The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea--The Forgotten War of the South Pacific (31 page)

East of the trail, Herman Bottcher looked sternly at Jastrzembski and DiMaggio. “I want eighteen men,” he said. They didn’t dare say no.

Per instructions from Bailey and Captain Hantlemann, Bottcher had already scouted the approach to Buna, where the Americans had run into murderous fire from snipers, machine gunners, and roving patrols. If he and his men could get around the interlocking bunkers and pillboxes, they could isolate the village from Buna Government Station.

Far to the right of the trail, Bottcher and his men slipped through a field of kunai grass and pushed north through jungle packed thick with sago and nipa palms. Overhead, the trees’ branches were knotted and twisted. “Watch the trees,” Bottcher warned. “Be on the lookout for snipers.”

It was late in the afternoon. Already the fruit bats were gathering in the sky. Like the late-day rains, the men could always count on the bats. They left their treetop lairs and swirled through the forest canopy on wings the size of a hawk’s.

Ahead Jastrzembski saw it—a pillbox. What the hell were they going to do now? He had no sooner said the words than he saw Bottcher bent over at the waist zigzagging with slabs of mud stuck to his boots. He slipped a grenade through the firing slit of the pillbox and dove into the jungle. Jastrzembski watched with relief as the grenade exploded.

After taking out the pillbox, they forded a tidal creek, holding their guns high over their heads, knowing that one Japanese machine gunner or one well-tossed grenade could take them all out. They watched for crocodiles, too—Buna’s rivers and creeks were full of crocodiles dining on dead bodies. Eventually the creeks and rivers filled with corpses, and even the men with chlorination tablets refused to drink the water.

Scrambling up the muddy banks of the creek, the men discovered a large dead snake rotting in the sun. The stench was overwhelming. Then, following the creek north, before they knew it they were at the edge of the beach, and suddenly Japanese soldiers opened fire on them. In less than five minutes, three of Bottcher’s group were dead and four more wounded. One of Bottcher’s men volunteered to try to take out the Japanese machine gun nest that had done the damage. As he ran forward, grenades landed at his feet, throwing him and a cloud of sand into the air. Wounded, the man squirmed in the sand.

“Lie still!” Bottcher yelled. “Lie still!”

Some of the men went out to get him and dragged him back. As the sun disappeared, they dug in. Bottcher radioed back to Gus Bailey, telling him that they were at the beach smack in the middle of Buna Village and the Government Station.

Bottcher and his men had not taken Buna, but they had broken the stalemate. In a matter of hours they had gained more ground than anyone had on either the Urbana or Warren Front in the two and a half weeks since the battle began.

Boice had not heard yet and had already written in his diary that the assault on Buna “was not successful.” And back at the command post, Eichelberger was fretting over the day’s failures. While he had been inspecting the front, a Japanese sniper almost blew his head off. Though Eichelberger escaped death by a whisker, the bullet struck his aide, a young man for whom he had great affection. “Full of grief,” Eichelberger carried him back to the field hospital, where doctors fought to save his life.

News from the Warren Front was that the all-out attack had failed miserably. Twenty minutes into the attack, the recently delivered Bren gun carriers—small, open-air tanklike vehicles—bogged down in the mud and got stuck on the tree stumps of the Duropa Plantation. The Japanese assaulted the carriers with machine guns, an antitank gun, hand grenades, and “sticky” bombs.

The Americans who advanced in support of the Australians manning the carriers fared no better. Under the blazing tropical sun, those who were not killed or wounded were laid low by heat prostration. According to the colonel in charge of the attack, the Americans had “hit” Colonel Yamamoto’s forces and “bounced off.”

For Eichelberger, the defeat was very discouraging. Freighters had brought the carriers up from Milne Bay along the newly charted water route. Once they reached the front, Higgins boats put them ashore. The Higgins boats were the first landing craft to reach New Guinea, and Eichelberger had hoped that the boats and what they were capable of delivering might help turn the tide of the battle.

Rather than turning the tide of the battle, though, the events of December 5 convinced Eichelberger that he was in for the fight of his life. Still, he had to deal with MacArthur, whose headquarters, according to one Australian general, reminded him of a “bloody barometer in a cyclone, up and down every two minutes.” If only MacArthur would take the time to visit the battlefield, he could see what Eichelberger and his men were up against.

In the eyes of many of the Red Arrow men, December 5 solidified Eichelberger’s poor reputation. He was a general who was willing to lose good soldiers in heedless frontal attacks. He was the “Butcher of Buna,” “Eichelbutcher.” Later, with equal parts bitterness and black humor, they would call the cemetery at Buna “Eichelberger Square.”

Eichelberger was not without self-reflection, however. He would later write of that battle: “I had seen the litters coming back. I had seen walking wounded being led from the front. I had seen men lying in ditches, weeping with battle shock. I had visited dressing stations. Yet there were advances to be made, and decisions which must not be governed by my own weaknesses or emotions.”

In a letter he wrote to his wife that night, Eichelberger said that the December 5 battle “will always remain with me as long as I live.”

By the time he wrote to Sutherland later that evening, though, Eichelberger’s mood had bounced back. Bottcher’s breakthrough had redeemed an utter failure on both fronts. Eichelberger was now full of praise for the Red Arrow men. “The number of our troops,” he said, “that tried to avoid combat today could be numbered on your fingers.”

Grose, too, was moved to revise his opinion of Smith’s Ghost Mountain boys. “The battalion’s men,” he wrote in his diary, “have been courageous and willing, but they have been pushed almost beyond the limit of human endurance.”

At dawn on December 6, after a “terrific rainstorm” the Japanese assaulted “Bottcher’s Corner” from two directions. Expecting the raids, Bottcher had set up a machine gun the night before, and he and his small group repelled both attacks.

That night, according to Sam DiMaggio, the men “fixed their bayonets in preparation for hand-to-hand combat.” It was impossible to sleep. DiMaggio licked at the dried salt that had formed around his mouth and wondered about the turn his life had taken. He had left the Malleable Iron Company, vowing never to go back. Now here he was, a soldier fighting for his life.

Land crabs skittered along the beach, through the palm leaves and the delicate snailshells, birds whistled from the nearby trees, and waves slapped against the barges. Jastrzembski was holding himself together through sheer force of will. His senses deceived him. Everywhere he saw Japanese slithering through the sand. Every noise sounded to him like an enemy soldier poised to bayonet him in the belly. He could almost feel it, ripping through his body, tearing apart his insides.

At 4:00 a.m., the false dawn lapsed back into darkness. Jastrzembski studied the sky and the unfamiliar stars, and then his eyes grew heavy. All he wanted to do was sleep and then he smelled it: the jungle. In the past two months he had grown accustomed to it, but there it was again, the odor of rot and decay.

Two hours later, Japanese troops crept toward Bottcher’s Corner, but a forward scout, Corporal Harold Mitchell, caught a glimpse of them. Mitchell let out a yell and charged the Japanese with a fixed bayonet. The Japanese were so startled by the rush that they failed to attack. Bottcher grabbed one of the machine guns, and together with the other machine gunner and his riflemen raked the beach, the brush, and the small coconut grove. During the skirmish, Bottcher was hit in the hand by an enemy bullet, but one of his men wrapped it and Bottcher returned to the machine gun. Mitchell made it back to their position unscathed.

That afternoon, Company E, minus its longtime leader Lutjens, and Company G made another stab at taking the village. When the attack bogged down, Stutterin’ Smith came forward, moved out front with Gus Bailey, and led the charge. It was as dark as the sky before a summer storm and in no time the companies lost sight of each other. Smith groped his way forward through the airless jungle.

Smith had not gone more than twenty yards when the Japanese began a rhythmic chant. It was the first time he had ever heard it, the precursor to a banzai charge. He took cover behind a tree and waited just as a mortar landed over his head. Hot metal fragments rained down. Five of his men fell. Smith wondered how he had escaped getting hit and then he moved his hand across his neck and up and down his back. He felt blood, and the next thing he knew an aidman was running toward him to put a dressing on his wound. Smith protested that it was just a shallow flesh wound. But the aidman insisted on bandaging it anyway, and encouraged Smith to return to the aid station. The attack had stalled; otherwise Smith would never have agreed to go back.

Back at the aid station Smith ran into Captain Boet, the battalion surgeon with whom he had crossed the Owen Stanleys. Boet took a look at the wound. Hell, Smith thought, what’s the big deal; it’s just a flesh wound. When Boet finished, though, Smith knew it was serious.

“It hit the kidney,” Boet said to his friend. “It’s a bad deal.”

“Hell no,” Smith replied. “I’m alive.”

Boet then summoned four native litter bearers and instructed them to carry the major to the portable hospital.

Lacking the equipment to treat him, the doctors at the portable hospital sent him on to the Evacuation Hospital. At the Evac Hospital, doctors stripped Smith and threw his putrid clothes and shabby boots into a fire. When they put him on a scale Smith was astonished by the weight he had lost. He was down to 138 pounds. At six feet three inches that meant he was nothing but skin and bones. After they had picked the metal fragments out of his back, they confirmed Boet’s diagnosis: Smith’s kidney had been damaged. They would have to get him back to Port Moresby and on to Australia as soon as possible.

That evening, a dull pain settled into Smith’s side. The carriers lay him in a makeshift cot, which they had fashioned using poles lashed together with a webbing of bush vines. Smith felt self-conscious. Around him, badly injured soldiers lay in their cots groaning. His wound was much worse than he knew.

Word was sent forward to the companies of the 2nd Battalion that Smith had been seriously injured, but probably would recover. Gus Bailey must have been relieved to hear that. He liked Smith as much as Smith liked him. How often would you find a battalion commander out front leading his men into battle? It was the exact principle that Bailey had adhered to: Never ask a man to do something you won’t do yourself. Anyway, Bailey was glad that he would not have to mark Smith down in his journal in which each day he recorded the names of G Company men and battalion officers killed in battle.

Captain Jim Boice took over for Smith, and his first order was to direct a platoon under the command of Lieutenant Odell to try to creep or shoot its way to the beach. No attempt had been made to reinforce Bottcher and his troops, and they were struggling to hold on. Boice realized that to lose the beach would set the American effort back three weeks.

Odell’s task was to get to the beach and then to extend Bottcher’s line to the sea. In the process he would have to destroy two enemy outposts: one not far from Bottcher and his men, the other in the direction of the village. Odell and twelve men made it to Bottcher without a fight, then threw grenades at the nearest outpost. When no one fired back, they went to investigate, running part of the way and then dropping to their bellies and crawling. Odell led the way. When they reached the pillbox, they discovered a number of Japanese soldiers either dead or dying, and bayoneted them all.

Next, they moved on the second outpost. Not far down, they encountered fifteen Japanese soldiers huddled in a shallow trench. Using English, one of the Japanese soldiers shouted that he and his men were prepared to surrender. Odell suspected a hoax. Without responding to the Japanese soldier’s request, he and his men rushed the trench, shot and bayoneted the enemy soldiers, and then closed in on the village. From the village, machine guns answered. Odell had now lost the element of surprise. He and his men retreated to the first outpost near Bottcher’s Corner where they set up another machine gun.

They had just settled into foxholes when Japanese soldiers from Buna Government Station fired on them. The bullets were zipping over their heads. “It was quite a sensation,” according to Odell, “stretched out in a foxhole (8 inches deep in water…) watching the leaves of the trees and bushes above your head rapidly assuming the appearance of cheese cloth.”

Odell was plastered against the sand wall of his foxhole waiting for the firing to subside when fifty screaming enemy soldiers attacked firing rifle grenades. One of Odell’s men raked the beach with the machine gun and stopped the assault. For the next few hours, Japanese soldiers crawled around the perimeter. Just after sunset, a dozen men pushed their way to the beach to reinforce Odell’s position, which was so close to both the village and the Government Station that Odell could hear the Japanese “talking and walking about.”