The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea--The Forgotten War of the South Pacific (14 page)

Ten minutes later, Swem and the entire patrol stared slack-jawed at what confronted them. All at once flashlights were aimed at a group of soldiers in shredded uniforms. At first, the men of the Wairopi Patrol thought they were seeing ghosts. But they were real enough: thirty-five Australians who had been fighting the Japanese on the Kokoda track thirty miles to the west. Segal opened his aid station. As he tended to the men, their story circulated among the Americans.

The Japanese had cut off the men from the main body of their battalion at Isurava on the Kokoda track. The group’s leader, Captain Ben Buckler, sent a platoon commander to seek help, while he and his men hid out in the hills above Eora Creek. For six days the group lay low, fearing that they would be captured and tortured. They lived off sugar cane and sweet potatoes, not daring to move during daylight. Eventually they set off to the northeast through the jungle in the direction of the coast. Almost three weeks later, Buckler’s group stumbled into the village of Sangai, where the village men carried twelve-foot pig spears. Buckler and his men expected to be killed, and possibly eaten, but instead they were given shelter and food. Buckler left behind his wounded and walked with the rest of his troops back inland.

At Wairopi, he and his men headed up the Kumusi River valley, past Kovio and the Owalama Divide, bound for Jaure. At Jaure, they turned south and headed over the wilderness of the Owen Stanleys, the same terrain that the Wairopi Patrol proposed to navigate. After more than a month of walking, they were already broken men when they entered the mountains, but the peaks north of Arapara nearly killed them.

The sight of Captain Buckler and his troops haunted the men of the Wairopi Patrol. What kind of place was this New Guinea? In a matter of a day, Medendorp’s men had gone from the heat of the hill country to the frigid mountains.

Nothing about Captain Buckler’s story, though, unsettled them as much as the possibility of torture at the hands of the Japanese. The barbarism of the Japanese army was legendary. A Japanese soldier would put a gun to his head, or hold a live grenade in his hand, or perform
seppuku
, gutting himself before he allowed himself to be captured. If captured, he expected to be tortured because that is what he would do in turn. Though they had signed the Geneva Convention of 1929, which articulated a policy for the humane treatment of POWs, the Japanese never ratified it. At the onset of the war, Prime Minister Tojo boasted that “In Japan, we have our own ideology concerning prisoners of war…”

In late January 1942, Japan’s famed South Seas Detachment—the Nankai Shitai—ran their barges ashore and captured almost a thousand Australians at the Rabaul garrison. The Japanese soldiers tied 160 Australian prisoners to coconut palms at Tol Plantation. While the remaining Aussies looked on, Japanese trainees used the men for bayonet practice. Bayoneting was officially sanctioned by the Japanese military. It was said to “eradicate a sense of fear in raw soldiers.” The plantation was filled with the cries of dying men and the grunts of Japanese recruits digging their bayonets into the bellies of their Australian captives. Privately, some of the Japanese soldiers expressed their revulsion, but publicly they kept quiet for fear of being perceived as cowards.

Arapara to Imiduru.

Mendendorp was upset about the lack of trail discipline. It was not only unmilitary, it was dangerous. From Arapara on, Medendorp insisted that platoons and companies stick together. With each day, the column was getting closer to the possibility of a Japanese ambush.

The men hardly heard him. The Wairopi Patrol was not made up of superbly conditioned soldiers specially trained in jungle and mountain survival. Prior to the march, many had never even climbed a hill higher than a thousand feet.

The soldiers who made up the patrol were not even infantrymen. They were heavy weapons guys of the Cannon and Antitank Companies, new units formed in Australia as part the division’s streamlining. But with no antitank weapons or tanks to shoot at, they became foot soldiers, pressed into duty because the 126th Infantry Regiment’s commanding officer, Colonel Quinn, did not want to disrupt his own battalions by providing the patrol with riflemen.

Lieutenant Segal must have been completely perplexed by the assignment, too. He was a doctor, after all. He had not been trained to walk a mile, much less be part of a grueling hike across the Papuan Peninsula. Even Medendorp—especially Medendorp—was no infantryman. He was a supply specialist. He had been an assistant Service Company commander. Supply often attracted talented rascals, jokers, and iconoclasts who enjoyed “wheeling and dealing” and the challenge of breaking army rules and getting away with it. But it also appealed to meticulous, can-do soldiers who followed army regulations to a T. Medendorp was the latter. He liked a good pair of socks, a knife with a blade sharp enough to cut paper, and clean silverware. When the general in charge of supply for the entire Southwest Pacific area was looking for a conscientious supply professional to identify airdrop sites at four-day intervals along Boice’s route, he chose Medendorp. It was a daunting task under the best of circumstances. Nine hundred men of the 2nd Battalion were scheduled to follow Medendorp’s patrol. Although it would use hundreds of native carriers, it would still need to resupply along the trail.

What Medendorp did not know was that some of the men from his former company were happy to see him go. He was an able officer, but he could also be a vain, demanding man. “He was always talking about separating the men from the boys,” says a former Service Company soldier. “He rode the guys hard, but he was a physical man, and could back it up.”

After scaling Turner’s Bluff outside Arapara, the men knew they were in the mountains for real. A series of imposing, razorback ridges stretched as far as they could see. “Sometimes,” Medendorp wrote, “the patrol was marching above the clouds.”

Even Keast, the former star athlete, found the trail grueling. In a letter to his brother Bob in Lansing, Michigan, he wrote, “We are…in the clouds about 20 hours out of 24. You can guess from that that it’s pretty wet most of the time. The sun is really hot when it’s clear. The country here is supposed to be the most geologically disturbed (25 cent word) in the world. Most mountainous country is continuous ranges but this is many short ranges and cross ranges. There is absolutely no flat ground…. Mountains all around with deep valleysin between. There are no roads…just a narrow ‘goat’ trail that winds over the mountains or along the streams with steaming jungle growth on all sides.”

The march to Imiduru, the patrol’s fifth day on the trail, gave Medendorp reason to hope. The patrol climbed three thousand feet in four hours of hiking, and platoons stayed together.

But that evening Medendorp’s hopes were dashed. The men’s feet were shot, and their backs ached. Medendorp knew he could not afford to lose any of them, so he instructed Sergeant Schmidt to let the men who were worst off use the abandoned native huts instead of their leaky shelter halves (later in the Pacific war, soldiers would use jungle hammocks with a rainproof cover and mosquito netting). At first, the men were relieved to get out of the rain. But once they turned off their flashlights, rats nibbled at their toes and cockroaches as big as mice crawled over them. Even so, the men hardly moved a muscle—rats and cockroaches were a price they were willing to pay to have a roof over their heads.

The next morning, Medendorp had to contend with more bad news. The native huts had been teeming with fleas, and the men who had slept there were now infested. To make matters worse, all but twenty of the patrol’s carriers “went bush,” fleeing in the middle of the night and hiding with other villagers in secluded jungle caves. Their pay—a shilling a day, plus rations, a stick of tobacco, and maybe some salt—was not enough for them to overcome their fear of the mountains. They hailed from societies governed by an intricate web of magic, myth, and sorcery, and the sight of Buckler’s emaciated men trudging out of the darkness confirmed their superstitions; the mountains were a place of bad spirits—
masalai
—and ghosts. The carriers warned that anyone who ventured into the high country would go blind, that his nose and ears would rot away, and his teeth would get so cold they would shatter in his mouth.

As Medendorp later noted, the carriers were also concerned about the patrol’s supply of food. They had no concept of an airdrop. According to them the patrol was marching “straight into starvation.”

After losing the bulk of his carrier force, Medendorp was livid. Who was going to lug the food through the mountains? How was he going to feed his men? Could he ask them to carry more? Could he hope for an airdrop at Laruni?

Medendorp made the only decision available to him. He instructed his men to shoulder as much extra weight as they felt they could. Then he told the remaining carriers that anyone caught trying to desert would be shot on sight.

Two days outside of Arapara, and fifty miles from the south coast, the Wairopi Patrol stopped near the village of Laruni on the banks of the Mimani River, which, fed by daylong rains, now barreled out of the mountains. No one could have been more surprised that Medendorp had made it that far than General Harding’s intelligence officer, who had just taken part in an aerial reconnaissance of the trail. On October 9, he wrote in his diary, “never saw such mountains…all jumbled together in no arrangement of ranges—just a tangled mass with ridges and spurs running in all directions, a creek in every draw and the whole thing covered with jungle so dense that the ground was nowhere visible.”

Standing at the banks of the river, one of the carriers pointed to the clouds. Medendorp looked up. “Laruni?” he asked, and the carrier nodded.

Medendorp knew that his men would never be able to make the climb. Loaded down with extra weight, they were exhausted. Medendorp instructed them to make camp; he would hike up to the village along with the patrol’s radio crew. From there he would radio regimental headquarters and request a special airdrop.

Keast set down his pack and leaned against the trunk of a tree. Earlier in the day, he had wrenched his knee. It was sore and swollen. To take his mind off the pain, he took out of his fieldpack the only two photos he had brought with him to New Guinea. In one, his pretty wife Ruth was sitting on the running board of the family car, holding their baby son. In the other, his oldest boy Harry was standing in front of the car, smiling at the world.

Keast had not seen his family since the summer of 1941. Unlike Zelma Boice and Katherine Bailey, Ruth Keast never made it to Fort Devens. That would have required traveling by train or car from Michigan with young Harry, who was six at the time, and with Roger Jr., who was very young. Keast did not mind Ruth not being there. He felt more comfortable knowing that she was at her parents’ farm with the boys. Besides, she had already said good-bye when she and Harry left Georgia.

While Keast was at Fort Benning during the summer of 1941, Ruth and young Harry rented a shack the size of a one-car garage outside town. Farther back off the road, a creek coursed through the woods and alligators lounged along its muddy banks. Occasionally, feral pigs emerged from the thickets, raiding and spilling the garbage cans and rooting among their contents. Ruth could tolerate the alligators and the pigs; what she could not stand was the humidity. Though she had grown up on a farm outside of Dimondale, Michigan, and was no stranger to the outdoors, she wilted in Georgia’s sticky summer heat.

Back in New Guinea, Medendorp needed a cigarette and a break before climbing into the clouds, and sat down next to Keast. Wiping his dirty hands on his sleeves, Medendorp asked his friend for a look at the pictures. He had seen them before, but that did not diminish his interest. He enjoyed Keast’s photos almost as much as he enjoyed his own. Medendorp smiled—it was good for a guy to remember that he had family back home.

After looking at the photos, he and Keast studied their crude map of the trail. Even with the map, both knew that navigating the terrain ahead would require a good amount of guesswork—accurate depictions of the Papuan Peninsula extended only fifteen miles inland. Daunting river crossings also awaited them. If a guy lost his balance and fell, the Mimani’s current would wash him away before his buddies had time to drag him out of the water.