The Great Alone (107 page)

“What are you talking about?” Wylie mocked. “Don’t you know there’s a girl behind every tree in the Aleutians?”

“Very funny,” he muttered, fully aware that there were no trees in the Aleutians. He set his silverware down and pushed up from the table. “I gotta get some coffee to wash this down.”

The food tasted as bad as it looked. Rather than think about what he was putting in his mouth, Wylie reached inside the pocket of his parka and pulled out the mail he’d picked up. He flipped through the envelopes and saw the letter he’d been waiting to get—Lisa’s. He laid the others aside and opened hers.

Dear Wylie,

It’s been a long time since I heard from you. I saw your mother at church last Sunday and asked if you had mentioned whether there was a chance you’d be coming home soon. I thought you might arrange to get a weekend pass over the Thanksgiving holiday, but she said you hadn’t indicated to her that you’d be home.

I was hoping you would. I’ve been wanting to talk to you so I could explain some things to you. I didn’t want to write it in a letter. But, since I’m not sure when you’ll be home again, I decided I’d better not wait to tell you. I’m not sure if you remember meeting Steve Bogardus, the man I work for, but Steve and I are getting married in December. I …

December. Wylie didn’t bother to read any further. This was the first of February. She was already married. Unconsciously he tightened his grip on the letter, crumpling the edge of it.

“Hey, Wylie. Look here. They got a magazine filled with pictures of nude women.” Big Jim thrust it in front of him.

The magazine was opened to a page that showed a tawny-haired girl, her naked body arched in a provocative pose. A white-hot fury seared through him. Wylie struck out blindly, knocking the magazine out of Big Jim’s hands; and abruptly rising to his feet, he upset the table and the bench. Distantly he could hear Big Jim yelling at him, but the angry and stunned expression on his friend’s face didn’t mean anything to him. He wanted to hit something—anything—and Big Jim was the nearest. He slammed his fist into the center of that dirty white beard, then dived after him when Big Jim tumbled backward.

The next thing he knew, several pairs of hands were dragging him off his friend. The fight went out of him as he watched Big Jim get up slowly, moving his jaw back and forth to see if it worked.

“What the hell got into you?” Big Jim glared.

“Sorry.” Wylie shrugged off the restraining hands, feeling half sick inside and unwilling to look his friend in the eye. He glanced at the overturned table and the spilled food, then reached down and picked up the bench.

The soldiers who had broken up the fight lifted the table and set it back up. One of them retrieved Wylie’s mail from the muddy floor, including Lisa’s letter. When Wylie saw him start to read it, he snatched it out of his hands.

“That’s mine, mister,” he growled.

“I wasn’t going to keep it,” the soldier retorted.

One of his buddies spoke up, “Wanta bet the letter says, ‘Dear John’?”

Big Jim stepped up to stand beside Wylie. “It’s none of your damned business, soldier, what that letter says.”

But they all knew. The silence of the mess tent told Wylie that. He crumpled the letter into a ball and stuffed it inside the pocket of his parka.

CHAPTER LVIII

U.S. Submarine Nautilus

May 10, 1943

A soldier of Mexican extraction accidentally jostled Big Jim’s arm, nearly causing him to spill his coffee. “Watch it, Pedro,” he growled and wedged himself into the narrow space on the bench beside Wylie. “Did ya ever get the feeling submarines weren’t designed to be transport ships?”

“Once or twice.”

The
Nautilus
was one of the largest submarines in the fleet, displacing some twenty-seven hundred tons. But even its accommodations were cramped by the addition of some hundred and twenty-five passengers, part of the ten-thousand-man force distributed among the thirty-four vessels in the invasion fleet. The storm had forced the postponement of the scheduled May seventh landing at Attu, repeatedly pushing it back another twenty-four hours. Now the storm had ended and Operation Landcrab was set to commence in the early-morning hours of the eleventh. Instead of one mass landing, the Army division was split into four segments. The largest contingent of troops, the Southern Force, was to go ashore at Massacre Bay; the Northern Force was to hit the northern harbor and submarine base of Holtz Bay; one regiment was to be held in reserve aboard ship; and the fourth group, made up of a crack combat battalion of four hundred and ten officers and men that had been organized in the last three months by Captain Willoughby, this “Provisional Scout Battalion,” as it was called, was to land at Scarlet Beach and cut off any Japanese retreat into the mountains. The commando-trained Alaska Scouts were dispersed among the various regiments. Wylie and Big Jim had ended up with Willoughby’s Scout Battalion.

A lanky private from Texas started to sit down at an empty place across the table from Wylie and Big Jim, then glanced at the bearded, tough-looking pair and hesitated. “Is it all right if I sit here?” he drawled thickly.

“Go ahead.” Big Jim shrugged.

The Texan sat down and started pouring sugar into his coffee. “Most of the fellas are tryin’ to grab some sleep before we go in, but I jus’ couldn’t shut my eyes. Guess you two couldn’t sleep neither.” He stuck a spoon in his cup and churned up the sugar in the bottom. “Do ya think the Japs’ll be waitin’ there for us?”

“It’s hard to say.”

“It’s crazy, ya know.” He grinned nervously. “We been trainin’ fer months in those California deserts, learnin’ desert warfare. They said we was goin’ to North Africa an’ face Rommel’s bunch. Then three months ago, they started turnin’ us into an amphibious outfit. When we marched onto that ship in San Francisco, all of us figured we was headed for the Solomons. Hell, we musta been at sea two days before they told us we was headed for the Aleutians. Shit, I never even knew where they were.”

“A lot of people don’t.” Wylie shook a cigarette out of the pack and lit it.

During the week they’d been cramped together on the submarine, Wylie had heard the same story many times. Even stripping every base in the Territory, Alaska couldn’t muster enough combat-ready troops to form a full division, and none were trained for an amphibious assault. But the War Department had the Seventh Motorized Division handy, trained for desert tank warfare. Since it was no longer needed in North Africa, they assigned it to the amphibious invasion of the sub-Arctic Aleutian Island of Attu. Then, with the same secrecy in which they had cloaked the whole Aleutian campaign, the troops hadn’t learned their destination until they were en route. To call it crazy was almost an understatement. What made it perhaps even more insane was the fact that only the Provisional Scout Battalion had set foot on Aleutian soil, training for one week on the snow and tundra at Dutch Harbor. The rest of the division had almost no knowledge of the terrain or conditions in which they’d have to fight.

A dearth of cold-weather gear had prevented the Army from properly outfitting the invasion force. Willoughby had managed to raid the supply depot at Dutch Harbor and refit his Scouts with proper jackets, socks, and waterproof “shoepac” boots. Without them, Wylie doubted that his battalion would have had a chance of surviving the overland trek they were going to have to make to be the “pincer” of the Landcrab operation.

Wylie gave the captain credit for preparing his men the best that he could in the time he’d had. Instead of rifles, submachine guns, and small weapons, he’d armed them with automatic rifles, machine guns, mortars, and demolition equipment. Instead of ball ammunition, they carried tracers and armor-piercing bullets, capable of penetrating ice instead of ricocheting. Their packs were filled with grenades, along with a day and a half’s supply of food.

“I’ll tell ya one thing I’m glad about,” the Texan said, talking incessantly so he wouldn’t have to think about the coming battle. “That I’m not in that Southern Force that’s landin’ at Massacre Bay. I mean, that’d be spooky, wouldn’t it? Why would anybody ever wanta give a place a name like that?”

“About two hundred years ago some Russian hunters murdered all the men in a native village on that bay. That’s how it came to be called Massacre Bay,” Wylie stated.

“It’d give me the fuckin’ willies if I had to land there,” the private declared.

The alarm rang, summoning the submarine’s crew to their battle stations. The skipper came on the address system. “We have picked up an unidentified vessel on our radar screen.”

“Jeezus, I’ll bet it’s a Jap submarine!” The Texan’s nervous exclamation drowned out part of the explanation the submarine commander offered to his passengers.

“We’re closing in on the target now.”

Everyone fell silent. Wylie waited tensely for some sound, some vibration of the vessel that would indicate the torpedoes were away.

Moments later the crew was ordered to stand down. The unidentified vessel had turned out to be the
Nautilus
’s sister submarine, the
Narwhal,
with its contingent from the Scout Battalion. The torpedoes had been ready to fire when the skipper recognized the vessel.

“I don’t like it,” Big Jim muttered under his breath to Wylie. “First those two destroyers run into each other in this fog. Now we damned near torpedo one of our own submarines. I tell you I don’t like it.”

“I didn’t know you were superstitious.”

“Hey, you guys!” A soldier burst into the galley. “They just picked up Walter Winchell’s broadcast on an Alaska radio station. He said, “ ‘To Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea. Keep your eye on the Aleutian Islands.’ ”

“Shit.” Big Jim set his cup down in disgust. “Why don’t we just send up flares so the Japs’ll know we’re coming?”

One hour after midnight, Wylie and Big Jim stood near the front of the line that formed to the hatchways as the submarine ascended toward the surface. Ahead of them, the lieutenant turned and looked down the line.

“Remember, move as quiet as you can and as fast as you can,” he instructed again. “If any enemy ships are sighted, this submarine will dive, whether we’re all on board the rafts or not. So we have to move out. Got that?”

Heads nodded. As the submarine surfaced, a crewman simultaneously spun the wheel, cracking the hatch cover. Wylie pulled back, avoiding the cold sea water that spilled through. He scrambled up the ladder ahead of Big Jim and barely squeezed through the narrow hatch hole with his full combat pack.

Moving swiftly, they inflated the rubber rafts on the submarine’s afterdeck and climbed into them, crowding together. The lieutenant signaled the conning tower. A moment later, the hatches were closed. Wylie watched the black waters of the sea sweep over the deck of the submarine as it started to submerge. An instant later, he felt the surging water lift the raft and carry it away. They were three miles off the western coast of Attu, code-named “Jackboot.”

It took them two hours to reach the small stretch of beach on the western side of the island. A gentle surf ran them aground in the dawn light. Wylie and Big Jim quickly scrambled over the side and plowed into the heavy snow that reached all the way down to the tideline. Mountains walled in the strip of snow-covered beach, rising sharply from the sand. The beach appeared to be undefended.

The temperature was below freezing as Willoughby assembled his officers and men on the beach. A muscular six-footer, he was a commanding figure with belts of machine-gun ammunition crisscrossing his broad chest. Instinctively, Wylie and Big Jim kept watching the thinning mists of the mountains while the captain ordered the rubber rafts hauled inland beyond the tideline and a signal flashed to the submarines waiting at periscope depth offshore.

As the sun climbed above the horizon, the fog started to lift. Willoughby walked over to Wylie and eyed the mountain walls that hemmed in the beach. “If the Japs have any lookouts posted in these mountains, the fog isn’t going to hide us from them much longer. Let’s find a way up.”

“A creek has cut a steep ravine over there.” Wylie gestured in the direction of the gulley. “Looks like it will take us all the way to the top.”

“Let’s move out.”

Wylie and Big Jim took the lead up the snow-packed ravine while Willoughby and the Scout Battalion strung out behind them. Three men were left at the beach to guide the rest of the battalion scheduled to land soon from the destroyer. The air was cold, burning his lungs as Wylie struggled up the steep incline. The sun was up, but so was the wind.

He couldn’t shake the feeling that the enemy was just behind the next snowdrift. Continually he scanned the windswept snow ahead of him, tinted blue by the clear skies above. Under other circumstances, he might have seen the beauty of the light play, but at the moment he was more concerned about where the Japs might be.

The droning hum of airplane engines rose above the sound of his own labored breathing and snow-crunching footsteps. Wylie paused and glanced seaward, spotting a group of F4F Wildcats from the aircraft carrier in the invasion fleet. As the fighters swooped toward the beach, others in the long straggling line turned to watch them.