Above the Thunder (23 page)

We listened, and maybe there were some in our large group who responded to the lecture as the officer desired—but I was not one of
those. In fact, I was repelled by the brutality of his words and actions, especially by his desecration of the bones of this Japanese soldier who had honorably fought and died under the flag of his country, who was probably a beloved son, perhaps a husband and father, in any case a human being who in death deserved at least the dignity of a decent disposal of his remains. After the lecture, I talked about it with a number of men, and every one of them felt the same as I did. In the rest of that war and two other wars following it, I still could not find it in myself to actually hate individual enemy soldiers, who merely tried to do their duty as it was given to them. But I know quite well that there are veterans of that war who not only hated the Japanese then but continued to hate them—as if each Japanese soldier were not just as helplessly caught up in the war as we were ourselves.

I happened to be at Finschhafen one day when an LST arrived with a load of Japanese POWs from Hollandia, where the 24th Division had taken control. There were about 250 of them seated in a natural depression in the ground, surrounded by guards. I was told that these were the survivors of a much greater number that had started the trip. En route, some had died of sickness or wounds, and many had committed suicide, most by jumping overboard. This was their escape from what they considered the disgrace of surrender—or perhaps they feared the terrible death they had been told awaited them if captured by the Americans.

The prisoners seemed completely beaten and dejected, many looked sick, and all sat looking at the ground—all except one, who was right in the middle of the group, sitting on a log. He gazed around defiantly at the guards and the curious bystanders like me, and his eyes burned like fire with hate. Maybe if I had experienced what that man had, I could have learned to hate, too.

There is nothing at all in my memory about our leaving Fortification Point, but we did, sometime along about the end of August 1944. I recall being aboard an LST, one of several that were shoving through sunny blue seas toward the northwest along New Guinea's long coast, while off to port was a bank of clouds beneath which I could see wet, forested hills. One of those people who always knows told me that we were in the vicinity of Wewak and Aitape.

The decks of the LST were crowded with the various vehicles of the 122d, each carefully laden in accordance with loading plans long before worked out by the brains of the battalion to be certain there was a proper place for everything, ready to be found and put into use with the least delay upon our arrival at our destination. Among the vehicles were the men, and somewhere aboard were two wooden crates containing two Piper L-4 airplanes.

On a fair afternoon the little convoy hove to a few hundred yards from shore at the eastern end of a long and shallow indentation of the coast called Maffin Bay. About ten or twelve miles farther up, the bay terminated at a blunt little peninsula on which lay the remnants of the town of Sarmi. The locale lay in that half of New Guinea that then
belonged to the Netherlands but is today a part of Indonesia. It was to be here that elements of the Golden Cross Division, the 33d, would meet the enemy for the first time.

But not the entire division. The 123d Infantry and the 122d FA Bn formed the nucleus of a task force. There were small reinforcing elements from Engineer, Quartermaster, Signal, Ordnance, and Medical Reconnaissance Troop, among other groups, to enable the task force to operate independently of the division, and Btry B, 123d FA Bn, was attached to provide the longer range and harder punch of its 155 mm howitzers under control of the 122d. The whole thing was commanded by the 33d's assistant division commander, Brig. Gen. Donald Myers.

Other divisions—the 41st, 6th, and 31st—had already fought the hardest part of the war at Maffin Bay. The 41st and the 6th had been relieved to go on to other tasks. Now we were to relieve the 31st Division so it could prepare itself for the invasion of Morotai. The Japanese forces remaining in the area, however, could not be left to themselves, since they were quite capable of delivering artillery fire, if nothing more, against Wakde Air Base, which lay on a small island just off Maffin Bay. Therefore our mission was, first, to cover and assist the withdrawal of the 31st and, second, then to maintain the security of the Wakde air base to ensure its continued operation.

On 1 September, the enemy at Maffin Bay was well aware that a relief operation was in progress, so he took advantage of the excellent opportunity to pull off the best attack he could against the 31st. Anticipating that event, the 31st had strong patrols out, and as we arrived off the perimeter that afternoon we could see the fighting in progress up the beach beyond the Woske River. We could see a tank burning, and, nearer at hand, smoke was rising from a burning supply dump.

I don't remember going ashore, but a few hours later there was HQ Btry sitting on a big sandbar on the east side of the mouth of the sluggish Tor River. It was late in the day by then, and it had been decided that we would bivouac there for the night rather than try to set up in the darkness of the jungle that crowded the beach. We began to gather driftwood and improvise supports for our jungle hammocks in anticipation of a night of rest.

The jungle hammock incorporated in one item not only a hammock but also a roof and a mosquito bar into which one entered through a zippered opening. It offered reasonably comfortable repose, secure from mosquitoes, other insects, and rain. This was our first experience with them—and I don't think I ever used mine again.

I was fortunate to find some good pieces of drift and soon had my hammock securely slung above the loose, dry sand. With the lulling sound of the rolling surf nearby, it seemed to promise a night of pleasant repose. But for me this was not to be.

There was some sort of a general plan, as I understood, to furnish one case of beer per month to each soldier in our division and, I suppose, other divisions in this hot, humid, and utterly uncivilized part of the world—assuming, of course, that the soldier wanted it. But the 33d had been down there now for several months without having received the first bottle of brew. It just so happened that two or three months' ration for our troops had arrived at Base F just in time to join our convoy for Maffin Bay, and now the small freighter was given priority at the solitary small dock to unload the beer and then to reload with cargo of the outgoing 31st Division. My job, whether or not I might choose to accept it, was to supervise the unloading and proper distribution of that shipload of beer.

For the task, I was given a six-by-six truck and a platoon of infantry. Besides a driver and assistant driver, I put four armed guards on each truck as it was loaded and proceeded along the dark, rutted, muddy roads through the thinned-out jungle inside the perimeter to find the unit for which the load was destined. Some of the detail worked in the hold, filling the cargo net, while others were on the dock, loading the trucks. I moved about the ship and the dock, doing what I could to prevent the theft of the entire cargo. Members of the ship's crew would sneak cases into remote areas of their vessel; our own men would hide cases on the wooden bracing under the dock; men on the trucks, including the guards, would divert cases of beer to their own personal or their units' interests; and other cases simply vanished into thin air. This went on all night, and when all accounts were considered, it was estimated that the equivalent of one truckload of beer had failed to reach any known destination in the task force.

122d Field Artillery Battalion Air Section at beach strip near Tor River, Maffin Bay, Dutch New Guinea, 1944. From left, standing: Don Vineyard and Raymond Kerns; kneeling: Wendell Young, Kennis Allen, and Eddie Janes holding the section's K-20 camera (Photograph by Ted Kinsch).

It was dawn when the beer job was done and I returned to our bivouac on the sandbar, to a scene of utter disaster. For reasons known only to those who understand the ways of the sea, the combination of tide and surf during the night had swept suddenly through the camp. Men sleeping snugly inside their zipped-up hammocks were rudely awakened by being plunged into chilly saltwater as their improvised driftwood supports collapsed. In the darkness and confusion, many hammocks were severely ripped as soldiers struggled to get out of them. Shoes and clothing, web equipment and weapons left outside the hammocks were scattered, buried, soaked; and in the gray morning light, bedraggled and disconsolate soldiers wandered about, trying to collect their belongings. My unoccupied hammock had come down, too, and I joined the dismal search.

But before the day was over, HQ Btry was properly encamped in its pyramidal tents among the huge trees just off the beach a short distance east of the Tor. Right in front of the camp, Vin and I selected a stretch
of beach to be our airstrip, and the boys uncrated and assembled our planes. Initially, they slept in the crates, but before long they, too, had a tent, and we used the crates as a workshop and for storing air section gear and supplies. To keep off the surf, we built a low sandbag dike along the seaward side of our strip. And we took to the air.

There was no such thing as a briefing or an orientation by 31st Division pilots who had been flying in the area. Vin and I simply began feeling our way. We did know that the Woske River, a winding, muddy, sullen stream a quarter mile west of our nearest perimeter positions, was essentially the boundary between “us” and “them.” Crossing the Woske, we—each on his own—flew on up the shoreline another three miles or so to the Sawar Airdrome, occupied by the enemy but no longer used for flying. Its runway and dispersal areas were overgrown with tall grass. At the far end of the airdrome was a swampy little creek for which it was named, and another mile brought us to the nose of a low plateau called Mount Haako—which marked about the limit of the seven-mile range of our 105s. Beyond Mount Haako, some ten miles from our airstrip, was a seven-hundred acre clearing split down the middle by a dirt road that intersected the beach road perhaps two miles from the ruins of Sarmi. That was the Foe Maoe Plantation.

We explored up the Tor and the Woske, with their mud bars and their numerous crocodiles, their overhanging jungle, and occasional black natives in dugout canoes. Away from the shore, the deep jungle was unbroken except by rare small clearings and, in one area, a cluster of small black-mud knolls kept barren by the feet of natives who lived there and who scattered like flushed quail into the jungle as we flew over. A few miles up that way was a jungle-covered eminence called Mount Aftawadona, a position the Japanese stubbornly defended in an effort to keep open an escape route for their survivors of the battle for Hollandia.

In the relatively open coastal areas, I saw many shell holes and bomb craters, many destroyed trucks, a few wrecked tanks and airplanes, and various areas where trenches and foxholes had been dug and bunkers constructed. In many of the places where shells or bombs had thrown up fresh earth, the Japanese troops were raising little vegetable gardens. But I flew for a week without seeing a single man of the two thousand
troops the enemy was thought to have left in the area. If Vin spotted one during that time, he said nothing to me about it. Meanwhile, our expanding explorations had taken us well beyond the range of our guns, not because we were asked to go but simply because we were curious.

I was flying over the Foe Maoe Plantation about a week after we arrived on the scene. It was late afternoon and the sun was shining, casting long shadows from the few posts still standing along the line of an old fence on one side of the plantation road. And then I suddenly realized that the shadow of one of those posts seemed to indicate that the post was split at the bottom and set into two holes, although it was just one post farther up. The truth finally bored its way through my skull: I was looking at a Japanese soldier!

He was the first one I'd ever seen in the wild. I had made a breakthrough, of a kind, in my career as an observer, and I was really excited about it. But there was no way I could attack him, out there even beyond range of the attached 155s. Nevertheless, I felt a compulsion to let him know that I had discovered him, so I dove right down at him as if I intended to scoop him up with my landing gear. As soon as it became evident to him that I had seen him, the Japanese—and two other nearby fence posts—dived for the roadside ditch. I passed low over them and then headed for home, exulting as if I'd won a great victory.