Forgiveness (10 page)

“Okay, looks like it hasn’t been overrun yet. Let’s go.”

Yet?
Ralph thought as he followed, crouching as low as he could. As they ran alongside the edge of the once-manicured garden, Ralph took in the level of devastation. The building, a turn-of-the-century seaside luxury retreat, had been heavily shelled. Bullet holes riddled the front door and most of the windows had been shot out. The runner hit the side door and it opened to a scene of total chaos. Ralph saw Major MacAuley, his arm bloodied and heavily bandaged, screaming into a phone in order to be heard over the explosions at the other end of the line. A report of relative calm came in from the northwest sector, immediately followed by a report that the northwest sector was being overrun.

“I need five men to head down to the road. I can’t find our goddamn Bren carrier!” the CO said. The Bren gun carrier was one of the few to have made it to the island. The truck was crucial for moving the only heavy guns the Canadians had. Without it, they had only their .303 Lee-Enfield rifles.

Everybody knew how important this mission was. Twenty men stood up immediately. The CO counted them off: you, you, you, you, and you. The five chosen dashed out the door that Ralph just entered. Within minutes, they were all back, with one drunken addition.

“The Bren gun carrier is smashed to hell 150 yards down the road, sir,” a man reported. The scent of whisky filled the lobby.
The CO became enraged; he knew the driver was drunk. Throwing down the map he’d been poring over, he took the driver by the collar and punched him in the face three times, then threw him to the floor. Standing over him, he demanded, “Do you know what you’ve done?”

It was only a matter of time now. Everyone in the room knew it, even the drunken driver. The poor chap had been trying to dull his sense of the inevitable.

Ralph found a corner in one of the bedrooms. He had not slept in three straight days. The tile floor felt cool on his face. His reprieve was momentary. Joe Delaney woke him up.

“Ralph, I thought that was you. Come on, I need some help. We gotta get some ammo up to the boys on Mount Parker. A group of ten of us are going.”

Ralph rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t seen Joe since the invasion and was glad to know he was still alive.

“Where’s Mount Parker?” Ralph asked.

“A few miles up from here. Let’s go,” Joe said as he popped up from his crouched position.

“Okay,” Ralph groaned, desperately longing for more sleep. As they made their way down the hall, stepping over men, some wounded, some sleeping, some shell-shocked, Ralph grabbed Joe’s arm. Joe turned. They looked at each other’s dirty faces and red, sleep-deprived eyes. Ralph smiled.

“Joe, we are a hell of a long way from our Grindstone.”

Neither had thought of home for some time. Joe chuckled.

“That we are. That we are.”

They made their way through the mess hall into the storage area in the back of the Villa. An old closet that had been used to store pineapples and mangoes was now stacked to the roof with boxes of .303 shells and some grenades. The men loaded the bandoliers over their shoulders.

“Take as much as you can carry. The guys on Parker are getting the shit kicked outta them,” hollered the guard.

Ralph was loaded up like a pack mule. The metal shells dug into his sweat-drenched fatigues. He heaved forward to support them against his neck and hugged his sides to keep them from swaying as he ran to catch up with the other nine. The ten men stood five to a side, hugging the narrow hallway to the back door. They knelt down. The sentry at the door looked them over and explained.

“We had a sniper out here a few hours ago. I think we took him out, but we’ve been suppressing fire every time this door opens. When I give you the go-ahead, hit the door hard; take the trail at your four o’clock into the bush. Run, you hear? Do not look back and do not stop.”

The sentry stood up and wiped his forehead. “Give me a minute, I’ll give the gunner a thirty-second warning.”

The men waited. Joe was behind Ralph. He put his hand on Ralph’s shoulder.

“Thanks for that, Ralph. I hadn’t thought of home in some time.”

Ralph nodded, and then they heard the sentry’s call.

“Go, men, go!”

The first man hit the door with his shoulder and the rest followed under the roar of a Bren gun.

The men marched the trail in two lines of five. The heat of the jungle quickly wore them down. Two miles in, the point stopped, knelt down on one knee, and held his arm in a fist. The other nine did the same. They all paused, listening for anything. For everything. The point jumped off the trail into the deep bush. Again, the men followed suit. Ralph landed right beside Joe, both men gripping their rifles, pointed for action.

Footsteps.

Ralph peered through the bush to see if it was friend or foe. The weary shuffling gave them away: they were Canadians. Ralph sighed and stood up to see a column of men, most barely able to walk, coming down the trail.

The other party’s scout approached Ralph’s lead man. The other
nine just stood and stared as the defeated-looking soldiers walked by. The men did not look up as they passed.

Ralph and the nine others all approached their leader, though they needed no explanation of what had just transpired.

“That’s all that’s left of Mount Parker,” the leader said.

“At least we won’t have to hump all this ammo up that hill,” one of the guys said, as they all turned and marched back to Palm Villa.

When they returned, an officer ran through the line, grabbing men at random for another short mission. Ammo was needed to the south of Palm Villa. Joe went. He never came back. When Ralph returned later that day, he saw a long line of bodies under blankets. He wondered if Joe was under one of them, but he was too exhausted to shed a tear.

It was seventeen days since the attack on Pearl Harbor. The men who were still alive were too tired to care. They were straggling in, two and three at a time, to the relative safety of Palm Villa. Many had spent the previous few days lost, wandering the hills without food or water. Most had not slept a wink. Everyone had watched a pal, a cousin, or a brother die.

Sniper fire was everywhere and the men were no longer able to exit the site without a hail of suppressing fire. A simple fact became increasingly clear: Palm Villa was a death trap.

The men tried to keep their spirits up. They clung to rumours of rescue like life rafts.
The Chinese guerrillas may launch a counterattack from the north. The Brits have sent rescue ships from Singapore.
They were lies told by men desperate for hope to equally desperate men.

On his second day at Palm Villa, Ralph resumed his position as a signalman. He was stationed in the operations room, where the officers were sending orders and receiving news from the few soldiers that had communication capabilities. None of the news was good. It was death across the island.

Of the four Canadian companies, only D Company remained largely intact, stationed around Chung Hom Kok. This would not last. Company A had been cut off in and around Repulse Bay. They
paid dearly for their isolation, losing over half their men. Company B was scattered throughout the island’s high ground around Mount Stanley. Companies C and H.Q. were huddled in Palm Villa. Everyone knew they had only a few hours left there. Japanese heavy artillery was pounding all held positions. Japanese airplanes owned the sky, swooping in and strafing the men whenever and wherever they were forced into a clearing. Japanese navy supply ships sat off the coast, loaded with food, ammunition, and supplies. Almost every man could see the sea from where he stood and fought. The sea was the last line. There would be no retreat from the shore.

Ralph sat at his assigned wooden table, receiver in hand. Each incoming report had to be shouted over heavy gunfire. Men, good men, men Ralph knew well, were dying. Dairy farmers from Sherbrooke, seamen from Cape Breton, woodsmen from Bathurst. Few were older than twenty. They’d been shot up in a strange land by an unknown enemy.

Ralph grew increasingly frustrated with each incoming message he passed on. He kept thinking one thought over and over:
this is not a fair fight.
His pals didn’t stand a chance out there. They knew it, the officers knew it, and
their
officers knew it. Churchill was right: the defence of Hong Kong was no good. And it was about to get a whole lot worse.

“We’re taking heavy fire in the Stanley sector!” a Scotsman screamed over the radio. The officers got quiet. They knew that if they lost Stanley Fort, it would all be over. There would be nowhere to go but the sea.

“We can’t lose Stanley. We lose it, we are done for. Grab as many able men as you can find. We have to make sure that the Japs don’t set up their heavy mortars to shell Stanley. We’ll leave at twenty-two-hundred hours,” Officer MacDougall ordered.

Ralph did as he was told. Armed with the reports he had been ferrying for the past few hours, he purposely chose no one he knew to come on the mission. He felt it was suicidal. Nonetheless, at twenty-two-hundred hours, he and twelve other men joined the
captain at the back door of the Villa. Between them they had two canisters of water, three cans of bully beef, one Bren gun with three bandoliers of shells, five hand grenades, and enough .303 shells to last one—maybe two—real firefights.

Ralph said a prayer. He asked God to watch over him. He asked for mercy. He sought grace. Ralph had never had to make this call before. As he had three days earlier, he found himself crouched in a line of men, single file, at the back door of Palm Villa. They gripped their rifles and waited for their call to move.

“Suppressing fire!”

The ring of discharged shells rattled down the hallway.

“Move!” the sentry bellowed.

The point man made a cross against his chest, kissed his fingers, and hit the door with his shoulder. The men dashed into the bush and regrouped five hundred yards from the Villa at the rally point. They counted off and, all accounted for, began their trek through a deep valley. Darkness was their ally and their enemy. It hid them from the enemy but made it all but impossible to see their way through the dense brush. The men took turns carrying the heavy Bren gun. The persistent buzz of Japanese planes ensured the guy with the Bren gun kept one eye to the sky.

The men clutched their rifles as they trudged through the night. Every broken branch they heard brought them to a standstill, wary. They made their way down a steep hill, grasping at branches and roots as they slipped their way down. Midway down, Ralph saw three shadows. He squinted. The long bayonets were the telltale sign. He raised his rifle and squeezed the trigger again and again. He didn’t think, he just shot, just as he had been trained. He had his sights on the last man and saw the silhouette go down. Was he shot or had he jumped into a water catchment? There was no way to know. Ralph may have killed a man, he may have not. The threat gone, he continued down the steep embankment.

At the edge of the valley, the CO stopped the men and called for Ralph. Ralph hustled up. The CO pulled a blanket over his head and
shone his flashlight at the map. As Ralph ducked in, the light momentarily blinded him. The two men pored over the map, running their dirty fingers along the line representing the trail they were on.

“We’ll cross this creek, proceed through this clearing, and dig in on this hill. From there, we’ll fight like hell to keep the Japs from setting up and shelling the village and Stanley Fort,” the CO decided out loud.

“Yes, sir.”

“How are the men, Ralph?” the CO asked as their bloodshot eyes met.

“They are scared. But they are holding up, sir,” Ralph responded.

“Volens et valens.”
The CO gave Ralph a wink and a smile.

“Volens et valens,”
Ralph repeated. A show of bravado is sometimes the best medicine.

On his way back down to the line to assume his position among the men, Ralph swapped out and took Bren gun duty.

Dawn was breaking on Christmas Day. The men waded through a little creek at full attention. If spotted, they were sitting ducks. They tried to make as little sound as possible with each step. One by one, they made it to the water’s edge and waited, guns pointed, searching for movement in the deep brush. Large explosions were heard in the background. The daily dawn assault was underway. It had become part of their routine. It could be counted on more than breakfast.

Once across the creek, the men crouched in the tall grass. The CO gave them a brief reprieve to wring out their socks and share what meagre food they had. Ralph pulled out the spoon that was in his shirt pocket, rinsed it off in the creek, and got in on an open can of bully beef that two other men were already sharing. Somewhere down the line, one man quietly hummed “Silent Night.”

With damp socks donned again, the men gathered their gear and peeked out of the grass. The clearing they needed to cross was
a full mile. A point man went out first. The rest of the men waited in silence but heard no gunfire. The CO waved them on, each man saying a little prayer as he stepped out from the cover of the brush. The dawn sun was already warm and Ralph was thinking about how the men were going to need more water than they had to last the day. He was thinking maybe they should have bottled some of that creek water, when he heard an unmistakable sound. He looked up at the men. They were continuing on course, their eyes on the trees on the other side of the clearing. Maybe his mind was playing tricks on him. Instinctively, he gripped the Bren gun a little tighter. No, there it was again. Ralph took a knee and scanned the sky. The sun was bright. He squinted hard. If he was right, he had only a few seconds more to act. And there it was, getting louder and closing in, the incendiary Zero. Its green-tipped wings with the red Rising Sun were the last thing many Canadian men saw before dying.

“Plane!” Ralph yelled.

The whole squad hit the ground, each man on his belly, eyes frantically searching the sky. They were smack dab in the middle of the clearing, too far out to run back to the grass, too far from the treeline to make a dash for it.