The Ghost Mountain Boys Read online

  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  A GUIDE TO THE BOOK’S MAJOR CHARACTERS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  INTRODUCTION

  MAPS

  PROLOGUE

  BOOK ONE

  Chapter 1 ESCAPE TO THE SOUTH

  Chapter 2 A TRAIN HEADING WEST

  Chapter 3 ARRIVAL DOWN UNDER

  Chapter 4 SONS OF HEAVEN

  Chapter 5 CANNIBAL ISLAND

  BOOK TWO

  Chapter 6 FORLORN HOPE

  Chapter 7 THE BLOODY TRACK

  Chapter 8 MARCHING INTO THE CLOUDS

  Chapter 9 ONE GREEN HELL

  Chapter 10 TO SWALLOW ONE’S TEARS

  (NAMIDA O NOMU)

  Chapter 11 FEVER RIDGE

  BOOK THREE

  Chapter 12 THE KILL ZONE

  Chapter 13 A POOR MAN’S WAR

  Chapter 14 IF THEY DON’T STINK, STICK ’EM

  Chapter 15 THE BUTCHER’S BILL

  Chapter 16 BREAKING THE STALEMATE

  Chapter 17 CAGED BIRDS

  EPILOGUE

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  COPYRIGHT

  To Elizabeth, for her patience and grace, and to our

  daughters Aidan, Rachel, and Willa

  And to the Red Arrow men of New Guinea and their families

  A Guide to the Book’s Major Characters

  U.S. COMMAND STRUCTURE

  General Douglas MacArthur: Commander in Chief Southwest Pacific Area

  Major General Richard Sutherland: MacArthur’s Chief of Staff

  Brigadier General Charles Willoughby: MacArthur’s Head of Intelligence (G-2)

  Major General George Kenney: Commander of Allied Air Forces

  Brigadier General Hugh Casey: MacArthur’s Engineer Officer

  Major General Edwin Forrest Harding: Commanding General 32nd U.S. Infantry Division from February 1942–December 1, 1942

  Lieutenant General Robert Eichelberger: Commander I Corps. Assumed command of all U.S. forces east of the Girua River in early December 1942

  AUSTRALIAN COMMAND STRUCTURE

  General Sir Thomas Blamey: Commander Allied Land Forces SWPA

  Major General Basil Morris: General Officer Commanding New Guinea Force

  Lieutenant General Sydney Rowell: Replaced Morris as General Officer Commanding New Guinea Force on August 10, 1942

  Lieutenant General Edmund Herring: Replaced General Rowell in late October 1942

  Major General Arthur “Tubby” Allen: General Officer Commanding 7th Australian Division

  Major General George Vasey: Replaced Tubby Allen as Commanding Officer of the 7th Australian Division on October 27, 1942

  32ND U.S. INFANTRY DIVISION

  Colonel Lawrence Quinn: Commander 126th Infantry Regiment until November 5

  Colonel John Mott: Temporary Commander Urbana Force

  Colonel John Grose: Assumed command of Urbana Force on December 4, 1942. Three days later, turned over command of Urbana Force to Colonel Clarence Tomlinson. Then took over command of the 127th Infantry Regiment. Resumed command of Urbana Force on December 20, 1942

  Lieutenant Colonel Clarence Tomlinson: Assumed command of the 126th Infantry after Quinn. Took over command of Urbana Force on December 7, 1942. Relieved of duties on December 20 due to exhaustion, but remained Commander of the 126th Infantry

  Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Smith: Commander 2nd Battalion 128th Infantry Regiment

  Major Herbert “Stutterin’” Smith: Commander 2nd Battalion 126th Infantry Regiment

  Captain William “Jim” Boice: Regimental Intelligence Officer (G-2), and leader of the Pathfinder Patrol

  URBANA FRONT

  Lieutenant Robert Odell: Platoon leader Company F 2nd Battalion 126th Infantry Regiment. Took command of the company in early December 1942

  Lieutenant James Hunt: Head of communications section attached to Company E, then F, and eventually Battalion Headquarters 126th Infantry Regiment

  Sergeant Herman Bottcher: Platoon commander Company H 2nd Battalion 126th Infantry Regiment. Attached to Company G

  COMPANY G 2ND BATTALION 126TH INFANTRY REGIMENT

  Lieutenant Cladie “Gus” Bailey: Commanding Officer

  Sergeant Don Stout

  Sergeant Don Ritter

  Corporal Stanley Jastrzembski

  Corporal Carl Stenberg

  Privates First Class Russell Buys, Samuel DiMaggio, Chester Sokoloski

  COMPANY E 2ND BATTALION 126TH INFANTRY REGIMENT

  Captain Melvin Schultz: Commanding Officer

  1st Sergeant Paul Lutjens

  Sergeant John Fredericks

  Private First Class Arthur Edson

  SANANANDA FRONT

  Captain Alfred Medendorp: Leader of the Wairopi Patrol, Commanding Officer of Cannon and K Companies

  Captain Roger Keast: Second-in-command Wairopi Patrol, and Commanding Officer Antitank Company

  Captain John Shirley: Commanding Officer Company I 3rd Battalion 126th Infantry Regiment

  Captain Meredith Huggins: Operations Officer (S-3) 3rd Battalion 126th Infantry Regiment

  Lieutenant Peter Dal Ponte: Commanding Officer Service Company 3rd Battalion 126th Infantry Regiment

  Lieutenant Hershel Horton: Platoon Commander Company I 3rd Battalion 126th Infantry Regiment

  Father Stephen Dzienis: Chaplain 126th Infantry Regiment

  Lieutenant Lester Segal: Physician assigned to Wairopi Patrol

  Major Simon Warmenhoven: Regimental Surgeon, 126th Infantry Regiment. Served on both Sanananda and Buna Fronts

  Author’s Note

  IN 1884 THE ISLAND of New Guinea was partitioned by three Western powers. The Dutch claimed the western half (it was handed over to Indonesia in November 1969 and is now called the province of Papua, formerly Irian Jaya), and the Germans and British divided the eastern half. The southern section of the eastern half became a British protectorate (British New Guinea Territory) and passed to Australia in 1906 as the Territory of Papua. The northern section formed part of German New Guinea, or Kaiser-Wilhelmsland. During World War I, it was occupied by Australian forces and in 1920 was mandated to Australia by the League of Nations. It became known as the Territory of New Guinea.

  Although the Battles of Buna and Sanananda took place in the Territory of Papua, because people generally refer to the island as New Guinea, I do, too, in order to avoid potentially confusing distinctions.

  Introduction

  NEW GUINEA WAS an unlikely place in which to wage a war for world domination. It was an inhospitable, only cursorily mapped, disease-ridden land. Almost no one—not the elite units of the Japanese forces that invaded New Guinea’s north coast in July 1942, not the Australian Imperial Forces or its militia, and maybe least of all the U.S. Army’s 32nd “Red Arrow” Division—was prepared for what military historian Eric Bergerud calls “some of the harshest terrain ever faced by land armies in the history of the war.”

  In New Guinea, exhaustion and disease pushed armies to the breaking point. Losses to malaria alone were crippling. Sixty-seven percent of the 14,500 American troops involved in the battles for Buna and Sanananda contracted the disease. On the Sanananda Front, casualties due to malaria were over 80 percent.

  The suffering was enormous on all sides. For the Americans, it could have been alleviated, at least initially, by better planning. But eventually the topography and climate would still have exacted a terrible toll.

  By the time the Red Arrow men arrived in New Guinea in September 1942, U.S. Marine troops were already fighting a brutal, well-documented land battle at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. The marines had a superbly oile
d publicity machine that kept them in the spotlight. The 32nd Division’s soldiers fighting in New Guinea felt forgotten. The American public, in particular, suffered from the misperception that except for Guadalcanal, the South Pacific was a naval war with a few insignificant ground operations thrown in for good measure. By October 1944, they knew that General Douglas MacArthur, who had fled the Philippines, had returned two and a half years later, keeping his promise. But they had little idea of what went on in the interim, which is to say that they had scant knowledge of the land war in New Guinea. Americans’ lack of interest revealed a geographical ignorance. The European front—and the exception of Guadalcanal—they could comprehend. The vast blue Pacific with its obscure island nations remained a mystery.

  Yet the fighting on the island of New Guinea—especially the early confrontations at Buna and Sanananda—was every bit as fierce as that at Guadalcanal. General Robert Eichelberger, who would assume command of the 32nd, wrote that in New Guinea, “Everything favored the enemy.”

  Casualties at Buna, in fact, were considerably higher than at Guadalcanal. On Guadalcanal 1,100 troops were killed and 4,350 wounded. The cost of New Guinea’s combined Buna-Sanananda-Gona campaign was 3,300 killed and 5,500 wounded. As William Manchester points out in his book American Caesar, “If the difference in the size of attacking forces is taken into account, the loss of life on Papua (New Guinea) had been three times as great as Guadalcanal’s.”

  On New Guinea, as at Guadalcanal, topography determined everything. Tanks and artillery, which won the day in Europe, were rendered useless. In the matted jungles, men were forced to fight battles at point-blank range. Soldiers used anything that worked—grenades, fixed bayonets, and, sometimes, their hands. Eric Bergerud described the struggle as “a knife fight out of the Stone Age.” George Johnston, an Australian war correspondent, called it one of the “most merciless and most primeval battles.”

  As fierce as the fighting was, the terrain and climate were just as dangerous. General Hugh Casey, MacArthur’s chief engineer, called New Guinea the “ultimate nightmare country.” Support units, he said, would face challenges “without precedent in American military history.” Before his first inspection of the island, he assumed that nothing could compare with Bataan and Samar. But New Guinea was in a class of its own. War, Casey told MacArthur, would be almost impossible to wage on the island. His warnings proved prescient.

  For the troops of the 32nd Division, New Guinea became “the ultimate nightmare country” indeed. Lenord Sill would later say, “All who were alive, were so near death…. Our briefing, before we began near Port Moresby, did not prepare us for what we were about to encounter. In the beginning, we were all young, healthy GIs, eager to conquer the world…. In a matter of weeks, long before we met the enemy force, all of us had been transformed into ghosts of our former selves.”

  Bob Hartman of Grand Rapids, Michigan, minces no words. “If I owned New Guinea and I owned hell, I would live in hell and rent out New Guinea.” The first time Carl Smestad saw the Sanananda battlefront he was convinced that it would be his graveyard. “God help us,” he thought. “We’re never going to get out of here alive.”

  One would think that the 32nd must have been a division of elite fighters, or that it contained units of crack troops. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Although Field Service regulations specified “all troops must be thoroughly acclimated before initiating operations,” the men of the 32nd were not ready for the jungle. When it came time to send the division to New Guinea, a commanding general judged it soft and just barely fit for combat.

  New to jungle warfare, the division lacked even the basics for survival, prompting one military historian to label the soldiers of the 32nd the “guinea pigs” of the South Pacific. Men were not issued any of the specialized clothing that later became de rigueur for the war in the South Pacific. For camouflage, their combat fatigues were hastily dyed before they left Australia. In the rain and extreme humidity, the dye ran and clogged the cloth, causing men to develop horrible skin ulcers. Soldiers were forced to wade through vines, creepers, brush, dense stands of razor-sharp kunai grass, and elephant grass as high as a basketball rim without the aid of machetes. They did not even have insect repellent—astonishing when one considers that they were fighting in a bug-ridden place. They were not equipped with waterproof containers either. Matches were often unusable. Quinine and vitamin pills, salt and chlorination tablets got wet and crumbled in their pants pockets. Never, perhaps, have American troops been more poorly equipped. Yet, in New Guinea, the 32nd Division was asked to do the extraordinary.

  PROLOGUE

  Dearest Lover:

  Is it ever grand out—you know, honey, you’ve read in stories about the tropical evenings, a warm, sultry night with a slight breeze…and a moon peaking thru the clouds. Well, that’s the way it was to-night. I stood there for a long time, watching and most of all wishing to have you standing along side of me, and that we could really take advantage of the “Romantic Atmosphere”…the stillness of the night—Just two things missing—First and most of all, My Mandy, and then some sweet, faint dance music. Well, we’ll just have to postpone it for the present…until another night. Give Muriel and Ann my love—I think about you all so often. What a great day it will be when we can be together again.

  Goodbye Sweetheart—All my heart’s love always—Yours forever, Sam

  Thursday Nite 6:00 PM.

  July 30, 1942

  My Sweetheart:

  And how’s my Mandy this evening? Let me see, right now it is three oclock in the morning in Grand Rapids, so you should be sound asleep—wish I could tip toe in on you right at this moment honey, and take a peep in at you, I’d carefully put a kiss on your lips, your cheeks, your eyes, and your hair, and then rest my cheek against yours for awhile without awakening you, then take a good long look at you again and tip toe out.

  Yours Forever, Sam

  Wednesday Nite 7:50 PM.

  Sept. 9, 1942

  To “My One and Only:”

  I’ll try my best to get my thoughts on paper, but it’s not like being with you darling, sitting across from you, watching the smile on your face, the touch of your legs under the table…I miss you love, oh God! How I miss you sometimes…All these things I’ve wanted to tell you, should have told you before I left…I hope you don’t think I’m sacriligeous but if I were offered my choice between heaven and you, I’d choose you…I’m going to say goodbye now…

  Always your man, Sam

  Later that night: Hello darling, here I am again. I hope the censors will let that letter go thru alright. I started out to write this letter, but wrote that one instead. I have hopes they [the censors] won’t open the previous letter, certainly no military secrets in there unless it’s a military secret…that I’m so very, very much in love with you—I’m sure tho that the japs don’t care about that.

  Wed. Nite 8:00 PM.

  Somewhere in New Guinea

  October 14, 1942

  Dearest Lover:

  Oct. 14—this is the eve of two years in the army—Two years ago tomorrow we were inducted…Have been under the “weather” a little of late. Been having a little dysentery…There are an enormous amount of flies here…I suppose you wonder all about New Guinea…There are a lot of natives here. Quite a bit of sickness and disease amongst the natives…They have a lot of skin diseases and eye infections. Lot of the small children walk about with “pot” bellies due to malnutrition. Pretty near all have rickets—some have large spleens because of malaria. The men folks wear a cloth about the hips…The women folks wear a tropical grass skirt…The other day I saw a woman nursing a baby on one breast and a small pig on the other—the natives are very much tattooed. They make wonderful boatsmen…Night before last crossed a fast streaming river and two of these natives handled a small boat and took us right straight across like nothing…The women seem to do much of the work—will see a native carrying a spear coming down a path and behind
him comes his wife all loaded down with fruit, coconuts, wood, etc. on her back and head, and perhaps a baby sitting on top of that holding on to her hair…

  What I’m really looking forward to is the day I step on U.S. soil—what a day that will be…

  Goodnight, My Mandy, Lovingly Yours, Sam

  Monday Nite

  New Guinea

  Nov. 2, 1942

  Dear Muriel:

  And how’s that big daughter of mine getting along—I’ve been wondering about you so much now that you are going to school…Mommie tells me you are a big girl now. How nice you play with Ann. Do you like your baby brother?…I sure miss you Muriel, remember how you and I used to play at night in the house before you went to bed, that was loads of fun, wasn’t it? Am thinking lots about you.

  Love, Your Dad

  Late November 1942, Buna Coast, New Guinea:

  BEFORE SETTING OUT, they smeared their faces with green paint. Loaded down with hand grenades, .30 and .45 caliber ammunition, and two days’ rations, the Americans struggled through heavy jungle and dug in just in front of a battalion of Australians. A second American detachment had its sights set on a spot farther north along the trail. Navigating through hip-deep swamps, the soldiers clashed with a Japanese patrol, lost their bearings, and ended up well short of their destination. Having realized that the main advance was falling apart, another company left the banana plantation and pushed forward in a northwesterly direction through nipa and sago palm. Two hundred yards out it was stopped in its tracks by heavy Japanese cross fire. Ordered to dig in, the men worked fast. They had just settled into their trenches when the Japanese attacked. Hundreds of enemy troops bore down on them. They rushed forward like wild Indians, shouting “Banzai!”, crashing through the jungle, their bayonets drawn. The Americans froze. The Japanese soldiers were almost upon them when the Americans finally fired. The forest filled with the smell of gunpowder. Called forward, two Australian companies hurried to help, and together they drove back the Japanese, inflicting heavy losses. At night, as their foxholes filled with water, the soldiers listened to swamp rats feeding on corpses.