Baseball, Battle, and a Bride

As we moved forward fifteen or twenty yards, men I knew well fell to my right and left. Suddenly, there was a loud “crack!” that reverberated right through me, and my M1 Garand seemed to explode in my hands. It took a couple of seconds, as my heart raced, to realize what had happened. For a second I thought I’d been shot. But then I realized an enemy bullet had struck the middle of my rifle, breaking the stock in half. The only thing that kept me from being killed by that bullet intended for me was the rifle in my hands. God had chosen to spare me a second time. Fragments of the bullet, or metal from the rifle’s trigger guard, impacted my left thigh, but there was no time to examine the wound. My adrenaline surged and I was completely focused on the task at hand. I wasn’t thinking much of anything at the time but, “Get me outta here!”
All my actions happened quickly, without much thought on my part. I was single-mindedly focused on one thing. Get another weapon and keep moving. If I remained in one place I was a stationary target, a dead man. Bullets were zipping and zinging all around; I was still getting shot at. A bullet smacked into a tree a foot to my right, spraying splinters and bits of foliage over me. A man from my platoon surged from behind me, past me on my left. Out of the corner of my left eye, I saw his head suddenly snap back and his body fall backward in a heap. I ran over a few steps and saw that he was dead. I picked up his Tommy Gun and pitched forward onto my belly a few feet in front of his body, then half-rolled onto my left shoulder, raised up slightly and aimed the Tommy Gun in the general direction of the Japanese machine gun fire. I squeezed the trigger. Nothing. Rolling onto my back, I slipped out the twenty-round magazine and quickly checked it. There were still bullets in the magazine. I slapped the magazine back in and cranked back the bolt with my right hand to ensure a bullet was chambered. I rolled onto my left side again, aimed, and pulled the trigger. It still wouldn’t fire. I threw the Tommy Gun down—it was worthless to me. Getting to my feet and taking a few steps forward, I spotted another rifle, an M1 like mine, lying in a tangle of jungle vines and leafy bushes. Someone who’d been wounded or killed and taken away by the medics must have left it behind a day or two ago in an earlier attack. This one too failed to fire. I ran a few yards to the right, bending almost double to make as small a target for the Japanese gunners as possible, and saw a trusty old M1903 bolt action WW-I vintage rifle lying next to a dead private. I fell to one knee as I picked it up, put it to my right shoulder, aimed it at the enemy bunker, and fired. “Boooom.” It worked great, and I ran forward with it, continuing the attack, pleased to see the bayonet was already fixed on the end of the barrel. Along with the remaining men in our company, I moved forward a few yards at a time, rising slightly and firing, then going back to cover, and repeating. I was glad the M1903 used the same .30 caliber ammunition as my M1, because I still had about twenty to thirty M1 rounds on me. The enemy fire was so intense that our attack soon faltered, and we received the order from Captain Horton to fall back. We’d run right into the Japanese bunkers, and we had no way to pierce their lines with only our rifles and a few grenades. We crawled back about thirty yards while under fire, and dug in as best we could. Our attack had gained less than fifty yards. However, I’d be very satisfied with my new M1903, as it was the most reliable weapon in these taxing conditions. I kept it the rest of my combat tour.
The two worst weapons for jamming in New Guinea were the BAR and the Thompson submachine gun. The filthy swamp water, frequent rain, humidity, dirt, rotting vegetation, and all the other conditions we put up with were very hard on weapons and we didn’t have cleaning equipment in the jungle—we barely had food, clothing, and ammo. The M1903 bolt-action rifle was the most dependable in those conditions. Gas chambered (semiautomatic) weapons were often trouble. Even the most famous US infantry weapon of WW-II, the M1 Garand, jammed frequently in New Guinea.
Supplies were so tight that at one point I went for days with just three bullets for my M1903. I had plenty of chances, but didn’t fire those last three because I had to save them for when I was most desperate, even though we were attacking every day. And, of course, all the men thought they had to save one last bullet for themselves. We would never allow the Japanese to capture us—that was a fate to which none of us would ever submit. But some of the men didn’t have any shells at all. We used our bayonets, the most effective weapon in those close quarters.