The Old Breed

Chapter 50

Machinato, Okinawa

May 4th, 1945

With 2/7 relieving us of taking care of the beach, the 1st Battalion was free to going back to the assault towards the Asa Kawa. Most of us grumbled about this, would rather deal with dead Japs than living ones, who could use rifles and kill us. But, as per usual, it wasn't for us to decide, the generals who sat far back behind the frontlines the ones who decided what we did. They probably cringed when an artillery shell landed miles away, while ordering us to walk right through those shells. Most of the time they'd never meet the men they sentenced to death.

What we could control however was how much ammunition and supplies we could take with us on the renewed assault. Amtracs had rushed crates after crates of ammo up to our lines throughout the early morning, which were easily grabbed up by the Marines. Huge quantities of ammo had been eaten up last night by our rifles, machine guns, and mortars, and at the notion of going back into combat without ammunition fueled the drive to grab as much as we could. Officers tried to maintain order, but it was impossible, the mad grab an everyone-for-themselves situation. I ended up with almost two hundred rounds of ammunition, ten clips in my cartridge belt, which each held eight rounds, a few clips stuck in my empty gas mask case, two bandoliers crisscrossing my chest, and a clip in my rifle. Long ago we had learned that when it came to combat, ammunition trumped everything except maybe rations and our canteen, and even then some Marines had traded in their second canteen or a few K-rations for extra ammo. Given the fact of how much ammunition we'd blown through last night, extra ammo was always a plus.

Our attack was delayed by almost two hours as ammo replenishment and unit reorganization took place, many Marines losing track of their squads and platoons in the dark, a few B Company Marines even ending up over with A. Once everything had been sorted out, though, the inevitable orders were issued, each platoon given the necessary information to press the assault. The objective was the same as usual, the northern bank of the Asa Kawa. We were trying to at least gain the high ground above the river by nightfall, although with the amount of resistance we'd had in the last few days, some people were pessimistic. As I passed one Marine, on his way towards one of the amtracs with ammo, I heard him grumble, "Goddamn this. We'll be lucky to advance another ten yards."

We were all tired of this, wanted a break more than anything else. From the edge of the airfield behind us to the river was a little over a thousand yards, the toughest thousand yards beside maybe Bloody Nose Ridge on Peleliu. Hundreds of Marines were already casualties in this slow slog to the river, and dozens more would likely be casualties by the time we actually made it. It would have been a challenge not to be fatalistic when the statistics looked like that. I knew I needed to focus on something good to stay alive, continue pushing, knew that without hope, I might as well just stop trying now. But I had begun to realize it was not thoughts of home that fueled my burn to keep moving, not girls, not even the hatred of the Japs, though that was a part of it, but it was mostly just the urge to not let down the other members of 1st Squad. I couldn't imagine leaving Lanky, Rocky, and the rest of the squad to face this alone while I took the coward's way out, either wounding or even killing myself. I couldn't do that to my friends, my brothers, who had survived with me from Cape Gloucester on.

The assault didn't start well. We'd barely advanced a hundred yards before heavy machine gun fire forced us to the ground. To the right, I could hear someone screaming, a Marine who hadn't made it down fast enough, another Marine yelling for a corpsman. A young Marine to the right of me jumped up, began scurrying towards the screaming. Well, he looked exactly like a Marine, but I knew he was a Navy corpsman. They made themselves as unoriginal and plain as possibly, using the exact same gear as the Marines, to become as little targets for the Japs as possible. Jap snipers purposely aimed for officers and corpsmen, something that had originally shocked us, but now we just looked at with mute resignation. Such were the atrocities of war.