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Beyond, in the open field, the bodies of some of the American gunners were being laid in rows beside the command tent. Farther on there were nine dead Japs in a ditch. One of them still clutched a stick with a bayonet tied to it. Nearby, beside a burning jeep, lay the body of a lieutenant. Corporal Anthony Kouma told us he had begged to be shot because he was so badly wounded. Kouma had said: "You'll be all right, sir," but the officer had died within a few minutes.
We passed the body of a dead American private and a few steps farther on Kouma stooped, looked at another body and cried: "My God, there's the major, the battalion commander. I thought he got out all right.
There's a man they'll never replace."
"Love, Mom." The major had died with his face to the enemy. Back of him about 20 yards lay his helmet and carbine.
Evidently he had dropped them and stumbled on after being hit. Beside his hand were two V-mail letters from home. Perhaps he had tried to read them once again before he died. One was signed, "Love, Mom.'' The other was signed with a girl's name and said, "You certainly are a sweet old thing."
In the wooded area just north of the field lay the results of the work of the artillerymen, and of the tankers and infantry who were now beginning to get back the lost ground. Not even on Tarawa were the Japs piled up so densely. In one area no more than a hundred yards square I counted more than 200 of them.
In a zigzag ditch about 25 feet long there were 56 Jap bodies. They were stacked four deep at some points. Many were laid open by the shell blasts and the blood of most of them had not yet started to congeal.
Among the dead there was a surprisingly high percentage of officers. At least 25 samurai swords were collected by souvenir-hunting troops who followed the tanks. Later we found one reason for this. Not all the Jap troops had shown the banzai spirit. Some of them still huddled in the fields and the ditches. One in four of them had committed suicide, but there was a cleanup job to do on the rest.
Simple Slaughter. Next morning our troops drove to the beach on the north of the Jap pocket and thus hemmed in the remnants of living and the windrows of dead in an area about a thousand yards along the beach and 500 yards inland. In the northern end of this pocket there was some fierce fighting that day before the enemy was beaten down. But from the lower end of the pocket, driving north, it was simple slaughter.
Three of our companies closed in, firing into the holes and ditches as they walked through the cane fields and woods. "All the fight's gone out of them," said Captain Thomas Wheeler of Kansas City as we walked behind his tanks. "Now it's just like killing rats."
The tank in front of us stopped beside a farmhouse crib where rice bags were piled high. A lanky fighting man—a lefthander—looked cautiously under the little house. He tossed a grenade, then pounced like a cat over the rice bags into the crib and fired a burst of four or five from his Browning. Another man followed him in and soon came out with an officer's sword.