The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea--The Forgotten War of the South Pacific (25 page)

East of the Girua River, as Colonel Smith began moving on the Triangle, he was heartened by the arrival of Major Stutterin’ Smith’s 2nd Battalion.

Smith, too, was happy to be back among familiar faces. The 128th had been his home for more than twenty years. One of the first people he saw was Lieutenant Mack Fradette, an old friend. Fradette was stunned by the condition of Smith and his men. Smith, who had always had problems keeping weight on, was as thin as a cornstalk. He had also just recovered from a bout of malaria. His men all wore long beards and in Fradette’s opinion looked like “walking skeletons.”

As the battalion got settled, Colonel Smith gave Stutterin’ Smith a quick tour of the area. However, the major would have very little time to familiarize himself with the lay of the land; the attack was scheduled for the following day. He must have hesitated for a moment when he saw the battlefield. “Buna,” Smith wrote, “was a nightmare…of jungle…kunai grass higher than a man’s head…and swamps…that rose and fell with the tides…. The Japs had built bunkers” with “excellent fields of fire covering approaches from inland routes…. These bunkers” were “practically invisible.”

That night, Stutterin’ Smith put Lieutenant Odell in charge of a platoon in Company F. Odell was forty pounds lighter than when he had come to New Guinea. Still, he realized that the “hardships thus far encountered were nothing compared with the hell that was to come.”

Just short of midnight on November 23, Colonel Smith and Stutterin’ Smith held a council of war at the colonel’s command post, which was situated along the Soputa-Buna track three-quarters of a mile short of the Triangle. They had already resolved the confusion that might arise from two battalions fighting side by side, each one commanded by a Herbert Smith. Stutterin’ Smith became Red Smith and Colonel Smith was White Smith. They also laid out the plans for the following day’s attack. It would come from three directions and would begin at 0800 with bombing and strafing by American pilots. Before the troops moved out, four 25-pounders, new to the front, would open up on the Triangle.

Despite the plans, both Smiths knew that they would be flying by the seat of their pants. They had no topographical maps of the area and their aerial photographs proved worthless; a large cloud covered the zone in which the attack was supposed to take place.

Dawn came in with a rush and at 0800 the planes appeared. Twelve P-40s strafed the Triangle, but for some reason the bombers never showed. Worse yet, the P-40 pilots completely missed their target. Both Smiths hesitated. They could not possibly send their men into the Triangle now; it would be a suicide mission. They called for more planes, which arrived five hours later—but only four of the twelve they had requested. Rather than firing on the Triangle, though, the four P-40s, unable to identify their targets in the thick foliage, turned their guns on Colonel Smith’s command post.

It was chaos. Men screamed at the top of their lungs and dove into the jungle. “We’re Americans, you stupid bastards! We’re goddamn Americans!”

The strafing stopped as quickly as it had begun. When Major Smith assessed the damage, he was relieved to discover that it had not been as disastrous as he feared. Only one man had been wounded. The Triangle, though, had been untouched.

But there was no turning back. Though fully conscious of the dangers of sending men into the maw of the Triangle, the decision had been made—the attack would go as planned. Both Smiths felt the pressure to push the offensive. According to headquarters in Port Moresby, they were to have taken Buna half a week earlier.

Before the men pushed off, 60 mm mortars fired on the Triangle. From Ango, the 25-pounders with ranges of nearly eight miles boomed. At 2:28 that afternoon the troops jumped off.

On the left, Captain Melvin Schultz and Sergeant Lutjens and the men of Company E swung wide around the Triangle. The night before, after the company received its orders, Lutjens had taken a moment to scribble a few lines in his diary. “God only knows what we are about to face,” he wrote. “If I said I am not afraid I would be a liar. Reread an old letter trying to place myself back in the states. To find something to fight for…I’m afraid of dying as much as anybody else. Maybe life wasn’t so pleasant for me, but God it seems good now. If I don’t come through this it will be God’s will.”

The plan called for Company E to cross Entrance Creek and sneak in behind the Japanese stronghold. Although the 128th’s Company F had made some progress on the left three days before, it took Company E eight hours to advance eight hundred yards across the dense swamp. The men could not see more than ten feet in any direction and they were under strict instructions to hold their fire even if fired at. Their mission was reconnaissance.

Men swore under their breath about how easy it would be for a bunch of Japs to ambush them in the swamp—they were goddamn sitting ducks. A Juki machine gun could wipe them out before they knew what had hit them.

When the first shot rang through the swamp, “everybody,” according to Lutjens, “flopped down and sank his face into the mud. I don’t know exactly how the rest of the guys felt, but it scared the hell out of me. Somebody whispered, ‘That’s a Jap.’”

One guy, who was out on the post, was trying to figure out where the shot had come from. When he reported that it had originated from behind a tree, Lutjens must have shaken his head. Talk about stating the obvious; the swamp was full of trees.

Though neither Lutjens nor Schultz knew it, Company E had stumbled smack into a Japanese outpost. The Japanese were guarding the bridge that spanned Entrance Creek, northwest of the Triangle. Lutjens’ men were scared, but they were not content to stay put. They crept forward. “We all wanted a peek at them [the Japanese],” Lutjens admitted. “After coming all that way, we wanted to see what they looked like.”

Despite their curiosity, Schultz and Lutjens eventually did the prudent thing—they halted the company. Men stood as still as mannequins. As dusk neared, a fog settled over the swamp. The men grew cold and uncomfortable. A few guys decided to light cigarettes to calm their nerves. It was a soldier’s prerogative—if he was going to be miserable, he might as well have a smoke. The Americans might have been short of 81 mm mortar ammunition, but they sure were not short of cigarettes.

According to Lutjens,

The Japs had automatic fire emplaced in coconut trees, and as soon as they saw the matches flare up, they let us have it—not from just in front, but from all sides. We’d walked right into the middle of them. We started to dig in, and I mean quick. Three of us dug a hole in five minutes flat, with our hands. We thought it was all over with. We couldn’t see a thing. The Japs were shooting all around us. They stopped for a while, and by the next morning we were all dug in. They couldn’t spot us too well through the jungle, but every time a man moved, they’d open up. One guy had the tip of his bayonet shot off. He didn’t move a muscle. Nobody fired. I sometimes think it took more guts not to than it would have to shoot back. Then it began to rain. It was a cold, cold rain. We had left our packs behind when we started, and all we had with us was a few rations in our pockets. Then the tide began to come up through our foxholes.

At this, soldiers left their foxholes and leaned against trees while the black water lapped at their waists. The lucky ones found high ground on the outstretched roots of mangroves, which spread over the area like giant spiderwebs. The Japanese, they knew, were fond of fighting at night, but in the belly of the swamp, it hardly mattered, day or night. The sun could not penetrate the ceiling of twisted branches.

Some of the men managed to nod off. Others, like Lutjens, waited hyper-alert, listening for the sucking sound of Japanese scouts slogging through the muck, watching the water for animals—giant long-haired rats, deadly snakes, crocodiles, and rabid, bloodthirsty bats—which they feared almost as much as the Japanese.

While Company E was stranded in the swamp to the left, Company F, led by Captain Erwin Nummer, and Company H, White Smith’s heavy weapons company, attacked up the middle. It was a scary proposition. Some of the men had fathers who had fought in World War I. From them they had heard grisly stories about attacking a trench system and the carnage that followed. A head-on assault on the Triangle, they feared, would be no different.

They were right. Captain Yasuda was waiting, eager to unleash the full fury of his firepower on anyone who blundered down the trail. Yasuda was supremely confident. He knew that whatever his men could not accomplish, the surrounding swamps would.

After only three hundred yards, the Americans encountered barriers of barbed wire that the Japanese had laid across the track. As they walked up to it to assess their options, the Japanese opened fire. Some of the men were so close, they could taste the gunpowder. Lieutenant Odell hit the ground and rolled off the track into the swamp that flanked it. He and the others had just two options: to dig in or to retreat. Captain Nummer called for a retreat. If they had any hope at all of advancing, they would need engineers with explosives to clear the trail.

In the swamp to the right, White Smith’s men, like Lutjens and company, were trying to work their way behind the Triangle when a large enemy force attacked them. It was a classic Japanese attack—near dusk, the Japanese riflemen unleashed savage yells and bore down on the Americans. Though the Japanese could not have known just how raw and unseasoned the American soldiers were, the reality was that they were up against men who had never before experienced battle. Furthermore, they had caught them off guard. The Americans scrambled to defend themselves, only to have their weapons fail. According to the official report, “[M]ortars fell short because increments [the propelling charges in the mortar ammunition] were wet. Machine guns jammed because web belts were wet and dirty and had shrunk. Tommy guns and BARs were full of muck and dirt, and even the Mls fired well only for the first clip, and then jammed because clips taken from the belts were wet and full of muck from the swamp.”

When their weapons failed, the Americans panicked and fled into the swamp. The following day, White Smith’s company commanders met with him at his command post. Red Smith was on hand for the meeting, too. Outraged that American soldiers would so easily relinquish a position, he wrote later that “Smith should have kicked their fannies right back into the forward positions.”

White Smith, however, saw the situation differently—his men were hungry and exhausted. Besides, he had little faith in the possibility of success on the right. His decision, he wrote, was “to abandon for the time being any action on the right and concentrate on the left…” When he made General Harding aware of his decision, Harding agreed—“the left hand road to Buna” was best. That put the burden of the attack squarely on the shoulders of Stutterin’ Smith’s Ghost Mountain boys.

Chapter 14

I
F
T
HEY
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ON’T
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TINK,
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TICK
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F
ROM THE SAFETY OF
Port Moresby, MacArthur watched in impotent fury. Offensives on both the Warren and Urbana Fronts had yielded nothing but bad news. Making matters worse, the Japanese landed more troops on the night of November 24.

The next day, Generals Blamey and Herring paid MacArthur an unexpected visit at Government House. In the course of their conversation, both generals lobbied for bringing in reinforcements. MacArthur proposed calling in the 41st Division, which had been training in Australia for over six months. The Australian generals wasted no time being polite—they were unimpressed with the 32nd Division, they said. They preferred to use Australian troops. For Blamey and Herring, who remembered MacArthur’s remarks about the efforts of their troops on the Kokoda track two months before, it was sweet revenge.

According to General Kenney, who was staying at Government House at the time of the Australian generals’ visit, the accusation that the Americans wouldn’t fight was “a bitter pill for MacArthur to swallow.” Kenney did not bother to defend the 32nd either; in fact, he was openly critical of the division’s commanders, who, he said, were unable to inspire their inexperienced troops. MacArthur was all ears. As a career army officer he did not have much faith in National Guard officers. In fact, the only one he trusted was General Hanford MacNider, and MacNider was recuperating in Port Moresby after being wounded by a Japanese rifle grenade while observing the fighting on the Warren Front.

The day after the generals’ visit, MacArthur sent two operations staff officers to the front with strict orders to observe what they could and to report back to him.

One of them arrived at the Warren Front, east of Buna Government Station, the day after Thanksgiving. Everyone knew by looking at his purposeful way of walking and his pressed uniform right off the quartermaster’s shelf that he was from HQ, “a typical, theoretical staff officer” devoid of “practical knowledge” of combat operations. The men did not bother to put on a show for him either. They were sick and tired, and their morale was low. According to E. J. Kahn, a member of Harding’s staff and a former staff writer for
The New Yorker,
they were “gaunt and thin, with deep black circles under their sunken eyes. They were covered with tropical sores and their jackets and pants…tattered and stained. Few wore socks or underwear. Often their soles had been sucked off their shoes by the tenacious, stinking mud.” To make matters worse, after a full week of fighting, they had nothing to show for their efforts.

After consulting with War Department observers, the HQ man was convinced that there was not only a lack of leadership on the Warren Front, but that the men had no fight left in them. The observers told him of soldiers who refused to advance, relying instead on aircraft, mortars, and artillery. He heard stories about men who in the heat of battle abandoned their weapons and fled into the jungle. Two days after arriving at the Warren Front, he was back at Government House, where MacArthur was awaiting his report.

The officer’s assessment was damning, and exactly what General Headquarters wanted to hear. GHQ wanted to make changes and now it had the evidence it needed to justify them.

What the observer had omitted from his report was that without more troops, heavy artillery (especially 105 mm howitzers, which were ideal for destroying pillboxes and bunkers), tanks, flamethrowers (which marines at Guadalcanal were using with great success), grenade launchers, and bangalore torpedoes, the Japanese bunker system was virtually unassailable.

General Harding’s head was on the chopping block, and he knew it. He had already dispatched Colonel John W. Mott, his chief of staff, to the Urbana Front. Mott’s orders were clear: Do what he needed to do to invigorate the attack. Mott wasted no time asserting his authority, or according to some, his ego. He relieved two of the 128th’s company commanders.

Mott also held a conference with the two Smiths. Earlier Colonel White Smith had convinced General Harding that redirecting the efforts of the two battalions toward Buna Government Station instead of Buna Village might energize the stalled advance and drive a wedge between the Japanese positions. However, when Mott asked Colonel Smith if he had a plan for doing just that, Smith confessed that he had not.

Mott then turned to Stutterin’ Smith. Did Major Smith have a plan? Smith said he had been thinking about it since Colonel Smith had proposed the idea. Though there was nothing ingenious about it, in his opinion throwing troops at the Triangle was a recipe for disaster. Japanese defenses were too strong. The key was to move troops into position on the far west side of the Triangle and stage an attack from there, behind the main Japanese position, while simultaneously striking at the head of the Triangle. They might catch the Japs by surprise. Mott was impressed enough to adopt the plan, and he and Smith hashed out the details. He also told Smith that he would soon get a chance to put it into action: General Harding had scheduled an attack on both fronts for the last night of the month, November 29–30.

Meanwhile, Harding was in the process of moving his headquarters and staff from Embogo on the coast to the inland Allied airfield at Dobodura. Fifteen miles from the coast, with a trail running on the left to the Urbana Front and on the right to the Warren Front, Dobodura was the logical choice for the new headquarters.

Dobodura was an area of broad grasslands that a tribe of coastal natives had inhabited to avoid the attacks of a neighboring coastal tribe. “Dobo-duru,” the native name, mispronounced by the Americans, literally meant “under the shade of the dobo tree.” Hoping to alleviate supply problems at the fronts and to free the Allied effort from its dependence on a depleted, vulnerable, and inefficient fleet of luggers, the Allies were converting Dobodura into a huge airstrip.

By the time Harding and his party left Embogo at 9:00 a.m. on November 29, the tropical sun had already burned off the morning mist and was beating down on the coast. It was a hot, tiring walk, and Harding and his sixty-man crew stopped often. Agile native climbers gathered coconuts in the tops of trees, and Harding and his men replenished their energy with the sweet juice. Late in the afternoon, they took a swim in the Samboga River. At dusk, they finally arrived at Dobodura.

General Herring’s senior liaison officer was there to greet them. Herring had just opened up an advanced headquarters behind the Sanananda Front, and had sent out his liaison officer to make contact with the Americans. That evening Harding learned that General Sutherland, MacArthur’s chief of staff, would also be paying him a visit.

It didn’t take Harding long to grasp what was going on: MacArthur’s triumphant script, which he had written from the comfort of his breezy veranda, was in jeopardy of being undone. And MacArthur, the stage manager, was not at all happy.

The attack that General Harding had scheduled for the last day in November was for all the marbles. All the men realized it, especially Smith’s Ghost Mountain boys, whose return Harding had fought so hard for.

Looking at them, Colonel Mott must have wondered why. Stanley Jastrzembski, the wet-behind-the-ears Polish kid from Muskegon, Michigan, was riding out another fever. The rumbling in his ears sounded like a train roaring through a valley. He had a temperature of 103 degrees and no quinine. He fumbled with his field pack, searching for the sweater he had picked up weeks before in Laruni. Soon the chills would come. Then his teeth would rattle so wildly they would feel as if they were going to fall out of his mouth.

Between the anticipation, the malaria, and the dysentery that had been with him since the 2nd Battalion’s march across the mountains, he could no longer control his bowels. He had not bathed in a month and could barely stand the smell of himself. He stank like rotten meat. “Dear Lord,” he prayed, “give me the strength and courage to continue.”

Even as Jastrzembski uttered these words, he knew that there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other American soldiers spread across the front, weakened by fatigue and dysentery, and burning up with fever. Prayer was their only recourse. With almost no quinine to soften the effects of malaria or bismuth to treat stomach ailments, Doc Warmenhoven and his staff could do little for the soldiers. If a man came back to a portable hospital with a high fever, a medic might allow him to lie down on a litter for a few hours, but unless he was at death’s door, he was expected to fight.

The men of the 2nd Battalion understood the importance of this attack. Some of them were going to die. Their tongues swelled, their skin felt too tight, their eyes were bloodshot. Tense and plagued by spasms of diarrhea, guys ran back and forth into the bushes to relieve themselves. Those who could eat, ate perfunctorily. Fires were forbidden, so they spooned out cold tinned baked beans and ham and eggs. Jastrzembski emptied a K ration box into his mouth. He gagged, but then worked up enough spit to swallow the crackers. A trickle of rain fell. He turned his helmet upside down to catch what he could.

Then there were the men who did not bother with water or food at all. A handful walked back and forth as if in a daze, wearing a blank look that soldiers would instantly recognize as the “Buna stare.” These were the “psychotics,” men broken by hunger, disease, exhaustion, and the grind of combat. Some had willed themselves to forget everything they loved—the taste of cold beer and Sunday suppers, what it was like to be with a woman, the rumbling engine of a fast car, the slap of a ball hitting a catcher’s mitt, the smell of fresh-cut alfalfa. Others obsessed on the smallest of details—keeping their mess kits sparkling clean, their boots tied as tightly a possible, figuring out the numerical combinations of their serial numbers. Anywhere but New Guinea, company commanders would weed out these men as fast as they could. Bizarre behavior was a sure-fire ticket off the front line, so much so that men affected or exaggerated their symptoms. At Buna, though, what company commanders needed more than anything else was warm bodies to throw at the Japanese bunkers.

Looking around at his men, some who were only half his age, Stutterin’ Smith must have wondered how many of them would survive the attack. Smith was not a man given to outpourings of emotion, but goddamn, he loved these boys. And that Gus Bailey might have been the best of the bunch. Bailey never lost that twinkle in his eyes.

A haze of cigarette smoke hung over the 2nd Battalion’s camp. Men fieldstripped their rifles, oiled them and wiped off the excess oil, sharpened their bayonets, and chain-smoked cigarettes down to stubs to dull their anxiety and temper their hunger pangs. The 2nd Battalion might have been short on food, but there was no shortage of “coffin nails.” The smokes were enclosed in their field rations and each GI was given a liberal supply. “Just like the fuckin’ army,” someone said. “No goddamn food, but all the cigarettes you want.”

They were new enough to war that they had not developed any superstitions or rituals that experienced troops rely on to keep them safe. Soldiers were writing letters back home just in case, or reading letters from home. Mail drops were made at Laruni, Jaure, and Natunga and some guys had a stack of letters that they read and reread until they had memorized them. As Lutjens said in his diary after receiving two letters from home, “No one will ever know what they mean to me.”

From the folks back home the soldiers learned that things were tough there, too. People could not buy tires, so everyone was forced to learn how to recap and retread. To save on gas, they coasted down hills and never let their cars idle. Nobody went for Sunday drives anymore. Paper, especially toilet paper, was hard to come by. The Andrews Sisters and Glenn Miller were doing their best to make the deprivation bearable. Still, Uncle Joe was forced to do without his morning cup of coffee and the butter he loved so much. Women could not find silk stockings and were wearing the hemlines of their skirts higher in a kind of brazen “patriotic chic” to conserve on material. Canning companies were working around the clock to produce enough canned peas and sweet corn for the soldiers. Farmers collected urine from their horses, which was being used to make penicillin. People were saving and collecting everything they could—scrap iron, newspaper, rags, grease, tin cans—to be salvaged and sent to factories for military use. Children were harvesting milkweed seedpods, which, because they floated, were used in life jackets. Wives and girlfriends, sisters and mothers were rolling bandages to meet their Red Cross quotas. Everyone with a son or daughter serving overseas flew a blue star flag. A gold star meant that they had had a son or daughter killed in action.

Some of the guys were writing letters to their wives or sweethearts, encouraging them to get on with their lives. They could barely make their hands shape the words: “I love you, Darling. Please know that I love you. But I ain’t coming home. I got this feeling I’m never coming home.”