By early the next morning we were in position to work the dreaded Meat Grinder. My three guard dogs plus a radioman who was going to double as a recorder were my “staff.” I was the spotter, so I’d call the actual mission. Goon and his boys would keep us alive once the Japanese realized there was artillery, naval or Marine, dedicated to digging them out with indirect fire. The colonel had also assigned a squad of regular infantry to reinforce our defensive ring. Ordinarily, infantry would be assigned exclusively to advancing friendly front lines all along the regiment’s sector, but the colonel realized that the usual regimental push wasn’t working. He decided to consolidate the bulk of the regimental forces where they were until I had had time to make a dent. Assuming I could. Colonel Sam was still the original show-me guy.
We hadn’t had to walk to this assignment. Four tanks had been assigned to get us up to The Line, where they dropped us off into a sixteen-inch shell’s crater at the bottom of a narrow ravine. We were now on the edge of the so-called Meat Grinder rock formation. Our first half hour was spent hurriedly digging in as the Japanese spotted the tanks and called in their own artillery. Fortunately, the crater was somewhat protected by a volcanic rock ridge, so for a change the shelling was noisy but not effective.
Unsettling word came from offshore. Apparently, there was an acute shortage of heavy projectiles. The Navy had just begun experimenting with ship-to-ship at-sea ammunition replenishment for the bigger ships, like cruisers, but the battlewagons still had to go off-station for several days either way. The CP told me I’d have to settle for a heavy cruiser, which fired eight-inch shells. For troops-in-the-open targets, eight-inch shellfire was more than adequate. It was not so effective for those targets that were deep underground. Either way, it wasn’t like I could argue about it. Eight-inch would have to do until one of the big gray beasts, fed and rested, returned to the scene. I wondered why somebody wasn’t staggering the offline periods for the battleships.
My cruiser was the USS Baltimore, one of the newer eight-inch gun ships with radar-controlled main and secondary batteries. Her radio call sign was Anthem, which I thought was pretty elegant for a ship-killer like Baltimore. My plan for defeating those sixty-second pop-up snipers who’d managed to hold up any progress into and beyond this sector with the grisly name involved mapping their tunnel network. I sent word out all along the front lines: every time a sniper pops up, try to kill him, but then send me his position in six-digit grid coordinates. Estimate it as best you can—don’t worry about precise grid numbers.
After twenty-four hours, I ought to have a lot of contact reports such as: at 1130 this morning, a sniper materialized in or near grid position X and killed two of my people before disappearing again. My scribe would then plot it. The positions wouldn’t be perfectly accurate, but after recording and plotting a sufficient number of spider hole incidents and applying a few formulae, we ought to start getting a pretty good idea of where the supporting underground tunnels were. As I’d explained to the comms major: the same advantage that the tunnel network gave the enemy in ambushing our Marines would be their undoing, because, ultimately, the tunnels couldn’t move around.
After two days of almost constant concealed rifle fire coming our way, we had more than a hundred penciled-in positions laid down on that topographic chart, and it was pretty clear where at least two of the main tunnels cutting through the Meat Grinder sector lay. I drew a mission box that covered one of them for a distance of six hundred yards and a width of two hundred yards. I then called the cruiser and requested an area-fire mission along the length of that box, using eight-inch armor-piercing. I fixed my binocs on the prominent ridge covering what should be the tunnel’s southern end, and then informed the cruiser that I would be walking their area fire down the length of a tunnel by issuing spots. It would be a cumbersome process, but my trusty scribe would be recording fall of shot during the mission. If the snipers kept popping up, I’d adjust the area fire until they stopped that shit. This would take some time, but there was a good probability that we’d eventually close down that tunnel. Then we’d go after the second tunnel, I hoped with a beast this time instead of a cruiser.
My plan gave new meaning to the term “indirect” method of fire support. I couldn’t see the target. My spots were all going to be relative to the plotted and calculated tunnel axis, garnered from Marines up and down The Line as they peeked over “hot” rocky ridges. The cruiser, like any offshore shooter, would have to convert my standard three spots—deflection, elevation, and range—to gun target lines from them to the target. They’d pump out three rounds in a single salvo, one gun from each gun turret, and then I’d give them a spot. Three more rounds and then another spot. I’d walk the cruiser’s fall of shot down the axis of where I thought the tunnel was. If I was right, it would kill everyone in the tunnel and collapse much of the tunnel. Do that long enough, and our guys could finally move forward. If I saw any evidence that our stuff was actually penetrating down to the tunnel, I’d shift to nine-gun salvos.
That was the theory, anyway, and my Marines were anxious for something to happen to those tunnels. The open question was what would the enemy do once he figured out that the Americans had located their tunnels. Goon just laughed. “As if we don’t know,” he said.
I rolled my eyes. “Anthem, this is Iwo, two-six Charlie: fire mission, over?”
“This is Anthem: roger, over?”
“Anthem, fire mission follows: troops in a tunnel, area fire within grid boundary as follows.” Many numbers followed. “Beginning at start-point new grid.” More numbers. “At my command, three guns, Main Battery, armor-piercing, along an axis of zero four five degrees true, one-hundred-yard spotted intervals. Full, nine-gun salvos on standby; smoke every third salvo, for a distance of six hundred yards. Report when ready.”
The cruiser’s talker repeated back my call, verbatim. Then I got a request to confirm armor-piercing. I wasn’t surprised—that stuff was supposed to be used to fight other cruisers. I confirmed what I wanted and that was the last I heard about it.
I then warned the closest friendlies. I wanted to make sure they were expecting the sudden barrage right in front of them. Sixty seconds later the Baltimore reported ready. I replied: ready, break, fire, which called out the first three-gun salvo. She had nine guns, but I thought iterations of three should do it for starters. I could always ramp it up.
That produced an immediate: “Shot, out,” followed seven seconds later by the traditional: “Stand by, out.” Three smallish explosions erupted along the beginning of where I thought the tunnels were. I sent back a spot to bring the fall of shot a little farther east. I’m sure the troops weren’t all that impressed, because the shells hit, penetrated, and only then went off, sometimes as much as twenty feet underground, resulting only in a series of dull thumps up on the surface. At this distance I couldn’t be too precise, so I spotted the next few salvos to cover as much ground as possible while talking the firing line gradually to the east in the direction of the most plotted spider holes. I called in ninety rounds over the next fifteen minutes as dawn slowly bloomed. The Marines could clearly see and hear the incoming shells as I spotted the salvos across the center of the Meat Grinder to its eastern edge, closest to the sea.
Once I was done, I called a second mission against where we thought the other tunnel might be, but then held the firing command until I saw something indicating we’d done some good. Anything at all, please God.
Nothing. No indication we’d hit anything but rock. I figured the Japs would know someone was hunting them, but there was no massive secondary explosion like we’d had the first time. On the other hand, there was no sniper fire, either. Maybe we had their attention, I thought. I said as much to Goon. May not want that kind of attention, he pointed out. Then Twitch called out: smoke!
He was right—there was grayish smoke beginning to lift up out of the gullies and crags out in front of us. Nothing dramatic, but something had to be burning underground, like one of those never-ending coal-mine fires. If that was solid rock, there would have been no smoke. I quickly called up a white phosphorus mission along the area we’d just shelled. Alternating, two armor-piercing followed by two white phosphorus rounds. After five minutes of that, the volume of smoke grew dramatically all along where we thought the first tunnel was lurking. If the tunnel had been breached in more than one place, that white phosphorus would be killing enemy troops in great numbers, especially confined underground like that. I figured when it got bad enough underground, they might even decide to evacuate the tunnels and come on out into the open.
Baltimore had a fix for that situation, too.
Having a heavy cruiser in contact and already zeroed in, I’d call for some of that new radio-fuzed five-inch ammo, called VT Frag, standing for variable-time fragmenting ammunition. It was normally used as an anti-aircraft round—instead of having to actually hit an aircraft maneuvering at high speed in three dimensions to cause the projectile to burst, these things transmitted a cone of radio-frequency energy ahead of themselves. If the receiver in the projectile detected even a hint of a return signal, it meant the projectile was close to an aircraft and it would go bang. It could also be fired at a high vertical angle so that it ended up coming straight down. When that RF receiver detected the ground approaching, it exploded, creating an airburst of shrapnel at sixty to eighty feet, which was perfect when enemy troops were exposed above ground, even if they were dug into foxholes.
I told the Baltimore we were seeing secondary fires, and then called in a chapter-two mission, again with eight-inch armor-piercing, to revisit the entire area. If we were on target, and now I thought we were, that should drive any survivors into tunnel number two, which plotted pretty close to the first one with one main intersection.
Then I set up a third mission to work the second tunnel, again alternating AP with WP. The Baltimore’s plotting room crew obviously now understood exactly what I was trying to do. After the first few of my spots, they advanced the fall of shot on a straight line all by themselves to the southeast, again, right down to the sea. This time, there was a lot more smoke rising up. Goon sat there, behind our rock, speculating on what it was like to have eight-inch cruiser shells going off down there in their happy little tunnels.
By the middle of the day, there was smoke oozing out of cracks we hadn’t known about. And definitely no more sniper fire, I was told. I wondered if the line Marines were going to try to advance. They’d been making so little progress pushing the Japanese back up the island that what little distance they gained each time was called a touchdown. In other words, a hundred yards at a time, with far too much blood being lost on our side. The generals and the admirals had predicted this entire assault would be over in five days, given the size of this island. We were now L+12 days in and had little to show for it except hideous casualty figures and all of the reserves already committed. This had to work.