The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea--The Forgotten War of the South Pacific (34 page)

Horton died that day, lying fifty feet from his friend Roger Keast.

Chapter 17

C
AGED
B
IRDS

The caged bird, in his dreams

Returns to his homeland

Forgetting my own self, every day and night,

I think of my father and mother in the homeland

And wonder how they are

I look upon the river
And it is like the one

I knew so well in childhood

far from here.

I
N MID
-D
ECEMBER
, Cannon Company and Company K moved from their position southwest of the trail to the rear. In a letter to his youngest sister, Alice, Alfred Medendorp wrote that his teeth were falling out because of a vitamin deficiency. But even the rear offered little relief. Company K’s journal keeper wrote, “The men are getting sicker. Their nerves are cracking. They are praying for relief. [They] must have it soon.”

The soldiers had all seen enough. A GI was brought in with the entire top of his head blown off. Another’s face was missing. Another had been shot between the shoulder blades. Medendorp witnessed the man’s agony: “The spinal cord lay exposed. The muscles could be seen and their contractions watched; the lungs were torn open in spots and with every exhalation of the breath several fine sprays of blood shot up.” Worse yet was the smell of the dead. “It is with us always,” wrote Medendorp, “and flies by the millions.”

East of the Girua River, General Eichelberger relieved the 2nd Battalion. He replaced it with the 127th, which had arrived at Dobodura, preparing to end what the Ghost Mountain boys had begun.

For MacArthur, the 127th could not attack soon enough. On December 13, a convoy carrying Major General Kensaku Oda, who was to take control of Horii’s South Seas Detachment, landed with eight hundred troops. When MacArthur got the news he panicked and immediately wrote Eichelberger.

Dear Bob:

Time is fleeting and our dangers increase with its passage. However admirable individual acts of courage may be however spendid and electrical your presence has proven; remember that your mission is to take Buna. All other things are merely subsidiary to this. No alchemy is going to produce this for you; it can only be done in battle and sooner or later this battle must be engaged. Hasten your preparations, and when you are ready—strike, for as I have said, time is working desperately against us.

Cordially, MacArthur

The following morning, the troops of the 127th stormed Buna Village. Expecting to have to wrest the village at bayonet point, the men were surprised when they entered unopposed. Suspecting a trap, they scoured the area for enemy soldiers. The Japanese were gone. After clinging to the village for three weeks, the enemy had vacated without a fight, as they had done three months earlier at Ioribaiwa Ridge.

The men of the 127th were shocked by what they discovered: a blighted landscape of scarred and beheaded trees, shell holes filled with water and mud and excrement, unburied bodies, the ruins of native huts, discarded clothing and ration cans, abandoned guns, very little food, and only basic medical supplies. But the Japanese bunkers stood intact even after direct mortar and artillery hits.

Two days later, Eichelberger’s troops registered another mini-victory. Colonel White Smith’s 2nd Battalion, 128th U.S. Infantry, down to only 350 effectives, stormed and took the Coconut Grove, the second major Japanese position west of Entrance Creek.

MacArthur’s headquarters wasted no time trumpeting the news, and on December 15, the lead headline of the
New York Times
blared, “ALLIES TAKE BUNA IN NEW GUINEA.”

It was typical MacArthur-esque hyperbole. What the front-page story omitted was that Buna Government Station east of Entrance Creek, the Allies’ main objective, was still firmly in Japanese hands. It also failed to mention was that the Japanese possessed a large chunk of land—the Warren Front—east of the Government Station, and another one west of the Girua River at Sanananda.

Despite the triumphant
New York Times
headline, the reality was that the war in New Guinea had already dragged on much longer than the Americans or the Australians thought it would. There had been successes—Buna Village and Gona—but in the big picture they were minor victories. Early on, the plan had been to envelop the eleven-mile-long front as if a giant hand were closing inexorably around the Japanese. The Americans would come up the coast while the Australians moved down. A combined American-Australian army would move north via the Sanananda track, while an entirely American force would attack the Triangle.

A week and a half before the capture of Buna Village, after the failure of his December 5 assault on the Warren Front, Eichelberger realized that this plan would not work—at least not east of the Girua River. Japanese positions were just too strong, and the terrain was dismal.

The Americans, Eichelberger decided, would soften up the Japanese positions by infiltration and aggressive patrolling, the kind of mobile, small-unit maneuver tactics that General Forrest Harding had pioneered at the Infantry School at Fort Benning.

Eichelberger’s plan was for reconnaissance platoons to identify enemy positions. He would then use artillery, especially the 105 mm howitzer—code named “Dusty”—with its high angle of fire and delayed fuses, to pound those positions into submission. Following bombardment, patrols would knock out the bunkers one by one, with rifles, grenades, grenade launchers, and mortars. If that failed, Eichelberger resolved to let starvation take its toll.

In the abstract, the plan seemed sound. The reality, though, was much more complicated. The terrain made even small-unit patrolling nearly impossible. While soldiers used grenade launchers with punishing effectiveness, their supply was limited, and they soon ran out of grenades. The 105 mm howitzer sat unused for days after firing a few hundred rounds because of a lack of ammunition. Eichelberger was again forced to resort to mortars and 37 mm guns, which hardly fazed the bunkers, and 3.7-inch mountain howitzers and 25-pounders that fired rounds with super-quick fuses that blew up on impact, leaving the Japanese positions undisturbed.

In mid-December, however, Eichelberger’s luck changed. Tanks arrived: four light American M-3 General Stuarts that General Harding had fought so hard for and that had been denied to him time and time again. They saved the day, sparing Eichelberger a career-ending decision; MacArthur, who demanded daily battle reports, never would have tolerated Eichelberger’s plan to let attrition take its toll.

A day after receiving the tanks, Eichelberger began to prepare for an all-out assault on Captain Yasuda’s and Colonel Yamamoto’s forces on the Urbana and Warren Fronts. In the waning light on the evening of December 17, five hundred Australian infantrymen assembled near the front. The Australians were the same troops who had defeated the Japanese at Milne Bay. They were new to the Warren Front and would lead the attack, while the Americans were held in reserve.

At sunup on December 18, the tanks and the camouflaged Australian troops moved out. Ahead of them sat the stranded Bren gun carriers that had failed to dent the Japanese defenses two weeks earlier. Farther ahead was the Duropa Plantation, with its elegant coconut palms swaying in the slight breeze. Underneath the trees in the long kunai, Colonel Yamamoto’s elite 144th and 229th Infantry troops hid in their bunkers and machine gun nests, unaware of the approaching battle.

Just before 7:00 a.m., artillery battered the plantation. Ten minutes later, even before the smoke cleared, the Australians advanced. The General Stuarts opened up on the bunkers with their 37 mm guns. An American officer described the results: “The tanks really did the job. They apparently completely demoralized the Japs [who] fought like cornered rats.” The Australians, wielding tommy guns and hurling grenades, moved forward in the wake of the tanks and caught Yamamoto’s men by surprise.

Except for heavy Australian casualties, the day was a success. The Allies now controlled everything east of the Girua River except the Old Strip and Giropa Point.

In a letter to Sutherland that evening (each night Eichelberger penned a letter to MacArthur’s headquarters and to his wife Emmaline), Eichelberger wrote, “I am glad he [Brigadier Wooten] has the tanks to help him. I do not believe he or anyone else would have gone very far without them.”

General Harding had been vindicated. The tanks, however, had not arrived in time to save his career.

Meanwhile, Major General Yamagata was trying to rally the Japanese troops on the Urbana Front. On December 17, he issued a message to the front’s commanders, calling for the “complete annihilation and expulsion of the enemy from the soil of New Guinea.”

At the same time, Eichelberger was putting his men into position for an assault on the Government Station.

With the entire 127th at his disposal, Eichelberger relieved White Smith’s 2nd Battalion, sending them to the village of Siremi for a well-deserved rest. To make up for the loss of White Smith’s men, he pulled the Ghost Mountain Battalion, under Jim Boice, out of reserve after barely a week’s rest. Boice moved a portion of his men into the Coconut Grove and the rest of his troops into the Triangle east of Entrance Creek.

At the Triangle, bunkers, firing trenches, and chest-high swamp guarded every possible approach to the raised track that led to the Government Station. The plan was for two companies to attack the Triangle from the Coconut Grove via the bridge that spanned Entrance Creek, while a third company moved on the point of the Triangle from the south. Prior to the assault, the area would be subjected to an air strike and 81 mm mortar fire.

At 10:00 p.m. the evening before the assault, Boice and Bailey and their men maneuvered into position through thick sago swamp. Bailey felt the same poignant ache for home he always felt on the eve of battle. Only a week earlier he had received a packet of seventeen letters from Katherine. He read the letters hungrily and then he reread each one slowly three or four times until he knew their details by heart.

Katherine had also sent along three baby photos of Cladie Alyn. Swelling with pride, Bailey passed them out among the company.

Back at home Katherine and Cladie Alyn were on their way to the Bailey farm to share Bailey’s most recent letter with his mother, Mamie. Mamie loved to have Katherine read the letters aloud to her, to hear the cadence of the sentences, her son’s words.

Katherine looked forward to the visits, too. Even when she and Cladie were dating, she enjoyed going to the Bailey farm. She loved its simple grace: the white house with a porch across the front, the barn that Jim Bailey, Cladie’s father, had built with lumber cut and milled on the farm, the fenced-in yard with the big oak, and the creek that wandered through the pasture behind the house. Now Katherine imagined how it would be when her husband returned. She and Cladie and Cladie Alyn would go down to the creek. They would roll up their pants and wade in the summer trickle.