The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea--The Forgotten War of the South Pacific (12 page)

Back up the trail, the Australians made plans for their counterattack. Three battalions began the advance on September 26. They came down off Imita Ridge, forded the Goldie River, and took up positions near Ioribaiwa Ridge, holding tightly to its plunging slopes. The following night, September 27, they shelled the Japanese position.

Early the next morning, the Australians started their advance. An air of uncertainty hung over the army. Company commanders were mystified by the absence of Japanese resistance. As they moved forward, the men felt a combination of excitement and dread. What kind of trap had the Japanese army laid?

A few hours later, unsure of what awaited them, two Australian companies scrambled up Ioribaiwa Ridge. The Japanese were gone. Tomitaro Horii’s army was in full retreat, bound for the Buna-Sanananda beachhead. Fleeing soldiers struggled to reach the scanty food reserves farther back along the supply line. In blinding downpours, they stumbled along, tripping and falling over Australian corpses. Strafed throughout the day by Allied planes, they made no pretense of fighting back.

The Australian counteroffensive began in earnest on October 3 with a visit from General MacArthur. With war correspondents close by, MacArthur sat in his jeep above the Goldie River Valley, looking proud and undaunted. As the men of the 16th Brigade marched by, he took the brigade’s commander aside:

“Lloyd,” he said, calling the officer by his first name, “by some act of God your brigade has been chosen for this job. The eyes of the Western world are upon you. I have every confidence in you and your men. Good luck and don’t stop.” Then MacArthur’s driver turned the jeep around. The following day, MacArthur was on his way back to Brisbane. His first visit to New Guinea had lasted hardly more than a day, his first visit to the troops barely an hour.

Chapter 8

M
ARCHING INTO THE
C
LOUDS

O
CTOBER
6, 1942. As Captain Jim Boice was lying low in the mountain village of Jaure on the north side of the Owen Stanley divide, he scribbled a note in his diary: “Lonesome for back home. Rain and rest.”

If Boice was enjoying a rare moment of self-congratulation, the situation warranted it. He had just led a reconnaissance team for seventeen days across the mountains via an obscure trail that the Americans came to call the Kapa Kapa, which no one other than native hunters and a 1917 government patrol had ever walked.

The Australians had counseled MacArthur against using Boice’s route, and the Australians knew what they were talking about. They had been locked in a death grip with the Japanese on the Kokoda since late July, a campaign made fiercer by the terrain. But the Kokoda was what the Australians called a “track.” A difficult, but established trail, it served as a government mail route, stretching from outside Port Moresby north across the Owen Stanley Mountains.

Since inheriting Papua from the British in 1906, the Australians had explored portions of the Papuan Peninsula, imposing a kind of Pax Australiana over the territory. According to its twenty-five-year-old colonial patrol report, the terrain over which MacArthur proposed to send a battalion, and possibly an entire regiment, though only thirty miles east of the Kokoda track, traversed much rougher country. The trail was too rugged, they said, the rivers too fast, and the mountain passes too high.

If anyone had the guts to scout a trail across the Papuan Peninsula, it was Jim Boice.

Boice did not look the part of a pioneer. He was a nearly bald, plain-looking man, and at thirty-eight, he was hardly young. He was also one of General Harding’s favorites: intelligent, confident but unpretentious, undersized but tough, as Harding himself was. In fact, Boice was so small that he had been afraid that the army would reject him. One week before his physical he stuffed himself with food and water to make the Army’s minimum weight requirement.

Boice liked the look of Jaure. With its large meadow, he knew it would be ideal for airdrops. The jungle had been a dense mesh of trees, leaves, vines, and fronds, but here, for the first time in weeks, the forest opened up and he could see in every direction. Flocks of white parrots, mountain pigeons, and green lorikeets flashed across the sky. Hawks and swiftlets cruised on updrafts.

Two days earlier, after sending a runner with his trail notes back toward Gabagaba, Boice radioed the divisional command post. The route across the mountains, roughly eighty miles from the coast, as the crow flies, was “taxing,” he said, “but practicable.”

Although Jim Boice may have been a reflective man, neither his message nor his diary offers many clues about how tough the trek really was. The reality was that by the time his small patrol reached the Owen Stanleys, the trail lost six hundred feet for every thousand feet it gained, climbing steeply up mountainsides, then plunging at sixty-degree angles into surrounding valleys. Some days, hiking from dawn till dusk, Boice and his men covered no more than two miles, though progress was difficult to measure because Boice’s map included only approximate distances. It was so cold in the mountains that they would have to worry about hypothermia. The airdrops that they depended on were days late and inaccurate, and much food that the crews pushed out of the planes was lost to the jungle.

By the time they reached Jaure, Boice’s feet were swollen and sore, and it was impossible for him to get his boots off. For two and a half weeks he had hiked in them, crossed rivers in them, and slept in them. Now the leather seemed glued to his feet. If he yanked at the heel, his skin felt as if it would tear. Finally, out of frustration, he may have taken his knife and cut slits in the leather to relieve the pressure. It did not matter; the boots were worthless anyway. They were rotting off his feet. Until the next airdrop, he was better off going barefoot like the carriers.

On the evening of October 6, a cold mountain fog settled in, and the rain came down in icy, gray sheets. Boice huddled under his shelter half. He had been lucky. He had made it to Jaure through tangled rain forest and clouds of mosquitoes and sweat bees, across gushing rivers, and over the Owen Stanley spine, without a serious mishap. Considering that he knew nothing of the route before he set out, it was an amazing accomplishment. Now the mountains lay behind him surrounded by clouds.

As was his habit, Boice removed two photos from a tin rations box. One of the photos was of Billy sitting in a Scout Flyer wagon. The other was of Zelma, Billy, and the family dog standing in the front yard of their Swayzee home. Boice held the photos in his hands until his fingers grew cold, then put them back in the rations box and took his diary out of his pack. Boice stored the diary in a large sheet of tinfoil. It was a small black pocketbook version that his wife Zelma had given him at Fort Devens. Boice set it on his lap and pulled out his prized fountain pen, the pen he had used to mark his high school students’ papers back in Swayzee, Indiana. Swayzee: Even the name sounded breezy, slow-paced, and peaceful.

No matter how miserable he was, no matter how short the entry, Boice was dutiful about writing. He liked the feeling of the diary in his hands. Just to hold it seemed to fill him with Zelma’s love. And the act of writing allowed him to conjure walking with Zelma through the quiet neighborhood while Billy slept in his arms and friends sat on their front porches sipping lemonade in the still, hot summer air. It enabled Boice to live, if only for a moment, in his former life.

With Boice’s message that the Kapa Kapa trail was “taxing, but practicable,” MacArthur’s plan for an overland advance on Buna was ready to be put into motion. The crux of the plan was this: The 250-man Wairopi Patrol, under Captain Alfred Medendorp’s command, would set out first. It would be followed by troops from the 126th Infantry Regiment, with the regiment’s 2nd Battalion leading the way. From the Australians’ experiences on the Kokoda track, the U.S. Army knew that a large group of soldiers could not rely on carriers alone. They got sick, they deserted, they needed food. Medendorp’s job, therefore, was to establish drop sites along the route that pilots could easily identify. He and his men would also be counted on to clear the trail of Japanese interference. The 2nd Battalion did not need to be fighting its way north across the mountains.

MacArthur originally wanted the 126th to penetrate and cross the Owen Stanleys, cut west, and sneak in at the rear of the Japanese on the Kokoda track, where it would ambush Horii’s army, cut off his supply line, or at the very least, hasten the Japanese army’s retreat to the north coast. Because of Boice’s report, however, MacArthur knew that he could never get a large number of troops over the mountains fast enough, so he amended his strategy. The 126th’s new mission was to reach Jaure and secure the Kumusi River valley west to Wairopi on the Buna-Kokoda track, a maneuver designed to cover the right flank of the advancing Australians. In time, the 126th would push north to the villages of Buna and Sanananda, where the Japanese army had established its coastal stronghold.

The blast-furnace heat was crippling. At Nepeana, Captain Alfred Medendorp stood in the shade of a coconut palm, trying to escape the sun, waiting for General Harding’s jeep to arrive.

Working from dawn till dusk, Company E and the 91st Engineers had slashed a road not just to Gobaregari, but another ten miles upriver to the village of Nepeana. Although the road, which Company E dubbed “Michigan Avenue,” was nothing more than a “peep trail,” a bone-jarring path that quarter-ton vehicles could negotiate, it allowed the Americans to transport supplies farther inland. The advance base was located just south of Gobaregari at Kalikodobu, which the Michigan boys, following a theme, called “Kalamazoo.” The name also brought to mind a favorite 1940s song—“I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo.”

Like Boice, Medendorp might have been trying to conjure images of home. Autumn in lower Michigan: the yellow-orange hickories shining in an electric blue sky; ducks in the sloughs; field corn ready to be picked; crisp nights and a big, shining harvest moon. He might have tucked in his shirt and massaged his hair into place. How absurd, to care about his looks in a place like New Guinea.

Growing up in his hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan, Medendorp had been regarded as a handsome ladies’ man. Unlike many other young men his age, his popularity with the opposite sex did not stem from his ability as an athlete. In fact his father, a Dutch immigrant, had never liked the brutality of football, and refused to let his son play on the high school team. Instead, Medendorp focused on music. He had a talent for it. Just out of high school he started a jazz band in which he played the saxophone and clarinet. At five foot eleven and 190 pounds, he was strong and built like an athlete, and he was proud of that. Dorothy Schutt was one of his many admirers. After meeting at a dance where Medendorp’s band played, they dated and a year later married.

Now, Medendorp and his men were preparing for the day’s march. In the blue-green haze, they yawned and stretched, and shaded their eyes from the glare of the tropical morning. A few were shaving. Who knew when they would get the chance again? Native carriers with vines tied around their ankles for traction shinnied up long, bare trunks to the tops of coconut trees, where they cut off coconuts and threw them down to waiting GIs.

Some of the other carriers, using fiber ropes, were tying bags of food to poles fashioned out of saplings, which they would carry on their shoulders, two men to a pole, one in front and one in back. An Australian sergeant barked at the carriers and told anyone willing to listen, “You gotta treat them with a firm hand, or they’ll run all over you.”

Medendorp had not had much experience with natives, but he had watched other Australians manage natives, and he knew that he did not like this sergeant’s style. Besides, he understood that the patrol, as he would later write, “depended on them utterly,” and they were to be treated as kindly as possible.

An old native man collected stray cigarette butts, taking a few remaining puffs. Other natives sat on their haunches passing a bamboo pipe in which they smoked a pungent trade tobacco. They were all fabulously decorated and tattooed, and the soldiers looked on as if they were watching an exotic movie; their eyes, according to Medendorp, “popped out at the sight.” The native men wore lap-laps—colorful skirts with a waistband and a small codpiece—shell earrings and strings of shells around their necks and woven bracelets of dyed fiber high on their muscular arms. Their teeth were stained a deep red from chewing betel nut. Their bare feet were broad and calloused. Pigs, the natives’ prized possessions, snorted and trotted around casually, as if they were used to having the run of the place. When the bony hunting dogs ventured too close, the men kicked at them and shooed them away. The native women and children remained out of sight.

The men of the Wairopi Patrol oiled their weapons and sorted through their fieldpacks. They moved in slow motion, already listless from the heat. Sergeant Ralph Schmidt watched them. Schmidt was a bear of a man who had grown up on a farm in Coopersville, Michigan. Baling hay, he could outwork any man in the county. If Medendorp needed to rely on someone to keep the men on their toes, it was him.

When General Harding arrived in Nepeana by jeep over Michigan Avenue, he, like everyone who tried to negotiate the road, was splattered with mud and dripping sweat. No matter; he was eager to hear of the patrol’s ten-mile march from Kalikodobu to Nepeana. Medendorp did not intend to paint a pretty picture; he knew that Harding would want the unvarnished truth.

Medendorp told General Harding that for many of his men the trail had been a nightmare. The men of the Wairopi Patrol carried eighty pounds from “the skin out”: the clothes on their backs, their backpacks, ten-pound M-1 rifles, two bandoliers of ammunition, and pineapple grenades. It was too much weight. Under a battering tropical sun, through jungle and rolling savanna country with mosquitoes teeming in the long grass, they walked sluggishly. Nothing in their training—no twenty-five-mile hike through the tablelands of Australia, no Louisiana Maneuvers—could have prepared them for the strain of it.