Said Ruggles in code: 'Jap aircraft overhead constantly. Will pose serious threat to landing craft.'
Nate was on lookout when the American armada approached the island, hundreds of ships of all sizes, and he expected Japanese planes to strafe them mercilessly, but now the storms became so violent that no planes could fly, and painfully the great ships moved close to shore. But even though the enemy planes were absent, the landing was hell. The Warden sank, drowning fourteen. One group storming ashore spotted the Japanese scouts, took them to be an advance force of a main Japanese army, and destroyed them with flame throwers. Another American team tried four times to make a landing, only to be forced back each time by mountainous waves thundering upon the beach, but as the long day passed into ominous night they kept on trying, and on their fifth attempt, aided by searchlights, they made it.
Next day Pacific Headquarters in Hawaii issued a brief communiqué: 'Yesterday our troops made a successful landing on Amchitka,' and reporters pointed out: 'A prelude to our retaking Attu and Kiska,' but no words indicated the hellish conditions the Americans had suffered in gaining this vital foothold in the brutal battle of the Aleutians.
From January till mid-March men like Nate and Ben Krickel worked like draft horses, hauling goods inland from the shore, storing them in piles, and slogging back knee-deep in icy water to break loose more cargo. It was back-breaking work, and usually it had to be done while a Siberian wind formed icicles on eyebrows. And when the gear was finally ashore, the amateur stevedores were transferred hastily to the flat area where the airstrip was emerging from the tundra. But wherever they worked, Nate and Ben lived miserably: food ships failed to arrive, and when they did stagger in they most often had food and clothing that had been destined for the tropics. For days in a row, when he was working at the far end of the airstrip, Nate would have no hot food, and when something was cooked up, it was frequently a type with which he was unfamiliar.
For example, one day Captain Ruggles went to great pains to steal a large bag of whole-wheat flour, the kind that made good, crunchy bread, but when the bakers turned it into loaves, Nate and the other men working with him refused to eat it. One farm boy from Georgia spoke for the group: 'Captain Ruggles, we got to be here in Alaska, it's our duty. We got to freeze our ass off, the enemy is just over there. And we got to eat cold food, because there ain't no stoves handy.
But by God we don't got to eat dirty bread like that, it's nigger food. We want white bread.'
Ruggles tried to explain that whole wheat was twice as nutritious, twice as good for a man who wasn't getting enough roughage, but he was powerless to convince these well-intentioned country boys: 'Dirty bread like that, it ain't proper for no white man to eat.'
But what caused the most anguish to these men who worked on Amchitka was best expressed by the farm boy from Georgia: 'Tears your heart out. You work here at the airstrip, these fine kids climb in their planes, wave goodbye, fly over to Kiska or Attu, hit a storm. Christ, always there's a storm, and they fly right into some damned mountain, maybe three or four of them in one day, and you don't see them kids no more.'
The toll was dreadful, for as one frightened airman once added in despair at the end of a letter to his girlfriend which had been otherwise hopeful and of good cheer:
'There is nothing in this world like flying in the Aleutians, and we've lost so many of our men I'm scared to death to get into my plane, the chances are so poor.'
He wrote one more letter to her, two days later, apologizing for his outburst, and then no more.
It was under such conditions that Nate resumed his study of the textbooks Corporal Hammett had given him, and obedient to Hammett's dictum, he continued to memorize ten new words a day, until his vocabulary became civilized, but he still spoke in fragments, insecure in the substantial knowledge he was acquiring.
He did what he could to protect himself from the blizzards, but he refrained from making friends with the airmen who arrived on Amchitka all bright-eyed and ten days out of training school. He saw that they had special problems which ordinary grunts did not. He told himself: I got to bear this terrible weather. I learn tricks like findin' the buildins that are mostly underground. Wind can't whip you about. But those in the planes, they got to live in it. Right in the heart of it. And they don't live long.
Of course, he had his own nightmares, for when it was rumored that the next hit would not be nearby Kiska but distant Attu, he knew that the brass would want to put scouts ashore to ascertain just what the situation was. So he went to Captain Ruggles and said: 'They call for volunteers this time, I won't go.'
'Now wait a minute, Coop. You're the best man we have. You don't know what fear is.'
'Yes I do,' and to his own amazement and the captain's, his eyes filled with tears, and after a while Ruggles said quietly: 'Nate, I'm sure I'll be sent to Attu to see how soon we could have an airstrip after we land. I'd hate to go without you.'
'Maybe,' Nate mumbled, and when it became obvious that the same three men were going to be ordered to scout Attu, he felt real fear, and he told himself: You can't keep goin' to occupied islands without bein' killed. But he gnawed on his fingernails and kept his apprehensions to himself. One night the orders came: 'The PBY is off the southern shore. The pilots say they know a sure place to set you down. Easy paddle in, then you're on your own.' Trembling furiously, Nate trailed behind Captain Ruggles and Ben Krickel as they moved in the darkness, but the awkward job of climbing into the PBY so preoccupied him that his nervousness abated, and he spent the flight to Attu concentrating his strength and his courage for the extremely dangerous task ahead.
With great skill the PBY flew a route which evaded Kiska, ducked in and out of storms, and landed in the choppy sea less than a mile from the southern end of Massacre Bay, where the cossack Trofim Zhdanko had landed with his twelve fur traders in 1745.
Climbing down into their rubber craft, the three men paddled through the heavy waves, made shore, and hid their boat under a tangle of twigs and low shrubs. Delighted with the ease of their landing, they started inland over the terrain the major landing parties would use in subsequent days, and came at last to a slight rise from which Ben could survey an area he had once known well: 'No defense, positions here. Our men will get ashore. But up there where the Japs are' and he pointed to the hills half a mile to the north' very strong.' In the meantime, Captain Ruggles was inspecting with his glasses in the growing light the airstrip which the Japanese were struggling to complete before the expected assault began: 'Good! They'll have it in fair shape just as we drive in to take it over.'
Scout planes, looking for intruders like these three, flew overhead but saw nothing, and for two days of the most intense concentration the Americans took mental notes of what the conquest of Attu was going to entail, and they were sobered by their conclusions. Ruggles confirmed the plans he had heard at headquarters: 'The moment we land at Massacre, we must drive north to Holtz Bay. Hold them off there and clean out the pockets to the east.' He asked Ben and Nate to memorize the mountainous lay of the land, and when the second night fell, he and his men crept back to the boat and headed south for their midnight recovery.
When they were safe aboard the PBY, with mugs of hot bouillon to warm their hands, Ruggles poked Nate and said jokingly: 'Pretty much like a picnic, wasn't it?' and Nate replied: 'Always easy, the Japs stay clear. But when you hit Kiska, leave me out.'
THE AMERICAN RECONQUEST OF ATTU, WHICH BEGAN ON 11 May 1943, was one of the significant battles of World War II, for although it involved relatively few troops, it determined whether Japan had any hope of using an Alaskan foothold from which to attack the United States and Canada. The Japanese defenders of Attu were a resolute group of about 2,600 superior soldiers dedicated to the task of retaining this foothold on American territory. Led by officers of great daring and acumen, they had constructed a chain of positions that were the acme of defensive warfare. But there were other holes in the earth, dug almost casually, into wh
ich Japanese soldiers would climb knowing that they could never by any conceivable miracle escape. Deep two-man caves flanked the approaches the Americans would probably use, and there was one fiendishly clever line of positions that guaranteed the death of American attackers but also the certain death of the Japanese defenders. To rout heroic Japanese like these was going to be a hellish assignment conducted in arctic storms and Siberian gales.
To accomplish it, 16,000 American GIs plus a few Alaska Scouts and unlimited American air power would apply relentless pressure at merciless cost to both attacker and defender. On the eve of this strange battle, fought at the farthest ends of empire, the character of the entire war in the Pacific hung in the balance: Japan, the bold attacker, was about to become the stubborn defender, while America, the sleepy giant caught off balance, was belatedly gathering its forces for a series of crushing, annihilating blows. As the sun set that evening in a surly glow, no one could predict how the battle for Attu would evolve, but the men engaged on each side were of equal bravery, equal determination, and equally committed to their contrasting ways of life.
At dawn a most fearful armada loomed out of the mists, bearing down upon the northeast corner of Attu, and Nate and Ben, from their landing craft, watched in awe as the huge battleship Pennsylvania unlimbered its great guns to pulverize the foreshore where the troops would soon be landing. A hundred and fifty massive shells strafed the shore but killed not a single Japanese, for they had built their revetments so stoutly that only a direct hit would ravage them, and even then the damage would come mostly from flying debris which could be removed later.
The larger portion of the American armada appeared out of the mists enshrouding Massacre Bay, and here the huge ships were able to empty their cargo and their men without serious opposition. But once ashore, as Nate had predicted and as he now saw from his ship, the attackers had to swing sharply uphill toward Holtz Bay, around whose perimeter the Japanese had dug their positions. What had seemed at first an easy landing became a bitter, rainswept, mud-encumbered attack, with hundreds of Americans absorbing sniper bullets which either killed or maimed. Always the Americans died without having seen the enemy.
For nineteen terrible days, usually without respite and often without food, the Americans pressed on, and in this relentless attack Nate Coop and Ben Krickel covered each other, shared foxholes, or ran together to toss activated grenades into the mouths of caves from which sniper fire had come. 'It's always the same,' Ben said with heavy breathing after attacking a cave, 'you throw in your grenade and hear three explosions.
The two men inside see it coming, know they're dead, and detonate their own grenades ... they make the job clean, I guess.'
During one hellish period Nate's group cleaned out a whole hillside of caves, one at a time, most often with that sickening drumbeat of three explosions to each American grenade. In that time no prisoners were taken, little was eaten, and no attacker slept in dry clothes. It was a harrowing, hand-to-shadow battle, no bayonet work, not many mortar shots, just the dull, terrifying work of cleaning out installations that could not be attacked in any other way. No American men ever fought under more difficult conditions than these on Attu, no Japanese ever defended their positions with a greater sense of honor.
At the end of eight days of this cave-by-cave elimination, some fifteen hundred of the enemy were slain, but over four hundred Americans were also dead. Now came the final push when fifteen hundred more Japanese must die, and a hundred and fifty Americans.
On both sides they would perish in chilling rain, blustery storms and mud. None died in a more fiendish way than the brave American officer leading Nate and Ben up a hill, nor the six Japanese responsible for his death.
Since Captain Ruggles was an airman, he was supposed to be aloft in some storm-battered plane, but because of his skill in detecting where airstrips should be located in the first few hours of a landing, he had slipped into a kind of permanent assignment to that most perilous of jobs, for when it was completed he became just one more foot soldier, except that his unusual bravery made him outstanding.
The responsibility Ruggles gave himself seemed routine. The American attackers were strung out along the bottom of a slope which climbed sharply to the north; the Japanese defenders were dug into a line of caves along the crest of the hill. At first glance it might seem that the task facing the Americans was impossible, but Ruggles had long ago devised a solution; it required exquisite timing.
Ruggles, with one or two trusted flank men, would move right up the center of the slope, depending upon a blanket of fire from their team to keep the Japanese away from the mouths of their caves. In the meantime, swift climbers far to the left and right would establish a kind of pincer movement that would carry them to a position well above the line of caves, from where they would creep down upon them from the rear and destroy the enemy with grenades tossed into the mouths.
Such a coordinated maneuver succeeded when all parts functioned perfectly, and Ruggles was one of the best at it: 'We finish off that line of caves and then look for some hot chow.'
But this time there was to be a subtle difference, because in the middle of the slope, not conspicuous from below, rose a slight but substantial mound, and looking at it, one would have supposed that the Japanese would have placed in it a series of caves pointing downhill to slow any Americans striving to climb up. But this the determined Japanese did not do; instead, they dug six caves on the far side of the mound, pointing uphill, and when they were ready, the colonel in charge said solemnly: 'The emperor asks for twelve volunteers,' and twelve young Japanese, far from home and bitingly hungry from lack of food, stepped forward, saluted, and moved two by two into the doomed caves.
They were doomed because the tactic they were to execute was suicidal from the start:
'You will allow the American attackers to pass over your positions. Wait till a sizable number have gone. And then open fire on their backs when they suspect nothing.' Many Americans would be killed in this way, but of course the twelve men in the caves would be slaughtered as soon as their positions were identified.
Ruggles, as one might expect, would lead the charge up the front face, with Nate on his left flank, Ben on his right and two skilled teams speeding up the far outside flanks to drop down upon the top caves from the rear, and everything went as planned, except that when Ruggles and his central core sped over the slight rise in the middle of the slope, they were allowed to proceed about twelve yards up the hill. Then from the hidden caves pointing uphill the Japanese fired pointblank into the backs of the attackers, and from habit, most of them aimed at the obvious leader, Captain Ruggles, who fell, cut to pieces by seven fusillades. One hit Ben Krickel in the left shoulder. Three other bursts killed two of Nate's companions, and yet another sped past Nate's ear.
Four Americans survived, including the wounded Krickel and Nate Coop, and for just a moment they were lost in confusion, but then Nate saw what had to be done: 'Ben!
Back behind the mound!' And he led the remnants of the team to the down side of the mound where they could not be attacked by the men in the caves. There they regrouped, and when they saw their mutilated captain ten yards up the hill, a sullen rage overtook them, so that even Ben Krickel, seriously wounded, insisted upon being part of the next action. Accidentally it seemed, Nate assumed charge: 'Creep up, belly down, prime grenades, and we'll reach over and slam them in.'
They did just this, four determined avengers, closing in upon the caves from the rear, ignoring bullets coming at them from the ridge, and thrusting the deadly grenades into the mouths of the caves, then falling back to hear the three explosions.
That left the two caves on the outer flanks still operating, and Nate shouted: 'I have this one! Ben, take over there,' but as he cried the words he saw that Ben had fainted, so he pointed to a young lad from Nebraska: 'Clean it out!'
But now these men had no more grenades, so two of them tore their shirts into long strips, and a third man doused th
em with the petrol he carried for such situations, and they were lighted and stuffed boldly into the mouths of the caves, and when four Japanese struggled chit, gasping for air, they were brained with rifle butts.
The conquest of this hill represented one of the last orderly assaults by American forces on Attu, and that night, the men assumed that they had conquered the Japanese, but at midnight, with no one on watch, they heard a rustling on the side of a hill where no sensible Japanese would be, and then a patter of feet, and finally the wild shouts of men in a banzai charge, determined to kill or be killed. Now an inferno raged in that stretch of the undefined front. Japanese, maddened in what they knew to be their final moments, rampaged in all directions, grabbing rifles pointed at them, slashing with long knives, setting fire to whatever they could reach.
They were irresistible, overrunning positions that no ordinary human could even attack, let alone subdue. And as they came, they screamed, and it was nearly an hour before Nate and his men established some kind of defensive line. Then amazing things began to happen. One Japanese brandishing only the twig of a tree, not fifteen inches long, came directly at an American soldier armed with a gun, thrust the gun aside, struck the startled American in the face with his twig, screamed and disappeared in the darkness. Two other Japanese, with bayonets tied insecurely to the ends of sticks, rushed right at Ben Krickel, endeavoring to stab him with their flimsy weapons. They struck him, but the bayonets slid to one side, and with his good arm he killed both men with blows to the head.
A fourth Japanese was the craziest of all. Chanting a wild song and brandishing a deadly pistol, he overcame all obstacles and rushed right at Nate Coop, who was powerless to stop him. Thrusting his pistol in Nate's face, he screamed and pulled the trigger.
There was a clicking sound; Nate thought he was dead; and then nothing happened.
With a sharp thrust of his bayonet, Nate killed the Japanese, and when he studied the man's gun he found that it was a child's toy, filled with paper caps. Wresting the gun from the dead man's fingers, Nate pulled the trigger twice and sent popping echoes through the muddy dawn. The battle for Attu was over.