The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea--The Forgotten War of the South Pacific (23 page)

Colonel Clarence Tomlinson, the new commander of the 126th, was equally puzzled by the news that his regiment would be fighting with the Australians. He tried to reach Harding, but failed to make radio contact. Unwilling to move without confirmation, he radioed Port Moresby instead. Port Moresby informed him that the order was legitimate, and early on November 20 Tomlinson set out for Popondetta, accompanied by Captain Boice. Late that afternoon, Tomlinson and Boice reported to General Vasey. Vasey, in turn, sent Tomlinson and Boice and the entire 126th on to Soputa.

Late in the afternoon on November 20, after slopping through thick mud for more than half a day, the 126th arrived at Soputa and received their orders. They would have a day of rest and on November 22 they would be committed to battle. Though wet and hungry, they were still feeling cocky—they would show the Australians how to fight! The exhausted Australians, whom they had been sent in to relieve, could have been offended by their brazenness; instead, they merely smiled knowingly. Dudley McCarthy, an Australian historian who witnessed the arrival of the Americans, wrote that, “…the Australians were content to sit back for a while and watch the Americans. There was a very real interest in their observation and a certain sardonic but concealed amusement. The Americans had told some of them that they ‘could go home now’ as they (the Americans) ‘were here to clean things up.’”

The following day Tomlinson and Captain Boice scouted the front, and that evening met with the 126th’s battalion commanders to discuss plans for the next morning’s attack. Their only map was a vague, sub-par, one-inch-to-one-mile sheet, which did not contain descriptions of the terrain ahead, so the advance was going to require a good amount of guesswork. Tomlinson and Boice were certain of one thing, though: The fighting was not going to be easy. Heavy jungle and swamp lay at the junction of the Soputa-Buna and Soputa-Sanananda tracks west of the Girua River, and the Japanese were dug in and waiting.

Chapter 13

A P
OOR
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AN’S
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AR

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ITH NO SHORTAGE OF
bad news coming from the front, MacArthur’s publicity team in Port Moresby was busy creating a message that had almost no basis in reality. The same day the 126th arrived at Soputa, MacArthur’s communiqué read, “Our ground forces have rapidly closed in now and pinned the enemy down on the narrow coastal strip from Buna to Gona. We are fighting on the outskirts of both places.”

As if convinced by his own PR, MacArthur issued orders calling for a full-scale advance on the Buna-Sanananda-Gona Front early the following morning. “All columns,” he said, were to be “driven through to objectives regardless of losses.” The message that General Harding received from MacArthur read: “Take Buna Today At All Costs. MacArthur.”

Harding could not believe his eyes. His 128th was up against thousands of Japanese troops, blistering fire, log bunkers, and a huge swamp that limited his army’s mobility. His 126th had been stolen from him. He had no artillery and he was dealing with a supply crisis. His luggers and trawlers had been sunk off Hariko, and the Dobodura airstrip was not yet fully functional. He was operating on what he called a “hand-to-mouth, catch-as-catch-can basis.” It was not the way to run a war, much less win it.

As if the terrain was not tough enough, equipment failures made his problems worse. Radios used by mortar platoons to coordinate firing did not work. Because of their short fuses, the few 81 mm mortars that made it to the front had almost no effect on the Japanese bunkers because they blew up on impact. Harding was also to have received a number of tanks, but Murphy’s Law prevailed—when the tanks were loaded onto barges at Oro Bay, the barges sank. Harding had no options but to take the bunkers out “by hand.”

Harding was also deeply concerned about casualties. In just three days of fighting, he had lost sixty-three men, and in one day of fighting alone, a single battalion suffered forty-one killed and wounded. Now MacArthur wanted him to take Buna regardless of the costs. Harding knew that if he followed orders he would be sentencing hundreds of Red Arrow soldiers to a certain death. “I know as well as anybody that you can’t win battles without getting a lot of people hurt,” Harding wrote in his diary. “But I also know…that infantry can’t break through an automatic weapons defense without first knocking out the automatic weapons. Anyone who knows his World War stuff knows that.” What Harding did next was to tell his officers that they were to push the offensive only as long as the progress they made justified the losses. Progress in the jungle, though, was tough to calculate. Was it a hundred feet, two hundred? Harding let his officers be the judges. He would accept the responsibility for defying MacArthur’s orders.

After three days of disappointment, General Harding needed good news, and it came with a pick-me-up late in the day on November 21. After the loss of his 126th Regiment, Harding had been troubled about the state of his left flank, and practically begged Lieutenant General Edmund Herring to return a portion of his men. Having taken over for General Rowell, who had been dismissed by Blamey in late September, Herring was now commander of all Australian and American forces in New Guinea. Herring agreed to Harding’s request and instructed General Vasey to pick a battalion to turn over to Harding for action east of the Girua River. For Vasey it was an easy choice: He selected Major Smith’s 2nd Battalion, the Ghost Mountain boys, who everyone seemed to agree had been done in by their 130-mile march across the Papuan Peninsula.

Smith’s men were weary and filthy, and their dirty uniforms hung loosely on their gaunt frames. They looked more like haggard Depression-era hobos than fighting men. But at least Harding had another battalion with which to work.

Early on the morning of November 22, Colonel Tomlinson pulled Smith aside.

“Good luck, Herbie,” Tomlinson said, “and get the hell out of here before the bastards change their mind.”

Smith took Tomlinson’s warning to heart and he and his men double-timed it for the Girua River crossing.

By late morning the 2nd Battalion was at the riverbank. It had only been a few days since they last forded it, but during that interval, fed by recent rains, the river had risen dangerously. Someone volunteered to swim the hundred yards and run a cable across the river, but moving the battalion across the river even with the use of the cable was a risky proposition. If surprised by a Japanese patrol while attempting to cross, they would be defenseless.

The battalion’s luck held, however, and by evening Smith’s men crossed the Girua without a single mishap. But if any of them had convinced themselves that their fortunes had changed, they soon discovered otherwise. Smith’s orders were to join the 2nd Battalion of the 128th Infantry Regiment at the Triangle. Of all the Japanese strongholds, the Triangle may have been the most impenetrable. For a group of men that had already undergone a seeming lifetime of misery, this was the worst possible assignment.

Along with naval pioneer troops, Captain Yasuda had over eighteen hundred men defending the Triangle. Yasuda had a series of superbly hidden machine gun positions south and north of the Triangle on the Dobodura-Buna track, the only man-made route to the Buna coast. In the Triangle itself, Japanese engineers had built an elaborate system of bunkers. In the Coconut Grove and Government Gardens just to the north and northeast of the Triangle, the engineers had designed more bunkers. Everything else was covered in swamp.

Smith and his Ghost Mountain Battalion reached the Triangle on the morning of November 23, and learned that the two battalions would come under the heading of Urbana Force (named after I Corps commander General Robert Eichelberger’s Ohio hometown) to be commanded by another Smith—Colonel Herbert A. Smith.

Thirty-nine days after leaving Nepeana on the other side of the mountains, Stutterin’ Smith’s Ghost Mountain boys were about to be blooded.

West of the Girua River on the Sanananda Front, Colonel Tomlinson was being asked to lead an attack despite the fact that he had just lost Stutterin’ Smith and the 2nd Battalion. He was now in command of only fourteen hundred troops, which included only one full battalion—the 3rd Battalion of the 126th Infantry Regiment.

Tomlinson’s troops spent the last week in November trying to get in position to establish a roadblock behind the main enemy position on the Sanananda track. His troops, their faces smeared with green camouflage paint, took to the swamps to the west and east of the track, but with little training in patrolling, inaccurate maps, and no lateral trails, they often lost their bearings. Colonel Tsukamoto and hundreds of fresh 144th Infantry replacements, relying on savage nighttime raids, caught Tomlinson’s tired, disoriented troops off guard. Casualties were heavy.

While Tomlinson’s troops tried to work in behind the Japanese, William Hirashima strove to make himself useful. He went out on patrols where he risked being shot by soldiers from both sides. Japanese snipers wanted to shoot him because he wore an American uniform and Americans would shoot him because he looked Japanese. Hirashima also negotiated with a wounded Japanese machine gunner who was stranded in a field. To do that, he had to walk out ahead of the frontline troops. He was completely exposed and only sixty yards separated him from the Japanese soldier. He could have been gunned down before he had a chance to utter his first word.

Hirashima shouted to the soldier. Was he willing to surrender? Just then a shot rang from the jungle. A Japanese sniper had spotted him. Hirashima dove into a nearby trench. He waited for a few minutes before crawling out. It had been a close call, but Colonel Tomlinson still wanted him to try to talk with the machine gunner. To take a prisoner so early in the battle would be a real stroke of luck; who knew what they might learn?

Hirashima agreed to try again. Seeing ahead of him a little rise, he decided to make for it. It would be dangerous, but the soldier needed to be able to hear him. Half expecting to hear a crack from the jungle and to feel a bullet tear into his belly, he stood on top of the rise and tried to coax the machine gunner out of hiding, saying he would be treated kindly. The soldier, though, was reluctant. Surrender was the ultimate disgrace.

Just then another shot ripped through the trees. Hirashima threw himself to the ground. He had been lucky; the sniper had missed again. No more pushing it though—the third bullet was bound to find its mark.

That day Hirashima thought he had proved his loyalty, but he still wondered if his fellow soldiers trusted him. Guys muttered under their breath: Whose side was he on? They better watch their backs. He looked like a goddamn Jap.

Captain Medendorp’s Cannon and Antitank Companies, which were considered to be part of Tomlinson’s fourteen hundred men, were in the vicinity of Wairopi. Since crossing the mountains, they had spent the last month in the Kumusi River valley on what Medendorp called “hell raising” patrols, essentially guerilla activity that, according to Medendorp, consisted of “playing hide and seek with the Japs.” Medendorp was still suffering from a badly ulcerated leg and in the past few weeks he had been racked by malarial fevers. His men were no better off. The “sick,” he wrote, “were struggling along with their arms thrown over the shoulders of friends walking on each side of them.” There was no time for them to recuperate, though. Tomlinson was in need of men.

Before Medendorp began marching toward the Sanananda Front, he and Captain Keast paid off the native carriers and scouts who had so ably assisted them on their patrols. Medendorp wrote later, “The parting was very sad.”

Medendorp’s consolation was that he and Keast had been reunited. Medendorp later wrote, “It was a greater pleasure than I can tell you to see Roger again when I climbed up that last hill into the village. He was smiling from behind his beard.” Waiting for his knee to mend, Keast had been tending the dropsite at Laruni while Medendorp scouted the Kumusi River valley.

On November 25, Medendorp, Keast, and the Wairopi Patrol began marching, but as they neared the front, Medendorp was slowed by the ulcer on his leg, so Keast went ahead to establish contact with Tomlinson. Moving in the opposite direction, however, away from the battlefield, were groups of natives “carrying stretcher after stretcher” of wounded Americans. It was an unnerving sight for Medendorp’s troops. Among the wounded they recognized friends. The natives, straining and sweating under their loads, treated the casualties with great compassion. Medendorp would later write, “There was no jostling. It was a symphony of movement. If the wounded man was too far gone to hold a banana leaf to shade his eyes from the sun…then a native walked behind a stretcher holding a broad leaf over the man’s eyes…. Their [the natives’] shoulders were sore and bandaged, and fatigue showed on their blank faces, still they trudged on like a stream of ants.”

Soon, the Wairopi Patrol heard rifle and machine gun fire, the explosions of mortars and “high overhead the soft sigh of…shells on their way to blast the enemy.” It was “sweet music” to Medendorp. But the Japanese were returning fire, too. When that noise “developed a lower pitch and became harsh and severe, like a buzz saw going through a knot,” Medendorp knew it was time to dive for cover.

Medendorp finally reached Tomlinson’s command post. Keast informed him that after a series of setbacks—just two days before they had lost more than a hundred men killed or wounded—Colonel Tomlinson, a hard-nosed West Pointer, had scheduled his largest attack yet for the morning of November 30. Medendorp was relieved by the news of the delay. He and his men badly needed a day of rest.

The day before the attack, Colonel Tomlinson pulled aside Medendorp and Keast to discuss plans for the following day’s attack. Tomlinson’s shirt was streaked with sweat and salt. He had large rings under his armpits and a skunk-like band that ran from his neck to the small of his back.

“There’s only about half a dozen Japs out there,” Tomlinson roared. “Three of those have dysentery and the other three fever! They move one machine gun from place to place. Our men are green, and they think that every bullet has their name on it. We must teach them to keep on advancing as long as they are not exactly being fired at. After hitting the ground they must learn to get up and get along. Now get in there and do your part in cleaning them out, or I’ll just have to tell the Australian general in command on this front that our regiment cannot accomplish its mission.”