The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea--The Forgotten War of the South Pacific (21 page)

The country that his parents had come to love and worship had betrayed them. Japanese-Americans had their homes, farms, and businesses seized. They were herded up and forced to live like animals.

Although Hirashima felt a great resentment, that experience did not turn him against the country he loved. It made him more determined than ever to prove his patriotism.

As the Americans negotiated the treacherous trail, Hirashima prayed they would not run into the Japanese. The men could barely walk, much less fight. For Hirashima, the thought of being killed in battle was frightening, but being taken prisoner would be the worst possible fate. For a Japanese-American soldier, the Japanese would reserve a special brand of cruelty.

They did not encounter any Japanese on the march, which was a good thing because they were in no condition for battle. When they finally arrived in Bofu, they were tired, hungry, and nursing a variety of ailments.

Simon Warmenhoven was grateful to have made it over the mountains. When on November 8 he wrote his wife Mandy to express his love and alert her that there would be a lull in his letters, he had no idea what was in store for him. He had walked over the mountains shouldering his own pack, a smaller bag of medical supplies, and occasionally the pack of another doctor. Once they reached Bofu, the men collapsed, but Warmenhoven’s work had just begun. He had managed to keep the men of the 126th healthy while they were training in Australia. He treated venereal diseases, and on a small scale, malaria, dengue fever, and an assortment of skin ailments. That was comparatively easy. Now, it seemed, everyone had some kind of ailment. Soldiers were burning up with fevers, and some had dysentery so bad he worried about dehydration. Everyone had feet torn up with blisters, sore knees and shoulders, and backs scorched by the sun, and he had not even gotten around to visiting Stutterin’ Smith’s Ghost Mountain boys. What would happen once the fighting started? How could he treat all the sick and wounded? How would the newly created portable hospital units (forerunners to MASH, mobile army surgical hospitals) function? Knowing how long it would take to evacuate soldiers to a field hospital and knowing the dangers of infection in a climate like New Guinea’s, the idea behind the portable hospital was to treat the wounded as far forward as possible, and to be mobile. Units would include twenty-five beds, moving as the battle shifted. On paper, the concept seemed workable, even brilliant. But Warmenhoven needed qualified medical personnel to man the hospitals. And like the other regimental surgeons, he was up against a shortage of doctors and corpsmen.

For Warmenhoven, battle was not a hypothetical. Back in Port Moresby, Japanese Zeros, intent on taking out the airfield, came at dusk one evening, dropping bombs across the area. Portions of the 126th were camped near the end of the runway. Men dove into foxholes or dashed into the jungle. One unlucky soldier was hit by shrapnel while lying in his cot. He was sobbing when his friend, Sergeant Jack Hill of the 126th’s 3rd Battalion, ran to him. Turning on his flashlight, Hill realized that the hot metal had torn off his buddy’s kneecap, and the smell of burning flesh made him retch. Hill yelled for a medic, and Warmenhoven appeared, instructing him to shine the flashlight on the wound with one hand and with the other to press a tourniquet to his friend’s leg. Then Warmenhoven calmly amputated the leg while bombs exploded nearby. At one point a soldier shouted, “Put that goddamned light out or I’ll shoot it out!” Warmenhoven looked at Hill. “Keep the light steady,” he said. “Keep it steady.”

As the division prepared for battle, Harding was also worried about the condition of his men, especially since he had no reserve troops. As a keen student of history, he knew what disease had done to General George Washington’s colonial forces, especially at the Battle of Quebec, where Washington’s army, under the command of Colonel Benedict Arnold, was crippled by smallpox.

Despite the poor health of his troops, and the fact that MacArthur had consistently denied him the 127th Infantry Regiment, which was still back at Camp Tamborine, Harding was upbeat about his army’s chances. Both ground and air reconnaissance indicated that the Japanese strongholds each held only two hundred to three hundred Japanese. His intelligence officers speculated further that the Japanese had already decided to relinquish Buna.

These reports had clearly made their way to the officers. Quinn’s message to Jim Boice about having tea in Buna on his birthday testifies to the prevailing belief that the Japanese invasion force had been reduced to a ragtag bunch of tired and sick soldiers. One Ground Forces observer ventured “Buna could be had by walking in and taking over.”

It was General Willoughby who challenged these optimistic appraisals of Japanese troop levels. On November 10, he estimated that about four thousand troops were holding the beachhead. He also thought it unlikely that the Japanese would abandon their position on the north coast. But four days later, after assessing Japanese losses on the Kokoda track, Willoughby revised his estimate downward and ventured a guess that the Japanese were capable only of fighting a delaying action at Buna. “The seizure of the Buna area,” he said, “is practically assured.”

B
OOK
T
HREE

Train the arm and school the eye.
Steel the heart to ice-lipped death.
They are God’s who learn to die
Having learned life’s shibboleth.

C.T. “B
UCK
” L
ANHAM
, “I
NTERIM
”

Umi yukaba, mizuku kabane,
Yama yukaba, kusamusu kabane,
Okimi no he ni koso shiname.
Kaerimi wa seji.

(Across the sea, corpses soaking in the water,
Across the mountains, corpses heaped upon the grass,
We shall die by the side of the Lord.
We shall never look back.)

O
TOMO
Y
AKAMOCHI
, “U
MI YUKABA
”

Chapter 12

T
HE
K
ILL
Z
ONE

O
N
N
OVEMBER
16, the Australians had just completed their crossing of the Kumusi River at Wairopi and began marching on Gona and Sanananda, northwest of Buna village via the Buna-Kokoda track. On the coast, the 128th moved out, too, in the hazy light of a tropical morning. The men lined their dog tags with rubber tubing so the clang of metal on metal would not give them away in battle. In addition to their packs, they carried canteens, knives, first aid kits hooked to their belts, cigarettes, Zippo lighters, two extra bandoliers of ammo per man, and hand grenades.

After weeks of idleness, they were happy to be on the move at last. One officer remembered the mood as “like the eve of a celebration to come. We were to go in to ‘raise the flag’ and there was to be a great victory for the American forces with very little effort on our part.”

For the first time since landing on the north coast the men appreciated the island’s luxuriant beauty—the picturesque coastline with its regal coconut palms, waves lapping at the sandy beach, a blue sky stripped of clouds, the first bands of sunshine filtering through the trees.

It was a puzzling thing to see—soldiers moving into battle without a touch of gravity, hardly conscious of their own mortality. Gangly young men, soaked to the bone, chuckled and gibed with each other and told jokes, the raunchier the better, raising their voices not to overcome rampaging fear, but to deliver punch lines. Though they were tired from having walked twenty miles through knotted jungle with bad feet, fevers, and oozing sores, and though they were hungry after the previous night’s meager dinner of rice and boiled, under-ripe papayas, they believed what they had been told: The beachhead was lightly defended, they would mop up, they would kill a few starving, near-sighted Japs, take a few scalps maybe, knock out some gold fillings, and push on up the island’s north coast toward bigger battles and then get back to civilization as quickly as they could. Once home, they would drink, race fast cars, date every pretty gal they could, take baths every day, eat until they could not stand, and sit on their front porches and wave to passersby.

Despite their initial cockiness, by the afternoon the men were beat, and they, too, rid themselves of everything they considered nonessential. But even after lightening their loads, they struggled in the 100-degree heat. By nightfall it was all they could do to wade a waist-deep creek. After crossing, they made camp at the creek’s mouth, near the village of Boreo, just north of coastal headquarters at Hariko.

Just behind the encampment, soldiers were assembling two Australian 3.7-inch mountain howitzers, which would provide long-range artillery for the attack. Using a captured Japanese barge, General Albert Waldron, Harding’s artillery officer, had brought in Australian mountain guns and two hundred rounds of ammunition early that morning. It was a daring move. He and his crew put ashore in an area that had not yet been scouted by Allied troops, unloaded, and then headed back down the coast to Oro Bay to pick up General Harding and his party, the members of a portable hospital unit, two 25-pounder field pieces, 81 mm long-range mortars, .50 caliber machine guns, rations, radio supplies, and ammunition. Harding and Waldron and his party were expected to arrive later that night.

By the time Waldron made Oro Bay, the supplies had been divided among three ships: the
Alacrity
, the
Minnemura
, and the
Bonwin.
Waldron’s barge was loaded and then all four ships departed for the front. The cruise north was a pleasant one. It had been over a month since a Japanese plane had been sighted along the north coast, and the crews of the various ships were relaxing for perhaps the last time before going into battle.

Just off Cape Sudest, General Harding, who was aboard the
Minnemura,
was enjoying dinner with the captain and its crew. It was nearly dusk, and the sky throbbed with the rich shades of a tropical sunset. A slender native boy stood at the bow of the ship, throwing out a plumb line and shouting out the depths. Angelfish gathered around the line, and the sea was radiant with color. Off the starboard bow, the black fin of a shark broke the surface of the water. In the distance, the
Alacrity,
the largest ship in the convoy, was already dropping anchor off Hariko. The
Alacrity
towed a barge and carried most of the ordnance, forty native carriers, and the twenty-nine-man hospital team.

Harding was sipping a cup of coffee when suddenly he heard the far-off sound of airplane engines. As the drone of the engines grew louder, everyone thought the same thing—Are they ours? The
Minnemura
’s captain stood and searched the rose-colored horizon with his binoculars. When he saw the blunt noses, he knew—Zeros! The
Minnemura
’s skipper swung the ship toward shore. The captain grabbed an ammunition belt and lunged for the machine gun mounted on the port deck. The native boy no longer shouted out depths. He had slipped silently over the side of the boat. Moments later, eighteen Zeros with red balls on the underside of their silver wings appeared out of the evening sky.

The Zeros buzzed overhead and kept on going as if on a bombing mission in some far-off place. Everyone on the boats held his breath, wondering if the planes would return. Without Allied aircraft escorts, which had already left for Port Moresby in hopes of making it over the Owen Stanley “hump” before darkness, the ships were sitting ducks.

Minutes later, the Zeros materialized out of the southern sky. They came in fast and low, bent on destruction, strafing the
Bonwin,
the third ship in the convoy. Aboard the
Bonwin,
men were hugging the decks inside the main cabin. Incendiary bullets ricocheted off barrels and wood planks. Though they were unaware of it, a fire fueled by burning gasoline was making its way to the main cabin, which was soon engulfed in flames. The ship was going down.

Three Zeros then attacked the plodding barge. The pilots were making one run after the next, “spewing tracer bullets,” according to Lieutenant Colonel Stanley Hollenback, who from the beach watched the attack unfold. When the bullets tore into gasoline drums, a surge of black smoke shot into the sky and surrounded the barge. It did not take the men long to realize that they were goners if they stayed aboard. Anyone who was able to swim, including General Waldron, dove as far from the barge as they could with bullets smacking around them.

Aboard the
Alacrity,
crewmen were firing back with .50 and .30 caliber machine guns and rifles. It was a futile fight. In less than a minute, the
Alacrity
was ablaze. Men hurled themselves into the water. A bomb fell among the natives, who had abandoned ship at the same time, and killed all but twelve of them. A chaplain stayed aboard long enough to toss over hatch covers and oil drums that the men could use to stay afloat. A lieutenant remained aboard ship, too, trying to subdue the fire and save what he could. Then he dove overboard and he and a number of men struggled to pull the boat to shore as bullets broke the water.

Lastly, the Zeros fell upon the
Minnemura,
which had run aground on a reef. Harding had grabbed an M-1 and was hiding behind boxes of C-rations. The pilots were making one pass after another, firing tracers and dropping bombs, and Harding was shooting back. The boat’s captain, though hit in the leg, filled the sky with bullets. He fired until his machine gun jammed. When the stern of the ship and a fuel tank were hit and fire swallowed the lugger, Harding and the captain dove overboard.

The water was filled with screaming men and blood from the wounded, which pooled and then dissipated like the rings of a rising fish. To escape the strafing, those who could swim dove under the water, ripping their legs, chests, and bellies on the coral. Those who could not swim flailed their arms and struggled to stay afloat or grabbed and clung to pieces of wreckage. Phosphorescence swirled around them.

Risking their lives, some men on shore pushed a life raft into the surf and paddled out to the boats. They picked up General Harding, but when Harding realized that there were nonswimmers who were likely to drown without the aid of the dinghy, he tore off his clothes, plunged into the water, and swam for shore. Whenever the Zeros fired he dove under and held his breath for as long as he could. The guys aboard the raft hauled in several wounded men, pulling them over the lip of the dinghy. Then they went to search for more. When the dinghy was full, they turned the boat toward the beach. Exhausted men, for whom there was no room in the dinghy, threw their arms over the side gunwales and were tugged to shore, where officers mobilized rescue parties, sending out small boats to search among the burning wreckage for survivors.

That night General Harding was able to assess the scope of the damage. Fifty-two men, including twenty-eight native carriers and Colonel Laurence McKenny, the division quartermaster, were killed in the attack. McKenny had been aboard the
Bonwin
when it ignited, and either drowned or burned to death. In addition, one hundred men were wounded. According to Lieutenant Colonel Hollenback, doctors “operated all night long on the men, mostly with abdominal wounds, sewing up the bullet holes in their intestines.”

The following morning, Harding realized the full extent of the catastrophe. In addition to the human toll, he had lost tons of supplies, including rations, artillery shells, the two 25-pounders, and the 128th’s heavy weapons. Now he would be entering battle with no mortars or artillery.

Under normal circumstances, a division would have dozens of 105 mm howitzers plus another twelve 155 mm howitzers. Harding had made numerous appeals for bringing in the big guns. Each time, however, Headquarters rebuffed him. The division, GHQ argued, did not have the means to transport them, or to keep them supplied once they had been delivered. The argument carried General Kenney’s imprint. Kenney was working behind the scenes, and he was determined that Buna would be an Army Air show. It was a classic turf war, and Kenney triumphed. “The artillery in this theater flies,” he said.

Later that morning, Zeros disabled two of the three remaining Oro Bay luggers that were hauling supplies to the front. Harding, though eager to carry out the attack, had to concede that his battle plan had been dealt a terrible blow.

Despite the disaster, and after much deliberation, Harding delayed the advance by only two days, scheduling it for 0700 on November 19. If intelligence estimates of Japanese troop strength were accurate, it was better to attack before Rabaul was able to send in more men.

At 0700 on November 19, 1942, the Australian mountain guns roared, signaling the start of the attack. Then two columns of troops moved out into the wet and blurry morning, trudging forward from Boreo along a muddy, tree-covered coastal trail, staying off the beach to avoid detection by Japanese reconnaissance planes. As the men of the 128th marched into battle, rain slashed diagonally through the forest canopy.

Two squads led the charge, grenades hooked by their spoons over their belts, safeties off, fingers on the thin metal of their triggers, ready to snap off shots at the slightest movement, the slightest sound, their eyes flaming like wildfire. The same question kept tracking through every man’s head: How will I do once the shooting starts? They all prayed that they would live to see another day. But they also prayed that they would not disgrace themselves.

The Japanese knew that they were coming, and because of the delay had two extra days to prepare their defenses. The night before, the Japanese had whetted and sharpened their bayonets, oiled their weapons, inspected their machine gun belts to make sure they would not jam in the heat of the battle, and checked their firing lanes.

Since landing in mid-July, engineers had been busily fortifying the area. The Japanese had established a series of masterful positions along a narrow eleven-mile front, extending from Gona on the west to Cape Endaiadere on the east.

The Japanese defense of the beachhead was built around three main positions. One was at Gona, the other along the Sanananda track, and the third was in the Buna area from the Girua River east to Cape Endaiadere, a promontory just west of Cape Sudest and the American’s coastal headquarters at Hariko.

Girua, located just up the coastal trail from Buna Village, was the main Japanese base with a supply dump and hospital. It was defended by a variety of positions and packed with bunkers, blockhouses, and trenches. Farther south, for miles along the Sanananda track, the Japanese established a main position and a handful of forward outposts. All the positions were situated on dry ground, surrounded by tangled, stinking, crocodile-infested sago, nipa, and mangrove swamp.

Beginning east of the mouth of the Girua River and continuing southeastward, the Japanese line of defense cut through a coconut grove and then turned southward to the trail junction where a track forked to Buna Village on one hand and to Buna Government Station on the other. The area between the forks became known as the Triangle. An offshoot of the Girua River called Entrance Creek bisected it. Sweeping north, the Japanese line enclosed the Triangle and then turned eastward to the grassy area known as Government Gardens. From the gardens, it led south and then east through the main grassy area to Siremi Creek, near an old airstrip. Continuing southward, it enclosed the bridge over Siremi Creek between the old strip and a new airstrip. Then, making a right-angled turn to the new strip, it followed the edge of the strip to within a few hundred yards of the sea. Cutting sharply northeast, it emerged on the sea at a point about 750 yards below Cape Endaiadere in an area of coconut palms known as the Duropa Plantation.