Battalion, Twenty-first, and another one of 50 soldiers ran into the Marine scouts in the 800-yard gap and drove them back.
There was now a broad undefended avenue running to the American rear, and in its path, 200 yards inland from the beach, was the Division Hospital.
Already many of the wounded in the hospital were stirring uneasily to hear the sound of Japanese artillery shells exploding around the batteries of the Twelfth Marines a few hundred yards to the left or north.
Not far from the hospital a young artilleryman of the Twelfth Marines felt a terror that is the palsy of the soul.
He had crawled into a cave to take cover from the Japanese shells. He had gone to sleep. He had awakened to find someone sitting on him. He felt for his carbine. Someone was sitting on that. There were perhaps a half- dozen of these intruders. He could hear the clinking of their canteens and smell the sour reek of saki, could hear the soft jabbering of their voices, could feel on the man astride him the hard round shape of a magnetic mine.
A squad of Japanese infiltrators had crept into his cave and were sitting there awaiting the daylight—when they would depart to attack the Marine guns.
It was eleven o’clock at night on Orote Peninsula, and an indescribable clamor had erupted in a mangrove swamp outside the right front of the First Marine Brigade.
“Listen at’em,” a Marine hissed to his foxhole buddy. “Damn if it don’t sound like New Year’s Eve in the zoo!”
The Japanese were screaming, singing, laughing, capering—they were smashing empty bottles against the big mangroves and clanging bayonets against rifle barrels.
Hoarse voices cried, “The Emperor draws much blood tonight!” Others rose in fits of cackling presumed to be terrifying. Some tossed grenades, yelling, “Corpsman! Corpsman!” or “K Company withdraw!” If they had hoped to unnerve the Marines or to goad them into giveaway fire, they had less than success. Their uproar only helped artillery observers call down a restraining fire on the edge of the swamp, while carefully registering all the Japanese avenues of approach with the combined guns of the brigade, the corps, and the 77th Division —as well as with the light and heavy mortars and 37’s of the front-line companies.
At five minutes before midnight, a Japanese officer staggered out of the swamp. He waved a saber in one hand, a big flare in the other. Stumbling into view behind him, wielding their rifles and light machine guns, as well as pitchforks, idiot sticks, baseball bats and broken bottles, came his
“Commence firing!”
Maniacal voices began bellowing over the mouth of Orote Peninsula. The ground shook. Flares cast their ghostly light. Puttee-taped legs, khaki-clad arms, went flying through the air. The ground to the left front became a slaughter-pen. Within it the Japanese began to run amuk. They screamed in terror. Those who survived fled back into the mangroves, where the Marine artillery pursued and punished. Between midnight and two in the morning, 26,000 shells were poured into the swamp.
Forty-five minutes later another
The Japanese rushed in among the Marine foxholes, where flares and star-shells displayed them in all their drunken madness. They reeled about. They tossed grenades into foxholes with the giggling cry, “Fire in the hole!”—and lurched crazily on. They clambered over heaps of their own dead to jump into the holes with the Marines, to die there—and often to kill as they died. Waves of attackers following them were caught in a crossfire and cut to pieces. Morning showed 400 Japanese bodies strewn in front of this position. On the First Brigade’s left, a single platoon killed 258 Japanese without the loss of a single man.
Commander Tamai’s attack had failed utterly.
But up in the north, Lieutenant General Takashina’s counterattack was breaking through.
Takashina’s grand
This stroke was made around midnight by the full force of the 48th Brigade on the left of the American line, the sector held by the Third Marines reinforced by the Second Battalion, Ninth Marines. It was against this last battalion that the 48th Brigade struck.
But the 48th never got through.
Seven times the Japanese attacked the American left, and seven times they were hurled back.
The fight raged for ten hours and was not spent until around nine in the morning of July 26. Before it was over the Second Battalion, Ninth Marines, was cut in half—but its men had killed 950 Japanese. Captain Louis Wilson of F Company was wounded three times, but stayed to rally his men and win a Medal of Honor. Once the bull-chested Wilson ran 50 yards in front of his lines to rescue a helpless Marine. As the battle began to go against the enemy, he gathered 17 men and led them in a rush on high ground commanding his own position. Thirteen of those men fell, but Wilson and the others took the hill.
In the morning they pursued the retreating Japanese from there, moving through assembly areas cluttered with empty bottles and saki-sour canteens.
Takashina’s second column was formed by the 2nd Battalion, 18th Regiment, led by Major Chusa Maruyama.
Maruyama brought his men up to the soft spot discovered by the probes of earlier patrols. It was held by a 50-man company of the First Battalion, Twenty-first Marines, and stood at the left-center of the American line. At four in the morning of July 26, Maruyama ordered his men to throw grenades.
They fell in a hissing volley behind and among the Marines.
“Wake up, American, and die!” the Japanese yelled, and rushed.
So tightly were they bunched, so oblivious were they to the death that swept among them, that they overwhelmed that undersized company and ripped a hole in the lines. The flanking Marine companies bent back their flanks. The left held by Captain William Shoemaker’s A Company beat back Maruyama’s attempts to widen the hole. Shoemaker went among his men. “If we go, the whole beachhead goes,” he told them. But a rumor swept the lines. Company A was being ordered to withdraw, some men whispered. Shoemaker heard it. He leaped to his feet, a big man bulging at the seams of his captured Japanese raincoat. His voice roared out in the dark.
“By God, we hold here!”
They held. On the right of the opening, Captain Henry Helgren’s C Company was also holding. Both outfits began pouring an enfilading fire into Maruyama’s men racing through the narrow hole. The Japanese were dashing for the beach and the massed American equipment back there. Some of them ran with land mines in their hands. Others had packs stuffed with 20 pounds of explosives or had charges strapped to their legs or wound around their waists. The Marine fire struck them and the rain-swept blackness was illuminated with blinding white flashes as these human bombs blew up. But many others got through, sweeping down on Marine tanks parked to the rear.
They attacked the tanks with their bare hands. They kicked them, beat upon them with their fists, backed off and fired useless rifle rounds against them—all in an effort to get at the crewmen within—Marines who were even then swiveling machine guns to shoot the squat tan men off each other’s tanks with the aplomb of cows mutually switching flies off one another’s backs.
Unable to destroy the tanks, Maruyama’s men ran farther down the draw. They came to the cliff, destroyed two platoons of Marine mortars, and began attacking the First Battalion’s CP, their drunken yells and the booming of their grenades counterpointing the shouts and firing of a pick-up force of Marine cooks, clerks and communicators which had been assembled to counterattack them. The CP fight—in which Maruyama was killed—ended at daylight with the destruction of the Japanese soldiers who had broken through.
Up at the opening which they had torn in the Marine line, Captain Shoemaker and Captain Helgren were counterattacking. They fought back across the hole, slamming it shut like a pair of swinging doors. A company of engineers and three weapons platoons were sent to reinforce them. They arrived just before Maruyama’s reserve struck at the restored line in a second thrust.
Howling, stumbling, waving sabers, bayonets and long poles, the Japanese rushed at Shoemaker’s and
