When they scrambled down nets from the troopship to the landing craft, that green to the north rising up out of the sea was the Japanese mainland. The punishment brigade was going in on the west side of Kagoshima Bay, a little south of the middle-sized city of Kagoshima. Orders were to push toward the city once they got off the beach. Those orders assumed they would get off the beach. That had to mean the fellow who wrote them was a damned optimist.
To be fair, the USA was doing everything it knew how to do to keep its men alive, even the ones in punishment brigades. Warships shelled the coast, sending clouds of dust and smoke into the air. Fighter-bombers raked the landing zone with machine guns, rockets, and firebombs made from jellied gasoline. From farther overhead, heavier bombers flying out of Okinawa and Saipan and other islands bloodily taken from the Japs dropped high explosives on the enemy.
Mike had been through the preliminaries too many times before to think they’d murder all the Japs waiting to murder him. No matter how much hellfire you rained on the bastards, you killed only a fraction of them. The rest would require more personal attention.
Even now, the Japs were trying to fight back. Shells kicked up waterspouts among the wallowing landing craft. Just by the luck of the draw, a few of those would be direct hits, and God help the poor fools in those boats.
The landing craft mounted.50-caliber machine guns as token antiaircraft protection. Suddenly, all of them seemed to start going off at once. Tracers stitched across the sky.
Some kamikazes went after the bigger warships and freighters. Some pilots decided they’d be doing their duty for the Emperor if they took out a landing craft’s worth of Americans. They weren’t so far wrong, either-if they could do it. A lot of them got shot down trying, or else missed their intended targets and went into the drink.
One flew terrifyingly low over Mike’s landing craft, so low he got a split-second glimpse of the young pilot’s face. Then the kamikaze was gone. Whatever he did, Mike never found out about it.
A swabby manning the.50 that had been banging away at the Jap flyer sang out: “Beach just ahead! Good luck, you sorry assholes!”
Mike would be happy to take all the good luck he could get. The Japs knew the Americans were coming. Kagoshima Bay was the closest part of the Home Islands to Okinawa. You didn’t have to be a military genius to see what that meant. All you had to do was look at a map.
So they’d put mines in the beachside water. A couple of landing craft hit them and went up with a boom. But the one Mike was riding made it onto the sand of Kyushu. Down went the landing gate.
“Come on, you fuckers!” Mike shouted to the men he would lead for as long as he could. He dashed out. They followed. His boots scuffed across the Japanese beach.
People were shooting at him again. That seemed to happen every goddamn time he visited a new island. The only polite thing to do was to shoot back.
A Corsair roared in at just above treetop height, almost as low as the kamikaze had passed over the landing craft. It machine-gunned and napalmed the ground in back of the beach. Mike whooped when the fireball from the napalm sent black, greasy smoke into the sky. He whooped again when he realized a lot less Jap fire was coming in. That Navy plane had done some good.
“Keep moving!” he called. “The farther off the beach we get, the better off we are.” He didn’t know that was true, but he hoped like hell it was.
Enemy fire picked up again. The Japs were doing everything they could to drive the invaders into the ocean. As if to underline that, a soldier stepped on a land mine. What happened next reminded Mike of an explosion in a butcher’s shop. He had nightmares often enough as things were. That memory would only make them worse.
Pretty soon, his boots were thumping, not scuffing. Whenever he saw anything moving ahead, he squeezed off a burst. He assumed anyone alive here would try to kill him with even a quarter of a chance.
You weren’t supposed to shoot civilians. Then again, they weren’t supposed to shoot at you, either. A gray-haired man in farmer’s clothes fired a rifle at him. The range wasn’t long, but the fellow missed. A big puff of white smoke poured from his weapon. Mike greased him before he could duck back into his hole. Then he ran up to make sure the guy was dead.
He was, or he would be in a few minutes. Half his head was blown off. Mike stared at the piece he was carrying more than he did at the horrible wound. It looked like something a farmer might make for himself. The Jap had a powder horn with black powder in it. He had percussion caps. His bullets were half-inch lengths cut from an iron bar. When Mike looked down the barrel, he saw it wasn’t even rifled. It looked to have been made from ordinary metal pipe. The whole setup belonged to 1861, not to 1945.
But by the end of the day he’d seen three or four more of those smoothbore muskets, all in the hands of civilians. Jap soldiers here carried Arisakas, the same as they did everywhere else he’d been. Those weren’t as good as M-1s, but they were reasonable military weapons. The muskets. . You could make stacks of them in a hurry and pass them out to anybody who wanted to use them.
They wouldn’t do much good. They weren’t a whole lot more dangerous than the spears Jugs had heard Tokyo Rose talking about. When you fired one, the smoke that burst from the muzzle yelled Here I am! to the world. With a smoothbore, you’d hit a man out past fifty yards only by luck.
What the makeshift weapons did say was that the Japs aimed to fight to the last man. Their soldiers had done that everywhere Mike had seen. He remembered the women on Saipan throwing their children off the cliffs and then jumping after them. Here in the Home Islands, it would be even worse.
And it was. Some of the people with those muskets weren’t old men who hadn’t gone overseas. Some were young women and girls. You had to shoot them, or they would shoot you. Mike hadn’t puked since Tarawa, but killing a musketeer in a kimono damn near did it for him.
A guy in his section, a burly fellow who went by Spider from a tattoo on his left forearm, didn’t kill one of those lady musketeers. He just wounded her. When he went up to see if he could save her and take her prisoner, she waited till he got close, then blew herself up with a grenade, and him with her.
From then on, the guys in Mike’s section shot first and didn’t ask questions even afterwards. That had to violate the laws of war. He didn’t worry about it. The Japs weren’t playing by the rules, either. If they armed civilians and sent girls into battle, they had to take their chances.
American Sherman tanks clanked forward. Mike was happy to trot along behind one for a while. It was like having a shield that also blew things up and killed things for you. The Japs had only a handful of tanks, and the ones they did have were no match for Shermans. Mike had heard that Shermans were death traps against German panzers, but they were almost unstoppable on this side of the world.
Almost. Something exploded under the one Mike was following. Fire and smoke burst from the hatches. A couple of crewmen got out. The rest. . didn’t. Mike peered under the Sherman’s flaming carcass. An arm hung out of a hole in the ground. A Jap had been in there with an antitank mine or an artillery shell. He’d killed himself when he set it off, but he’d killed the tank, too.
“Fuck,” Mike muttered. He lit a cigarette, wishing he had whiskey in his canteen. How were you supposed to fight people like this? Most military planning assumed that the other guy wanted to live as much as you did. The Japs tore up that rule and danced on it.
Fighting barely slowed down when night fell. The Japs kept coming, wave after wave of them. Mike snatched a little sleep like an animal, curled up in a hollow. Nothing this side of getting wounded would have woken him.
Firepower let the Americans push forward. The only planes in the sky had stars on their wings and fuselages. The Japs fought for Kagoshima street by street, house by house, just the same.