The Ghost Mountain Boys Read online

That night Medendorp posted sentries. If he thought that this precaution would ensure his men a night of rest, he was mistaken—no one could possibly sleep with a Japanese patrol in the area.

  The next two nights passed uneventfully, and then on the morning of the patrol’s third day in Laruni, three C-47s with fighter escort rumbled out of the clouds. The men were jubilant at the sight of the planes. They grabbed each other and danced and jumped in celebration. The U.S. Army had not forgotten about them.

  Their elation was short-lived, though; the drop was a disappointment. The regimental band members who assisted with the drops kicked the food out of the side of the planes. Much of it, though, fell into the surrounding valleys, and lay scattered in the rain forest. The men knew that it would be their job to retrieve it, and the prospect filled them with dread. Finding small bundles of food in the jungle was like searching for needles in a haystack.

  That afternoon Medendorp and the Wairopi Patrol set out for Jaure already tired from the morning’s food hunt. Medendorp left Laruni with a heavy heart. Because of the injury to his knee, Keast was unable to walk and Medendorp ordered him to remain behind. He hated to leave behind the man he described as “an intimate personal friend,” and knew that he would miss Keast’s spirit and physical strength. “Keast,” he wrote, “had more endurance than anybody else. Each morning he went ahead and selected a bivouac area for the night, and took care of the tired troops as they came in.”

  But Medendorp had spent the last two nights listening to Keast “crying out with pain.” Although he was concerned about his friend’s health, he was even more concerned about the patrol. They needed to make good time, and they needed to be mobile, especially if Japanese soldiers were marching to meet them. With Keast, Medendorp left behind Sergeant Ludwig and fifty-two men who Medendorp decided were unfit to cross the mountains.

  It was a mixed bag for the men who stayed behind. They were grateful for the much-needed rest, but being left behind frightened them. Keast and Ludwig were accomplished soldiers, but fifty-two tired men would be no match for a sizable Japanese patrol.

  Before setting off for Jaure, Medendorp radioed regimental headquarters. Using the code words that the regiment had established for the villages along the route, which the men had named after cities in Michigan, Medendorp informed Colonel Quinn that Keast would remain in Laruni.

  “Starting for Holland,” Medendorp said, referring to Jaure by its code name. “Keast has bad knee. He is staying at Coldwater (Laruni) with fifty men. Received supplies.”

  Only a mile out of Laruni, it looked like the end of the line for the Wairopi Patrol. A dense fog crawled up the mountains, and the trail disappeared. The native carriers were almost a liability now. In the jungle they had often helped Medendorp to locate the trail; to find cold, pure water, filtered by stones; to distinguish between harmless and killer snakes; and to forage for food to supplement the soldiers’ rations. But in the mountains, they were lost and terrified, and had to be alternately encouraged and berated to continue.

  Everything that Medendorp had feared about the march to Jaure was coming true. “Words,” he wrote later, “cannot describe the hardships of that march over the mountains.” The rain that fell the previous evening turned the trail into a pit of shin-high mud that sucked at the men’s boots. The patrol made excruciatingly slow progress over tier after tier of sharp mountain peaks, and dangerous descents on slippery trails. Sometimes men lost their balance and tumbled into the jungle. When they struggled to their feet, they were covered in half-inch-long leeches. Getting them off after they had attached themselves was not only a chore, but the leeches left small, stinging red wounds that, if not treated, invited infection. The men also discovered that the forest teemed with something like stinging nettles. The natives called it “salat,” and rubbed the leaf on tired muscles to relieve soreness. They had to choose carefully, though—just a touch from the wrong salat leaf left behind a painful red rash.

  Massive trees with trunks the size of army jeeps, adorned with lianas and wrapped in a swarm of vines resembling large pythons, flanked the trail. At first the men marveled at them, but less than an hour into the hike, they were incapable of admiration. The faint hunting trail rose nearly straight up, and soon they were on all fours, slopping through the mud, grabbing at roots, trees, ferns, bushes, sharp-edged leaves, anything they could grasp to keep from falling backward down the slippery mountain. Everything they reached for came equipped with spurs or thorns or tiny but sharp bristles, and often swarms of angry red ants.

  Medendorp had to keep his troops moving. “We were marching,” he wrote, “again with only the rations we could carry…. If we couldn’t get to the next dropping ground…we would be stuck in the jungle without supplies.”

  Two days out of Laruni, after a series of false summits, surrounded by frigid, swirling mists, the Wairopi Patrol confronted the highest point on the trail, the 9,500-foot Mount Suwemalla, which sat in the midst of the cloud forest, a strange, icy, god-forsaken place where the sun never shone. Glowing moss and phosphorescent fungus covered every tree, and subterranean rivers roared beneath the men’s feet. They were convinced that the peak was haunted and promptly dubbed it Ghost Mountain.

  Ghost Mountain—the men could not wait to leave it behind. Soaked in sweat and trembling from the cold and rain, which “fell without ceasing,” Medendorp’s patrol began its descent. “At one place,” Medendorp wrote later, “we right-stepped over the face of a stone cliff with our bellies pressed against the stone and our arms outstretched like a Moses in prayer…. It is still a miracle to me that all of our men got over that point safely.” As darkness fell, the patrol made it to level ground. Medendorp continued, “Finally, we reached the bottom and made camp beside a clear running stream, and in a constant rain.” Too exhausted to prepare camp or to build fires, they ate their rations cold and shivered in the chilly night air. As much as they had hated the heat of Nepeana, the men longed to be warm again.

  By noon of the next day, the patrol reached Suwari. Medendorp wrote that the village’s “wild” natives fled in terror. Despite the probability of fleas, the native huts looked too warm and dry to pass up, so Medendorp halted the patrol. They would spend the rest of the day and the night in the village. Then Medendorp issued a warning: “No souvenirs.” Nothing was to be touched. The soldiers were to leave tobacco behind as a thank-you. Medendorp wanted the people to know they could trust the American soldiers.

  Medendorp’s precaution was a smart one. The patrol had reached the north side of the mountains, and that meant the possibility of Japanese. The last thing the patrol needed was angry natives who could report its presence to the Japanese and spoil the entire plan—or worse yet, get a lot of people killed.

  In the middle of October 1942, many New Guinea natives had still not allied themselves with either the Japanese or the Americans and the Australians. They were waiting for the outcome of the early battles and watching to see who treated them best. It was an unsentimental calculus on their part. They wanted, simply, to side with the winning army in order to minimize the war’s impact on their people.

  That night, the eight remaining natives—four more carriers had fled before the patrol began its ascent of Ghost Mountain—sang and danced in their hut until morning. Whether they were singing out of gratitude for their safe passage over Ghost Mountain, or fear, no one knew. Medendorp allowed them to celebrate, though. Anything to keep them happy.

  Before setting out for Jaure the following morning, Medendorp left behind a platoon under a lieutenant to guard the village. If the Japanese sneaked into the village, they could ambush the 2nd Battalion, which Medendorp knew from periodic radio reports was slowly making its way north.

  Two days out of Suwari, and fourteen days after setting out on the trail, Medendorp and the Wairopi Patrol walked into Jaure, at the headwaters of the Kumusi and Musa Rivers. It had taken the patrol nearly a week to travel the last sixteen miles. At Jaure, they discovered Boice’s pathfinder patro
l, from which they had not heard anything since Laruni. Everyone, it seemed, was okay—after sighting the Japanese patrol, Boice decided that it was safer not to try to make radio contact.

  Boice, who had been out scouting, returned to the village. What he saw stunned him: Medendorp and his men were a pitiful sight. For a moment Boice may have experienced a twinge of doubt. Had his report on the feasibility of the route across the mountains consigned hundreds of men to misery? For him and his small patrol, the trail had been extraordinarily tough, but it was “practicable.” But what would become of an entire battalion? What would happen when the monsoons arrived? Would the trail be “practicable” then?

  Boice did not express any of these reservations to his friend.

  “Well Al, you old son of a gun,” he said, shaking Medendorp’s hand.

  Hoping to achieve a bit of humor, Medendorp paraphrased Stanley encountering Livingston.

  “Jungle Jim, I presume.”

  The following day, Medendorp dispatched a fifty-man detachment into the Kumusi River valley. When Sergeant Jimmy Dannenberg’s group left Jaure, everyone was outfitted with new boots that had been dropped days before. Few had a pair that fit well, but no one cared. New boots, ill fitting or not, were something to be grateful for.

  Medendorp stayed behind to radio Colonel Quinn. Then, because every porter with whom he had begun the hike had deserted, he spent the day rounding up seventy-five native carriers.

  Medendorp described the new carriers as “wild” looking. To be sure, the natives of Jaure were some of the most isolated people on the Papuan Peninsula. Except for infrequent contact with Australian colonial patrols and perhaps the odd prospector, they had no exposure to the outside world. They were tattooed men, who wore bone necklaces, ear and nose ornaments, loincloths of beaten bark, and fur hats; they smeared their bodies with pig fat to protect against the cold. They believed in sorcerers, supernatural forces, the dream world, and spirits that had to be propitiated through elaborate rituals.

  Lieutenant Segal examined the natives. Many were covered in bug bites, and because of a vitamin B deficiency, they also had skin diseases, festering sores, peeling skin, and grayish scales. In truth, Segal was only able to give them basic care. He had sent numerous radio messages requesting surgical instruments, and though food and ammunition came, the instruments never did. It was a constant frustration for Segal. How was he to care for an entire patrol and its carriers with only one scalpel and a few hemostats?

  Using that one scalpel and his knife, Segal first took care of the soldiers’ boils and ulcers. Some of the men had skin ulcers where their fatigues had rubbed and the straps of their backpacks had pressed against their shoulders. Some had malaria, with temperatures hovering at 103 degrees. They complained of tender bellies, aching joints, confusion, impaired vision, and nightmares. For them there was nothing Segal could do. He was almost out of quinine.

  Late that night, Medendorp limped over to Segal. He had an ulcer on his leg that had been causing him pain since Ghost Mountain. He had ignored the advice of Boice’s patrol to treat “small wounds,” because they “fester rapidly.” Segal sterilized his knife over the fire and sliced into the ulcer. Medendorp tightened his jaw and clenched his fists. The ulcer oozed a putrid, yellowish-brown pus.

  Three days later, Medendorp and his men dragged themselves into Barumbila, a village down the Kumusi River in the shadow of Mount Lamington, about ten miles southeast of Wairopi. Medendorp was “weak from almost constant dysentery and…a fever.” At Barumbila, which was an ideal site for a dropping ground, he spent the day recruiting a large force of natives to collect and carry supplies for the approaching 2nd Battalion. Soon after, he learned that General Kenney and his Fifth Air Force had airlifted the entire 128th U.S. Infantry Regiment to a village called Wanigela on the Papuan Peninsula’s north coast, where pilots put down on a crude airstrip carved out of the kunai grass by missionaries and area villagers. MacArthur had discovered a better way to get troops across the mountains.

  Chapter 9

  ONE GREEN HELL

  ALFRED MEDENDORP WAS AT THE VILLAGE of Laruni when the 2nd Battalion got the go-ahead. Though Major Simon Warmenhoven worried about the myriad medical needs of nine hundred men marching across New Guinea, there was little he could do now. A team of medics and a platoon of engineers would accompany the battalion. Warmenhoven could only hope for the best.

  Company E led the way for the 2nd Battalion with the battalion’s other companies—F, G, H, and Headquarters—following at one-day intervals.

  It was fitting for Company E to be out front. When General Harding came to Amberley Airfield to see the company off on September 15, he told the men that they had been selected to go first because they “were the best in the outfit.” He called them the “spearhead of the spearhead of the spearhead.” Lutjens and his men liked the sound of it and began referring to themselves as “The Three Spearheads.” It was a distinction the company could be proud of: The 32nd was the first combat division of the U.S. Army to embark on an offensive mission against the Japanese. That meant that Company E was leading the way for the whole division.

  Private Art Edson, who had scouted the coastal route to Gabagaba with Lutjens, took a moment to write his sweetheart.

  Dearest Lois,

  I take the chance to drop you a line as I may not have the chance again for a long time, as we are now some where in New Guinea…. This island is the Hell Hole of the world. I never expected to see natives used for pack horses or dressed like you see in shows, grass skirts and that is all…. Have seen quite a few crocodiles and have shot a couple. We shot a snake today, nine feet long. Will write more as soon as possible.

  Love Forever, Art

  On October 13, the day before Company E set out, Lutjens made a brief entry in his diary: “Been three weeks in New Guinea…I’m afraid it will become much worse than this. We are now starting into the foothills of the Owen Stanley Range…. We are going to carry six days’ rations—one pound of rice, one handful of green tea, a little sugar and two cans of bully beef. Plus our field equipment.”

  What Lutjens described was a situation in which each man was carrying an almost impossible amount of weight. Provisions and field equipment, ammunition, plus a weapon—a ten-pound M-1, or a nine-pound model 1903 Springfield rifle, or a twelve-pound Thompson .45 caliber submachine gun, or a twenty-pound Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR)—meant that the average man in Company E carried nearly as much as Medendorp’s men—sixty to eighty pounds. In other words, no one had learned from Medendorp’s experience.

  The machine gunners had it the worst. A .30 caliber machine gun alone weighed thirty pounds, not counting the tripod and ammunition. Together the gun, tripod, and ammunition were so heavy they were divided among three men. Still, the machine gunners struggled under loads that would have broken lesser men trekking across the flat fields of Kansas.

  The men lugged 60 mm mortars over the mountains, too. One carried the fourteen-pound baseplate, another carried the long, eighteen-pound tube or cannon, another the legs, which weighed just over fifteen pounds, and three men lugged the mortars—three four-pound rounds per man.

  Company E’s trek began, ironically, with a party. At Nepeana, the natives danced and sang and lavished them with rice, yams, and paw-paws. The day after, reality set in with pelting monsoonal downpours that drenched the soldiers to the bone and turned the trail into a river of mud and clay.

  Lutjens described what would become an ordinary day:

  We’d start at six in the morning by cooking rice, or trying to. Two guys would work together. If they could start a fire, which was hard because the wood was wet even when you cut deep into the center of a log, they’d mix a little bully beef (canned mutton) in a canteen cup with rice, to get the starchy taste out of it. Sometimes we’d take turns blowing on sparks, trying to start a fire, and keep it up for two hours without success. I could hardly describe the country. It would take five or six hours to go a mile, edging along c
liff walls, hanging on to vines, up and down, up and down. The men got weaker; guys began to lag back. It would rain from three in the afternoon on, soaking through everything. The rivers we crossed were so swift that if you slipped it was just too bad. It was every man for himself. No one waited for anyone else, unless he was hurt. An officer stayed at the end of the column to keep driving the stragglers. There wasn’t any way of evacuating to the rear. Men with sprained ankles hobbled along…. If they hadn’t made it, they’d have died.

  The engineers did their best to remove roots, deadfall, and large rocks from the trail. At river crossings, they toppled trees that could reach the far bank. At steep ascents and descents and along treacherous cliffs, they sometimes erected handrails.

  On the way to Strinimu, the men of Company E, like Medendorp’s men, began to jettison equipment they considered extraneous. After all, what need would they have for a gas mask or a razor or a mess kit? The guys got together in groups of three; one kept a spoon, another a knife, another a fork. Later, they would share the utensils. One guy would dip into a can of beans, take the biggest bite he could, and pass on the spoon.

  As they approached the mountains, Lutjens watched as men discarded equipment regardless of its utility. They threw out blankets, raincoats, mosquito nets, and extra underwear. They cut their pants off just below the knees and their shirts at the shoulders. They sliced off the extra leather at the top of their boots. Some ripped the buttons from their shirts. They kept their toothbrushes, though; they needed something to clean their rifles.

  The waste delighted the native carriers, many of whom brought along nothing more than tobacco, a machete, and a string bag. The practice of platoon leaders like Lutjens was to stop every hour for a ten-minute rest. While the men rested, the carriers set down their loads and backtracked, scavenging everything they could fit in their bags.