Pacifica Military History Free Sample Chapters.pmd

Free Sample Chapters 385
within minutes; they had to be pulled down to prevent them from
becoming entangled with the barrels of weapons peering over the edges
of the fighting holes.
The battalion aid station, which was located on the nose of the hill,
had to be pulled back over the crest so the medics could safely move
among the wounded and pull others back to a place of rela-tive safety.
The battalion communications center was menaced by machine-gun fire
and the communicators had to abandon their ra-dios to sprint to safety.
A rifleman on the line was struck by a bullet. A pair of medics charged
through the nipping fire and lifted him, one on either side. They staggered
through the beaten zone. Another rifleman was shot and went to his
knees yelling, “I’m hit!” He pitched forward an instant later, yelling,
“I’m dead.” And he was.
Captain Ralph Phelps, the battalion executive officer, rushed through
the fire to confer with Captain Donald Downen, the A Company
commander. As the two officers conferred, a thin stream of machinegun
bullets passed between them, no more than three inches from their
bodies. The two popped off the ground and ran for cover in order to
finish the discussion.
A Japanese sniper armed with an American BAR was spotted and
grenaded from his treetop perch. A corporal, second-in-command of a
rifle squad, was shot to death hauling ammunition to his men. A lieutenant
who had been nicked in the back of the neck when a bullet passed through
his helmet in the road-clearing opera-tion bled for two hours before he
found time to seek treatment.
The assault was coming through mainly on the right. The Jap-anese
had done some superb spotting, for most of the troops sent out on the
road-clearing patrol had been drawn from this sector and replaced by a
few pistol-toting mortarmen. There was one light air-cooled .30-caliber
Browning machine gun on the right, but the gunner was absent due to
illness and the assistant gunner had wandered off to a latrine moments
before the attack commenced. The only man in the gunpit was Private
James Newbrough, a green ammunition carrier.
After a weird exchange of taunts, three Nambu-carrying Japa-nese
charged Newbrough’s gun. Two died and the other with-drew.
Newbrough kept spraying bullets around, but the more he fired, the