invasion fleet would have to traverse the Flying Fish Channel, and that in the Flying Fish Channel were two islands, Taemuui-do and Yonghung-do.
These islands, the major went on in a manner that reminded Captain Dunwood of the district sales manager of the Chrysler Corporation urging the salesmen to greater heights, were so located that any artillery on them could be brought to bear on ships of the invasion fleet moving down the Flying Fish Channel.
This situation, of course, could not be permitted. Commencing at 0400 14 September, both islands (and other islands in the immediate vicinity) would be brought under an intense naval artillery barrage by various vessels of the invasion fleet, probably including the battleship USS Missouri, which had been hastily demothballed and rushed to Japan from the West Coast.
Whether or not the Missouri actually turned its fifteen-inch naval cannon on the islands, the briefing officer had said, there was enough firepower on the other men-of-war, cruisers, and destroyers to wipe the islands clean. Company B should encounter virtually no resistance when they went ashore on Taemuui-do and Yonghung-do.
That was so much bullshit, Captain Dunwood believed. He had gone ashore at Tarawa and Iwo Jima, and on each occasion had been assured that following the massive pre-invasion barrages of naval artillery to be laid on those islands, resistance would be minimal.
He of course kept his personal—or was it, he wondered, professional?—opinion to himself, and went so far as to correct another Marine, who had also been on Okinawa, who said, “Bullshit, I’ve heard that before” aloud when told of the awesome resistance-destroying naval artillery barrage to be laid down.
The next five days, said the major from First Marine Division G-3, would be devoted to training Baker Company for, and equipping it for, the seizure of the islands of Taemuui-do and Yonghung-do in the Flying Fish Channel.
Then they would reboard LST-450 and sail for the channel itself.
The training was good—Captain Dunwood had to admit that—and it was necessary. It had been a long time since anybody moved from an LST into a Higgins boat, and some of his men had never done so.
Captain Dunwood took dinner every night in the O Club, but he never saw the candy-ass sonofabitch who’d done the job on his finger so long as he was at Sasebo. But he often thought about him, and hoped he would.
XXII
[ONE]
TOKCHOK-KUNDO ISLAND 1530 13 SEPTEMBER 1950
The last message from General Pickering to McCoy—with the date and time stamp 1200 12 Sep—had included the cryptic line “will be out of town for the next few days,” which McCoy correctly interpreted to mean that he was leaving Tokyo to board the command ship USS Mount McKinley.
That suggested the invasion was still on, that there had been no delays. Taylor had told him that because of the tides, the only time and date the invasion could take place was in the early-morning hours of 15 September.
With that criterion, if there had been serious problems in mounting the invasion, the options available had not included a delay while the problem was being solved. Rather, the options had been to solve the problem, live with it, or call the invasion off. The invasion, McCoy was sure, was on.
And, in the absence of word to the contrary, that meant the D Minus 1 assault on Taemuui-do, Yonghung-do, and Tokchok-kundo itself was on.
Over the past week, as Major Kim had infiltrated national police onto Taemuui-do and Yonghung-do, he had exfiltrated the militia. That hadn’t been nearly as difficult as McCoy thought it would be. The militia had been local fishermen before being issued Arisaka rifles and bandoliers of ammunition and told what was expected of them.
With the arrival of the national police, they had become local fishermen again, turned the weapons over to the national police, and left. For example, the small local fishing boats that touched ashore during the day at Nae-ri with two fishermen aboard left with three. Or four.
McCoy had been personally uncomfortable with militia, since he thought of them as—knew they were—civilians, and his entire life in the Corps had taught him to keep civilians out of the line of fire.
Now he was personally uncomfortable with the notion of just over 120 national policemen on the three islands they held. Intellectually, he understood they were more like gendarmerie, a paramilitary force, organized and trained more like soldiers than policemen, but emotionally, Captain K. R. McCoy, USMCR, thought of them as “Kim’s Cops.”
And if the artillery started landing, as it inevitably would