The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea--The Forgotten War of the South Pacific (22 page)

In the Siremi Creek area the only dry ground was occupied by the two strategically important airfields, one called Old Strip, which was bombed relentlessly by Kenney’s pilots; and the other called New Strip. Although the airfields were primitive, MacArthur coveted them. In Allied hands, they would serve to check any further Japanese threat to Port Moresby. They would also aid an Allied advance along New Guinea’s north coast and make bombing raids on Rabaul far more practical.

Access to Buna and the airstrips, however, was almost impossible. By water, Buna was protected by a maze of shallow coral reefs. By land, it was surrounded by a swamp, only three feet above sea level, reaching far inland. The natives used the few dry areas for gardens of taro, yams, sugarcane, bananas, and breadfruit. The drier areas outside the perimeter of the swamp were barely more accessible. They were covered with coconut palm plantations and broad fields of golden kunai and elephant grass. The elephant grass grew to heights of ten feet, and both grasses were razor sharp.

In the area east of the Girua River, the Japanese had erected hundreds of impregnable coconut log bunkers between eight and thirty feet long. In designing them, the Japanese engineers had attended to the smallest of details. The bunkers were reinforced with coconut logs, I-beams, sheet iron, and forty-gallon steel oil drums filled with sand, and camouflaged with earth, grass, rocks, and more logs. Because of the high water table, engineers constructed them seven or eight feet above ground and carved out firing slits in them. The entrances were positioned so they could be covered by troops in adjacent bunkers, and they were angled to protect soldiers from hand grenades. The bunkers opened directly onto fire trenches, or were connected to them by shallow crawl tunnels.

Bunker and trench systems protected all of the inland approaches to Buna Village and Buna Government Station. The approaches, in turn, were honeycombed with enemy emplacements.

Colonel Yokoyama, the commanding officer of the 15th Independent Engineers, took charge of all the Japanese forces west of the Girua River. Captain Yasuda, the senior naval officer, took command east of the river.

The Japanese line at Buna left the 32nd Division no room to maneuver, and forced the Americans into swamps, putrid with decay, or onto paths where the Japanese could concentrate their firepower. The situation clearly called for an amphibious assault using shallow-draft landing craft, but all available Higgins boats had been diverted to Guadalcanal.

As the men of the 128th closed in on the Japanese positions, the jungle, according to Robert Doyle, a
Milwaukee Journal
reporter assigned to the 128th, “was as quiet as a church.”

Another hundred yards down the trail, the 128th met a hailstorm of fire. Men were scythed by Japanese machine gunners, by snipers who used a smokeless powder and were tied into the tops of trees with enough water and food to last them days, and by riflemen hiding in their bunkers. The Japanese shells made a small flash, so the Americans could not tell where the shots were coming from. If a tribe of headhunters wielding spears had attacked, the Americans could not have been more shocked. They had stumbled directly into the enemy’s kill zone.

One scout took a bullet to the head. His killer was only four feet away, invisible in his camouflaged bunker. When the men saw the scout go down, they scattered. They dove from the trail and fired wildly. Bullets ripped through the jungle. Men cursed, “I can’t see the bastards!” It did not take long before wounded soldiers were sobbing, “I’m hit, I’m hit!” Then came the awful “Stretcher bearer!” It was the first time any of the men had ever heard the call. Those who survived the war would always remember it.

A medic was jumping from one man to another, opening his pouch to get at first aid supplies, and dusting gaping wounds with sulfa powder to fight infection. The jungle was full of injured soldiers, blood-spattered vines and ferns, shards of shattered bone, and strings of bloody intestines hanging from gaping holes in men’s bellies. The Japanese snipers were especially fond of the gut shot. A gut-shot soldier would act like a decoy—he would cry out for help, drawing in more soldiers.

Japanese troops continued to rain down lead on the bewildered Americans, who clutched trees, hid underneath sprawling mangrove roots, and dug down into the muck. But every movement, every muscle twitch drew more fire from the Japanese. Some men were on their bellies, heads down, crawling forward blindly, bumping into dead bodies strewn along the trail. In no time the bodies would swell in the tropical heat, and then the flies and the maggots would find them.

A soldier sprinted forward. When he finally stopped, he realized that he was standing on the roof of a Japanese bunker. Before he could mutter “Goddammit,” a bullet ripped into his arm. Instinctively, he hit the ground and rolled off the bunker and kept rolling. It must have seemed like a miracle. When he came to a stop, he was alive and there was a medic at his side.

An engineer observer watched it all.

The first opposition from the enemy was a surprise and a shock to our green troops. The enemy positions were amazingly well camouflaged, and seemed to have excellent fields of fire even in the close quarters of the jungle…. Snipers were every where…. The enemy habitually allowed our troops to advance to very close range—sometimes four or five feet from a machine gun post—before opening fire; often they allowed troops to bypass them completely, opening fire then on our rear elements, and on our front elements from the rear.

Our troops were pinned down everywhere…. It wasim possible to see where the enemy fire was coming from; consequently our own rifle and machine gun [fire] was ineffective…. Grenades and mortars…were difficult to use because, first, it was difficult to pick out a nest position to advance upon with grenades, second, the thick jungle growth, and high grass, made throwing and firing difficult, and, third, because it was nearly impossible to observe our fire.

It was “the longest [day] of my life,” said one of the American soldiers. “We were surrounded by the terrible din and confusion of battle—the clatter and clang of rifles and machine guns.

“The parade of injured GIs was heartbreaking to watch…. The walking wounded struggled past us…. A few were being carried on litters, and some were left where they died, until the next day when they could be taken care of by special burial squads.”

Eventually, the chaos ended. The sun was dropping fast. Unaccountably, the Japanese did not launch a massive attack. If they had, they would have caught the Americans back on their heels, disorganized and dispirited.

As it was, the Americans had a chance to lick their wounds, recover some of the dead bodies, and assess their losses. The Japanese had stopped them in their tracks, mauled them, and the Americans had little to show for it—nothing more than thirty feet of lousy jungle.

The Americans did not take any chances with the few Japanese soldiers who had tried to slip around behind the advancing army and were killed. They bayoneted them or shot them again. Native carriers sent out to collect the enemy dead were instructed to slit their throats before moving them. The Japanese were known for their tricks. Wounded soldiers would lie among the corpses, feigning death, “playing possum,” and would open up on a squad or platoon after it had passed.

Most of the Americans could not resist the chance to view the dead Japanese. They were stunned by what they saw. What they were looking at were not the gaunt corpses of men who had fought and starved in the mountains. These were strong, well-armed physical specimens, and the Americans went from thinking they were fighting “a few sick Japs” to believing they were in combat against “jungle supermen.” Sergeant Roy Gormanson of Company A said, “I always thought that the Japanese were small people, but then I saw my first dead Jap. He was six feet one or better.”

The reality was that despite a formidable Allied air presence, the Japanese had succeeded in landing nine hundred fresh troops at Basabua on November 17. These were probably the soldiers that Gormanson had come upon. Many of them were from the 144th Infantry and the 3rd Battalion’s 229th Infantry, a unit whose two sister battalions were fighting on Guadalcanal. The 229th was made up of experienced jungle troops who had fought in China, Hong Kong, and Java. All nine hundred men were deployed east of the Girua River in the Cape Endaiadere-Duropa Plantation area, under colonel Yokoyama, who formerly was in charge of the Sanananda-Girua area, west of the river.

As curious as the Americans were to see the bodies of Japanese soldiers, they were unnerved and frightened at the sight of their own dead. Some of the men avoided the corpses. The shock that they had experienced in their first battle had turned into a kind of despair—to look upon a dead friend might mark them for death in the next battle. Others came to pay their last respects before the bodies were covered up. Many cried. A handful turned bitter and made silent promises to themselves that they would pretend to fight, but when the bullets were spraying across the jungle, they would crawl behind a tree. They had no intention of dying in some godforsaken place.

Others vowed revenge. In future battles, they would kill like machines and afterward take souvenirs. It was a barbaric ritual, but one that became commonplace. These men rifled through the pockets of the Japanese dead, scrounged through their packs taking whatever they could: photos, flags, insignias, sabers, pistols, hara-kiri knives, money, diaries, even boots and the split-toed tabi shoes that many of the Japanese soldiers wore. Some would cut open the mouths of the dead from ear to ear. Then, with the butts of their rifles they would smash a dead man’s teeth and take his gold crowns. Some cut off fingers and kept them for good luck. One guy cut the ears off a Japanese soldier and kept them.

That evening, after rounding up the corpses, the soldiers of the 128th dug in. The medics, who had been shot at all day, removed their red crosses and arm brassards and began dyeing their white battle dressings green. Japanese snipers loved to zero in on the white bandages.

None of the men slept. It was raining, and they wrapped themselves in leaky raincoats or shelter halves. Their foxholes were filled with water. And their minds played tricks on them, too—vines became gun barrels, trees skulking Japanese soldiers. Dead buddies came back to life. Cicadas and crickets shouted obscenities.

The Japanese were on the move, too. Ray Bailey, a platoon sergeant with Company B, remembers stringing up triplines that night. He and two of his buddies—they called themselves the “Three Musketeers”—used C ration cans and grenades. They pulled the pins on grenades and then crammed the grenades into the cans, knowing they had only five seconds—One Mississippi, Two Mississippi—before the grenades splattered their guts all over the jungle. Once in the can, the grenade handles would not budge. If a Japanese creeping through the jungle hit the string they had tied to the handles, the grenade would come tumbling out of the can and trigger the detonator.

Bailey and his buddies thought that they would sleep easier after setting the triplines, but the Japanese had other ideas. “They had one of our guys,” Bailey says. “He was hollering. They were torturing him so we could hear and there was nothing we could do about it.” The day before, the Americans had brought in a Japanese prisoner. “We never felt any hate against him,” Bailey recalled. “But after that, everyone vowed they would never bring in another Jap prisoner.”

Back at his headquarters at Embogo, Harding was stunned by the 128th’s defeat. Allied Intelligence had seriously underestimated the number of enemy soldiers at the beachhead, maintaining that the Japanese army had only fifteen hundred “effectives,” when in actuality its troop strength numbered nearly 6,500 fighting men. To make matters worse, Harding was still reeling from the news he had received that afternoon: He would have to forfeit his 126th Infantry Regiment to General Vasey, who wanted it west of the Girua River on the Sanananda track, a move that had MacArthur’s blessing. While the 128th attacked from the east, up the coast, Harding had hoped to use the 126th as his left-flank force in a head-on advance on Buna Village and Buna Government Station. It was a classic double envelopment, intended to squeeze the Japanese out of their bunkers through overwhelming force. Now, only a day into the assault, he had lost a whole regiment to the Australians, and was forced to commit his reserve, the 128th Infantry’s 2nd Battalion. Still he would be short of men.