| (What a smart little bugger she is He pats her affectionately on her tiny rump(Some man's gonna be lucky one of these days
As they walk home, he thinks of the quarrel Alice will start over the doll(Aw, shoot, Ah don' give a damnShe starts messin' up, an' Ah'll jus' throw a little ol' fit, and she'll quit right fastJus' git 'em afraid, that's only way a woman understands
He walks back along the street with her, nodding and calling to his friends(Ah jus' don' understand how screwin' makes a kid, one thing's one thing, and t'other's t'otherIt's jus' too damn confusin' when you set down and try to start thinkin' things out, wonderin' what you're gonna do nextHell, ya jus' let it happen to ya and you go along all right that way
The child's steps lag, and he picks her upCome on, honey, you hold the doll and Ah'll hold you, and we'll git along okay
(All a man got to do is take it easy an' he'll enjoy himself Feeling pleased and content, he continued homeWhen Alice started complaining about the price of the doll, he threw his little ole fit, and poured himself a drink
13
CUMMINGS put in a busy week after Hearn was transferred to Dalleson's sectionThe final and major assault on the Toyaku Line, which Cummings had been postponing for almost a month, had become virtually a necessityThe character of the messages he had been receiving from Corps and Army permitted no further delay and Cummings had his informants in higher echelons as well; he knew he would have to produce some success in the next week or twoHis staff had developed the attack plan through its final variations and details, and the assault was scheduled to start in three days
But Cummings was unhappy with itThe force he could muster would be relatively powerful for the few thousand men involved, but it was a frontal attack and mulberry bags there was no reason to assume it would be any more successful than the attack that had preceded it and failedThe men would advance, and halt probably to a crawl at the first serious resistanceThere would be no compulsion for them to keep moving
Cummings had been toying with another plan for several weeks, but it depended on receiving some naval support, and that was always doubtfulHe sent out a few cautious feelers and received some contradictory answers which had left him undecided; the secondary plan had been sidetracked in his mind before the need to produce something tangible and effectiveBut it was this other plan that intrigued him, and at a conference of his staff officers one morning he decided to draw up an additional set of plans which would incorporate the naval support
This other plan was simple but powerfulThe extreme right flank of the Toyaku Line was anchored on the water's edge a mile or two behind the point where the peninsula joined the islandSix miles to the rear of that was a small cove called Botoi BayThe General's new plan was to land about a thousand men at Botoi and have them drive inland on a diagonal to take the center of the Toyaku Line from the rearAt the same time his frontal attack, reduced in strength, of course, would drive forward to meet the invading troopsThat invasion could work if the landing was successful
Only that was the doubtful part of itThe General had enough landing craft assigned him for ferrying supplies from freighters off the island to be able to transport his invasion troops in one wave if necessary, but Botoi Bay was almost out of range of his artillery, and air reconnaissance had shown that fifty or perhaps even a hundred Japanese troops were entrenched in bunkers and pillboxes on that stretch of beachArtillery couldn't drive them out nor dive gucci tote bombersIt would take at least one destroyer and preferably two firing at point-blank range, perhaps a thousand yards offshoreIf he were to send a battalion in without naval support a bloody and disastrous massacre would occur
And the beach at Botoi Bay was the only place where he could land troops for at least fifty miles down the coastPast Botoi some of the densest jungle forests on Anopopei grew virtually into the water, and nearer his own front line were bluffs too steep to be scaled by invasion troopsThere was no alternativeTo take the Toyaku Line from the rear they would need the Navy
The thing that appealed to Cummings about this flanking invasion was what he called its "psychological soundness The men who would land at Botoi would be in the enemy rear without any safe way to retreat, and their only security would be to drive ahead and meet their own troopsThey would have to advanceAnd, conversely, the troops attacking frontally would do so with more enthusiasmCummings had found from experience that men fought better when they believed their share of an assignment was the easy partThey would be pleased they missed the invasion, and even more important, they would believe that the resistance before them would be softer, less decisive, because of the movement in the rear
After the battle plan for the frontal assault had been completed, and it was merely a question of waiting a few days until all the supplies had been brought up to the front, Cummings called a special conference of his staff officers, outlined the new plan to them, and gave orders that it should be developed as a corollary of the major attack, to be used as opportunity grantedAt the same time he sent a request through channels for three destroyersThen he put his staff to work
After a hurried lunch, Major Dalleson returned to louis vuitton replica bags his G-3 tent, and began to draw up the plans for the Botoi invasionHe sat himself down before his desk, opened his collar, sharpened a few pencils with slow absorbed motions, his heavy lower lip dangling pensively and moistly, and then he selected a blank piece of paper and wrote "Operation Coda" in large block letters at the top of his sheetHe sighed pleasurably and lit a cigar, diverted momentarily by the word "coda," which was unfamiliar to him"Code, it means probably," he muttered to himself, and then forgot about itSlowly, laboriously, he forced himself to concentrate on the work before himIt was a problem for which he was quite suited
A more imaginative man would have loathed the assignment, for it consisted essentially of composing long lists of men and equipment and creating a timetableIt demanded the same kind of patience that is needed to construct a crossword puzzleBut Dalleson relished the first portion of the work before him because he knew he could do it, and there were other kinds of work about which he was not so certainThis was the type of job that could be managed by following the procedures to be found in one Field Manual or another, and Dalleson had the kind of satisfaction a tone-deaf person might know in recognizing a piece of music
Dalleson began by estimating the number of trucks that would be necessary to move the invasion troops from their front line positions down to the beachSince the frontal attack would undoubtedly be in progress then, it was impossible to decide now which troops could be usedThat would depend on the future situation, but it had to be one of the four rifle battalions on the island, and Dalleson separated it into four isolated problems, allotting a different number of trucks for each possibilityThere would be trucks needed for the land attack, and the omega speedmaster leather assignment of them could be handled by G-4Dalleson looked up and scowled, staring at the clerks and officers in his tent
"Hey, Hearn," he shouted
"Yes?"
"Bring this over to Hobart, and tell him to work out where we can draw the trucks from
Hearn nodded, took the piece of paper Dalleson handed him, and strolled out of the tent, whistling to himselfDalleson watched him with a puzzled and slightly belligerent expressionHearn irritated him slightlyHe could not express it, but he was a little uncomfortable with him, a little uncertainHe always had the feeling that Hearn was laughing at him, and he had nothing concrete to fasten it uponDalleson had been a little surprised when the General had transferred Hearn, but it had been none of his affair, and he had assigned Hearn to supervising the draftsmen in their map overlays, and forgot about him almost entirelyHearn had done his work well enough, quietly enough, and with over a dozen men in the tent almost all the time, Dalleson had paid little attention to himLately it seemed as if Hearn had introduced a new humorThere was a kind of sour snickering at the more boring and meaningless procedures now, and once Dalleson had overheard Hearn saying, "Sure, old Blood and Guts puts the outfit to bedHe doesn't have any children, and dogs don't take to him, so what do you expect?" There had been a burst of laughter which stopped abruptly when they saw he had overheard, and since then Dalleson had had the idea that Hearn had been talking about him
Dalleson mopped his forehead, turned back to his desk, and began to work on the embarkation and debarkation timetables for the invasion battalionAs he progressed he chewed his cigar with relish, pausing every now and then to probe his mouth with one of his large fingers whenever some tobacco leaves had lodged in his vintage cartier watch t |
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