Tokyoamachee – or something like that – was a piece of work! I mean a real piece of work. It was all built to scale by the Engineers and realistic as hell: a real Jap city smack dab in the middle of the Georgia “Pineys.” It had gilt pagodas, and rice-paper-walled houses, and little gardens and shrines and stuff all over for acres and acres. And a big wall surrounding it...
I may not have that name right, after all these years – all from memory now. One time I had a sort of souvenir magazine or booklet about Camp Wheeler and the Infantry Training cycle there – but it must be in my stash somewhere else or something, and unless I can find it again I may not be able to get that name just right for you.
We were a “forgotten host’ – as I have told you previously. We were to be the first American invaders to wade ashore on the Japanese home islands – a bloodbath that the Generals in Washington were lying awake nights trying to figure out how to ameliorate some way. Japan in those days was considered a “land of fanatics,” and the perceived wisdom was that they would fight to the death, every man, woman, and child. They would never surrender and it would be requisite to wade ashore and take every square foot physically away from them.
"With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem,
The troopships bring us one by one,
At vast expense of time and steam,
To slay Afridis where they run.....
Two weeks after we started what was to be the last combat-trained cycle through historic old Camp Wheeler (named for “Fightin’ Joe Wheeler, the famed Confederate General...), Harry S. Truman dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Best thing that ever happened for our “forgotten host” – you betcha! – sad, but nevertheless true! – but now we were in the 16th week of our cycle, at the end, and we must do what we had set out to learn and to do before that bomb was dropped: take Tokyoamachee!
Juggernauts cannot be halted, once set in motion...
I cannot remember quite how we came up on Tokyoamachee. All I know is that we had been advancing and running through the woods for miles it seemed, and there were all these hidden pop-up, full-size Jap soldier cut-outs that the Engineers had concealed all over the place. They mostly all looked the same: buck-toothed accentuated Japanese figures with thick glasses on and they would suddenly trip right in front of you – charging full on with evil grin and fixed bayonet! You fired direct into them and ran on. When I simply describe this as a “fact” (of training and of survival in those days) to young folks today (the “30 to 40” crowd) – I almost invariably get a lecture on “racial bias” and other shit like that – which their keen diagnosis of the facial features discloses to them when I describe the “targets.” I have written it elsewhere – quoted it elsewhere, really – and will state it again here: “Had there never been a Pearl Harbor, there would never have been a Hiroshima.”
More I cannot say. (I can, but I won’t...).
We reached the walls at last of Tokyoamachee. A tank had breached them and gone crunching inside, so we just followed right on in through the gap. A Sergeant making up an impromptu machine gun crew out of nowhere somehow, saw me and pegged me to “Carry the barrel, Soldier, and follow me.” With two other guys drafted into the same crew, we all lay our M-1’s against a wall, and picked up the machine gun components he indicated and ran after the Sergeant. He popped into a building and we right after him. He was three steps ahead of us – and bounding up a stairway inside. We followed posthaste.
We entered a small room and he was over and then right out (!) the window before we could hardly catch our breath. When we got there, we saw he had jumped clear across a (thankfully!) narrow street or alley down below, and landed on the projecting, curled-up eaves of a pagoda-like building across the way. He ran along them a short distance, and popped out of sight again through an opening into that building. My compatriots – the assistant gunner now (by virtue of the tripod he was carrying – lighter than my load by some bit) and the ammo carrier (who immediately set down one of his ammo boxes and kept just the remaining one) both hesitated only momentarily... then both ran and jumped out the window and across the little alley after the sergeant.
My turn.
“Jeezul!,” I thought. “Am I supposed to jump across that? I might break my neck! I am at least fifty pounds heavier than those guys, and I got the heaviest piece of goods here (as usual): the barrel assembly...”
My fear was that the wide overhang of the curled-up pagoda eaves simply might give way under me and “...down would come barrel, baby, Bernie, and all” as in the Nursery Rhyme of yore, crashing into the alley... two stories below.
Sarge popped his head out of the pagoda hole across the way again, and called: “You need an invitation here or what, Soldier?”
"Of all 'is five years' schoolin' they don't remember much
Excep' the not retreatin', the step an' keepin' touch.
It looks like teachin' wasted when they duck an' spread an 'op --
But if 'e 'adn't learned 'em they'd be all about the shop".
So it was now or never. I backed up the length of the little room (not very much) and took off like a big gooney bird, machine gun barrel and all. I barely cleared the windowsill and was airborne – in the same sense a thrown rock is airborne: not for long, and rather gracelessly into the bargain! I saw or rather think I remember I saw, that alley under my feet and then almost instantly I landed with one hell of a big thud on the projecting eaves. I felt them “bounce” and give and thought, “Well, this is it!”
But they bounced back... and then up and down a few times, and shimmied to a standstill. The eaves had held after all! God Bless the Corps of Engineers, I thought...
I ran along the roofline and I, too, popped inside the pagoda. My fellow crew members and Sarge were already in place at yet another window, and I arrived with the barrel assembly and popped it into the tripod. In no time, the ammo carrier had fed the belt into the receiver and we were chattering away with the best of them and pouring out a satisfying stream of blanks upon our “unseen” enemy.
It was all a very long time ago and it was very “real.” And I thank my stars every night that we never had to “go there” and do that.... (But if we had had to, we were ready. Our education in racial sensitivity could well wait a few more decades...).
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