The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea--The Forgotten War of the South Pacific (19 page)

Smith and Company H stayed in Jaure until 9:30 a.m. while a message from Colonel Quinn containing new orders was received and decoded: The entire battalion was to lay over in the village of Natunga. Forward scouts had indicated that the village was an ideal location for an airdrop; it sat on a prominent hilltop with fifteen acres of open grasslands. Colonel Quinn complimented Smith and the rest of the battalion on its determination. He also passed along some uplifting news: The Japanese were in full retreat on the Kokoda track. Then he added, “Hug and kiss Jim Boice for all of us.”

Chapter 10

T
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S
WALLOW
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NE’S
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EARS

(namida o nomu)

I
N LATE
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CTOBER
1942, the Australians pressed their counterattack on the Kokoda track. By the time Horii reached the village of Myola, his men were manifesting symptoms of beriberi, typhus, dysentery, colitis, and malaria, for which many didn’t even have quinine. Others were slowed to a virtual crawl by jungle rot.

Lieutenant Sakamoto wrote angrily, “It is damp and dark here in the thick woods. We have no more than a handful of rice left. If we are to remain until the end, we will all die from beriberi. What is the Army doing?”

As they grew sicker, soldiers watched, with a growing bitterness, their officers “endeavoring to evade hardships.” Some rode horses and hoarded food while ordinary soldiers walked and starved, eating grass, roots, leaves, a few grains of rice they found in the dirt and mud, the flesh of dead horses, and anything else they could scrounge along the way.

Days later, Sakamoto was diagnosed with beriberi and feared that he would not be able to go on. “Cruel nature,” he wrote, “God take us to Paradise. Each day, we are nearing our death.”

By the time Horii’s troops reached Templeton’s Crossing, they were doing anything they could to stay alive. Lieutenant Sakamoto’s dispassionate diary entry of October 19 read, “Because of the food shortage, some companies have been eating human flesh (Australian soldiers).” After weeks of consuming grass and roots and putrid horseflesh, Sakamoto added, “The taste was said to be good.”

Advancing Australian soldiers discovered evidence of cannibalism. The Japanese had tied Australian soldiers to trees, cut strips of flesh from the bodies, and wrapped the strips in large leaves in order to preserve the meat. Now the Australians, despite suffering from malaria, dysentery, and fatigue, pushed forward, bent on revenge.

Watching from afar, MacArthur grew frustrated with what he considered the Australians’ cautious advance. When Arthur “Tubby” Allen, the Australians’ commanding general, reached Myola on October 17, a message awaited him. In it, MacArthur made it clear that he was unhappy with the pace of the counterattack. The casualties, he said, were “extremely light.” Allen refused to let his men rush blindly into an ambush. What he knew, and MacArthur did not, was that at some strategic point, the Japanese would turn and fight.

That place was Eora Creek. Once they reached the ridge that towered over the gorge, they stopped running and dug in. They erected log bunkers in which they placed their machine gunners. While the healthy and semi-healthy were ordered to stand and fight, carriers behind the lines lugged the diseased and wounded back to the field hospital in Kokoda, and in some cases, all the way back to the north coast, a ten-day journey.

When the oncoming Australians reached the Eora Creek gorge on October 22, Brigadier Lloyd smelled a trap and divided his brigade. He wanted a portion of his men to attack head-on while the others took to higher ground, outflanking the enemy army. But the units charged with sneaking in above and behind the Japanese lost their way in the dense forest, and a mere platoon made it to a spur above the Japanese position. Hoping to catch Horii’s army off guard, it attacked. But the Japanese, old pros at encirclement, cut off the platoon’s escape route, and the killing commenced. Thirteen of the platoon’s seventeen men were lost.

The other group was met by Japanese machine gunners who, swinging the barrels of their guns, strafed the oncoming Australians as they fought to cross the rushing creek. Eventually, though, a group of a hundred men bored straight ahead and stopped to grub out trenches within shouting distance of the Japanese position.

Concealed behind log bunkers, Horii and his officers celebrated with cups of sake. “How tasteful it was!” wrote Lieutenant Sakamoto, the faithful diarist. They had seized the high ground and stopped the advancing Australian army in its tracks.

By October 26, the Australians had been bogged down at Eora Creek for four days, and MacArthur’s temper boiled over. Again, he had a message sent to the front: “In spite of your superior strength enemy appears able to delay advance at will. Essential that forward commanders should control situation and NOT allow situation to control them. Delay in seizing KOKODA may cost us unique opportunity of driving enemy out of NEW GUINEA.”

A day later, acting as MacArthur’s personal henchman, General Blamey relieved Allen of his duties. Then, mounting a furious attack from a nearby ridge, the Australians descended on Horii’s troops. Those enemy soldiers who fled into the jungle survived; those who fought died. The Japanese lost hundreds of men at Eora Creek, but the Australians, too, paid a dear price for victory. Nearly three hundred Australian soldiers were killed or wounded.

By late October, Major-General George Vasey was leading the Australian counteroffensive. Vasey was a man of courage, driven to succeed. On November 1, as the Australians bore down on Kokoda, he told his officers, in words reminiscent of General Horii’s, “The enemy is beaten. Give him no rest and we will annihilate him.”

As Vasey spoke of defeating Horii’s army, the Japanese general, having been told that Rabaul would provide him with 20,000 reinforcements, resurrected his dream of capturing Port Moresby.

The following day, Horii and his army abandoned Kokoda. He chose the west side of the Kumusi River, near the villages of Oivi and Gorari, to make his stand.

“We will hold the position until reinforcements arrive,” wrote an exuberant Lieutenant Sakamoto. “The tide is turning in our favor.”

A mile separated the villages of Oivi and Gorari. Though Horii had three thousand soldiers at his disposal, many were so weak they could barely shoulder their weapons. Desperate for protein, they killed horses, and then again resorted to cannibalism. This time, though, the Japanese soldiers were not eating Australians. “We ran short of rations,” Sakamoto wrote on November 4. “We devoured our own kind to stave off starvation.”

Five days later, according to Sakamoto, the “enemy began its offensive. They have encircled us, while throughout the morning their planes bombed and machine-gunned us.”

Cutting off all their possible escape routes, Vasey had laid a death trap for the Japanese. On the dark and rainy night of November 11, four thousand Australian troops, wrote Dudley McCarthy, the official army historian of the Kokoda campaign, “were gathering themselves for the kill.” When they attacked, they came at the Japanese from all sides, nursing a hatred of the Imperial army so intense that only slaughter could satisfy it. Lieutenant Sakamoto died in the fighting.

General Horii, however, escaped. Hoping to reach the coast and reassemble his army with the addition of reinforcements, he fled to the Kumusi River. Swelled by recent rains, the Kumusi surged at its banks. The bridge was gone, bombed into rubble by Allied pilots. Realizing that the river was too deep to ford, Horii fled on a raft with a small group of officers, leaving Colonel Yazawa at the river’s edge to tend to nearly three thousand men.

Yazawa had to act quickly. Soon, Vasey would be in hot pursuit. Yazawa ordered the men to construct basic rafts. Shoving them into the slashing current, they prayed that their rafts would hold up. Some did, but others fell apart, sending the soldiers tumbling into the river. Men drowned by the dozens as the river pulled them into its muddy depths and swept them downstream. Trucks waited to transport those who had made it across. With room enough only for the seriously wounded, most were forced to walk.

Seizo Okada, the war correspondent who had landed in New Guinea with the Yokoyama Advance Force in late July, vividly described the scene. “Their [the Japanese soldiers’] uniforms were soiled with blood and mud and sweat, and torn to pieces. There were infantrymen without rifles, men walking on bare feet, men wearing blankets or straw rice bags instead of uniforms, men reduced to skin and bones plodding along with the help of a stick, men gasping and crawling on the ground…some of them lying there for a while and struggling to their feet again, while others stirred no more.”

A mile and a half downriver, Horii’s raft ran aground, and he and his party scrambled up the bank, followed the river toward the coast, and discovered a native canoe. The canoe, though, was too small to accommodate the entire party. The decision was an easy one. While the rest of the party stumbled its way toward Awala, Horii, his staff officer, and his personal orderly floated down the river toward the coast, his mad hope of reinforcements shattered. The troops Rabaul had promised were being diverted to the Solomons.

No one would ever see the general again. Accounts of his death differ. Some say that the canoe overturned and Horii drowned. Others suggest that he paddled out to sea where the canoe, hit by fierce winds, capsized. Horii’s staff officer drowned and the general and his orderly attempted to swim to shore. Miles out, Horii tired. With enough energy for a final dramatic gesture, legend has it he raised his hands over his head, and in a resounding voice, shouted, “Tennoheika Banzai!” (“Long Live the Emperor!”)

Back at Gorari, the Australians celebrated. Vasey was heralded as a hero. From Port Moresby Blamey effused, “The greatest factor in pressing the continuous advance has been General Vasey’s drive and personality.”

Vasey, though, was hardly satisfied with half a victory. The Japanese were still firmly entrenched on New Guinea’s north coast, and Vasey was envisioning a final, decisive battle.

It’s “Buna or bust,” he told his men, “And we will not bust.”

In the mountains things were not going well for Stutterin’ Smith’s Ghost Mountain boys. Short of food, they marched from Jaure to Natunga, raiding gardens, shooting domesticated pigs, and scrounging whatever they could find along the way, especially bananas and papayas to guard against scurvy. Out of desperation they disobeyed one rule that Medendorp insisted was unbreakable—never touch the natives’ property.

By the time the battalion reached Natunga, many of the men flopped down in the mud at the village’s edge and lay there without moving, more dead than alive. “Malnutrition, malaria, dysentery,” Lutjens wrote. “Shoes and clothes are all shot to hell.”

Back at regimental headquarters on the south coast, Colonel Quinn had grown increasingly concerned about the condition of his troops. When Smith alerted him that the men needed food and medical supplies to continue, Quinn took matters into his own hands. He would personally oversee the airdrop.

Natunga looked to Smith like the perfect spot for a drop. In the distance, Mount Lamington loomed blue and ominous, its peak obscured by clouds. Heavy jungle stretched from Natunga to the mountain’s steep slopes and north along the rain-swollen Girua River, but Natunga itself sat in a large meadow on a hilltop. Smith realized that it might be the battalion’s last chance to resupply before going into battle.

Natunga also had a ready supply of healthy, well-fed natives to carry provisions. They were stout and strong men, who sported full body tattoos that they had acquired during elaborate initiation ceremonies. They wore their hair in long plaits interwoven with cloth made from the tapa tree, and plucked their beards and their body hair.

For days, the sky hung low over the village. Smith was beginning to despair when on November 5, the weather broke. Smith sent Quinn an urgent message: “Weather clear. Drop. Drop.”

When Quinn left Seven-Mile Drome outside Port Moresby, the jagged peaks of the Owen Stanleys pressed up against a cloudless sky. Perhaps, at last, Lady Luck would be on the 2nd Battalion’s side. Looking down from the plane, Colonel Quinn would have been able to see the terrain that Smith’s men had covered. It must have made him shudder. Solid jungle sprawled in every direction.

As the plane neared Natunga, Quinn spotted the clearing. The pilot made a pass and Quinn, who was at the door, prepared to kick out the wrapped and bound packages to which they had attached parachutes to improve the recovery ratio.

Below, everyone—the soldiers, the native carriers, and the villagers of Natunga—watched in horror as one of the parachutes opened sooner than it should have. It billowed out of the cargo door and became entangled in the plane’s tail assembly. The plane wavered and then plunged nose-first into a nearby hill. Not everyone saw the crash, but they all heard the explosion. Hoping that maybe someone had survived the crash, Smith sent out a salvage team.