Free Great Pacific War: A History of the American-Japanese Campaign of 1931-33 by Hector C. Bywater Page A

barrage of smoke. And now an iron hail smote the American trenches as the battleships lying well out in the gulf sent salvo after salvo of heavy shell screaming over the transports, this long-range covering fire being directed with great precision by spotting aircraft. But the defenders, on their part, were not idle. Somewhere behind that opaque wall of smoke the transports were coming on; perhaps they were even now transferring their men to boats for the final dash ashore. Targets might be invisible for the moment, but they were there all the same, and every gun was brought into action against them. At this time the two 8-inch railway pieces were up the line twenty miles north-east of Dagupan, and were thus in a position to open a flanking fire on the transports as the latter steamed further in to the shore.
    Fire had been already opened on several ships that loomed dimly through the smoke, and the two guns were being moved south again to keep them bearing, when a stretch of the railroad line was found to have been torn up near San Fabian by the explosion of a ground mine. This damage, which could not have been done more than an hour beforehand, was clearly the work of spies. It had the effect of eliminating the two most powerful guns possessed by the defence, for they were unable to come further south, and the point where they were held up by the broken line was too far removed from the landing beaches to permit of effective fire. By now the Japanese disembarkation was in full swing. Night had fallen, and although the smoke screen was thinning, as the vessels that made it were now in shoal water and had to turn back, it was still dense enough to baffle the American searchlights and star shell. On the stroke of eight o’clock the first party of invaders broke through the screen and headed straight for the beach. On they came in boats towed by launches and in motor barges, which hurled smoke bombs from mortars in the bows. The battleships out in the gulf had now suspended their fire, but light cruisers and destroyers offshore still kept up a brisk cannonade.
    The American trenches and batteries had been bombarded incessantly for four hours, and had suffered heavily during this period; but if the enemy counted on meeting with no resistance he was sharply undeceived. As the first boats emerged from the pall of smoke they came under a tornado of fire from artillery and machine-guns. Many were sunk; others, in which the occupants had all been stricken down, drifted aimlessly about; but the rest pushed on doggedly until the keels grounded on the beach, when the little men in khaki tumbled over the side and came plunging through the surf, holding rifles and cartridge pouches above their heads, and uttering staccato war cries. Scourged by a cross-fire that cut men down in swathes, the human wave came steadily on, spreading up the foreshore, now lapping the American front trenches, and then flowing over them. Fresh boatloads landed, another flame-tipped wave surged up the beach, and the barrage fire from the smaller warships in the offing was lifted as the attack penetrated deeper inland.
    In rather less than an hour after the first troops had come ashore the enemy had gained a firm foothold over a wide front, and by now his guns and light tanks were landing across the pontoon bridges which the engineers had laid out with extraordinary speed. All four lines of American trenches were in Japanese hands. Having been hastily thrown up only a few days previously, when Dagupan was first suggested as a likely venue for the enemy's landing, they were badly sited and too shallow, nor was there enough wire to protect the entire front. Such entanglements as there were had been breached at half a dozen points by the naval bombardment, which had also levelled the trenches in many parts. Nevertheless, behind these wretched defences the American troops and their Filipino comrades had fought so stoutly that the invaders lost 2,000 men in storming