Let's get back to the battle...
Third Krulak Fight
I did this battle a long time ago but I still got the notes from it. So here is the story of the fighting. It turned out to be an exciting battle of wits between the two sides with plenty of high-level strategies being employed.
Our marines head into the jungle for the 3rd adventure and eagerly anticipate trading fire with our Japanese opponents once again. Unfortunately this bunch is more crafty than the average run-of-the-mill 'slanteyed beeyich'. For they are holding their fire as we approaching... waiting to deliver sudden death at the point of their bayonets.
But marines have their own game to play. Masters of adaptation, they rise to the challenge of finding the enemy ambushes with a tactic called "Mathmatical Recon". First, the marines stand out in the open meadow and yell out jeers like, "C'mon baby, hurt me."
The jeering continues until we are rewarded with a rifleshot and a marine drops to the ground saying, "Oh ya that feels good." The mathmatician expert in his squad rushes to the stricken marine lying on the ground and takes out a sketch book, a compass, protractor, ruler and a pencil. After sharpening his pencil, he uses the equipment to trace the marine's gunshot wounds to the crop of vegetation containing the culprits responsible for the gunshot.
The rest of the process is elementary. Once their position is discovered, the enemy has no chance against the accurate, deadly fire from the marines' rifles and machineguns. Another couple of marines are lost in the firefight which is acceptable in order to properly smite the enemy as they ought to be.
Our boys wash, rinse, and repeat the tactic as necessary until we are starting to take fire from a bunker pointing at 45 degrees SW perfectly covering the approaches to the objectives. After a couple of our dudes are slotted by the bunker, we decide to get down and dirty with the "Smokey Toad Diversion" tactic. Marine squads take turns leapfrogging forward and dropping smoke in a line infront of the bunker. This way, each squad only loses one man to the bunkerfire. Our line of smoke extends perpendicularly infront of the bunker providing an unbroken line of cover for us to continue on towards the objectives with no more cheapshots reducing our numbers. Meanwhile, our engineer squad heads up the left flank to put some hurt on the bunker.
Unfortunately our engineers didn't veer left far enough and gunfire from the bunker picks off 2 of our boys. One marine loses his cool at seeing his buddies gunned down, and disobeying orders, he charges the bunker. By some order of heavenly cruelty, he makes it to the bunker without being shot and jumps on top of it. Little does the poor lad know, but had he taken a round on the approach instead, his fate would have been far more the merciful than what is to come. The marine lays down on the top of the bunker and prepares a grenade to toss into the bunker slit just beneath him.
Inside the bunker...
"Nandarou koreya!?!" (*what the f**k is going on!?!*) squeals one.
"Orera, mina zenmentsu sarerunda zo!!" (*We're all gonna die!!*) shrieks another.
The bunker commander speaks in a calm, confident Seagal-style voice. "Ano baka na kemono hakujin, shinuki ga arisou da." (*Stupid white pig has a deathwish.*)
"Chikushou!!" (*Oh sh*t!*) screams a gunner. An arm is snaking its way into the firing slit of the bunker with a pinless grenade in the hand's grasp.
"Kono tensai ni makasero!" (*Leave it to this genius.*) commands the commander. He takes hold of the intruding arm by the wrist and twists the grenade from the marine's hand. The commander tosses the grenade on top of the bunker while retaining his hold on the marine's arm to ensure he will remain there for the...
The bunker crew are showered in dust from the ceiling. The arm has become detached from its owner by the blast and the commander takes one of his own grenades and wires it into the hand of the arm. He pulls the pin and tosses the arm, grenade and all, in the direction of where the engineers are taking cover. "Okaeshi jikan." (*Payback time.*)
The arm lands among the engineers hiding in some brush. One of them winds up to deliver a field kick to the dangerous limb but is stopped by his squad leader yelling, "No! It's Bob's arm!"
It wasn't until the other marines had finished shooting up all the defenders of the objectives and circled around the bunker from the right side that a successful satchel charge assault destroys it. Marines search the wreckage for survivors. Then, like some scene from a horror movie, the bunker commander, covered in a cake of blood, dirt and ragged uniform pieces, rises up out of the shattered remains of the bunker to grab and break the leg of a passing marine. Many a clip is emptied into that legendary bushido warrior before the dust is finally left to settle.
With all known enemies terminated, the marines are now spread out in the jungle and the weaker squads that were beat-up from the fighting are left to guard the objectives. It is in this diluted state that the enemy hammers us with an attack from the rear! Infiltrators pop out of the thick green jungle growth to butcher one marine squad defending an objective and ambush another squad coming to it's rescue. The jungle comes alive with infiltrators trying to take back several objectives. But it doesn't all go the Japanese way. At close range, the Japanese are shredded by the fire from the marines.
We give them the good news. Strong marine forces converge on the sneaky Japanese and destroy them in a hell of concentric fire from all weapons available.
The fight is over and the scoreboard records the cost to both sides:
USMC lost 20 dead versus 79 dead Japanese.
The totals for the campaign are 87 marines dead and 344 Japanese dead.
