The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [309]
Abruptly Dalleson remembered he had given the attack battalion no antitank support and he groaned aloud this time. It was too late to get them up in time for the attack on the supply depot but perhaps he could send them in time for a Jap counterattack if it were to develop. He alerted the antitank platoon of 2nd Battalion, sent them after the first units. How many other things would come to mind?
And of course he waited, swearing to himself as he grew more nervous. He was at the point where he was convinced everything would go wrong, and like a small boy who has kicked over a bucket of paint he hoped feebly that he would get out of it somehow. What bothered him most at the moment was the thought of how long it would take to get all these men back and reasserted after the attack failed. It would be at least another full day -- two days lost on the road. That was what bothered Dalleson most. With surprise he realized he had mounted a complete attack.
Ten minutes before the hour was up, the radio silence was-broken. The attack battalion was two hundred yards from the supply depot, still unnoticed. The artillery began to fire and continued for a half hour. At the end of that time the battalion moved forward and captured the supply depot in twenty minutes.
Dalleson picked up the story by degrees. It was discovered much later that two thirds of the Japs' supplies were captured that afternoon, but he hardly thought about that the first evening. The important news was that General Toyaku and half of his staff were killed in the same advance. His secret headquarters had been only a few hundred yards past the supply depot, and the battalion had overrun it.
It was too much news for Dalleson to assimilate. He ordered the battalion to bivouac for the night, and in the interim moved up every man he could find. Headquarters and service companies were stripped of everyone but the cooks. By the next morning he had fifteen hundred men behind the Japanese lines and the flanks were rolled up by afternoon.
Cummings returned the same day from Army. After much pleading, after giving his considered opinion that he could not end the campaign quickly without invading Botoi Bay, he was granted a destroyer. It had followed behind him, was supposed to reach the peninsula by the following morning. It would be impossible for him to order it to return now.
Instead, he had the staff working all night to divert troops from the jungle to the tip of the peninsula. When morning came he was able to send two rifle companies out in assault boats to invade Botoi Bay. The destroyer appeared on schedule, shelled the beach, and came in close to shore to give direct support.
A few Jap snipers greeted the first wave with an occasional shot and then fled. In half an hour the invading troops joined up with some units maneuvering behind the shattered Japanese front. By that evening the campaign was over except for the mopping up.
In the official history of the campaign sent to Army, the invasion of Botoi Bay was given as the main reason for breaking through the Toyaku Line. The invasion was aided, the history was to say, by strong local attacks which made some penetrations of the Japanese lines.
Dalleson never understood quite what had happened. In time he even believed that it was the invasion that had decided it. His only desire was to be promoted to captain, permanent grade.
In the excitement, everyone forgot about recon.
12
On the same afternoon that Major Dalleson was mounting his attack, the platoon continued to climb Mount Anaka. In the awful heat of the middle slopes they bogged down. Each time they passed through a draw or hollow the air seemed to be refracted from the blazing rocks, and after a time their cheek muscles ached from continual squinting. It was a minor pain and should have been lost in the muscle cramps of their thighs, the sullen vicious aching of their backs, but it became the greatest torment of the march. The bright light lanced like splinters into the tender flesh of their eyeballs, danced about the base of their brains in reddened choleric circles. They lost all account of the distance they had covered; everything beneath them had blurred, and the individual torments of each kind of terrain were forgotten. They no longer cared if the next hundred yards was a barren rock slope or a patch of brush and forest. Each had its own painful disadvantages. They wavered like a file of drunks, plodded along with their heads bent down, their arms slapping spasmodically at their sides. All their equipment had become leaden, and a variety of sores had farrowed on every bony knob of their bodies. Their shoulders were blistered from the pack bands, their waists were bruised from the jouncing of their cartridge belts, and their rifles clanked abrasively against their sides, raising blisters on their hips. Their shirts had long washed lines of white where the perspiration had dried.