The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea--The Forgotten War of the South Pacific (33 page)

Back up the track from where Sikkel had come, not far outside the southwest perimeter of the roadblock, Lieutenant Hershel Horton had gone out on what he called a “mercy patrol” to pick up the dog tags of Keast’s group. After hearing the story of the ambush, he figured Keast was dead, but part of him could not help but hope. Perhaps his friend was lying somewhere in the jungle, still breathing.

When shots burst from behind a thicket of sago palms, Horton and the three men with him dove for cover. Horton was hit. His buddies tried to crawl to him, but Japanese snipers had them pinned down. When the shooting subsided, Horton realized that his buddies had somehow made it out. He then dragged himself forty feet through the mud to what he described as a “grass shanty.” Wounded, with bullet holes in his hip and right leg, “semi-delirious,” and without food or water, Horton waited for two days for his friends to return. Finally, on December 3, one of his buddies, accompanied by a medic, was able to reach him. But the two men could not lift Horton, so the medic gave Horton a drink of water, which he lapped at like a thirsty dog, then bandaged his wounds and promised to return as soon as possible with help. True to his word, the medic came back with help the following day. He gave Horton water again, but when an enemy sniper shot and killed his assistant, the medic was forced to crawl away. Lying in the hot sun, Horton craved fluids and pawed at the jungle humus, trying to dig a hole deep enough to reach water. “Life,” he wrote in his diary, had become a “terrible nightmare.”

On December 5, while Horton was waiting for his buddies to retrieve him, Lieutenant Pete Dal Ponte led a sixty-man ration and ammunition party through the jungle. Dal Ponte knew he had to reach Huggins. Dal Ponte’s party, though, was not made up of choice riflemen. His men were cooks, clerks, and mortarmen who had been pressed into duty. Each man carried forty pounds of supplies. Though only a mile separated them from the roadblock, Dal Ponte had to contend with hip-deep swamps and Tsukamoto’s troops, who lay dug in like badgers between the American command post and Huggins.

Dal Ponte and his men had not gone far when Tsukamoto’s troops sprung upon them. Despite the heavy loads and their lack of fighting experience, Dal Ponte’s men drove them back, and at one juncture almost penetrated their defense and pushed through close to the southern end of roadblock. But the Japanese rallied and surrounded them. Dal Ponte and his men were fighting for their lives.

Late in the day, Dal Ponte’s party managed to blast its way back to the American command post, limping in with half a dozen casualties and two dead soldiers.

For the next two days, supply parties tried to reach the roadblock, only to be turned away by Japanese fire.

The signalmen, struggling to keep the lines of communication open, had it just as hard—they had never strung wire across a tropical wilderness before. They could not run it along an established trail because as soon as the Japs saw it, they had cut it. So they had to hide it, wading into swamps, risking their lives in the sniper-infested jungle. The signalmen divided into two-man teams. Acting as a lookout, one soldier toted a rifle while the other carried a little reel of braided copper and metal combat wire.

While supply parties tried to push through to Huggins and the signalmen strung and repaired wire, the Australians tried to dislodge Tsukamoto’s forces. They met with no better luck than the Americans. Tsukamoto had positioned his men throughout the jungle, and they subjected the bewildered Australians to a fierce cross fire. After two days of fighting, the Australians counted 350 men dead or wounded. Unable to withstand those kind of casualties, the Australians would not mount another attack for almost two weeks.

Dal Ponte, though, was not to be denied by Tsukamoto’s firepower. He had friends at the roadblock and he knew the situation was desperate. Early in the morning on December 8, he and his party trudged into the jungle determined once again to reach Huggins. Sunlight flickered through branches, cockatoos screeched, and crowned pigeons darted through the trees. Three hundred yards south of the roadblock, the jungle erupted with gunfire. From both sides of the trail, machine gun fire bore down on the men.

Dal Ponte knew they would be mowed down if they could not locate the guns. His plan was a crazy one: He would expose himself to fire while his men got a bead on the machine gunners. His men must have wondered if he had a death wish. He would be cut down in seconds.

Before anyone could stop him, Dal Ponte dashed out from behind a copse of trees. Bullets slapped through the underbrush all around Dal Ponte, but miraculously he was untouched. And now his men knew where the shooting was coming from. Slipping into the forest with his band of cooks, clerks, and mortarmen, Dal Ponte stalked the snipers. When they reached the enemy positions, the Japanese were gone.

That afternoon, Dal Ponte made it to the roadblock (now called Huggins Roadblock) where Huggins had established a double perimeter, two men to a foxhole. The men were alive, but starving and nearly out of ammunition. The Japanese had since established another roadblock farther to the north and surrounded Huggins’ position with snipers.

When Dal Ponte arrived, he discovered that one of those snipers had put a bullet in Huggins’ head. Huggins, though, had the luck of the Irish, and was busy directing his men despite his wound. Dal Ponte could see that Huggins needed medical attention, and reluctantly Huggins agreed to turn over command to him and let Dal Ponte’s party lead him out of the roadblock.

That evening, having made it through the gauntlet of Tsukamoto’s troops, Huggins briefed Medendorp. At the roadblock, men were burning up with malaria fevers. They had ringworm and their feet were going bad. They lived in filthy holes, unable to dispose of their feces. Corpses festered in the hot sun and it rained every night. Of the 225 men holding the garrison, barely half of them were able to fight. Medical supplies, food, and ammunition were almost nonexistent. Perhaps worst of all, the troops were subjected to repeated attacks and did not dare sleep. Sometimes at night the Japanese crept so close that the Americans reached out and grabbed their ankles. Pulling them into their trenches, they slashed the Japanese soldiers’ throats with razor-sharp knives and bayonets.

Though Medendorp’s Cannon Company and the men of the 3rd Battalion’s Company K were not engaged in near-constant combat, the conditions they were enduring were hardly better than those Huggins described at the roadblock. A soldier wrote in K Company’s journal that “between mosquitoes, Japs, heat, bad water, and short rations, it has sure been hell…. What is left of the company is a pretty sickbunch of boys.” All the officers who had crossed the mountains with Medendorp were “gone, dead, wounded or sick.”

Sick or not, men were forced to go out on patrols and were often the targets of Japanese snipers and machine gunners, especially at dawn and dusk, when the Japanese liked to attack. Patrols often returned with wounded men. The dead, though, they left behind. It was especially painful to leave dead buddies lying in mud puddles. The Japanese picked them clean as a bone, grabbing anything of value—grenades, lighters, knives, rings—and mementos. Photographs, though, they discarded—often, soldiers would find wedding pictures and photographs of children alongside the trail. But the Americans had no choice but to leave their buddies behind. Carrying them through the swamp in order to bury them back at the command post was an impossible feat, so they gritted their teeth and turned their heads in shame.

Not even Father Dzienis, despite his efforts, was able to retrieve many of the bodies. When he succeeded, he and a volunteer or two would carry the corpse back to the little cemetery he had built just behind the front lines. Dzienis remained utterly devoted to his men. Even in the midst of battle he held services for them—Catholics, Lutherans, agnostics, it did not matter to him. Though his legs “were one mass of running sores,” when he was not at the aid station comforting wounded men, maintaining morale, delivering last rites, or inviting soldiers to worship with him, he crawled out to the front lines to “visit his flock.” The soldiers were always glad to see him. “Chaplain Dzienis is here!” Soldiers would pass along the news from slit trench to slit trench.

The day after Dal Ponte’s men pulled Huggins out of the roadblock, soldiers on all fronts learned that the Australians had taken Gona.

Prior to the Japanese invasion in July 1942, Gona had been one of the prettiest spots on the peninsula’s north coast, with a church built of woven sago leaves and a handsome mission building with a red tin roof that caught rainwater. On the grounds, shaded by elegant palms and tulip trees, sat a school and a green, groomed cricket field. The pathways were lined with red hibiscus. Just down from the mission, the blue waters of the Solomon Sea washed over an idyllic stretch of black sand.

When the Australians seized Gona four and a half months later, they were horrified by what they saw. The Japanese had reinforced their bunkers, which doubled as latrines, with their own dead. Inside, they had used corpses as firing steps. They had stacked them with their rice and ammunition. They slept beside them. The bunkers reeked so badly the Japanese soldiers had resorted to fighting in gas masks. Partially decayed bodies floated in nearby lagoons.

In two days, the Australians buried almost a thousand Japanese bodies. Not a single enemy soldier remained alive.

For the Australians, the cost of victory at Gona was huge. One brigade lost over 40 percent of its troops. The victory must have given General Vasey pause. Perhaps he should have resisted the urge to “annihilate” the Japanese. By cutting off their supply and troop pipeline, he could have watched and waited while they starved.

There was a lesson to be learned at Gona. MacArthur, though, failed to recognize it.

The day after the Australians stormed Gona, another ration party made it to the roadblock. Upon returning to the command post, the leader of the ration party delivered another worrisome report. The men at the roadblock continued to deteriorate. If they hoped to survive, they needed to be supplied at least once every two days.

Medendorp had nothing but admiration for the men supplying Huggins. “These patrols,” he wrote later, “marched the flesh right off their feet, leaving in many cases sores that were so deep that they showed red meat.”

On December 12, Lieutenant Horton waited not far from the trail, hoping that someone might find him. Weak and able to dig for only seconds at a time, it had taken him four days to reach water. Even though it was “polluted by the rotting bodies” that lay around him, he slurped at the muddy puddle. A day later, he heard a rescue party traipsing through the jungle. They were looking for him, but a blinding rainstorm and Japanese snipers drove them away. Horton dared not call out. “The Japanese are living within 15 yards of me,” Horton wrote. “I see them every day.”

Horton tried to make a splint for his leg. He rose to his feet unsteadily, but his strength gave out. When he sat down and leaned against a tree, a Japanese sniper, who had seen him moving, shot him in the neck and shoulder. Horton lay at the base of the tree, waiting for the next bullet. “Why has God forsaken me?” he wrote in his diary. “Why is he making me suffer this terrible end?” Later, he continued, “I have imagined several other rescue parties…. My right hip is broken and my right leg, both compound fractures; else I could have been out of here in those first couple of days, wounds or no wounds. My life has been good, but I am so young and have so many things undone that a man of 29 should do…. I shall continue to pray for a miracle of rescue…. God bless you my loved ones…. I shall see you all again some day. I prepare to meet my Maker. Love, Hershel.”