The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea--The Forgotten War of the South Pacific (45 page)

Seppuku,
or hara-kiri (literally “cutting the belly”) is a form of Japanese ritual suicide by disembowelment. It was used by warriors to avoid falling into enemy hands. World War II Japanese officers, steeped in bushido, would have used the word seppuku.

In his book
The Samurai Way of Death,
Stephen Turnbull writes:

Seppuku…could take place with preparation and ritual in the privacy of one’s home, or speedily in a quiet corner of a battlefield. In the world of the warrior, seppuku was a deed of bravery that was admirable in a samurai who knew he was defeated, disgraced, or mortally wounded. It meant that he could end his days with his transgressions wiped away and with his reputation not merely intact but actually enhanced. The cutting of the abdomen released the samurai’s spirit in the most dramatic fashion, but it was an extremely painful and unpleasant way to die, and sometimes the samurai who was performing the act asked a loyal comrade to cut off his head at the moment of agony.

James Clavell writes in the novel
Shogun
that seppuku may have originated not as a positive good, but as the lesser of two evils. The code of bushido, unlike the European codes of chivalry, didn’t forbid mistreatment of prisoners. For this reason, a Japanese soldier had every reason to suspect that he would be tortured. Therefore, he would often choose seppuku instead.

Eichelberger’s letter to MacArthur is from
Our Jungle Road to Tokyo.

Details of Buna’s fall and the various correspondences are taken from Milner, Mayo, and
Our Jungle Road.

Medendorp writes of those remaining on the Sanananda Front.

Wada’s diary entires are from ATIS translations, Ham, and Raymond Paull.

Milner’s version of Oda’s death differs from Ham’s and Mayo’s, both of whom write that Oda committed suicide.

Winston Groom writes, “Two types of cannibalism were practiced by the Japanese. The first, and most common, was simply to stay alive when Imperial troops were abandoned by their supervisors on far away islands with no food to speak of. The second, and more disgusting, was the custom of ranking Japanese officers who, in the spirit of Bushido…deliberately ate the livers and organs of fallen enemies in the belief that it made them strong and brave.”

Paul Ham claims that Wada was not killed but was rediscovered floating on a raft and handed over to Allied forces. According to Ham, Wada went on to write something called “Painting over my shame,” which is contained in a document called
The Signals Company Records: 144th Infantry Regiment.
In all my research, Ham is the only historian I discovered who says that Wada survived.

Simon Warmenhoven’s daughters generously (and courageously) gave me access to all their father’s letters. Details of Warmenhoven’s death are from interviews with Jack Hill, Edward Doyle, and Bill Sikkel. Hill held Warmenhoven in his arms after the colonel shot himself. The official army version of his death (the report from the commanding general) stated that his death was the result of a gunshot wound received while in the Southwest Pacific Area. Over a decade later, Mrs. Henerietta Warmenhoven received the “Official Statement of the Military Service and Death” of her husband. It stated that “death occurred in the line of duty.”

Because atabrine was new and because doctors had not yet determined the proper dosage for malaria treatment, temporary atabrine psychosis was a danger. However, according to Major Lewis Barger, a military medical historian in the Office of the Army Surgeon General, “atabrine psychosis” was not statistically significant. “Military Psychiatry: Preparing in Peace for War” (Bordeu Institute website) gives a 12 percent rate for malaria cases treated with atabrine. There is also the possibility that Lieutenant Colonel Simon Warmenhoven was suffering from what we now know as “posttraumatic stress disorder.” During the Civil War, it was called “soldier’s heart.” The British military psychiatrist C. S. Myers introduced the term “shellshock” in 1915. Still, it was largely misunderstood. Therapies were designed to increase a soldier’s willpower. In 1941, a pupil of Sigmund Freud’s, Abram Kardiner, wrote
The Traumatic Neuroses of War,
with detailed clinical descriptions of psychoneurotic and physio-neurotic symptoms. Shortly after World War II, psychiatrists noticed what they called “gross stress reactions” among war veterans. In 1945, Commander Leon Saul, a doctor in the U.S. Navy Reserve, coined the term “combat fatigue” to describe a myriad of post-battle symptoms. It wasn’t until the mid-1970s that the American Psychiatric Association came up with the phrase “post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Epilogue

Bill Sikkel told me this story about returning to Australia during an interview in October 2006.

Quotes regarding the nature of the Buna war are from
Our Jungle Road.

According to Gailey, Bergerud, and Anders, the war could have been shortened by weeks had the 32nd Division been properly supplied.

Major Koiwai’s quote is from Milner.

With the exceptions of Bataan and Corregidor, William Manchester would call Buna MacArthur’s “darkest hour.”

Manchester quotes MacArthur about keeping casualities to a minimum at Buna. Eichelberger would later write that Buna was “siege warfare…the bitterest and most punishing kind.”

Eichelberger’s comments about MacArthur are cited in Jay Luvaas’ book,
Dear Miss Em: General Eichelberger’s War in the Pacific, 1942–1945.

Casualty statistics are from Milner.

Milner and Mary Ellen Condon-Rall quote Warmenhoven.

John T. Greenwood wrote, “The 32nd Infantry Division was basically noneffective on account of malaria for four to six months after its return from Papua.”

Stanley Falk comments that “Luzon was a magnificent victory but hardly a cheap one.”

Stanley Falk in his essay “Douglas MacArthur and the War Against Japan” is very critical of MacArthur. Contrary to popular myth (one, in fact, perpetuated by MacArthur), MacArthur did not advocate “bypassing” Rabaul. As Falk points out, he commented to his chief of staff that it “would go down in history as one of the time’s greatest military mistakes.”

Condon-Rall writes at length about what MacArthur learned at Buna.

John T. Greenwood points out that MacArthur told Colonel Paul F. Russell, chief of the Tropical Disease and Malaria Control Branch of the Preventive Medicine Division at the Office of the Surgeon General, and an army expert on malaria, “Doctor, this will be a long war if for every division I have facing the enemy I must count on a second division in hospital with malaria and a third division convalescing from this debilitating disease.”

Eichelberger pays tribute to the 32nd in his book.

In their essay “MacArthur’s Fireman,” Jay Luvaas and John Shortal discuss what Eichelberger learned at Buna.

At Hollandia in late April 1944, Eichelberger and his men had a chance to put much of what they’d learned into action. The landings went off without a hitch and the Americans pushed forward, seizing the Japanese airfields in five days. General Marshall described the operation as a “model of strategical and tactical importance.” Eichelberger enjoyed the same success at Biak a month later. Using the lessons he learned at Buna, he eschewed a frontal asault on Japanese positions. Instead he sent troops in behind, a maneuver that probably spared hundreds of American lives.

Notes on New Guinea’s natives are from Powell’s
The Third Force,
John Waiko’s
A History of Our Time,
and numerous interviews with Buna villagers. The Keith McCarthy quote is also from
The Third Force.
Like Australia, the U.S. government has not compensated the carriers or their families.

Sam DiMaggio’s post-Buna history is from “I Never Had It So Good.” Details in the Gus Bailey profile are from interviews with Katherine Matthews and from Wendell Trogdon’s book. Paulette Lutjens provided me with the information on her father, Paul Lutjens. Herbert Smith discusses his later life in his three books. The details of Alfred Medendorp’s life were provided by his son, Alfred Jr. Herman Bottcher’s story is from interviews with soldiers who fought with him in the Philippines and from Mark Sufrin’s article, “Take Buna or Don’t Come Back Alive.”

Leslie Anders writes at length of General Harding’s life after Buna.

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