The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea--The Forgotten War of the South Pacific (38 page)

It was the exact approach that he and MacArthur had rejected at Buna.

Had the Allies known that Japanese Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo had issued orders via Rabaul calling for the withdrawal of forces up the coast, they might have been content to ambush the fleeing soldiers and cut off the supply lines to the beachhead, condemning the Japanese who remained at Sanananda to a slow but certain death. Instead, they moved in for the kill.

The Americans who had arrived on the Sanananda Front late in November would not be part of the final offensive. Of the fourteen hundred men who had gone into battle, only 165 remained. In no condition to fight, they were pulled off the front before the final Allied assault on Sanananda.

Alfred Medendorp was not one of the 165. In late December, incapacitated by malaria and fifty-five pounds lighter than when he had left Nepeana in early October to cross the mountains, he was shipped to the evacuation hospital at Dobodura. The next day he and a group he described as “battered, filthy, long haired, gaunt, festering, stinking wretches” boarded a plane for Port Moresby.

Lieutenant Lester Segal was not one of them either. After a month on the Sanananda Front, he was transferred to Buna to attend to the men wounded in the siege of the Government Station. Because of a shortage of medics, he stayed on in the aftermath of the battle. Eventually, he, too, was evacuated to Port Moresby. Seriously ill—perhaps with scrub typhus—it was a “miracle,” according to Medendorp, that Segal was still alive.

Of the 165 men, only ninety-five were able to march to the bivouac site at Siremi east of the Girua River. Father Dzienis was one of them. “Only then,” Medendorp later learned, “did he surrender his festering, fever-ridden body to a hospital to begin a long fight for recovery.”

At Siremi, Dzienis and the others washed and shaved for the first time in months, and were issued shelter halves and mosquito nets. Two days later, Eichelberger held a ceremony for them. “I received the troops,” he wrote, “with band music. It was a melancholy homecoming. Sickness, death, and wounds,” he wrote, “had taken an appalling toll. [The men] were so ragged and so pitiful that when I greeted them my eyes were wet.”

On January 16, the 127th and the 163rd Infantry Regiments were ordered to attack the Japanese garrison at Sanananda. The 127th was to advance on the coastal track from Buna Village, blocking any attempt by the Japanese to flee east. Meanwhile, one battalion of the 163rd was to move up the Sanananda track to the coast while another battalion sealed off the escape route west of Huggins Roadblock. After clearing out the Japanese positions south of the roadblock, the men of the 163rd were to join Australia’s 18th Brigade and advance north along the track.

On January 17, as the Allies converged on Sanananda, General Yamagata determined that the evacuation plan could not wait. The wounded and sick were to leave by landing barge. The rest of the troops were to escape any way they could—on foot, or by swimming up the coast. Upon reaching the mouth of the Kumusi or the Mambare River, they would be shipped even farther up the coast to Lae and Salamaua.

Kiyoshi Wada wondered if he would make it out alive. “I am left to take charge in this place,” he wrote. “We think that tonight will be the last night for Girua and we talk about swimming together to Lae. Wonder if we can get away? Wakaichi will not leave us behind.”

Late the following night, Wada, who had also read the Allied leaflets, continued, “We looked forward to getting on the boat tonight but because the wounded were put on first, we could not get on…. Reinforcements haven’t come. There are no provisions. Things are happening just as the enemy says…. I don’t think Wakaichi will leave us behind.”

The next day, Yamagata delivered the evacuation orders to General Oda and sent an aide to carry them to Colonel Yazawa. That night Yamagata and his staff and over a hundred sick and wounded soldiers left Girua in two large motor launches. Later, a prisoner of war stated that the general made “room for himself by taking off the patients and men already loaded on the barge.”

Oda was indignant: Yamagata, he believed, had taken the coward’s way out. Early the next morning, Oda, Yazawa, and a large number of troops plunged into the swamp and ran smack into an Australian outpost. Yazawa, who had been in New Guinea since the overland assault on Port Moresby, was killed and, by some accounts, Oda was too. Other reports contend that Oda stayed behind. Realizing that his end was near, he told a soldier that he was going off “to smoke one cigarette at leisure.” Soon afterward, the soldier heard two pistol shots and ran back to assist Oda. There he found the general and his supply officer lying on a cloak on the ground where they had killed themselves.

As the last evacuation boats pulled anchor, Kyoshi Wada was left standing on the beach, longing for home. He returned to the hospital and was killed by mortar fire early the following morning.

A day later, on January 22, 1943, the Buna-Gona-Sanananda campaign officially ended. Advancing Allied troops caught starved and weary enemy soldiers in their shelters or trying to escape and mowed them down. By day’s end more than five hundred Japanese lay dead. It was the largest single-day slaughter since Gorari nearly three months earlier.

Carl Stenberg, like most of the men of Ghost Mountain battalion and the 128th Infantry Regiment, was already in Port Moresby, waiting to be transported south to Australia. Days before the fall of Sanananda, he had left Dobodura and was flown over the Owen Stanley mountains. The entire trip took forty-five minutes.

Stenberg had been marching or fighting for over three months. His ear throbbed and bled and he was woozy with malaria. His lower legs were a patchwork of jungle sores. And when he slept the nightmares came: He was stranded in a swamp, stuck up to his hips in mud that gripped like quicksand. The tide was in and the water crept to his chest. He held his head high to breathe as rats glided by, making their way through the black scum.

Stanley Jastrzembski was lying in a hospital bed not far from Stenberg. Early in January, after a nine-day regimen of quinine, atabrine, and plasmochin, Jastrzembski’s fever broke; but now it was soaring again. Wrapped in towels and ice, he lay on a cot, unable to escape the smell. He was back in the jungle, waiting and watching. Bodies bloated by the heat floated past. They were smiling. He could see their gold fillings.

In late December 1942, Simon Warmenhoven was appointed division surgeon at the request of General Eichelberger and received a rare battlefield promotion to lieutenant colonel. In mid-January, as the Allied attack on the Sanananda and Girua garrisons was about to begin, Warmenhoven turned thirty-three and was still performing surgeries in a poorly lit tent. On January 20, he learned that he was being sent back to Port Moresby. He arrived in Australia not long afterward and went directly to a hospital for treatment of hookworm. In late February he returned to Camp Cable, where he took up residence in a small wooden house. The first thing he did was to put pictures of his family on his dresser. Warmenhoven was now a celebrated doctor. Articles in newspapers across the U.S. were praising his bravery in New Guinea and his medical achievements just behind the front lines. In early March, his picture was on the front page of the
New York Times.

Back in Australia, Warmenhoven did not feel like a celebrity. He worked around the clock seven days a week nursing the Red Arrow men back to health while neglecting his own needs. In early April, exhausted, he suffered a malaria attack and was hospitalized for three weeks. At the time, doctors little understood the possible toxic effects of large doses of atabrine and quinine. The term “atabrine psychosis,” characterized by drug-induced manic depression and schizophrenic episodes, had only recently been coined. Nevertheless, Warmenhoven was treated aggressively. Upon returning to Camp Cable three and a half weeks later, he learned that MacArthur was preparing to send the 32nd back into combat. As division surgeon, he was asked to sign a medical release stating that the division was healthy enough to return to active duty.

He refused.

On Monday night May 3, 1943, he wrote Mandy.

Dearest Lover:

Had a lovely letter from you yesterday, darling. Came at the right time too believe me. Sure had the “blues” here for a couple of days. That’s why I haven’t written you. I don’t often allow myself to get that way but after all, when one is away from his best friend in the world you my wife, and away from such grand children, you just can’t help it. I love the way you ended your letter, Sweetheart, about “not being so far apart because we’ll live forever in each other’s hearts.”

Lovingly Always, Sam

Two days later, Lieutenant Colonel Simon “Sam” Warmenhoven shot himself in the head.

E
PILOGUE

I laid him down by the bend in the stream;
And erected a cross at his head.
His funeral song was a kockatoo’s scream,
As if they knew my buddy was dead…

I’ve evened the score, yes, a dozen times o’er,
But no matter the distance between,
My mind wanders yet and I’ll never forget,
His grave by the bend in the stream.

B
OB
H
ARTMAN,
B
UNA
V
ETERAN

It would take months for the 32nd Division to be transported to Australia, where upon arriving, the sick and wounded were sent to a variety of hospitals in the Brisbane area. Those in relatively good health went to Coolangatta on Australia’s Gold Coast for R&R. The men chased girls and got roaring drunk. They told stories, too. The stories were not sad or dark; in fact, according to Bill Sikkel, they were full of “GI humor.” The one that really busted up Sikkel and the guys who had been on the Sanananda Front was about Father Dzienis.

It was in late November and Father Dzienis excused himself from a conversation to visit the recently dug two-hole outhouse. When a Japanese navy ship shelled the track, Dzienis came running out with his pants down around his ankles, “mad as a hornet.”

“To hell with the Geneva Conventions,” he thundered (according to the Geneva Conventions, a chaplain was not allowed to be armed). “Give me a pistol!”

When victory at Sanananda was declared on January 22, 1943, the war on New Guinea’s Papuan Peninsula came to a close. For the first time in World War II the Allies had defeated the Japanese in a land operation. Two and a half weeks later, the fighting on Guadalcanal ended.

New Guinea was a flashback to earlier wars. General Eichelberger called it a “poor man’s war,” one largely unaffected by America’s industrial machine. For two months, the Allies beat at nearly impenetrable enemy defenses. One American destroyer, bombarding Japanese positions, could have shortened the campaign by weeks. Shallow-draft landing craft, commonplace when the Marines invaded Guadalcanal, could have brought the campaign to a quicker close by hauling in much-needed tanks and artillery. Even something as basic as transport ships reliably delivering supplies could have eased the suffering of the soldiers.

Eventually, the Allies succeeded in pounding the Japanese into submission, but at what cost? What would MacArthur have lost by letting the Japanese starve? Major Mitsuo Koiwai was the commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion, 41st Infantry. When captured at the end of the war, he said, “We lost at Buna because we could not retain air superiority, because we could not supply our troops…. We were in such a position…that we wondered whether the Americans would bypass us and let us starve.”

At the war’s end, MacArthur privately resolved to never again force a “head-on collision of the bloody, grinding type.” There would be “No more Bunas,” he said. On the other hand, he publicly congratulated himself during the war for his patient execution of the campaign. On January 28, he issued his final campaign communiqué, declaring that in the battle for New Guinea the “time element was…of little importance.” It added, “The utmost care was taken for the conservation of our forces, with the result that probably no campaign in history against a thoroughly prepared and trained army produced such complete and decisive results, with so low an expenditure of life.”

Correspondents who had witnessed firsthand the brutality of the campaign were outraged by MacArthur’s claim. It was a piece of fiction, a brazen lie. When some refused to wire the text to their editors, MacArthur’s headquarters threatened to expel them from the SWPA.

Eichelberger was flabbergasted by MacArthur’s claim. Was this the same MacArthur who had told General Harding to “Take Buna Today At All Costs”? Was this the same commander in chief who told him to “take Buna or don’t come back alive”? Eleven years later, in a letter to Samuel Milner, the army’s official historian, Eichelberger wrote, “The statement to the correspondents in Brisbane after Buna that ‘losses were small because there was no hurry’ was one of the great surprises of my life. As you know, our Allied losses were heavy and as a commander in the field, I had been told many times of the necessity for speed.”

Eichelberger was justifiably bitter. Demonized by his men, he bore the brunt of MacArthur’s sense of urgency. He would later write, “The great hero went home without seeing Buna before, during or after the fight while permitting press articles from his GHQ to say he was leading his troops in battle. MacArthur…just stayed over at Moresby 40 minutes away and walked the floor. I know this to be a fact.” Though MacArthur had never bothered to visit the front “to see first hand the difficulties our troops were up against,” he continually hounded Eichelberger “to push on to victory.”

Victory at Buna and Sanananda came at a huge cost. Eichelberger wrote in his book,
Our Jungle Road to Tokyo,
“Buna was…bought at a substantial price in death, wounds, disease, despair, and human suffering. No one who fought there, however hard he tries, will ever forget it.” Fatalities, he continued, “closely approach, percentage-wise, the heaviest losses in our own Civil War battles.” Historian Stanley Falk agreed. “The Papuan campaign,” he wrote, “was one of the costliest Allied victories of the Pacific war in terms of casualties per troops committed.”

The combined victory at Buna, Sanananda, and Gona, though costly, was psychologically and strategically momentous. Together with the fall of Guadalcanal, it destroyed the myth of Japanese invincibility. Strategically, it broke Japan’s hold on New Guinea, ensuring the security of the Australian continent and the American supply line to the Pacific.

Buna-Sanananda was not the 32nd Division’s only campaign. In December 1943, it returned to battle in New Guinea at Saidor, followed by invasions of Aitape on the New Guinea’s far north coast, and Morotai, near the island of Halmahera, between New Guinea and the Philippine island of Mindanao. Later, it participated in the liberation of the Philippines at Leyte and Luzon.

Although the division’s battles were overshadowed by the likes of Tarawa, Saipan, and Iwo Jima, Eichelberger managed to put the Red Arrow men’s contributions into perspective:

“Some of the Pacific history has been written, but little of it has been concerned with the men I commanded—the ordinary, muddy, malarial, embattled, and weighed-down-by-too-heavy-packs GIs. They waded through the surf, they struggled through the swamp mud…they cut tracks which ultimately became roads leading to the airfields they constructed. They were the true artisans of the island-hopping campaign in the Pacific which led ultimately to the Philippines and Tokyo. They called it—The Hard Way Back.”

It was, in fact, the 32nd Division to which General Yamashita surrendered near Kiangan on September 2, 1945. By the war’s end the 32nd Division had been in combat for 654 days.

As costly as its other campaigns were, none could compare with Buna and Sanananda, where the division’s casualties pushed 90 percent. Out of the nearly eleven thousand troops in the division’s three combat teams, there were 9,688 casualties. According to Samuel Milner, the division’s 126th Infantry Regiment “had ceased to exist.” Of the 131 officers and 3,040 enlisted men who went into battle in mid-November, only thirty-two officers and 579 enlisted men remained when the last remnants of the regiment were transported to Port Moresby in late January. The 126th’s Ghost Mountain Battalion was down to 126 men and six officers. Companies E, F, G, and H had been reduced to the size of platoons. Each had fewer than thirty men. West of the Girua River on the Sanananda Front, the Antitank and Cannon Companies and the 3rd Battalion fared just as poorly. As of January 20, 1943, Antitank had just ten men. None of the other companies had more than twenty.

Illness represented the vast majority of those casualties. Of the 9,688 casualties, 7,125 of them were due to illness. On the battlefields of Buna and Sanananda, malaria, dysentery, dengue fever, scrub typhus, and hookworm were as debilitating as enemy bullets.

When the entire division assembled at Camp Cable in April 1943, Simon Warmenhoven was shocked by the condition of the soldiers and their inability to recover. Physicals revealed that men had lost a quarter to a third of their body weight. Sam DiMaggio was down to 135 pounds and had blackwater fever. His liver and spleen were enlarged and his urine was the color of a Buna swamp. Others were suffering from exhaustion, malnutrition, and anemias related to vitamin deficiencies.

Those with hookworm, dysentery, and anemias eventually responded to treatment. The majority of the malaria cases, however, did not. Men with malaria got worse instead of better, suffering relapse after relapse.

Bill Sikkel’s personal malaria report is illustrative of what Stenberg and many of the Red Arrow men experienced. Sikkel had led patrols on the Sanananda Front since the third week in November. Stricken with high fevers, he was taken off the Sanananda track and evacuated to Port Moresby on Christmas Eve, 1942. Treatment in Port Moresby consisted of three days of quinine, then three days of atabrine, then three days of plasmochin. Following that, he took one atabrine tablet per day. Upon reaching Australia, before going to Coolangatta, he, like many other soldiers, was quarantined and given a seventeen-day malarial treatment. Australian officials were worried that malaria could spread in epidemic proportions throughout the continent; returning troops were banned from Australian territory north of 19 degrees south latitude, an area known for its large mosquito populations. On March 11, Sikkel suffered another malaria attack and was hospitalized at the 155th Station Hospital at Camp Cable. After a positive smear, he received nineteen days of quinine, atabrine, and plasmochin in addition to adrenaline shots. That treatment was followed by six weeks in a malaria rest camp at which he received one atabrine tablet per day. Three months later, Sikkel suffered a third attack. It was the worst of the three. He was admitted to a U.S. Navy hospital at Nelsons Bay, New South Wales, and then transferred to the 47th Station Hospital in Sydney, where he was diagnosed with malaria, bronchitis, and hookworm, and was hospitalized for forty-three days.

By September 1943 when the 32nd was preparing to return to New Guinea, 2,334 men, judged “unfit for combat,” were dropped from the division roster.

The decimation of the 32nd Division by disease was not an isolated incident. By the end of 1942, the Australians had 15,575 cases of infectious disease: 9,249 cases of malaria, 3,643 cases of dysentery, 1,186 cases of dengue fever, and 186 cases of scrub typhus.

And as badly off as the Americans and the Australians were, the Japanese suffered more. One Japanese official called New Guinea “a magnificent tragedy.” Of the sixteen to seventeen thousand troops committed to the campaign, they lost roughly twelve thousand, many to dengue fever, malaria, dysentery, and even beriberi, a disease directly related to starvation.

One thing is clear: MacArthur came away from New Guinea with a profound respect for the destructive power of malaria. In future campaigns he made sure that troops were supplied with malaria tablets, mosquito netting, protective clothing, and training in antimalaria procedures. By October 1944, when MacArthur returned to the Philippines, malaria was no longer a significant problem among Allied ground troops.

Some historians believe that MacArthur learned a number of other lessons at Buna, responding to its savagery by developing his policy of “bypassing” or “leapfrogging,” a “hit ’em where they ain’t” strategy that relied on the efficacy of air power and amphibious operations. After Buna, MacArthur avoided enemy strongholds. Rushing the construction of airstrips, he pounded the Japanese supply line, leaving bases to “wither on the vine.” This strategy, MacArthur admitted, was “as old as warfare itself.” Admiral Nimitz had already used it to great effect in the central Solomons and would again later in the central Pacific when he jumped from the Gilbert Islands to the Marshalls and then to the Marianas. MacArthur, though, got credit for it.