THE MANILA BATTLE, for which my Regiment received the Presidential Citation (awarded to army units conducting themselves in such a manner that, were they individual soldiers, would earn them a Distinguished Service Cross) produced many heroes. Four 148th infantrymen won the Congressional Medal of Honor, among them one of my friends, Bob Viale, whose actions … and death … occurred not too many blocks from where our Regimental Headquarters were temporarily set up:
Thirty seconds elapsed between the explosion of the hand grenade and Lieutenant Viale’s death. We don’t know what he thought about in those thirty seconds, although we heard him gasping, ‘‘ Damn fool, damn fool, ’’ over and over again until he died. His intestines were so badly ripped and splattered by the grenade that probably he wasn’t able to think at all.
Whether he actually knew what he was saying or not, the rest of us acknowledged that Bob Viale was a damn fool. Even when he reported to us at Bougainville, fresh from Fort Benning and the States, we suspected his slight lisp and naive earnestness. We assigned him to Co. K, the reserve company of the reserve battalion, and his platoon leading consisted of heroic efforts to erect homes out of shelter halves and to cut latrine seats out of oil drums. By the time Company K was sent into the line, the Japs had expended themselves completely and were now engaged in foraging rather than fighting. We didn’t wander too far out of our perimeter to hunt them down, and they didn’t come too close to our fields of fire to dig edible plant life. Viale never fired a shot in anger the whole six months he spent on those northern Solomon isles.
Early in December we boarded transports to make the grand assault on Luzon, Philippines. The brass hats briefed their staff meticulously, and even the platoon leaders were given all details. In turn, the platoon leaders, at special sessions on deck, carefully outlined the big and little picture to their men. Each man learned the army mission and the squad mission. That was standard operating procedure. Viale carried this orientation to a ridiculous extreme. Each afternoon he’d summon his platoon sergeant, platoon guide, and squad leaders to the officers’ mess of the U. S. S. Harris and there plan grand strategy– on platoon scale. With diagrams, maps, field manuals, notebooks, rulers, pencils, aerial photos, and what not, Viale and his ‘‘ staff’’ would prescribe each tactic and maneuver. We joked that Viale had even deduced the exact minute each man should urinate, and we explained to him that ‘‘ the best laid plans of mice and men’’ are often shot to hell if a guy has kidney trouble.
He won the nickname ‘‘ General, ’’ and some of his fellow officers conceived the cynical notion that since the regimental commander was on the boat, Viale was showing off. The colonel did notice Viale’s enthusiastic briefing and ‘‘ encouraged’’ other platoon leaders to emulate the ‘‘ General. ’’ Which, of course, further endeared him to his comrades.
We soon discovered that Viale’s fanatical concern for the welfare of his platoon was not just eyewash. He spent more time in the crowded holds, visiting his boys, than he did playing cards or reading in the comfortable officers’ mess. He begged extra candy and cigarettes for his men, personally escorted them to sick call, gave them stationery and stamps, snuck them up to his quarters for a shower, and even shared with them a bottle of Three Feathers Bourbon which he had salvaged from Officer Liquor Distribution Days at Bougainville. This last gesture, everyone remarked, cinched it. He wasn’t an exhibitionist. He was a damn fool. That was Bob. His sympathetic attention to his men shamed other platoon leaders. Although they cursed Viale bitterly for his ‘‘ unofficer- like fraternization, ’’ they soon had their own quarters looking like a non- com’s club. Nor did the brass discourage this friendliness. These were the men you would order to die for you in a month, and the platoon leaders were given complete freedom to work out their own brand of discipline.
At 9: 30 A. M., 9 January 1945, the Luzon assault began. The rehearsals and the skull practices paid off, as each squad went for its predesignated palm tree, church steeple, or bridge. The Japanese disappeared and the cost to our regiment of establishing this beachhead were one man gored by an enraged caribou, and two men hurt as they fell from the landing nets into the LCT’s. Then followed the grueling 137- mile hike down the central plains, toward Manila, the men limping along on blisters with blisters. The Nip resistance was spotty. There were small scraps at Clark Field, Fort Stotzenburg, Plaridel, and Malolos. There were patrol clashes on the flanks. But the longest stretches were nothing more lethal than prostitutes charging three cigarettes or two atabrine tablets. On 4 February our troops crossed the Tulihan River on a bridge impoverished with oil drum pontoons and moved cautiously into the outskirts of the capital city Manila. As the troops talked gingerly down Rizal Avenue, they were deluged with cheers, liquor, and kisses, the hullabaloo drowning out the occasional ping of a sniper’s bullet which presaged ominous things to come.
On the morning of 5 February, the 3rd Battalion, 148th Infantry Regiment, in the Bisondo District, ran into stiff Japanese rear- guard which had to be ferreted out of churches, restaurants, and storehouses. The Nip had traded his jungle for the wall of a store and his tree and vine for a second- story bedroom window, but he hadn’t lost the sneak- touch. The battalion objective this day was the Jones Bridge across the Pasig River, and the Nips objective was to hold the north bank until the bridge could be destroyed and the heart of the capital, across the Pasig, could be gutted, burned, demolished, blasted by fire, and explosives. Five hundred yards from the Pasig was a small stream running parallel to it, the Estero de la Reine. Co. K was pacing the battalion attack and Viale’s platoon, the first, was the company’s point, way out in front.
By 11: 00, the flames across the Pasig jumped the river around Jones Bridge, and a strong southeasterly breeze fanned the fire to the right and front of the attacking elements. It was necessary to shift the direction of the attack to the left and to bypass the smouldering sections if possible. Viale angled his thirty- five men toward the fifteen foot long Ongpin Street Bridge, crossing the Estere de la Reine. As the lead scout darted across this bridge, he was halted by cross fire from three different pillboxes across the stream commanding the span and its surroundings. The scout squirmed back to Viale and reported the exact location of the three pillboxes. Good boy. Without hesitation, Viale formed a three- man assault team, consisting of a veteran squad leader, a BAR man, and himself. He ordered his rifle grenadier to toss a few smoke grenades on the opposite end of the causeway to provide covering clouds so that the team could slither across. Five grenades effectively smoked the area, and Viale led his two men across the span. The rest of the platoon would move across on his orders, or on the orders of the squad leader in case Viale got hit. The three soldiers found a partially demolished wall for protection on the far side and flopped down behind it. When the smoke cleared, in about four minutes, Viale pointed out the three enemy emplacements to his assistants; the first was one hundred yards in their front and he ordered the BAR man to pour automatic fire into the aperture. The second pillbox was seventy- five yards to his left, and he instructed the squad leader to keep potting away at it with his M1, since it was the least likely to cause trouble to Viale, as he personally went after pillbox number three, twenty- five yards to his right front. Dragging his carbine in his left hand and filling the inside of his shirt with smoke and fragmentation grenades, Viale crept and crawled into the teeth of the Jap machine gun. It chattered a couple of times as he got within fifteen yards of it. The Nips had spotted his tail bobbing along the ground and had managed to crease the center seam with a low round. Rolling slowly to his side, Viale whipped out a smoke grenade, pulled the pin, tossed it at the gun, whipped out another and tossed it to his own right. In one minute, at the height of the smoke screen, with the Japs firing blindly at him, he crawled sharply to his right, then to his left, avoiding the line of fire. Once out of this fire line he leaped to his feet and ran undetected to the top of the emplacement which, unfortunately for our antagonists, had no roof. At one yard range, Viale pumped five shots into three squealing Nips, and checking off the first pillbox of three.
He squirmed back to his two soldiers, told the BAR man to keep ramming bullets at the enemy 100 yards away and then laid out a plan whereby he and the squad leader would envelop the Japs to their left. Utilizing fire, movement, and the last smoke grenade, Viale moved a few yards forward, covered by his partner’s M1, and then the squad leader leapfrogged him, under protective fire of Viale’s carbine. The fire was neutralized, and as Viale, from ten yards, poured one full clip of twenty rounds into the aperture, the squad leader got to the rear of the Japs and tossed in two fragmentation grenaded, then one more for good measure. They counted the pieces together. Four dead Nips and two Nambus machine guns out of action.
The last pillbox was tough, well dug in with a concrete roof, small apertures, good, clear fields of fire– it defied frontal attack. Viale sent back after his rocket launcher, who came tearing across the bridge as Viale, the squad leader, and the BAR man all fired toward this last obstacle. The bazooka man got into position, fired four times, got three direct hits, and shattered the will of the enemy to resist. It also shattered the enemy, as six more Nips, in various stages of decomposition, were counted around the two machine guns.
The rest of the platoon sprinted across the causeway without incident and immediately went into wedge formation with Viale at the vertex, moving with his lead scout. He led them up Calle Nueve Street against the nuisances of snipers, the gripping fear of an ambush, and now something new, the plunking in of 90 millimeter mortar shells, exploding with disquieting regularity. A few of his men were nicked, but as they moved toward the source of the firing, the shells went over their heads, and they realized they were under the Nip margin of safety, the umbrella, which was fine for them, but the rest of the company and battalion must be catching hell 500 yards back.
The breeze kept fanning the fires and now Viale had the enemy and the river to his front and left and the conflagration to his right and rear. One escape route remained, east along Dasmarinas Street, and he received word from the company commander that the fire had forced a company change in orders and he was to get the hell out of the ‘‘ trap. ’’ He started moving along Dasmarinas Street and about two blocks away, came to a large junction of Dasmarinas, Nueve, and San Vincente, a junction which he must cross. Two Jap pillboxes sweeping the junction decided he must not, and these two pillboxes, dug in at the corner of two buildings, defied assault from the street. Viale recognized the suicidal nature of a frontal attack, and began combing the surrounding buildings for vantage points from which to knock out these emplacements. The guns had to be eliminated– and now– if the platoon didn’t want a premature cremation. The fires had begun to singe them, forcing them toward the lanes well swept by the two Japanese .30 millimeter automatic weapons.
Viale waved his men to follow him. He circled the intersection and headed toward a house which overlooked the emplacements. Approaching this house from the left rear of the Jap pillboxes, he entered the ground floor. He noticed a rickety ladder leading up to a small window from which, he hoped, someone could throw hand grenades on or into the enemy strong points. Since he was left- handed and the enemy was to the right front of the window, he was a natural to try out his pitching arm. He pulled out the pin on a fragmentation grenade, holding the grenade in his right hand with the safety handle depressed by the right palm. He slowly ascended the ladder and reached the opening. His estimate was correct. From here, the Japs were dead lotus blossoms. As he lifted his right hand to transfer the grenade to his left, a Jap rifleman from God knows where winged him in the upper part of the right arm. The grenade was knocked out of his hand and fell to the ground, now armed, as the handle popped off. In five seconds it would explode. Viale and the men around the ladder all yelled, ‘‘ Duck, ’’ or ‘‘ Hit the ground, ’’ since there was nothing to do except fall in any kind of depression, hold your breath, pray, and wait for the fragments to whizz by you (you hoped).
Bob Viale, always the damn fool, jumped to the ground and picked up the grenade, looking desperately around him for a place to throw it. His men were everywhere, in the doorway, in the room, outside of the room. He couldn’t aim for the small window because chances were ten- to- one he’d miss and a lot more men would be hurt when the grenade would explode as it bounced back off the wall. Two seconds– one second– get rid of it, Bob.
Bob never did get rid of it. He jumped to the farthest corner of the room, shoved the grenade deliberately into his stomach, bent double, and blew his guts all to hell. No one else was hurt, which would have been of great consolation to Bob if we could have told him. All we could do was watch as he lay on the floor, writhing and groaning, ‘‘ Damn fool, ’’ for thirty seconds until he died.