All of the shooting now came from the direction of the American advance. The Japs between the attacking force and Barry’s trench were keeping their heads down and their gun barrels hot. Their camouflaged helmets offered difficult targets.
“Hold your fire until our boys blast them out of those trenches,” Barry told his friends. “It won’t be long now. Then we can see what we’re shooting at. Curly, suppose you face the other way and see that nobody snipes—”
PING!
Barry broke off as a .25-caliber slug glanced off his helmet. The shock of it hurt his old head-wound like a knife stab.
“I see the beggar!” yelped Curly. “He’s in that tree above the wrecked tent....”
The raving of his tommy-gun drowned out Levitt’s words. Tony Romani’s weapon joined it, firing short bursts. Suddenly the shooting stopped.
“One more honorable sniper bites honorable dust,” chanted Rosy O’Grady’s navigator. “So solly!”
From concealment in patches of brush and trees the Jap field guns started to fire. They were lobbing shells just over their trenches, feeling for the Americans down the slope. Apparently some of the shells landed close. Their result was simply to speed up the attack.
In a series of short rushes the two companies closed in on the entrenched Japs. While some of them advanced the rest poured a hot fire into the Jap positions. Then the foremost Americans started hurling grenades. In a few minutes much of the fighting was hand to hand. Howling like wolves, the boys from Montana, Ohio, and New York leaped into the Jap front-line defenses and cleaned them out.
Fred Marmon and Cracker Jackson wanted to charge down the slope and join that fight, but Barry forbade it.