Palawan April 27, 1943
An orgy of chaos was happening. Dozens of assault ships were anchored. Assault barges, landing craft and self-propelled armored vehicles were circling in the water waiting for ninety day wonders to lead them to the beaches. Some battalions were still well organized, companies clustered with their assault platoons forward and a reserve platoon just five minutes behind. Other battalions had lost companies. One of the assault battalions should have been able to hit a stretch of beach four hundred yards wide with eight hundred men in under ten minutes. When they landed, only two hundred men were on the correct portion of the beach. Most of the rest of the battalion merely landed half a mile to the south although one platoon was marooned a mile to the north.
Further off-shore, USS Arizona and her division mates waited for the first tendrils of Apollo. As soon as the horizon hinted orange, heavy naval rifles started to fire. Two older cruisers joined the Pearl Harbor veterans. They were all firing at map coordinates initially although they quickly shifted to directed fire once the airborne spotters could see worthwhile targets of opportunity. Destroyers were being held in reserve for immediate reaction when the ground commanders ran into trouble and needed to be bailed out.
Overhead, a dozen Wildcats circled warily. They were waiting for the inevitable counter-attack on the beachheads. Forty miles south of the lightly defended beaches, Enterprise and Yorktown bomber squadrons pounded an airfield while to the north Essex’s air group hit a hardened bomber base. The escort carriers were sticking tight to the transports to provide point defense fighter coverage and immediate air support for the grunts.
By mid-morning fourteen thousand men, eighty tanks and sixty field guns were ashore. Even as another wave of LSTs were preparing to beach themselves, USS Richmond, USS Raleigh and six destroyer transports left the protection of the invasion fleet. The ships increased speed to twenty five knots and headed to the northeast. The fast carrier groups trailed these eight ships for three hours, the gap slowly increasing as flight operations took the carriers back to the south and west, but the converted cruisers and destroyers were covered by fighters until the late afternoon at which point they were on their own.
By nightfall, both divisions were ashore. Engineers were already busy bulldozing a plantation and moving steel matting. Within a week, fighters could operate, at some hazard, from a brand new strip. Infantry men were walking slowly up the road while tank companies laagered for the night. A few Japanese observation posts were overrun; a timber bunker filled with second string garrison troopers and a single light machine gun could annoy and harass a battalion of infantry backed by a double handful of M-3 tanks. The tanks were covered by infantry and then the heavy 75 millimeter guns chucked high explosive shells at the defenses. Occasionally, combat engineers and their satchel charges and flamethrowers were needed, but the route to destroy the main Japanese garrison was opening up.
As American infantrymen waited for medics after clearing another squad sized hard point, the guns of Fort Mills in Manila Bay tracked eight potential targets. Eagle eyed men soon smiled as heavy shells were removed from the guns. Relief was not here, but these ships were promise that it was coming.
End of Volume 5
