The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea--The Forgotten War of the South Pacific (28 page)

Chapter 15

T
HE
B
UTCHER’S
B
ILL

B
ACK AT DOBODURA, GENERAL HARDING
had just gotten the news of Stutterin’ Smith’s success. In the big picture, the breakthrough did not amount to much. Buna Village and Buna Government Station had not been touched. With the rest of the 126th—the 1st and 3rd Battalions were still fighting alongside the Australians west of the Girua River—Harding figured that he might have been able to overwhelm the Japanese. But without a numerical advantage, he would have to continue probing their positions for a weak spot. It was a slow, costly business that was bound to keep the grave diggers busy.

On the coast, his 128th Infantry Regiment was bogged down, too. Though Colonel Mott had shaken things up by relieving two officers, the change did nothing to affect the tactical situation. The Japanese were dug in too well. Only tanks or more troops would change that.

Earlier that morning, as Stutterin’ Smith’s troops pressed the attack, General Sutherland flew in from Port Moresby and Australia’s General Herring came in from Popondetta to meet with Harding. Though they had ostensibly come to discuss battle strategies, from Harding’s perspective, the generals had already reached their own conclusions. Sitting on empty ammunition boxes under a small grove of trees at the edge of a kunai field, neither Sutherland nor Herring appeared very interested in listening. But Harding continued to press the issue. Having already argued for tanks and artillery, he asked for the 127th Infantry, which had arrived in Port Moresby on Thanksgiving Day. He reminded the generals that he barely had a third of his 126th Regiment.

By lunchtime, Herring was on his way back to Popondetta. Sutherland, though, stayed on. He and Harding were making small talk when suddenly Sutherland dropped his bomb: MacArthur, he said, was “worried about the caliber of his infantry” and the aggressiveness of its officers. Sutherland wanted to know how Harding intended to rectify the situation. The general bluntly defended his men. Anyone, he said, who thought that his troops were not fighting “didn’t know the facts.” Sutherland then asked him if he intended to replace any of his top officers. Harding replied that he did not.

Sutherland had heard enough. That afternoon he returned to Port Moresby and recommended to MacArthur that he relieve Harding of his duties. What was lacking at Buna, Sutherland said, was not artillery, troops, tanks, or planes. What was missing was inspired leadership. That Sutherland had not even been to the front lines to assess the situation did not prevent him from commenting on Harding’s alleged inability to motivate his men. Harding would later say that Sutherland’s report to MacArthur must have been a “masterpiece of imaginative writing.”

MacArthur had already ordered Major General Robert L. Eichelberger, I Corps commander, to report to him in Port Moresby. MacArthur had great faith in the general. If anyone could remedy the situation at Buna, it was Bob Eichelberger.

Though he had never commanded troops in battle, Eichelberger’s résumé was top-notch. Early in his career, he had served in Panama and on the U.S.-Mexico border. Later, at the tail end of World War I, while assigned to the American Expeditionary Force in Siberia, he had been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for acts of bravery. Having attended the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth and the Army War College, after which he became superintendent of West Point, Eichelberger possessed superb leadership and organizational skills and a keen understanding of military theory.

On November 29 when MacArthur summoned him, Eichelberger was at Rockhampton, Australia, training the 41st Division in jungle warfare. Early the next morning, as Sutherland was on his way to Dobodura to talk with Harding, Eichelberger boarded a plane for Port Moresby.

At MacArthur’s headquarters, Eichelberger and his chief of staff found MacArthur with Generals Kenney and Sutherland. Sutherland had already told MacArthur of his meeting with Harding, and it took only a moment for Eichelberger to discern MacArthur’s mood. Almost before Eichelberger sat down, MacArthur was talking heatedly, striding up and down the veranda, holding his pipe like a weapon.

The 32nd Division’s troops were sick and tired and poorly trained for war in the jungle, but that was no excuse for cowardice, MacArthur said, citing the reports of his operations staff officers.

“A real leader, “he insisted, “could take these same men and capture Buna.”

MacArthur continued, “Bob, the number of troops employed there is no indication of the importance I attach to this job…. The fact that I’ve sent for you, with your rank, indicates how much importance I attach to the taking of Buna…. Never did I think I’d see Americans quit.” MacArthur then told Eichelberger that he was to leave for the front the following morning because “time was of the essence.” The Japanese, MacArthur said, might send in reinforcements “any night.” Eichelberger was to relieve Harding and his subordinate commanders, or MacArthur threatened, “I will relieve them myself and you too.” MacArthur continued testily, “Go out there, Bob, and take Buna or don’t come back alive.” Then he added, “And that goes for your chief of staff, Clovis, too.”

At breakfast the following morning, MacArthur had apparently mellowed. Pulling Eichelberger aside, he wished him luck and god-speed and told him that he was “no use to him dead.” Eichelberger must have felt great relief. Just the day before, he had written Harding, his good friend and former West Point classmate, to express confidence in him.

But then MacArthur’s mood again turned cold. Promising to decorate him if he took Buna, MacArthur told Eichelberger that he was to push the battle regardless of casualties.

“That was our send-off,” Eichelberger later wrote, “and hardly a merry one.”

By 1:00 p.m. that same day, Eichelberger took command of all U.S. troops in the Buna area. The next day a medical officer reported to Eichelberger on the condition of his men. The troops, he said within earshot of General Harding, looked like “Christ off the cross.” Considering their depleted condition, he added, the men were carrying on heroically. It was difficult for Harding not to feel a degree of satisfaction. It was what he had been saying all along.

The men of the 32nd had been subsisting on short rations for well over a month. Because fires were not allowed at the front—the wet wood sent up billows of smoke and attracted too much attention—they ate their rations cold. Their feet swelled and bled. Their fingernails and toenails fell off. They were suffering from jungle rot, malaria, dengue fever, dysentery, ringworm, dehydration, and heat prostration. And there was a shortage of everything they needed to stay healthy—quinine, salt and chlorination tablets, bismuth, and vitamin pills. Because of the sand, mud, water, and humidity, they could not depend on their weapons either. BARs, M-1s, and machine guns jammed. When precious gun oil and patches reached the front, they came in large containers and were difficult to distribute. Spare parts were nearly impossible to find. Ammunition and medical supplies ran short. Soldiers who had lost their entrenching tools were still waiting for replacements.

As a consequence, the morale of the troops was low. To make matters worse, their battlefield successes were few. Although Stutterin’s Smith’s troops had punched a hole in the Japanese perimeter, the Japanese had not yielded much valuable ground. Their positions were impregnable and Harding’s troops lacked the weaponry to reduce them. Mortars, artillery, and air bombardments had proved to be largely ineffective. The only other possibility was for a soldier to rush a bunker and stick a grenade through a firing slit, a feat that took monumental courage and a lifetime of good luck. It was a heartbreaking, ridiculous way to bust a bunker. According to Stutterin’ Smith, “Many more failed than succeeded.”

The day after arriving at Dobodura, Eichelberger was eager to tour the front.

Eichelberger did not know it, but after days of fighting, things had finally died down. And he did not like what he saw—men resting at aid stations, men dozing at the roots of trees, unshaven men wearing dirty, tattered uniforms, and empty ration tins surrounded by flies.

Jastrzembski was one of those dirty, unshaven men. His fatigues were caked in mud and diarrhea. He had sweated out the malaria attack, but his limbs were still trembling. His right eye quivered uncontrollably. Just the thought of the previous day’s battle, of cradling his buddy, of staring into the hole in La Venture’s belly knowing that he was a goner, made the bile well in Jastrzembski’s mouth. He tried to put the image out of his head. He was on his way back to the aid station where a buddy had told him they were passing out new jeans. Now more than anything else he just wanted a new pair of jeans. That is when he looked up and saw the general and “lots of brass” walking toward him. Immediately, he realized the general was new. Eichelberger wore his insignia of rank—no officer who had spent any time on the front dared to do that. A Japanese sniper would pick him off in a matter of minutes.

“Soldier, show me the front,” Eichelberger said.

Jastrzembski hardly heard him.

“The front, soldier, the front. I want to see the front,” Eichelberger demanded.

“Follow me,” Corporal Jastrzembski said.

Eichelberger, who was already irritated by the lack of discipline he had witnessed, scowled. He was a three-star general. Who did this soldier think he was talking to him like that?

After walking a hundred yards or so, Eichelberger asked Jastrzembski where the command post was, and Jastrzembski pointed down the trail. Then the general reached in his pocket and handed him a pack of cigarettes. Jastrzembski was a cigar man, but he took the cigarettes anyway. He knew he could trade them later for chewing gum.

Eichelberger stopped at the command post, and then farther down the trail he encountered three soldiers hiding in the long grass at the trail’s edge. When Eichelberger asked them what lay ahead, the men answered that an enemy machine gunner had fired on them hours before. Eichelberger was surprised. Hadn’t they bothered to scout the trail since? The men told the general that they had not. Eichelberger then offered to decorate any one of them brave enough to move forward. When no one volunteered, the general was incensed.

Later, Eichelberger held a meeting of his senior officers at Stutterin’ Smith’s command post, which was nothing more than a collection of tables around a large hollow tree stump. Smith had a field phone, which was connected to other field phones by single-strand Australian wire. When Smith phoned his company commanders, every phone in the jungle rang—including the Japanese ones.

Harding also attended the meeting. It was the first time since early October that he had seen Smith, and Harding did not recognize him at first. The gaunt, bearded Smith, Harding wrote in his diary, looked like a “member of the Army of the Potomac.”

The gathering was a heated one. According to Smith, Eichelberger acted “like a bull in a china shop,” and made some “caustic comments” about what he had seen at the front, including the incident with the three men. Smith kept his mouth shut. Years later, recalling the general’s anger, he wrote, “Decorations look damn artificial to a soldier who is filthy, fever ridden, practically starved, living in a tidal swamp and frustrated from seeing his buddies killed.” Listening to Eichelberger denigrate his men, Colonel Mott could no longer hold his temper.

“Dammit,” Mott said. “Anybody who thinks the men aren’t fighting, doesn’t know beans. Do you have any idea of what it’s like out there? The mountains were hell on the men. And now they’re fighting in swamp water up to their chests. You want to know why? Because the Japs have every piece of high ground from here to Australia.”

Harding threw his cigarette to the ground and snuffed it out. He agreed.

Then, Eichelberger’s voice rose, “You’re licked!” he said, looking at Mott and Harding. “Your men aren’t fighting; they’re cowards!”

The meeting broke up shortly after that and Eichelberger buttonholed Smith and asked him what his assessment was.

“It’s tough, damn tough,” Smith said. “It doesn’t pay to attack. The plan should be really basic: To edge up slowly every day. But even that’s not working. We’re not getting anywhere.”

Eichelberger was under no illusions. He could plainly see that American forces “were prisoners of geography,” and that Buna was going to be “siege warfare…the bitterest and most punishing kind.” But that was no excuse for faintheartedness. With MacArthur’s warning ringing in his ears, Eichelberger looked Smith straight in the eye. “I don’t think you’re trying hard enough.”

Back at his tent in Dobodura, Harding tried to understand Eichelberger’s attitude. His old West Point classmate was under enormous pressure. MacArthur had given him “an earful” and appointed him his executioner. Was Eichelberger simply carrying out orders? Despite trying to see both sides, it was difficult for Harding not to be bitter.

Harding had been determined to avoid what he called the “butcher’s bill run up by the generals of World War I,” and obviously he had not pressed the battle hard enough for MacArthur’s tastes. In France, the 32nd’s Red Arrow men, facing rapid-firing artillery and machine guns, had developed a reputation for bravery. But Harding knew that it had come at a huge cost to the division: In five months, the 32nd Division lost three thousand men and counted almost fourteen thousand among the wounded.

Harding refused to repeat that kind of carnage at Buna. To order headlong attacks on the Japanese positions was “Civil War tactics,” pure madness. While at Fort Benning Infantry School, Harding had been one of a group of instructors who attempted to define and implement a new set of battle tactics that put a premium on ingenuity and discouraged high casualty rates. George C. Marshall was the school’s assistant commandant at the time, and Harding had Marshall’s blessing. He and his fellow officers developed and taught flanking movements and other innovative battlefield techniques.

Harding also edited a seminal study of small-unit engagements during World War I, and enumerated a list of lessons learned. One of those was: “To assault by day an organized position, manned by good troops equipped with automatic weapons, without providing for adequate support by (artillery) fire or tanks, is folly.”