Stuart Slade - A Mighty Endeavor

“Order the third regiment to advance on the flank of the Japanese positions along Ridge 73. One infantry battalion to detach and capture Hill 151, supported by a battalion of the engineers.”

She looked again at the map. Ridge 73 met Ridge 70 at a right angle. Hill 151 formed the pivot between the two. It was an odd position. Hill 151 was a critical piece of terrain, but only if both Ridge 70 and Ridge 73 were also held in strength. If those conditions were met, the Japanese would be trapped in a bowl; their rear blocked by the Mekong, their left flank anchored against another, smaller river that fed into the main waterway.

A further advance from Ridge 73 on their right flank would roll them up.

Japanese resistance was stiffening as the Thai troops approached the woodline north of Ridge 70. It wasn’t that the individual troops were fighting with greater determination. As far as Sergeant Mongkut could see, that wasn’t possible. To the best of his knowledge, not one Japanese soldier had surrendered. They’d stayed in their defensive positions and held their ground until they were killed.

He honestly couldn’t understand it. The instructors had taught their Thai students that positions should only be held until they were untenable. It was much more effective to abandon such positions and retake them later than to lose men in a hopeless defense. The Japanese obviously did not believe in that doctrine. Even their most hopeless positions had been held until every man in it was dead. There was no such thing as bypassing positions or maneuvering them out. The Japanese had to be dug out and killed, one by one.

“Sergeant, the engineers are moving in. We must cover them.” The cavalry lieutenant obviously knew what he was doing. Mongkut recognized that, but he wasn’t his lieutenant and he glanced around looking for some guidance.

“Lieutenant Somchai is gone, Sergeant. He never made it out of the trenches.” Corporal Pon was wounded, his face swollen and battered with one eye closed and his front teeth missing. Blood stained his jaws and the front of his uniform and his voice was hard to understand.

Mongkut nodded, acknowledging both the news of Somchai’s death and the orders he had been given from the cavalry officer. The sacrifice of the troops that had been trapped in the open had bought the Japanese time to build defenses in the woods. Tracer fire streamed out from a defense position, ricocheting off the Carden Lloyd carrier. The vehicle responded with a long burst from its Browning. A pair of engineers started to move forward. They kept perilously close to the tracer fire and used its suppression to get close enough to the source of the Japanese gunfire.

What happened next horrified Mongkut in a day already been filled with nightmares worse than he could ever have imagined. A long stream of orange fire erupted from the engineer team and arched into the Japanese defenses. The flamethrower operator was well-trained. He started squeezing bursts out in quick succession. Balls of red-orange rolled into the woods. The roar of the flamethrower was bad enough. Worse were the hideous screams from the Japanese positions. The occupants of their position ran out of the woods, living torches soaked in fire from their heads to their feet. They could hardly be seen in the inferno that consumed them. All Mongkut could see was the black outlines of the men as they writhed and burned. All he could smell was the ghastly stench of burning flesh and the petroleum fuel of the flamethrower.

“Forward, quickly.”

The cavalry officer gave the order. His men moved quickly against the position they had just incinerated. Mongkut quickly glanced to one side and the other. He could see terrible, feather-like bursts of flame as the engineers got to work. Then, the forest closed in around him and the men were pushing into the shadowed ground. It was blackened, seared and stained with a filthy, black glue that stuck to everything. There was a charred trunk on the ground, one where the bark was broken open and roasted by the flamethrower. Then, Mongkut saw the dark red inside. It wasn’t a tree but the remains of a man, burned until he was unrecognizable as anything human. All around him were bicycles; dozens of them were blackened by fire and their tires burned or melted. The Japanese infantry had ridden them into action, not knowing that they were cycling into an inferno.

More bursts of machine gun fire erupted from the trees up ahead. Some cavalrymen went down. Others had taken up their positions and returned fire while a machine gun carrier edged through the trees until it could bring its Browning to bear. It would suppress the position until a flamethrower crew could get to work. Mongkut lost track of time and space. Lost in the green world under the trees, all he was aware of was moving forward until they met Japanese resistance. There the ghastly sights and sounds of the flamethrower attacks would be repeated.

Sometime during the battle of the forest, Corporal Pon was killed. Mongkut was aware than the number of survivors from his unit was steadily shrinking. A section had a corporal and eight men; the battle had started with eight such sections in each platoon. Looking around, he guessed that the cavalry platoon and the engineers, plus his own unit, was barely equal to his own platoon’s original strength. The engineers were suffering too. When the horror of the flamethrowers had sunk in, the Japanese made the engineers their primary targets. Every so often, their rifle and machine gun fire would explode the pressurized cylinders of fuel on the back of a flamethrower man. Then he would be the one turned into a screaming, living torch.

At some point in the battle, their axis of advance had swung from east to south. Mongkut realized they were driving the Japanese parallel to the river instead of back towards it. He had no idea where he was in the forest or why the unit was maneuvering the way it was. All he knew was that there was another Japanese position in front of him that had to be suppressed before its world would be turned into fire. He knew something else: he hated the Japanese beyond anything he could imagine. They have lost this battle, it’s all over. Why must they make us fight like this when they must know they have lost the battle? Why are they forcing us to do these things? As the hatred seethed in his mind, he started to welcome the sight of the flamethrower crews burning the Japanese in their dugouts and foxholes and relish the sounds of screaming from their victims.

Lieutenant General Akihito Nakamura knew defeat looming when he saw it. He had left his headquarters the other side of the river so he could lead his division when they broke through the Thai defenses and headed into the heart of Indochina. That hadn’t happened. His division was being methodically destroyed, driven back on to a narrow spit of land where the Mekong and one of its tributaries joined. There was no way out of that position. That left only one option open to him and his division command staff. They were preparing for it now, loading themselves with hand grenades and picking up rifles so that they could make a last charge on the enemy. Perhaps, even now, one last charge will turn the tide of the battle. It has before.

The Thais were closing in. Nakamura knew that from the closeness of the sound. Machinegun fire, artillery, the crash of grenades and the evil roar of the flamethrowers. The last sound infuriated him. How could his soldiers be expected to fight like warriors when they were burned alive in their defenses ? The Thais hadn’t even charged like proper soldiers. Instead, they moved forwards slowly and patiently. Nakamura looked up at the setting sun. A few minutes and it would be night. A pity I don’t have that long. A night charge would have a better chance of breaking through . He led his men out to their last-hope attack.