The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea--The Forgotten War of the South Pacific (36 page)

After the failure at the Triangle, Eichelberger was forced to reassess his strategy. Late on the evening of December 19, in a letter to Sutherland, he explained how he would cross Entrance Creek farther downstream, bypassing the Triangle. “General Herring,” he wrote, “is very anxious for me to take the track junction, and I am most willing, but the enemy is…strong there and is able to reinforce his position at will. I am going to put in artillery on him…and I am going to continue that tomorrow morning. Then I am going to find a weak spot across Government Gardens.”

It was a tidy plan.

On the morning of December 24, with five companies of the 127th in position, Eichelberger ordered a major attack. It began with artillery and mortars opening up on Government Gardens and the Government Station. Fifteen minutes later, the infantry moved out. What separated the 127th from its destination, though, was an obstacle course of thick, chest-high kunai grass, a swamp as wide as a football field, and a 300-yard coconut plantation. Eichelberger believed this to be the epicenter of the Japanese position. Captain Yasuda had prepared the entire area with bunkers, foxholes, firing pits, and snipers hiding in trees.

The regiment had advanced barely a hundred yards when it came up against blistering enemy fire that cut the companies to ribbons. Even with Eichelberger’s artillery officer directing mortar fire from a coconut tree not far from Yasuda’s lines, the Americans managed to carve out only another fifty yards. After being wounded in the back by a shell fragment, the artillery officer tied himself into the tree like a Japanese sniper and continued to direct the mortar fire until he lost so much blood that he lapsed into unconsciousness, and had to be evacuated.

Eichelberger, who was at the front for much of the day directing troop movements like a young lieutenant, was devastated by the failure of the attack. Christmas Eve day, 1942, he reported to MacArthur “was the low point of my life.” MacArthur, though, did not want to hear it. He wanted results. Earlier he had callously told an Australian officer, who had complained that Eichelberger would get himself killed if he insisted on leading troops into battle, “I want him to die if he doesn’t get Buna.”

Back at the evac hospital in Dobodura, which was nothing more than a big tent with rows of cots, Stanley Jastrzembski was riding out a fever. He knew that the Americans had made a big push that day by the number of casualties that kept coming in. The worst were the belly wounds; those poor guys would moan and scream out all night long. What had really gotten to him, though, was Jim Broner. Broner had been shot in the leg in the battle on November 30.

Jastrzembski did not know what to say to him. His brother, Willard, was already dead. Had he heard?

“How ya doing?” Jastrzembski said, avoiding the subject.

Broner was lying on a cot and fumbled for words. Then he blurted it out. “Tomorrow,” he said, “they’re going to take my leg off.”

What the hell for, Jastrzembksi thought to himself. The poor SOB is gonna lose his leg over some godforsaken island.

Toward evening, Jastrzembski’s buddy Chet Sokoloski came in with a big smile on his face. Jastrzembski sat at the side of his cot and grimaced. His feet throbbed. They were raw and inflamed, and the skin was peeling off in small sheets like waxed paper.

“Why the smile?” Jastrzembski winced. “Just because you ain’t dead, right?”

“Nope,” Sokoloski replied. “It’s Christmas Eve. Did you forget?”

“Christmas,” Jastrzembski groaned. “In this hellhole of a place.”

“I got you a package,” Sokoloski said.

Sure enough. Jastrzembski looked at the return address. It was from one of his sisters. He shook his head. “All the way from Muskegon.”

Jastrzembski was too weak to open the package, so Sokoloski did the honors. Tearing off the newspaper and opening the box, Sokoloski was dumbfounded. “Candy and cake,” he said.

You’re putting me on, Jastrzembski thought. Then Sokoloski passed him the box. There it was, a big Christmas cake.

“The damn thing’s full of mold.”

“Here,” Sokoloski said. Taking his bayonet, he cut off the top two inches. Then Jastrzembski and Sokoloski—a pair of Poles—devoured it on Christmas Eve in New Guinea.

On Christmas Day, instead of regrouping and allowing his men to rest, Eichelberger decided to force the issue, returning to the Urbana Front again to direct operations personally.

When a company of the 127th pounded its way over hundreds of yards through Government Gardens, ending up on the coast near the coconut plantation, Eichelberger thought that perhaps his luck was changing. The Japanese quickly rallied, though, and surrounded the company, inflicting heavy losses. When reinforcements attempted to come to its rescue, they were ambushed, and an entire platoon was wiped out.

Eichelberger’s Christmas Day attack had been a mistake, and he wondered if Buna would become “an American military disaster.”

That night, returning to the command post, he found Sutherland waiting for him with disturbing news. The Australians, Sutherland said, were again mocking MacArthur. Despite a distinct numerical advantage, American troops had been unable to take Buna Government Station. Eichelberger argued that he had whole battalions—Stutterin Smith’s Ghost Mountain boys and White Smith’s men—that were no longer capable of fighting.

Sutherland then handed him a letter.

“What’s this?’ Eichelberger asked.

“MacArthur,” Sutherland answered.

Later, Eichelberger sat down to read the letter. Although MacArthur had never visited the battlefield, he was full of “Ivory Tower” advice, all of which revealed his ignorance of frontline conditions at Buna. Urging Eichelberger to use his
superior
numbers, he wrote:

Where you have a company on your firing line, you should have a battalion; and where you have a battalion, you should have a regiment. And your attacks, instead of being made up of two or three hundred rifles, should be made by two or three thousand…. It will be an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth…. Your battle casualties to date compared with your total strength are slight so that you have a big margin still to work with.

I beg of you to throw every ounce of energy you have into carrying out this word of advice from me, as I feel convinced that our time is strictly limited and that if results are not achieved shortly, the whole picture may radically change.

With the memory of December 5 still fresh, Eichelberger must have been taken aback by MacArthur’s letter. The general clearly wanted to see more casualties. It was a bloody calculus: dead and wounded soldiers were a sign of initiative.

Eichelberger’s command was in jeopardy, and he knew it, so he sat down and penned a reply to the general. He was pushing the offensive, he wrote, with the kinds of numbers he felt the situation necessitated. And his men were indeed fighting gallantly. “I hope you will not let any Australian generals talk down their noses at you.” Then he assured MacArthur that his men would “push on to victory.” His earlier notion of letting attrition do the dirty work was no longer even a consideration.

Late on Christmas night a Japanese submarine, having escaped prowling American PT boats, unloaded rations and ammunition at Buna Government Station and shelled Allied positions on the Warren Front.

On the morning of December 28, Sutherland again showed up at Eichelberger’s command post. This time, though, he arrived with good news: The 41st Division’s 163rd Regiment, a unit of fit, superbly trained National Guardsmen from Montana, had just reached Port Moresby, and soon it would be sent to the Urbana Front. It was exactly what Eichelberger needed to hear. The previous night, he had read MacArthur’s latest piece of fiction. It had left him fuming mad. “On Christmas Day,” the communiqué read, “our activities were limited to routine safety precautions. Divine services were held.”

Together, Eichelberger and Sutherland visited Colonel Grose’s command post. Grose informed Eichelberger that he was pulling out the 127th’s exhausted 3rd Battalion, which had made the Entrance Creek crossing and had born the brunt of the battle in Government Gardens.

Eichelberger’s response shocked him.

“No John,” Eichelberger replied. “That’s not the plan. This afternoon I want you to attack the station.”

Grose could not believe his ears, and asked for confirmation. When Eichelberger told him that was indeed his plan, it was left for Grose to implement some kind of strategy.

Deciding that one prong of the attack had to come from Musida Island, which separated Buna Village from the Government Station, Grose sent out five boats. Their objective was to engage the Japanese east of the island while engineers repaired the bridge that spanned the creek between the island and the Government Station.

The boats pushed off in the late afternoon. Disoriented, they went west instead of east, and American troops who were dug in on the sand spit northwest of the island figured they were enemy boats and opened up on them. A lieutenant from the lead boat, which sunk immediately, struggled to shore and managed to reach the spit without being killed by friendly fire.

The lieutenant shouted, “You’re firing on Americans!” By the time the troops realized what they were doing and stopped, all five vessels had been sunk. Luckily no one had been killed.

Back at the bridge, 3rd Battalion troops tried to reach the station. At the far end of the bridge, though, the new pilings collapsed and the soldiers fell into the creek. Eichelberger, according to Grose, “ranted and raved like a caged lion.” He had hoped to impress Sutherland. Sutherland, though, left Grose’s command post in disgust. He had not been on hand to see the dramatic seizure of the Government Station, but instead witnessed the Keystone Kops in action.

The following day, Eichelberger’s command was saved by a patrol’s discovery: Captain Yasuda’s men had evacuated the Triangle.

Later, on the same morning, the original Urbana Force—White Smith’s 2nd Battalion 128th, and the Ghost Mountain Battalion, minus Gus Bailey—was pulled out of reserve again and sent forward.

For Stenberg, being sent back into battle was a blow. At the battalion’s bivouac site, he had sweated out another fever, and his left ear was worthless. He wondered now if he could hear well enough to save his own life. Would he be able to hear a stick crack just before a Jap gashed open his belly, or the shifting of a sniper hiding in the crook of a tree? He had been lucky on December 19, and he knew it. Now, he was being sent back in two days before the end of the year.

Stenberg and what remained of the 126th’s 2nd Battalion took up a holding position at the southeast end of Government Gardens. White Smith’s men moved into the Triangle. While the two battalions were en route, a company of the 127th pushed past the Government Station and established a pivotal two-hundred-foot frontage along the beach just west of Giropa Point.

While the Americans had finally fixed their supply problems—two hundred tons of cargo were coming in via freighter and lugger—the Japanese garrisons were being bombed into oblivion. At Girua, at the head of the Sanananda truck, Kiyoshi Wada, a member of the signal unit, chronicled the garrison’s collapse.

On December 20, Wada wrote, “At this rate I’ll become a dried-up human being.” Three days later, he wrote again, “When we made our first attack I had no consideration for life or death…. However, nowadays, somehow I am full of the desire to go back home alive just once more.”

The day after Christmas, Wada again found time to write: “The area around our tent is a desolate field. At about 8 o’clock, Hagino [Wada is referring to Private Mitsuo Hagino of the 144th Infantry Regiment’s 3rd Battalion] next to me, was hit. Since so many patients came pouring in, the medical men are shorthanded and I was forced to stop the bleeding and bandage Hagino outside in the pitch dark.” On December 28, Wada wrote despairingly. “Went to get water from the stream. On the way the jungle was full of dead, killed by shrapnel. There is something awful about the smell of the dead…. Everyone has taken cover in the jungle, but since there is no one to carry Hagino and take care of him, I cannot leave him behind. I have decided to stay…. All officers, even though there is such a scarcity of food, eat relatively well. The condition is one in which the majority is starving. This is indeed a deplorable state of affairs for the Imperial Army. I took out a picture of my parents and looked at it.”