Facing the Mountain (Adapted for Young Readers) by Daniel James Brown

Author:Daniel James Brown [Brown, Daniel James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2023-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

At 6:22 on the morning of June 26, as the sun rose over western Tuscany, Cannoneer Roy Fujii picked up a shell to load into the breech of the howitzer Kats and his artillery crew had named Kuuipo—“Sweetheart” in Hawaiian. Kats crouched nearby, his fingers in his ears, having just set the coordinates for what was about to be the 522nd’s first shot of the war. Their target was a formation of German vehicles about to get underway, two miles south of their position.

As Roy shoved the shell into the breech, it jammed. For a few moments, he wrestled with it. Swore at it. Wrestled with it some more. With the enemy vehicles liable to move at any moment, there was no time to lose. Roy picked up a sledgehammer, and—disregarding the distinct possibility that he would detonate the thing and kill them all—began pounding on the shell.

At last it popped into the breech. One of the other men pulled the lanyard, the shot was off, and the 442nd’s artillerymen were finally at war.

A little to the north, the young men of K Company were spread out, walking ten feet apart through fields and olive groves. They weren’t sure where they were going except that it was somewhere in the hills ahead of them and that they should expect to run into German resistance by midmorning. Now and then they heard the sharp, splitting sound of a rooster crowing or the cooing of wood pigeons from dark forests of cork oaks.

But mostly the world was silent and still except for the shuffling of their boots, the clanking of their gear. Fred found to his surprise that he was not particularly afraid. More eager than afraid, anyway. Anxious for the fighting to start, if for no other reason than to know for sure that he wouldn’t run.

Directly ahead of them on a low hill lay the town of Suvereto, an attractive jumble of buildings with red tile roofs. Beyond the town rose steeper hills clad in olive groves with vineyards on the lower slopes and mixed deciduous forests higher up. At the summit of those hills was a tiny hamlet called Belvedere that the Germans were using as an observation post from which to direct artillery fire on the countryside below.

The morning blossomed into a lovely early summer day, the kind when you could see for miles if you had a good vantage point. And that’s exactly what the Germans had. All morning they had been biding their time, watching the Nisei advance on Suvereto. Now they unleashed a torrent of shrieking steel.

The worst of it fell on F Company. Mortar shells landed among them with devastating effect, blowing men off their feet. Then Tiger tanks—enormous sixty-ton machines armed with massive eighty-eight-millimeter main guns and a pair of machine guns—rolled out from the cover of nearby woods and began to fire on the Nisei soldiers, more or less at point-blank range. Clutching their helmets to their heads, those F Company

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