The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea--The Forgotten War of the South Pacific (29 page)

In 1937, in his position as editor of the
Infantry Journal,
he elaborated on this point. “Since wars began,” he opined, “this ‘do something’ obsession has driven leaders to order attacks with no prospect of success…. The enemy’s position is immensely strong, but our masters are impatient. We attack and the history of military disaster is enriched by another bloody repulse.”

In another editorial, Harding blasted senior commanders during World War I for firing junior officers whenever things did not turn out as planned. According to writer and historian Tom Doherty, “The qualities that Harding emphasized in his writings boiled down to this: A good leader possesses the courage and self-discipline to protect his organization from his own rash impulses and from the anxieties crashing down from the chain of command….” Harding, Doherty elaborates, “had expressed these convictions years ago in peacetime, but did he have the courage to act upon them at Buna, where he was caught between enemy fortifications worthy of the Western Front and a living legend who insisted on victory at any price?”

According to Doherty, many of the men who served under Harding at Buna believed the answer to this question was yes. “They were convinced,” Doherty adds, “that far from being too weak to succeed…Forrest Harding was too principled to add…‘another bloody repulse’ to history’s long roll of military disasters by sacrificing his soldiers on the altar of Douglas MacArthur’s impatience.”

Harding sat down with his diary. Eichelberger, he wrote, “showed no appreciation of what the men had been through, or the spirit shown by most of them in carrying on despite heavy casualties, the roughest kind of opposition, and the most trying conditions.”

Once he was done writing, Harding went to Eichelberger’s tent to bury the hatchet and to discuss a new plan of attack. Eichelberger only half listened and then interrupted Harding to object once again to what he had discovered at the front. Harding guessed at Eichelberger’s intent.

“You were probably sent here to get heads,” Harding said. “Maybe mine is one of them.”

“You are right,” Eichelberger answered briskly.

“I take it I am to return to Moresby.”

“Yes,” Eichelberger replied.

Then Harding stood up and stepped out into the night.

The next morning, after a night’s downpour, Eichelberger woke to a stream running through his tent. The water was thigh deep and his personal possessions were floating away. If he was irritated by the previous day’s events, he was really aggravated now. Having dismissed Harding, he wasted no time in instructing his staff to relieve Harding’s top commanders, including Mott.

Then, over breakfast, Eichelberger apologized to Harding, insisting that he had no choice in the matter. Harding, ever the gentleman, accepted his friend’s word. Later he excused Eichelberger in his diary, writing, “It was probably either his head or mine.”

Harding’s staff was not so forgiving. It was a “dirty deal,” one of them insisted. Harding was being scapegoated. Weeks before, the general had wanted to cut off the Japs as they retreated from Kokoda to the coast. The Red Arrow men might have wiped out Horii’s army, but Blamey had insisted that the Australians be in on the kill, and MacArthur agreed. Consequently, Harding lost three pivotal weeks. In the meantime, the Japanese were able to land reinforcements.

Word of Harding’s dismissal made the rounds. While his staff collected his belongings, he paid a last visit to a nearby portable hospital. Stretcher bearers were bringing in wounded soldiers. Harding, visibly moved, apologized to the men for letting them down. An injured soldier overheard. “Hell, no, General,” he said. “
We
let
you
down!”

Later that day, Harding left Dobodura for Port Moresby. Buna was now Eichelberger’s alone to try to take.

The problem, which Harding tried to articulate, was that Buna, as Eichelberger would soon discover, was a “Leavenworth Nightmare.” The U.S. Army Command and General Staff School in Leavenworth, Kansas, did not teach solutions to such dismal tactical pictures. The Japanese defensive position was superb. They commanded the high ground up and down the coast. The Americans were relegated to the blackwater creeks and swamps, thick with viciously spiked nipa and sago palms that made the coordination of advances impossible. Companies were scattered all over the place. Classic military maneuvers like the double envelopment, where an enemy’s flanks are attacked simultaneously in a kind of pinching motion, were unworkable. Fronts, at least in the conventional sense, did not exist.

While Eichelberger set out to reorder his units, which had become “scrambled like eggs,” his new officers struggled to come to grips with the reality of their commands. One complained about a “lack of almost everything with which to operate.”

Eichelberger also decided to move his command post closer to the front. While this was going on, Stutterin’ Smith sensed that the Japanese were growing weak. Acting on a hunch, he sent out small patrols to harass the Japanese positions. They were “colonial tactics,” according to Smith, designed to keep pressure on the enemy and gather intelligence, while Eichelberger figured out the division’s next move.

Smith’s hunch proved correct: Up and down the eleven-mile front, Japanese soldiers were suffering. Sergeant Phil Ishio, a Japanese-American from Salt Lake City who worked as a translator with I Corps, had just translated some of the diaries that Smith’s men discovered when they raided the Japanese shacks on November 30.

The Japanese were short on food and medical supplies. Unlike American soldiers, who were discouraged from keeping diaries for fear that they might end up in the wrong hands, the Japanese had obviously not had any security briefings. Ishio was surprised by the candor of the daily entries. On the morning of the November 30 battle, a Corporal Tanaka wrote, “At the break of dawn, the enemy charged. We repulsed them…. It is now merely a case of waiting for death…there isn’t much we can do…. We have not eaten for over a week and have no energy. As soldiers, we are ready to die gallantly.”

Twice a day, American patrols attacked the Japanese and then retreated to their company command posts. Company E was so close to enemy lines that the GIs could hear the Japanese chattering. The patrols could not get too close because the Japanese had run trip vines up and down their lines. Behind the vines, though, the Japanese had grown lackadaisical. Swede Nelson and squad leader Sergeant Ned Myers took advantage of their inattention. Armed with tommy guns, the two men sneaked within thirty yards of a Japanese pillbox without being detected. Fifteen enemy soldiers were laughing and smoking when Nelson and Myers opened fire, killing twelve of them.

At night, the Americans ceased their attacks and stuck to their miserable, water-filled foxholes, which most men had dug using the pans from their mess kits because they did not have entrenching tools. They stayed put, two men to a hole for protection, listening to the sounds of the jungle, trying to distinguish the swamp rats scurring through the long grass from Japanese soldiers creeping in for a closer shot.

The Americans took little comfort in the foxholes. “Even with a guy right there, you’d wake up in the middle of the night and just lie there, listening and staring at the black,” Lutjens explained.

In contrast to Smith’s daytime raids, the Japanese did their dirty work at night. “The night,” emphasized a training slogan, “is one million reinforcements.” Japanese soldiers yelled out, “Tonight you die,” and then they worked their rifle bolts back and forth. Bizarrely, they were especially fond of Eleanor Roosevelt insults. “Eleanor eats shit!” they would often yell out. Sometimes they fired sudden shots that pierced the darkness, or set off firecrackers. It was their version of psychological warfare, designed to deprive the battle-weary Americans of sleep and peace of mind. And sometimes they would silently infiltrate an enemy camp, climb a tree, tie themselves in, and wait until daylight to do their damage.

One morning in early December, Captain Melvin Schultz, commander of Company E, spied a Japanese sniper just outside his command post. The sniper could have easily killed him but was waiting for more men to arrive. Schultz calmly went about his business and then whirled around and pumped eight shots into him. The sniper fell from his perch. His bullet-ridden body dangled above the ground for all to see.

Under extreme pressure for results, Eichelberger did not waste any time ordering his first attack. The plan was a basic one. On December 4, Stutterin’ Smith and his Ghost Mountain boys would close in on Buna Village, while Colonel Smith’s men from the 128th got in position to deflect a counterattack from Buna Government Station.

On the evening of December 3, the troops had their first hot meal in weeks. Eichelberger had demanded it—half-starved soldiers, he said, could not be counted on to fight. With full bellies, men found the energy to slip back to the Japanese bivouac that they had stormed two days earlier to search for souvenirs. Fearing booby traps, company commanders had issued strict orders to leave the stuff alone, but few of the men felt the need to comply with the order. The jungle was so thick that even in broad daylight they could sneak back to the Japanese outpost without being noticed.

That night, nine Zeros flying fifty feet off the ground dropped food supplies to Japanese troops at Buna Government Station. Eichelberger regarded the drop as a good omen. It was further evidence that the enemy was tired, sick, and running low on food and ammunition.

All of this was true. Some Japanese soldiers charged with holding the beachhead did not even have weapons to defend themselves. Colonel Yokoyama commanded these men to tie bayonets to poles. Those without bayonets he ordered to fashion spears or clubs out of wood.

Major General Tsuyuo Yamagata, who had just landed with five hundred troops north of Basabua at the mouth of the Kumusi River, warned his men of the situation at the front. The battlefield, he said, was a “continuous swampland…devoid of supplies.” The health situation was also extremely bad. “Until now,” he continued, “conditions as severe as these have been unheard of during the China and Greater East Asia conflict.” Then he urged the men on, adding, “I have not the slightest doubt that you will conquer hardships and privation and that with one blow you will annihilate the blue-eyed enemy and their black slaves which will be the key to the completion of the Southern operations.”

Veteran troops who had made the long retreat from Ioribaiwa confirmed Yamagata’s appraisal. Although they had fought in the Singapore, Malay, and Bataan campaigns, they had never seen a worse battlefield. Reaching the coast, they discovered that Japanese doctors were ill equipped to care for them. Hospital conditions were deplorable. Sick and wounded soldiers were forced to lie on straw mats outside the overcrowded hospital. Reeking swamp water had seeped into the wards, causing clothes, bedding, and medical supplies to mold, rot, or rust. Those doctors who had not been forced into infantry duty had almost no medicine to treat patients. They performed operations without anaesthetic. The very ill were simply left to die.

For those suffering from malnutrition, there was little food to nurse them back to health. The detachment supply officer gave orders to slaughter the remaining horses. For many of the sickest soldiers, though, the meat was of no help. For the past month they had eaten anything they could—leaves, grass, roots, dirt, even their leather rifle straps. Now their digestive systems were incapable of processing regular food. According to one Japanese journalist, many of them “vomited blood and died.”

General Horii’s section leader, who penned agonized diary entries from Ioribaiwa Ridge, now turned his attention to the Imperial army’s disintegration. “Thinking reinforcements will come,” he wrote in late November, “we have waited every night…. As the battle stretches from day to day the number of men killed and wounded increases. The patients are all collapsing. We don’t know how great our losses are…but we are holding out, hoping for a miracle. In the meantime…we find that our Bn Comdrs and Coy Comdrs have all been hiding in trenches under trees and not one has come out.”