The Ghost Mountain Boys Read online

  When Corporal Carl Stenberg heard about Pearl Harbor, he and a bunch of buddies had just come back from Alexandria, Louisiana. It was a weekend ritual for Stenberg. While other soldiers went to Alexandria for the women, the recently married Stenberg made the trip to go to the theater.

  When Stenberg and his friends returned on Sunday afternoon, the camp was buzzing with activity.

  Trucks waited, their engines idling, and men rushed from building to building. Even before hearing the news, Stenberg knew that something big was up. It was in the mess hall that he learned what had happened.

  “The Nips just bombed Pearl Harbor!” exclaimed a cook.

  The following day, fearing the Japanese might follow up Pearl Harbor with attacks on other strategic sites, the entire camp mobilized. The division sent soldiers to guard dry docks, factories, shipyards, bridges, chemical refineries, utilities, and sulfur mines across the south, from Mississippi to Louisiana to east Texas. Some officers, including Major Herbert Smith, went to the Infantry School at Fort Benning to learn combat tactics.

  Pearl Harbor abruptly ended Stenberg’s dream of “putting in a year” and returning home to resume his life. On December 31, 1941, the army informed all one-year soldiers that they were now obligated to serve for the duration of the conflict plus six months. Few soldiers were pleased, but now instead of griping, they spoke of “exacting revenge” on the “yellow bastards” and making “quick work” of the war. “Remember Pearl Harbor” became their battle cry.

  Japan’s December 7 assault on Pearl Harbor decimated the Pacific Fleet, killed or wounded over 3,500 men, and sent shock waves through America. In Japan, the excited voices of newsmen crackled over radios: “The war with America has begun!” Throughout the day stations across Japan played military songs, including the inspirational “Battleship March.” At dawn on the same day, the Imperial army landed at Kota Bharu on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula, beginning its takeover of Southeast Asia.

  The day after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on Japan. Winston Churchill, for one, was relieved. He exclaimed that he was “well content” with the news; the U.S. had been forced to enter a war it had long resisted.

  America geared up at a furious pace. Across the country, men by the thousands no longer waited to be drafted. Many did not even know where Pearl Harbor was. They knew, though, that the Japanese had just bombed American soil. The Selective Service cracked down on conscientious objectors, and the attorney general rounded up alleged Axis sympathizers. Meanwhile, President Roosevelt issued his infamous Executive Order 9066: By August anyone who was one-sixteenth Japanese, possessing at least one Japanese grandparent, a total of one hundred twenty thousand people, was interned.

  By January 1, 1942, the United States would surpass Germany as the world’s largest producer of planes. Thousands of defense plants were being built; shipyards were running around the clock. “America Firsters” who, advocating isolationism, had opposed entry into the war no longer had an ideological leg to stand on. The American public supported strict rationing programs, which included limits on paper, shoes, silk, butter, milk, canned goods, meat, and fuel oil. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without” was a slogan indicative of the kinds of sacrifices that Americans were willing to make. People cultivated “victory gardens,” drove at a “victory speed” of 35 miles per hour to conserve gas, and organized scrap drives with slogans like “Slap the Jap with the Scrap!” “Hit Hitler with the Junk!” Bing Crosby sang a song called “Junk Will Win the War.” When the War Production Board (WPB) asked for four million tons of scrap metal to be gathered in two months, people responded with five million tons in three weeks. The WPB organized rubber drives and paper drives. The Farm Security Administration began a program called “An Acre for a Soldier.” The profit on that acre was used to buy canteens and other essentials for servicemen. Overnight, apathy had turned into fervent patriotism.

  By mid-February 1942, concerns about a Japanese follow-up attack had quieted. The men of the 32nd were back at Camp Livingston preparing to go north to Fort Devens, Massachusetts by special troop train. At this point Churchill, Roosevelt, Curtin, and Marshall had not yet struck their deal to send the 32nd to Australia. The plan was to ship the division to Northern Ireland. In fact, its 107th Engineer Battalion was already on its way. But only six weeks after arriving at Fort Devens, the 32nd was getting ready to move again. Few of the men knew what was in the works. What they did know was that they were no longer headed for Europe.

  Katherine Hobson Bailey, wife of Lieutenant Cladie Bailey, had driven to Fort Devens to see her husband off. Bailey, who had been the executive officer of Jastrzembski, Stenberg, and DiMaggio’s G Company, was now its commander.

  Earning the respect of the men of Company G had not been easy for Bailey when he reported to Camp Livingston in April 1941. The first strike against him was that he was an ROTC officer. National Guard units were insular groups, made up of men whose friendships often dated back to high school, even grade school; national guardsmen were not very accepting of outsiders, especially new officers. The second strike was that Bailey, an Indianan, was an interloper among the tightly knit Muskegon, Michigan, men. But Bailey quickly earned the admiration of the men of Company G with a unique combination of charisma, humor, and toughness. As an ROTC second lieutenant, he had done a two-year stint in the Civilian Conservation Corps, and it was in the CCC that Bailey learned how to motivate men. The key was to be right there with them, struggling under a heavy pack, doing the work that they did. When other officers enjoyed the privilege of riding in jeeps to training areas, Bailey chose to walk with his men. When the occasion called for it, he could be decidedly un-military. One member of G Company recalls, “he ran a light ship, making weekend camp fun…no inspections, no reveille, just fun and card games.”

  It did not take long for everyone to realize that the company’s new lieutenant was a natural. And it did not take them long to give Bailey a nickname. The men of G Company simply called their lieutenant “Gus.”

  Gus Bailey was a man from humble roots who made the most of his considerable abilities. A farm boy, he was no stranger to the kind of backbreaking labor that characterized rural life during the Depression. The house he grew up in had no electricity or indoor plumbing.

  His father, Jim Bailey, was a carpenter who built houses and barns all over the county; his mother, Mamie Bailey, sold eggs and cream, and canned with Cladie’s help, but mostly the farm provided just enough for the family, including a once-a-week Sunday chicken supper.

  A standout athlete by the time he reached high school, Cladie swapped the hardcourt for the baseball diamond and became a star pitcher on the Indiana University baseball team that won the Big Ten Championship in 1934. Bailey was no ordinary jock, though. While at IU, he developed a love of Robert Service’s North Woods ballads.

  Poetry wasn’t something he tried to hide in the army, either. Later, the guys of G Company learned to look forward to his recitations of Service poems, which Bailey performed with flourish. Bailey was a poker player, too. Once he got to G Company, it was Bailey who instigated the all-night games, which invariably meant late nights and tables decorated with empty beer bottles.

  It was during the fall of 1940, while Bailey was still teaching and coaching at Heltonville High School, that he and Katherine Hobson began dating. She was a beautiful redhead and recent graduate of Bedford High School, twelve years Bailey’s junior. Given that she was the age of the senior girls strolling the halls of Heltonville High, there might have been some who considered the budding romance improper. If so, Bailey would not have cared a whit. He was as taken with Katherine as she was with him.

  What had first caught her eye was Cladie Bailey’s (Katherine always called him Clade) looks. Bailey was a handsome, square-jawed man with a field of brownish-blond hair. He was a fashionable dresser who wore white starched shirts and pinstriped suits and liked his shoes well polished. But what Katherine ha
d come to love most about him was not his good looks, which he never let go to his head, but his honesty and kindness. “He was the same,” she said. “He never varied in his kindness to people.”

  Once Bailey left for Camp Livingston in April 1941, Katherine and he continued their romance by mail. Two months later, while he was home on extended leave, they were married. It was a small ceremony, just Cladie and Katherine and two witnesses, Sam Bailey (Cladie’s cousin) and his wife Mildred, the couple that had set up Cladie and Katherine’s first date. The reverend, a Hobson family friend, performed the ceremony in his little parsonage. Afterward, Cladie and Katherine walked out into the steamy night air and watched the Fourth of July fireworks flash across the sky, joking for a moment that the celebration was staged in their honor.

  Shortly after the wedding, Cladie and Katherine Bailey set off together for Camp Livingston. In the fall of 1941, Katherine joined Bailey at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he was doing a three-month advanced training stint. Bailey’s schedule even allowed the young lovers to take weekend trips. After Fort Benning, Bailey returned to Camp Livingston and Katherine followed. Then in the winter of 1942, she traveled north by car to Massachusetts.

  When she arrived on base, she drove out to where Company G was marching. When Bailey saw her car, he halted the men and ran over to welcome his wife. The men waited in the cold as Katherine and Bailey embraced through the open car window—then Bailey double-timed it back to the company.

  In Massachusetts, the Baileys rented a small one-room apartment in the town of Ayer near Fort Devens. It was a happy time for Katherine; she was in love, and she was pregnant. In early April, though, the inevitable finally came.

  When Zelma Boice came to see her husband off, she presented him with a small black diary. William “Jim” Boice loved literature and was the proud owner of a collection of first-edition novels. It was one of the traits that Zelma admired most about this thoughtful, reflective man. She was his opposite—spirited, quick to act and speak. Their marriage had yielded one child—Billy Jr.—and she and her son made the same trips that Katherine Bailey did from Louisiana to Georgia, back to Louisiana again, and north to Massachusetts.

  Zelma’s independence and self-reliance had caught Boice’s eye. In Swayzee, Indiana, a small town located in the flat farm country north of Indianapolis, he had been dating her sister when Zelma and a beau joined them on a double date. It quickly became apparent to Boice that he was with the wrong woman. Though Boice would never be described as impulsive, it didn’t take him long to correct his mistake.

  Boice knew, too, that back in Swayzee, Zelma and Billy would be well cared for. Zelma would continue to teach third grade, and on weekends she and Billy would go out to the farm where Zelma’s parents still lived.

  Billy Boice, just two, stood watching his parents say good-bye, too young to understand the psychological burden his father carried. As a boy who had hardly known his own father—Boice’s father was a glass blower who had died young of black lung—Captain Jim Boice was determined to be a loving presence for his own son. The war changed all that.

  Major Herbert Smith had been transferred from the 128th to the 126th and was acting as the 2nd Battalion’s XO (Executive Officer). He was too busy for teary good-byes; besides, his wife Dorothy and their son Jerry had spent a week at Fort Devens in March. He had discouraged their visit, but Dorothy had a mind of her own, and she and Jerry came by train despite Smith’s objections.

  For a week, Jerry followed his father wherever he went and was especially happy when his father took him to see the guys in the 128th, Smith’s old unit. These were men whom Jerry knew from home in Neillsville, Wisconsin, and Louisiana. When the week came to an end and it was time for Jerry and Dorothy to return to Wisconsin, Jerry, according to his father, was “heartbroken.”

  Smith himself felt a sense of relief when Jerry and his mother departed. He had to get back to his new regiment. The transition from the 128th to the 126th was not an easy one for him. After having spent his entire military career in the 128th since enlisting in the Wisconsin State Guard in 1919 at the age of sixteen, Smith was faced with having to try to win the loyalty and respect of a bunch of guys he did not know. Truth was, he was lucky to be in the army at all. Smith was a tall (six foot three), raw-boned man with black hair and hollow cheeks. While at Camp Beauregard, he flunked his physical because he did not meet the army’s weight requirement. The regimental surgeon granted him a six-month waiver, and Smith was literally told to eat to save his military career.

  The 126th, though, was his biggest challenge to date. It was a Michigan outfit, and Smith hailed from Wisconsin, on the other side of Lake Michigan. He was not averse to proving himself. Back home in Neillsville, Wisconsin, the Badger State Telephone and Telegraph was a family-owned business, and Smith was the boss’s kid. His father rode him hard, too. The elder Smith expected his son to earn the front office by digging postholes, setting poles, trimming trees, and stringing wire and cable with the line crew.

  Now he would have to prove himself again. The junior officers and the grunts were watching closely to see if he was up to the task.

  Two things they did know was that Smith was a stutterer, and he had a volatile temper. The guys mocked him behind his back.

  “Look out for St-St-St-St-Stutterin’ Smith. He’ll ch-ch-ch-chew your ass right out.”

  According to Erwin Veneklase, “when Smith was really mad, the stutter completely disappeared.” The guys of the 126th learned to listen for the stutter as a kind of barometer of Smith’s mood. Nobody wanted to be dressed down by “Stutterin’” Smith.

  On April 7, Colonel Lawrence Quinn, the popular commanding officer of the 126th Infantry, tried to impress upon his men the importance of their mission.

  “Our path will not be smooth,” he said. “We have much to do in the way of training to attain the goal we have set for ourselves—a rugged, powerful, hard-hitting, fast-maneuvering infantry team…But what we lack in perfection we more than make up for in espirit de corps…Our destination is secret; and, except for curiosity, is unimportant. What is important, however, is the fact that we are on our way to meet the enemy. War is a grim business. It is a killer business…Should you experience difficulty developing this desire to kill, you have but to recall what we are fighting for—our homes, our loved ones, our freedom, the right to live as we please.”

  On April 8 at 5:40 a.m., thirteen freight trains and twenty-five passenger trains departed Fort Devens. The railroad yard, according to one of General Edwin Forrest Harding’s staff officers, was a “madhouse.” Harding, the 32nd Division’s new commander, and most of his staff had left for San Francisco almost two weeks earlier. They would be waiting when the men arrived.

  Despite Colonel Quinn’s stirring speech, when the train rolled west, few of the men felt the impending doom of battle. The bombing of Pearl Harbor was four months old, and the Japanese had not followed up with other attacks on the American mainland. The men were being shipped off to war—they knew that—but how that war would manifest itself was impossible for them to imagine. As they boarded the train, they shot the bull and joked as if the train ride were just another chance to play cards, pull practical jokes, and see the sights.

  Outside of a small cadre of officers, no one knew where the trains were headed. They traveled west via Albany and Buffalo and reached Chicago twenty-four hours later. In Chicago, they stopped so repairs could be made to one of the locomotives. It would be a while before they were moving again, so the men were allowed to disembark to stretch their legs.

  They were all curious—just where in the hell were they headed? That’s when a sergeant recognized a relative in the train yard. He slipped by the guards at the depot platform who had been posted there to stop the soldiers, for security reasons, from talking to anyone and said, “C’mon, give me the skinny.”

  As the train headed for Kansas City, the word circulated among the troops.

  “Oakland,” Jastrzembski heard one of
the guys say. “We’re headed for goddamn Oakland. I wonder what that means? One thing’s for sure, we ain’t going to Europe to fight the Krauts.”

  In Oklahoma, the train stopped and the men took a half-mile run. By noon, it was bound for Clovis in the flat grasslands of eastern New Mexico. En route, Captain Medendorp gave a lecture on Japanese weapons.

  Afterward the guys got together in small groups. “That’s it. Now it’s for sure. It’s the Nips; we’re going to fight the Nips. Those sons-a-bitches.”

  If the men were headed to “fight the Nips,” no one was in a hurry to get them there. The route to Oakland via the desert Southwest was a puzzling one to say the least. In Winslow and Seligman, Arizona, they disembarked and were ordered to run again. Then there was the train itself; the farther west it got, the slower it traveled. Inexplicably, it was given low-priority status and lost “rail rights” to trains hauling freight.

  As far as Simon Warmenhoven was concerned, the train could crawl to the coast. The farther he got from Michigan, the farther he was from Mandy and his daughters. Besides, he loved the West’s wild country, the canyons, and the Painted Desert. At one of the Arizona stops, he bought his two daughters each an Indian doll and his wife a Navajo purse. Like some of the other officers, Warmenhoven was lucky enough to be on one of the passenger trains, traveling in style. He ate well, was assigned a sleeping car, and even had stewards to turn down his bed. It sure beat the way he used to get cross-country. In college, he made his way from Sunnyside, Washington, to Grand Rapids, Michigan, on filthy sheep trains. For a free ride, he watered the sheep at stops and herded them back onto the cars.