The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea--The Forgotten War of the South Pacific (16 page)

Using that one scalpel and his knife, Segal first took care of the soldiers’ boils and ulcers. Some of the men had skin ulcers where their fatigues had rubbed and the straps of their backpacks had pressed against their shoulders. Some had malaria, with temperatures hovering at 103 degrees. They complained of tender bellies, aching joints, confusion, impaired vision, and nightmares. For them there was nothing Segal could do. He was almost out of quinine.

Late that night, Medendorp limped over to Segal. He had an ulcer on his leg that had been causing him pain since Ghost Mountain. He had ignored the advice of Boice’s patrol to treat “small wounds,” because they “fester rapidly.” Segal sterilized his knife over the fire and sliced into the ulcer. Medendorp tightened his jaw and clenched his fists. The ulcer oozed a putrid, yellowish-brown pus.

Three days later, Medendorp and his men dragged themselves into Barumbila, a village down the Kumusi River in the shadow of Mount Lamington, about ten miles southeast of Wairopi. Medendorp was “weak from almost constant dysentery and…a fever.” At Barumbila, which was an ideal site for a dropping ground, he spent the day recruiting a large force of natives to collect and carry supplies for the approaching 2nd Battalion. Soon after, he learned that General Kenney and his Fifth Air Force had airlifted the entire 128th U.S. Infantry Regiment to a village called Wanigela on the Papuan Peninsula’s north coast, where pilots put down on a crude airstrip carved out of the kunai grass by missionaries and area villagers. MacArthur had discovered a better way to get troops across the mountains.

Chapter 9

O
NE
G
REEN
H
ELL

A
LFRED
M
EDENDORP WAS AT THE VILLAGE
of Laruni when the 2nd Battalion got the go-ahead. Though Major Simon Warmenhoven worried about the myriad medical needs of nine hundred men marching across New Guinea, there was little he could do now. A team of medics and a platoon of engineers would accompany the battalion. Warmenhoven could only hope for the best.

Company E led the way for the 2nd Battalion with the battalion’s other companies—F, G, H, and Headquarters—following at one-day intervals.

It was fitting for Company E to be out front. When General Harding came to Amberley Airfield to see the company off on September 15, he told the men that they had been selected to go first because they “were the best in the outfit.” He called them the “spearhead of the spearhead of the spearhead.” Lutjens and his men liked the sound of it and began referring to themselves as “The Three Spearheads.” It was a distinction the company could be proud of: The 32nd was the first combat division of the U.S. Army to embark on an offensive mission against the Japanese. That meant that Company E was leading the way for the whole division.

Private Art Edson, who had scouted the coastal route to Gabagaba with Lutjens, took a moment to write his sweetheart.

Dearest Lois,

I take the chance to drop you a line as I may not have the chance again for a long time, as we are now some where in New Guinea…. This island is the Hell Hole of the world. I never expected to see natives used for pack horses or dressed like you see in shows, grass skirts and that is all…. Have seen quite a few crocodiles and have shot a couple. We shot a snake today, nine feet long. Will write more as soon as possible.

Love Forever, Art

On October 13, the day before Company E set out, Lutjens made a brief entry in his diary: “Been three weeks in New Guinea…I’m afraid it will become much worse than this. We are now starting into the foothills of the Owen Stanley Range…. We are going to carry six days’ rations—one pound of rice, one handful of green tea, a little sugar and two cans of bully beef. Plus our field equipment.”

What Lutjens described was a situation in which each man was carrying an almost impossible amount of weight. Provisions and field equipment, ammunition, plus a weapon—a ten-pound M-1, or a nine-pound model 1903 Springfield rifle, or a twelve-pound Thompson .45 caliber submachine gun, or a twenty-pound Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR)—meant that the average man in Company E carried nearly as much as Medendorp’s men—sixty to eighty pounds. In other words, no one had learned from Medendorp’s experience.

The machine gunners had it the worst. A .30 caliber machine gun alone weighed thirty pounds, not counting the tripod and ammunition. Together the gun, tripod, and ammunition were so heavy they were divided among three men. Still, the machine gunners struggled under loads that would have broken lesser men trekking across the flat fields of Kansas.

The men lugged 60 mm mortars over the mountains, too. One carried the fourteen-pound baseplate, another carried the long, eighteen-pound tube or cannon, another the legs, which weighed just over fifteen pounds, and three men lugged the mortars—three four-pound rounds per man.

Company E’s trek began, ironically, with a party. At Nepeana, the natives danced and sang and lavished them with rice, yams, and paw-paws. The day after, reality set in with pelting monsoonal downpours that drenched the soldiers to the bone and turned the trail into a river of mud and clay.

Lutjens described what would become an ordinary day:

We’d start at six in the morning by cooking rice, or trying to. Two guys would work together. If they could start a fire, which was hard because the wood was wet even when you cut deep into the center of a log, they’d mix a little bully beef (canned mutton) in a canteen cup with rice, to get the starchy taste out of it. Sometimes we’d take turns blowing on sparks, trying to start a fire, and keep it up for two hours without success. I could hardly describe the country. It would take five or six hours to go a mile, edging along cliff walls, hanging on to vines, up and down, up and down. The men got weaker; guys began to lag back. It would rain from three in the afternoon on, soaking through everything. The rivers we crossed were so swift that if you slipped it was just too bad. It was every man for himself. No one waited for anyone else, unless he was hurt. An officer stayed at the end of the column to keep driving the stragglers. There wasn’t any way of evacuating to the rear. Men with sprained ankles hobbled along…. If they hadn’t made it, they’d have died.

The engineers did their best to remove roots, deadfall, and large rocks from the trail. At river crossings, they toppled trees that could reach the far bank. At steep ascents and descents and along treacherous cliffs, they sometimes erected handrails.

On the way to Strinimu, the men of Company E, like Medendorp’s men, began to jettison equipment they considered extraneous. After all, what need would they have for a gas mask or a razor or a mess kit? The guys got together in groups of three; one kept a spoon, another a knife, another a fork. Later, they would share the utensils. One guy would dip into a can of beans, take the biggest bite he could, and pass on the spoon.

As they approached the mountains, Lutjens watched as men discarded equipment regardless of its utility. They threw out blankets, raincoats, mosquito nets, and extra underwear. They cut their pants off just below the knees and their shirts at the shoulders. They sliced off the extra leather at the top of their boots. Some ripped the buttons from their shirts. They kept their toothbrushes, though; they needed something to clean their rifles.

The waste delighted the native carriers, many of whom brought along nothing more than tobacco, a machete, and a string bag. The practice of platoon leaders like Lutjens was to stop every hour for a ten-minute rest. While the men rested, the carriers set down their loads and backtracked, scavenging everything they could fit in their bags.

When Company E finally reached Laruni, the rain came down in waves. Lutjens was huddled under a shelter half with his best friend, Staff Sergeant Peeper, and Sergeant John Fredericks. All were wet and caked with mud. Their bodies ached, but they were too hungry and exhausted to sleep. What they did was to talk about food. Back home on the farm in Michigan, Fredericks had been a great eater, so Lutjens and Peeper deferred to him.

Fredericks did not disappoint them. He talked about sprawling farm breakfasts and heaping suppers, and about canning apples. When Lutjens and Peeper joined in they discussed Christmas dinners and swore that if they made it out of New Guinea and back home alive that they would devote their lives to the joyous pursuit of food and eating. In other shelter halves, men were discussing the same thing. The subject of women never came up, at least not in a sexual way. When they talked about women, they fondly remembered the smells of their mothers’ kitchens, the comforting odor of cookies and apple pies baking in the oven.

What they might have craved more than anything else was salt. Lutjens later wrote, “The sweat in that drippy, oozy place took all the salt out of our bodies.” He dreamed of “good salty bacon or a dill pickle.”

Up until Laruni, food consisted of Australian bully beef and half a canteen cup of rice, which the soldiers stored in a sock that they knotted at the top. Even the hungriest of men considered the bully beef too vile to eat. Some, like Lutjens, could stomach it only when mixed with rice in what Lutjens called a “hobo’s stew.” If Lutjens ate it plain, he got “sick as a dog.” But at Laruni, Company E got lucky. One morning, a pilot making a drop dove dangerously low, skimming over the tops of the trees. Men rushed to recover the boxes, dreaming of the possibility of finding a chocolate bar. According to Lutjens, a guy “would sell” his “soul for a chocolate bar.” They thought they were fantasizing, when instead of chocolate, they found another treat—hard candy! Lutjens wrote that the candy dropped “from the jungle vines overhead like a hail storm,” and was scattered across the rain forest from “hell to breakfast.”

The soldiers’ joy at discovering the candy was short-lived. Beyond Laruni, wrote Lutjens, the march became “one green hell.” Still, Company E kept moving, motivated by a curious sense of pride. “No one,” according to Lutjens, “wanted to get passed by another unit.”

As bad as Company E had it, the men of Companies F, G, and H had it worse. The boots of nearly two hundred soldiers—those of Company E—had turned every square foot of trail into something resembling a pig wallow.

It was man against jungle, and it was obvious to Don Stout, a platoon sergeant from Muskegon, Michigan, that the jungle was winning. Stout had joined the Michigan National Guard in 1939 at the age of fifteen. He had never liked school anyway and if the recruiter sensed that Stout was too young, he chose to ignore the Guard’s eighteen-year-old requirement. Stout was proud of his new uniform, though he had to contend with people who called him a freeloader living off the federal government.

When Stout joined the Guard, he never envisioned himself slogging through the jungles of New Guinea.

“You should have seen ’em,” Stout says. “Guys were straggled out so far along the trail. When they were too sick or tired to move, they would set up a pup tent—if they hadn’t tossed it already—and pray that they would get better before the last company came past.”

At twenty-five, Don Ritter, a staff sergeant also from Muskegon, was something of an old-timer, especially compared to Stout. But he certainly did not lack for strength. “One hundred and seventy-five pounds and not an ounce of fat,” he says. “That’s how much I weighed when I started.” When the malarial fevers hit, though, they laid waste to his body. The first full-blown attack struck one day out of Nepeana. Ritter could not understand it. The jungle was a humid 100 degrees, but his body shook as if he were back in Muskegon walking shirtless on a chilly October morning. By the time the medic was able to check him out two days later, Ritter’s chill had turned into a 103-degree fever. On the trail he walked like a zombie. His buddy Russell Buys helped him out, but Buys was himself exhausted. Ritter’s legs were buckling on him, and his teeth rattled like a train going over the tracks. He drifted in and out of delirium. Thousands of parasites were reproducing at will inside his liver and exploding into his bloodstream.

“I don’t know if I can make it,” Ritter told Buys. “I’m sicker than a dog. Just leave me here.”

Buys, though, insisted that his friend keep moving. “And somehow,” Ritter says, “I did. I didn’t have a choice. It was walk or die. They couldn’t get you out. Evacuation just wasn’t a possibility.”

Stanley Jastrzembski says, “Everybody had malaria, and everybody was throwing stuff out of their packs. The guys with quinine pills were popping them like gumballs. Things got really bad when guys started getting dysentery, too. Then we all damn near died. I had ‘jungle guts’ so bad, I could scrape the crap off my legs with a tin ration can. Some guys had to go thirty times a day and all that came out was blood.”

The food and water did not help the situation. If there was not a nearby stream or river, men drank from muddy jungle puddles. And often when they reached camp, they were so tired they did not bother to cook their rice. “We just soaked it in water to soften it and then ground it up in our mouths like animals. It was hell on our bellies,” says Jastrzembski.

A stench followed Company G through the jungle. Jastrzembski’s body soured with the smell of encrusted sweat, excrement, and oozing sores. The worst dysentery cases dropped their pants and voided their bowels where they stood, or, like toddlers, fouled themselves as they walked, too tired to take down their pants. Some resorted to cutting the backs out of their pants and relieved themselves whenever nature “called.”

D
ISEASE HAS ALWAYS
been the enemy of armies. MacArthur witnessed this firsthand in the Philippines and, before that, as a divisional commander in World War I, when trench foot and the flu ravaged battalions. In the Philippines, dysentery, ringworm, hookworm, dhobi itch, and especially malaria disabled countless men. By March 1942, the combat efficiency of MacArthur’s troops had fallen by more than 75 percent due to disease and malnutrition. But MacArthur had never encountered anyplace like New Guinea. It was the perfect incubator for a host of debilitating tropical diseases. The bodies of the men—of Stout, Ritter, Jastrzembski, and countless others—who made the march across the Papuan Peninsula coursed with pathogens. Although the dysentery outbreaks might have been avoided through better hygiene, the men were largely defenseless against insect-borne diseases like malaria.