The Naked and the Dead (7 page)

            When Croft came back he made no comment on the news Brown gave him. Brown was relieved and decided he did not have to blame himself. He stopped thinking about it.

            But Croft brooded over the event all day. Later, as they worked on the beach unloading supplies, he caught himself thinking of it many times. His reaction was similar to the one he had felt at the moment he discovered his wife was unfaithful. At that instant, before his rage and pain had begun to operate, he had felt only a numb throbbing excitement and the knowledge that his life was changed to some degree and certain things would never be the same. He knew that again now. Hennessey's death had opened to Croft vistas of such omnipotence that he was afraid to consider it directly. All day the fact hovered about his head, tantalizing him with odd dreams and portents of power.

PART TWO

Argil and Mold

1

            In the early briefings of his staff, Major General Edward Cummings, commander of the troops on the island, had described Anopopei by saying it was shaped like an ocarina. It was a reasonably accurate image. The body of the island, about a hundred and fifty miles long and a third as wide, was formed generally in a streamline with a high spine of mountains along its axis. On a line almost perpendicular to the main body of Anopopei, the mouthpiece, a peninsula, jutted out for twenty miles.

            General Cummings's task force had landed on the tip of this peninsula, and in the first few days of the campaign had advanced almost five miles. The initial wave of assault troops had splashed out of their boats, run up the beach, and entrenched themselves at the edge of the jungle. Subsequent waves passed their position and filed through the brush along trails the Japanese had cut previously. There was little resistance the first day or two, for the majority of Japanese had been withdrawn from the beach when the Navy shelling began. The early advances were only briefly delayed by a minor ambush, or a temporary defense position set up along a ravine or across a trail. The troops pawed forward gingerly a few hundred yards at a time, sending out many patrols to examine the ground ahead before each company moved up. There was no front line for several days at least. Little groups of men filtered through the jungle, fought minor skirmishes with still smaller groups, and then moved on again. Cumulatively there was a motion forward, but each individual unit moved in no particular direction at any given time. They were like a nest of ants wrestling and tugging at a handful of bread crumbs in a field of grass.

            On the third day the men captured a Japanese airfield. It was a minor affair, a quarter-mile strip of cleared jungle with a small hangar recessed in the brush and a few buildings already destroyed by the Japanese, but the Pacific communiques included it, and radio announcers mentioned the victory toward the end of their news broadcasts. The airfield had been taken by two platoons who circled the jungle about it, routed the sole machine-gun squad still defending the clearing, and radioed back to Battalion Headquarters. The nightly defense positions of the General's troops had some coherence for the first time. The General established a front line a few hundred yards beyond the airstrip, and listened that evening to the Japanese artillery bombarding the field. By midmorning the next day his troops had moved forward another half mile up the peninsula, and the front had broken again into sluggish separate globules of mercury.

            It seemed impossible to maintain any sort of order. Two companies might start in the morning with perfect liaison between their flanks, and by nightfall would be bivouacking a mile apart. The jungle offered far more resistance than the Japanese, and the troops tried to avoid it wherever they could, threading their way along creekbanks, forging trails through the comparatively uncluttered wilderness of natural coconut groves, and moving with pleasure through the occasional clearings of kunai grass. The Japanese in response would shell the clearings at unpredictable hours, so that the troops avoided them finally, and blundered through the uncertain avenues which thinner patches of jungle might provide.

            In the first week of the campaign the jungle was easily the General's worst opponent. The division task force had been warned that the forests of Anopopei were formidable, but being told this did not make it easier. Through the densest portions, a man would lose an hour in moving a few hundred feet. In the heart of the forests great trees grew almost a hundred yards high, their lowest limbs sprouting out two hundred feet from the ground. Beneath them, filling the space, grew other trees whose shrubbery hid the giant ones from view. And in the little room left, a choked assortment of vines and ferns, wild banana trees, stunted palms, flowers, brush and shrubs squeezed against each other, raised their burdened leaves to the doubtful light that filtered through, sucking for air and food like snakes at the bottom of a pit. In the deep jungle it was always as dark as the sky before a summer thunderstorm, and no air ever stirred. Everything was damp and rife and hot as though the jungle were an immense collection of oily rags growing hotter and hotter under the dark stifling vaults of a huge warehouse. Heat licked at everything, and the foliage, responding, grew to prodigious sizes. In the depths, in the heat and the moisture, it was never silent. The birds cawed, the small animals and occasional snakes rustled and squealed, and beneath it all was a hush, almost palpable, in which could be heard the rapt absorbed sounds of vegetation growing.

            No Army could live or move in it. The men skirted the jungle forests, and moved through second-growth brush, past smaller woods of coconut trees. Even here they could never see for more than fifty or a hundred feet ahead, and the early stages of the operation were conducted by groping movements of tiny groups of men. The peninsula was only a few miles wide at this point, and the General had two thousand men stretched across it, but there was little connection between them. Between one company of a hundred and eighty men and another, there was room for any number of Japanese troops to slip through. Even when the terrain was comparatively clear, the companies would not often try to set up a partial line. After a week of fumbling through the jungle, the military concept of a connected line could seem no more than a concept. There were Japanese left everywhere behind the front troops, and all through the jungle, in every part of the area that the General had captured on the peninsula there were subsidiary ambushes and skirmishes, until the mouthpiece of the ocarina seemed covered with burs. There was an intense and continuous confusion.

            The General had expected this, had even made his allowances for it. Two-thirds of his force of six thousand men were kept in the rear working on supplies, and threshing the jungle in security patrols. He had known from intelligence reports before the campaign began that the Japanese had at least five thousand men against him, and of these, his men had not come in contact with more than a few hundred. The Japanese commander, General Toyaku, was obviously holding them for a protracted defense. As if in assurance, the scattered air reconnaissance that was granted Cummings occasionally from Army Headquarters, brought back photos which showed a powerful defense line set up by Toyaku on a front which ran from the main mountain range of Anopopei to the sea. When Cummings came to the base of the peninsula he would have to pivot his troops through a ninety-degree arc to the left and face the defense line Toyaku had built.

            For this reason, Cummings did not mind the leisureliness of his advance. Once his troops had reached the Toyaku Line it would be essential to keep them well supplied, and for that he would need a road which could keep pace with his men. On the second day after the invasion, the General had reasoned quite correctly that the main battles with the Japanese would occur miles away. He had immediately diverted a thousand men to building a road. They started on an improved trail which the Japanese had used for motor transport from the airfield to the beach, and the division engineers widened it, sodding the top surface with gravel from the beach. But beyond the airfield the trails were rudimentary, and after the first week still another thousand men were assigned to the road.

            It took them three days to build each mile, and the front troops drew constantly ahead. By the end of three weeks the division task force had moved fifteen miles up the peninsula and the road reached only halfway to them. Along the rest of the route, supplies were carried up by pack trains, and almost a thousand more men were occupied with that.

            The campaign progressed uneventfully from day to day, no longer being mentioned in news broadcasts. The division's casualties were light, and the front had finally achieved some form. The General watched the constant activity of men and trucks out of all the bivouacs in the jungle adjacent to the beach, and contented himself temporarily with cleaning out the Japanese who were left in the rear, with building the road, and with moving his front forward at an easy and calculated rate. He knew that in a week or two, at most a month, the actual campaign would begin.

2

            To the replacements, everything was new and they were miserable. They seemed to be wet all the time, and no matter how they set up their pup tents, they would always blow down during the night. They could find no way to anchor their short tent pins in the sand. When the rain started they could discover no alternative to drawing up their feet and hoping their blankets would not become drenched again. In the middle of the night they would be awakened for guard, and would stumble through the moonlight to sit numbly in a wet sandy hole, starting at every sound.

            There were three hundred of them and they all felt a little pathetic. Everything was strange. Somehow they had not expected to do labor details in a combat zone, and they were bewildered by the contrast between the activity of the day when trucks and landing craft were constantly in motion and the quiet of evening when everything was so peaceful. Then it was cooler, and out across the water the sunset was usually beautiful. Men would be smoking their last cigarettes before dark or writing letters or attempting to secure their tents with a piece of driftwood. The sounds of battle were muted at night and the distant crackling of small-arms fire, the remote echoes of
_f
the artillery seemed detached from them. It was a confusing period, and most of them were pleased when they were assigned to their companies.

            But Croft was not. He had been hoping against his better judgment that recon would be given the eight replacements they needed, and to his disgust they had been assigned only four. It was the culmination of a series of frustrations for him since the platoon had landed on Anopopei.

            In the beginning, the first annoyance was that they saw no combat. The General had been forced to leave half his division behind to garrison Motome, and as a result he had brought to Anopopei only a fraction of the officers and personnel from Division Headquarters. These men were merged with the bivouac of headquarters company of the 460th Regiment, and the Combined Headquarters was established in a coconut grove on a low sandy bluff overlooking the sea.

            Recon had been assigned to set it up. After working on the beach for only two days, they were diverted to the bivouac, and spent the rest of the week in clearing the brush, laying barbed wire around the perimeter, and leveling an earthen floor for the mess tents. After that, their duties had been routine. Each morning Croft had assembled the platoon and reported to work on the beach detail or the road gang. A week went by and then another without any patrols.

            Croft fretted. The labor details irked him, and although he had employed the same efficiency with which he managed all the platoon's activities, he was sullen, bored with the unchanging pattern of each day. He was seeking for an outlet to his resentment and the replacements provided it. Before they were assigned, he had noticed them on the beach every day, had watched them fold their pup tents and be counted off for labor details. And like an entrepreneur considering improvements, he had been calculating what kind of patrols he could manage with a full seventeen men.

            When he learned that recon had been given only four new men, he was infuriated. It brought them up to thirteen, but since the paper strength of the unit was twenty men this gave him no balm. On Motome, the headquarters squad, consisting of seven men, had been assigned permanently to the regimental intelligence section, and for all practical purposes were out of the platoon. They never went on patrols, they never shared guard or labor details, they took their orders from other noncoms, and by now he no longer knew all of them by name. On Motome the riflemen in the platoon had gone out sometimes with three or four men on a patrol which needed twice as many. And all that time there had been seven additional men in his platoon over whom he had no authority.

            To increase his anger he discovered that a fifth man had been assigned to the platoon, but had been diverted already to headquarters squad. After evening chow, he stalked over to the orderly room tent and started an argument with the Headquarters Company Commander, Captain Mantelli.

            "Listen, Cap'n, you're gonna give me that other man in headquarters squad."

            Mantelli was a light-haired man with glasses, and a high-pitched merry laugh. He held his hands before his face in a mock attitude of defense as Croft burst in on him.

            "Hold on, Croft," he laughed. "I ain't a goddam Jap. What the hell do you mean busting in here and tearing down this orderly room?"

            "Cap'n, I been shorthanded too long, and I ain't gonna take it any more. I'm tired of taking the men out and risking their ass, when there's seven men, seven men goddammit, just sitting around in headquarters, being orderlies and to hell knows what for you officers."