The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea--The Forgotten War of the South Pacific (32 page)

Sitting in their sandpit, some of Bottcher and Odell’s men watched in the direction of the village. The others kept their eyes on the Government Station. Bottcher heard something suspicious out on the water. Then Jastrzembski caught sight of a Japanese barge trying to get reinforcements to Buna Village. Bottcher and the other machine gunner were behind their machine guns, and as soon as they spotted the silhouette of the lead boat, tracers cut through the darkness. The barrels of their machine guns grew so hot that DiMaggio poured water from his canteen over them. Suddenly, an explosion rocked DiMaggio. Then he saw the barge go up in a shock of flames. Japanese soldiers dove overboard. Swinging his machine gun back and forth, Bottcher hit them as they swam for shore. Jastrzembski saw the bodies, illuminated by the glowing phosphorescence, roll in on breakers. The following morning, as the sun radiated through great clouds that had spilled rain on the north coast for the entire night, Jastrzembski saw that the waves had deposited the corpses onto the beach like driftwood.

That morning, Jim Boice hoped to capitalize on Bottcher’s breakthrough. With the help of two well-used flamethrowers that had just come in by lugger, and with Bottcher on the beach preventing Japanese reinforcements from reaching Buna Village, he hoped to overwhelm the bunker that had stymied the battalion’s advance for weeks.

The flamethrower’s operator advanced on the bunker. Twenty men covered him. He got within thirty feet of the Japanese position, stepped into a clearing, and turned on the weapon. The flame singed his eyebrows and sputtered. It lit the field on fire but fell well short of the Japanese. Then the Japanese opened up on the operator and three of the cover men, killing them instantly.

The weapon that Boice hoped would end the stalemate at the front was defective. Once again, the soldiers of the 2nd Battalion would have to resort to direct assaults on Japanese positions, a primitive tactic that guaranteed the battalion would lose more good men.

By December 8, 1942, Japan’s hold on the north coast of the Papuan Peninsula was slipping. The jubilation that had followed the attack on Pearl Harbor and the beginning of Japan’s “Great East Asia War” one year before had turned to despair.

On December 8, First Lieutenant Jitsutaro Kamio wrote in his diary: “Today is finally the one year anniversary. We should have a ceremony but everyone is exhausted.”

Although Allied ground forces had registered few significant gains, with the opening of new airfields at Dobodura and Popondetta, General Kenney’s pilots stepped up the pressure on the Japanese, slowly tightening the noose, making it almost impossible for ships to deliver troops, food, medicine, or ammunition.

Kuba Satonao, a first-class mechanic in a naval transport unit, wrote that because of the shortage of ammunition, officers had instructed soldiers to “make every bullet count.”

The Allied supply situation, on the other hand, had vastly improved. Supplies that Harding had requisitioned weeks before being dismissed began to arrive. Engineers had just completed the Dobodura-Siremi jeep track and a number of other important supply tracks. New coastal luggers to replace those that had been destroyed in mid-November had just arrived at Oro Bay. The Americans now had mortars and large artillery and enough ammunition, including delayed-action mortar shells, to do real damage. They also had a new four-inch-to-one-mile Buna map, which forward artillery and air observers used to help operators of the big guns zero in on their targets.

As a consequence, the Americans hammered the coast. Kuba Satonao wrote, “All we do is get severely bombed. Buna is gradually falling into a state of danger.” A few days later, he wrote again, “now they are coming over at night. We lived till today, but it is something unusual. There are tears in my eyes as I realize the meaning of the fact that I am alive.” Days passed before he was able to write again: “From early morning today there was mortar fire around us. From the left there is considerable large artillery fire…. There is a constant flight of enemy planes overhead. We are now in a delaying and holding action. The amount of provisions is small and there is no chance of replenishing ammunition. But we have bullets of flesh. No matter what comes we are not afraid. If they come, let them come…. We have the aid of Heaven. We are warriors of Yamato.”

When Satonao writes of “bullets of flesh,” he is referring to the suicide squad. Later in the war, as the Japanese turned to acts of desperation, suicide squads, of which the kamikaze was a manifestation, became common. Early on, the suicide squad still served a practical purpose—to incite terror in the hearts of the enemy. At Buna, as elsewhere, the suicide squad or “Kesshi Tai” (literally “Determined-to-Die Unit”) had no shortage of volunteers.

The sun dropped fast on the evening of December 8, and Captain Yasuda made one last attempt to reach Buna Village. As a diversion, he had a force of forty attack from Buna Village. Then he sent out a hundred men from the Government Station, hoping they might slip into the village without being detected. But Bottcher, Odell, and their troops caught them moving on the beach and gunned them down, finishing off the wounded with their bayonets. Inland, Boice’s troops repelled them, too. With machine guns and mortars, they drove the Japanese back.

On the afternoon of December 9, Lieutenant James Downer, who was now commanding Company E, volunteered to lead a patrol against the main Japanese bunker position at the southern edge of the village: the one that the flamethrower had failed to reduce the previous day.

Downer’s plan, though, was the same one that had failed time and time again—he would storm the bunker and try to stick a grenade through the firing slit while the rest of the patrol covered him. Downer bravely set off through the jungle but was picked off by an enemy sniper. Two of his men crawled out to get him, pulling themselves along on their elbows. But when they reached him, they realized he was dead and dragged him back. For the rest of the day, Company E tried to maneuver around the bunker, drawing blistering fire from the Japanese defenders. That night the shooting stopped and Downer’s patrol managed to get close enough to see that the bunker had been abandoned. Perhaps their constant pressure had worn down the Japanese. Whatever the reason, the important thing was that the bunker fell at last to Downer’s patrol.

Eichelberger was heartened by the news. To his eye, the men were fighting now like real soldiers.

One Japanese soldier noted the change. Early on he’d written that “The American is untrained, afraid, and stumbles about in the jungle…. They fire at any sound or shadow, wasting ammunition, giving their positions away…. They are like scared children who cannot learn…. We can kill them all….” By mid-December he wrote, “The enemy is very hard to see in the jungle…. Enemy tactics are to hurl heavy mortar fire on us and rush in close behind.”

While the Red Arrow men had “learned their business,” as the official army historian said, three weeks of constant fighting had exacted a toll, especially on the men at Bottcher’s Corner.

On December 11, twenty-six soldiers from the 127th U.S. Infantry fought their way to the beach to relieve Bottcher, Odell, and their men. For soldiers new to the front, the sight of decomposing corpses lying strewn across the sand must have been deeply unsettling. The stench, according to Odell, was “unendurable.” The new men buried the bodies and then took over Bottcher’s position.

Before leaving the beach, Bottcher had to make good on an order he had received. Allied Intelligence, G-2, wanted a prisoner to interrogate. Bottcher and Corporal Mitchell discovered a wounded Japanese soldier huddling in a foxhole. When the man reached for his gun, Mitchell knocked him out with the butt of his rifle.

Mitchell washed the dried blood and sand from the soldier’s face. The soldier came to, and when he did, he was terrified, expecting the Americans to slit his throat. Instead, Bottcher gave him a drink and poured water on his chest. Then he and Mitchell bandaged the soldier’s leg, gave him a piece of chocolate, and delivered the prisoner to an aid station.

As worn out as the men at Bottcher’s Corner were, the rest of the battalion was in no better shape. After twelve all-out attacks on Buna Village in three weeks, Stutterin’ Smith’s 2nd Battalion was barely capable of holding the ground they had won. Companies had been reduced to the size of platoons, platoons to the size of squads. Companies E and F each had fewer than fifty soldiers left to fight, a quarter of their original strength. The battalion that had crossed Ghost Mountain with nearly nine hundred soldiers now had fewer than three hundred men left.

At the roadblock four miles southwest of Bottcher’s Corner, on the other side of the Girua River, the Japanese attacked, and time and again Huggins and his men held.

“The situation was utter chaos,” Huggins recalled. “Nobody knew what was going on. We were green kids….”

Second Lieutenant Bill Sikkel saw the chaos first hand. He and Captain Russ Wildey managed to sneak and shoot their way north toward the roadblock. The foray took the better part of a day, and because they had not been issued compasses, they had to guess their way through the jungle. They arrived just in time: Huggins and his men had been under attack for thirty-two hours and were running low on ammunition.

Sikkel was struck by the scene. Bodies of the Japanese dead lay scattered around the flanks. The Americans hugged the inside of the slit trench waiting for the next Japanese attack.

The patrol spent the night, and the following morning Sikkel and Wildey brought out seventeen wounded and sick men and navigated their way back to the battalion command post. Sikkel was used to the jungle. Two weeks before, on the eve of his twenty-second birthday, just before setting out on his first patrol, he had emptied his pockets and told Father Dzienis to send the contents back to his mother in case he did not make it. He had been maneuvering through the swamps and the tangled forest each and every day since then. Doing it with wounded men, though, was especially dicey. He kept a close eye out for the deer-like imprint of the split-toed Japanese tong. It was a sure sign that snipers lurked nearby.