul “Beezer” Daniels said.

“Naw, it’s somethin’ about bein’ near the ee-quater,” Private Harry “Badass” Robbins said.

“It’s like digging into a thousand year-old compost pile,” Private First Class William “Brain” Bynum said. Entrenching tools plowed into the loamy soil, making scores of insects homeless. Biting beetles the size of a man’s thumb, foot-long centipedes that left red welts where they crawled across human skin, tree leeches that fell and sucked. Clouds of mosquitoes, smelling the breath of the men, made themselves at home. The mosquito swarm grew fierce at dusk. The only defense was to cover up with a poncho or blanket. “Skeeter dope” wouldn’t arrive until later in the war.

The jungle symphony grew silent. “We may be favored by a visit from some unwanted guests PDQ,” Sergeant Fenton said.

“Yeah,” Karam murmured. “Lock and load. Stand by to repel assault. Ready the flares. Pass the word, quietly.”

Loud rustling and feet squishing in muck from the opposite bank. “Fire flares!” Karam yelled. The flares popped over the jungle canopy and floated slowly down to earth, turning night into day.

Shrieking like banshees, Japanese soldiers boiled out of the green wall of vegetation, holding their rifles at high port arms, their 20-inch bayonets flashing in the flare light.

“Blood for The Emperor!” and “Marees, you die!” they screamed. They came at the “Marees” in a rush and would have overwhelmed them had not the creek’s nearly waist-high water slowed them down.

“Open fire, fire at will, open fire, fire at will,” Karam shouted. A fire hose of .30 caliber fire tore into the attackers. The machine guns danced on their tripods, dishing out death at 600 rounds per minute; BARs rasped a greeting at 500 rounds per minute; M-1 rifles fired as fast as a man could pull the trigger. The mortar squad lobbed 60mm rounds at almost point-blank range.

The attackers screamed as bullets slammed into them. Twisting and jerking in a macabre dance of death, their bodies began to fill the creek. Still they came and some reached the Marine’s position, slashing, stabbing and thrusting their bayonets. The cries of wounded and dying Marines blended with the cries of the enemy.

With no time to reload, the platoon took on the Japanese mano-a-mano. Swinging their M-1 rifles by the barrel like baseball bats; the men fought with whatever was at hand; helmets, K-bar knives, empty ammo boxes, entrenching tools, even fists. The sound of grunting, cursing and shouting filled the air as young men struggled to kill each other.

Badass swung his M-1 by the barrel, shouting the rebel yell, “Wa-hooo! Wa-hooo! Come awn, you yaller basterds, come and get me!” The enemy’s mushroom-shaped helmets were no match for Badass’s swinging for the fences.

Reaching Karam’s foxhole, a soldier tried a bayonet thrust. The lieutenant shot him in the face with his .45 Colt pistol. A second soldier jumped him and wrestled him into the bottom of his hole, trying a chokehold. Karam put his left hand behind his head and jabbed him in his eyes with the fingers of his right hand. The soldier screamed and loosened his hold. Karam grabbed his K-bar knife and rammed it into the enemy’s throat up to the hilt. Blood spurted everywhere.

He jumped out of his hole, pulled his .45 pistol and ran down the line shooting Japanese that had broken through. His bloody hands made the pistol grip feel like a bar of wet soap. He held it with both hands. He saw Sergeant Fenton doing the same thing with someone’s BAR. Fenton yelled, “You take the left, I’ll take the right!” Karam nodded.

The assault began to slow down. The frontal attack had been a ruse. The Japanese sent a squad around each end of the Marine’s lines to encircle the platoon.

Karam yelled, “They’re trying to get behind us! Machine guns on the flanks. Thompsons get ’em!”

The men with the Thompson submachine guns opened up on the encircling enemy. This bought time for the machine gunners to uproot their weapons, deploy to the flanks and cut down the infiltrators. The Japanese waved and jumped like marionettes as machine gun rounds chopped them down.

Their attack smashed by a wall of bullets, the survivors melted back into the jungle. Their dead dammed the creek like a badly stacked cord of wood. The enemy soldiers that had floated down to the sand spit lay about like ruined rag dolls.

Karam waved his arm up and down in front of his face, palm open, signaling “cease fire.”