The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea--The Forgotten War of the South Pacific (39 page)

For the natives of New Guinea, who according to General Blamey could not be given “too much praise,” nothing would ever be the same. Yet, as the war moved up the coast of New Guinea, the natives, and especially the carriers, were forgotten. According to a former ANGAU administrator, “Carriers and conscripted village men never received their just rewards.” Author Alan Powell writes that this remains “a lasting stain on Australia’s war record.”

What’s more, civilized warfare had clearly wrought greater destruction than centuries of tribal battles. An estimated fifteen thousand New Guineans died as a direct result of the war and tens of thousands more died of disease and starvation.

According to John Waiko, a native New Guinean, who was born a year after the campaign ended, war had a profound effect on people: “The villages suffered severely, without men to clear gardens, hunt, maintain houses and canoes, etc…. The women were strained from overworking, there was…high infant mortality, there was all the grief of separation and bereavement and the frightening…loss of will to live…”

The people of the Buna coast, in particular, returned to find their land strewn with the detritus of war. Airfields and roads quickly fell into disrepair. Undetonated shells lay scattered around the swamps. The population of crocodiles burgeoned. Rotting corpses fouled drinking holes, homes and gardens had been destroyed, birds and animals had disappeared, and trees were nothing but bare, bullet-ridden trunks. In the sunlight and stagnant water of bomb craters, mosquitoes bred, malaria cases skyrocketed, and the disease became more virulent by passage through many human hosts.

Sam DiMaggio recovered from blackwater fever in time to take part in the battles of Saidor, Aitape, Morotai, and Leyte, where he suffered on and off from malaria. He was discharged on points (a soldier needed only eighty-five combat points to get back home and DiMaggio had 130) one day before his company shipped out to Luzon. Once back in the States, he was sent to Fort Ord in California, where he was in charge of a barracks of a hundred men who were training to go to the Pacific. He was at Fort Ord on V-E Day, May 8, 1945, and in Albion, Michigan, on V-J Day, September 2, 1945. DiMaggio received a Combat Badge, a Purple Heart, the Bronze Star, and four campaign stars for his service. His brother Jimmy was killed in northern France by a German sniper in November 1944. DiMaggio had six more malaria attacks after he was discharged in July 1945 with the rank of sergeant. The piece of shrapnel that lodged in his jawbone on December 19, 1942, is still there today.

Suffering from jungle rot and malaria, Stanley Jastrzembski was put on limited duty in Sydney, Australia, where he guarded a stockade. Although he had enough points to get home, he stayed on until Japan surrendered—until, as he says, “the last dog was hung.” Jastrzembski was discharged in mid-August 1945. He was awarded the Bronze Star for his service.

Gus Bailey won the army’s second highest award—the Distinguished Service Cross—for his heroism at Buna. Back in Australia, he was promoted to captain and made commander of the 126th’s 1st Battalion. He took part in the battles of Saidor, Aitape, Morotai, and Leyte. Although he had been offered a position as regimental executive officer, which would have kept him off the front lines, Bailey turned it down and was killed by a Japanese grenade on the Villa Verde Trail on the island of Luzon on April 25, 1945. He was awarded the Silver Star posthumously. In February 1949, his body was returned to the U.S.

Carl Stenberg was put on limited service in Australia, where he was assigned to a replacement depot in Brisbane and later to Signal Section headquarters. In August 1944, Stenberg was bound for the United States aboard a Norwegian freighter, and four months later he was discharged. He suffered from malaria attacks for another ten years and still has scars on his legs from jungle ulcers. Stenberg received the Combat Infantry Badge, the Presidential Citation, two Oak Leaf Clusters, and the Bronze Star, but what he treasures more than anything else is the Christmas card he received from Jim Broner in December 1996. The note reads: “I will never forget the effort that you made in saving my life, so many years ago: And believe it or not I’m still enjoying every minute.”

Paul Lutjens spent a year in Australia, recuperating from malaria and the wounds he sustained in battle on December 5 and was awarded the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star, and the Distinguished Service Cross. When he returned to the United States, he was still so gaunt he could wrap his hands around his waist. The first thing he did was to make his way to San Jose, California, and propose to Lorraine Phillips, the woman to whom he wrote from the swamp on November 29, 1942. He and Lorraine were married at the Presidio in San Francisco. In February 1944, he traveled to military bases throughout the South, lecturing about the Buna campaign to troops preparing to go overseas. Afterward, he embarked on a career in military intelligence and counterintelligence, and was stationed at bases across the United States, as well as in the Philippines and Japan. Later, he commanded military intelligence groups in Hawaii, Germany, and at the Presidio.

Herbert “Stutterin’” Smith was sent to the 105th General Hospital at Gatton, about thirty miles from Brisbane, where he recuperated in a small ward with Paul Lutjens and Harold Hantlemann (Hantlemann would eventually marry the ward’s Red Cross nurse). Afterward he was made executive officer and port inspector of Base Section 4 in Melbourne. Just before going back to the United States, he checked into the 4th General Hospital, where his roommates were Guadalcanal veterans from the 1st Marine Division. According to Smith, “They continuously harped about the tough times they had endured” until one day Smith put on his blouse and they asked him where he acquired his ribbons—a Combat Infantry Badge, the Purple Heart, and the Distinguished Service Cross. When Smith told them Buna, they did not refer again to Guadalcanal in his presence. On October 6, 1943, Smith sailed for the United States and not long after he retired from the military. On June 28, 1990, forty-six years after he left the army, the State of Wisconsin honored Smith with the Wisconsin National Guard Distinguished Service Medal.

Captain Alfred Medendorp suffered recurrent malaria and was classified as “unfit for combat duty.” He was reassigned to the Amphibious Training Center where he worked with the navy to improve the performance of troop and equipment landing craft. He was rotated home in April 1945 and was awarded the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star, and the Combat Infantry Badge. In 1950, Medendorp (by then a major) volunteered for active duty during the Korean War. He was stationed at Fort Monroe, Virginia, until the spring of 1954. He was then assigned to the Military Assistance Advisory Group in Taiwan. On September 3, 1954, during his inspection of Chinese Nationalist Forces on the island of Quemoy (now Kinmen Island), a mile and a half from the Chinese mainland, Medendorp was killed during an artillery barrage.

General Eichelberger said of Herman Bottcher, “He was one of the best Americans I have ever known.” For his heroism at Buna, Bottcher was given a rare battlefield commission as a captain and awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. Bottcher was killed in Leyte on November 28, 1944. Although he had achieved the rank of major, he was making a lone reconnaissance behind enemy lines in the Ormoc Valley when he was cornered in a rice paddy by a Japanese patrol. He held off the Japanese for four hours, but was finally killed by two rifle slugs to the head. Legend has it that advancing American soldiers of the 32nd Division found him facedown in a puddle of mud, still gripping his pistol. He is buried in the Manila American Cemetery. Today a memorial to Herman Bottcher stands in the village of Buna.

General Edwin Forrest Harding went on to become commanding general of the Panama Mobile Force, where he trained units in jungle warfare. Unlike Eichelberger, he never took the opportunity to justify himself in a postwar memoir. In 1946 Harding retired to Franklin, Ohio, to the stately family home. He remained the favorite general of 32nd Division veterans. One veteran said, “His greatest fault was that he loved his troops and could not stand to see them slaughtered.” At a reunion, they presented General Harding with a Bronze Red Arrow plaque, which he treasured.

On June 21, 1943, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Lieutenant Colonel Simon Warmenhoven was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. Henrietta “Mandy” Warmenhoven saved every one of her husband’s 160 letters.

Notes

I
N PUTTING THIS BOOK TOGETHER,
I have used countless interviews—with veterans of the march and the campaign, and wives, children, grandchildren, and friends of the participants—to elaborate on the official army narrative. I have also used self-published books, diaries, newspaper articles, and veterans’ printed recollections to bring the human history to life. Major Herbert M. “Stutterin’” Smith wrote three informative books about his experience:
Four Score and Ten; 0-241957;
and
Hannibal Had Elephants II.
The Indiana author Wendell Trogdon wrote a wonderful biography of Gus Bailey called
Out Front: The Cladie Bailey Story.
Sam DiMaggio dictated his biography to his son J. P. DiMaggio; it’s called “I Never Had It So Good.” Captain Alfred Medendorp left behind two detailed accounts of the march and the ensuing war. The first is an official document published by the Ground General School in October 1949, titled “The March and Operations of Antitank and Cannon Companies…(Personal Experience of a Patrol Commander).” The second is an extensive (over one hundred pages), untitled collection of personal memories. Walter Shauppner left behind a diary in which he detailed the day-by-day activities of the 127th Infantry Regiment, beginning with its arrival at Port Moresby Harbor. Lawrence Thayer wrote a revealing account of the 128th’s experiences. Clarence Jungwirth wrote
Diary of a National Guardsman in WWII,
an informative account of his experiences from 1940 to 1945. Paul Lutjens left behind a diary and the text of his lecture on the Papuan campaign. General Edwin Forrest Harding’s diary is also an excellent source of information. Courtesy of Walter Hunt, Jim Hunt’s brother, I have Lieutenant Hunt’s diary and an enlightening letter that Hunt sent to Major Herbert Smith after reading one of Smith’s books. Jim Boice’s diary was very useful, as were Lieutenant Colonel Bill Sikkel’s recollections and those of Gordon Zuverink, Herb Steenstra, and Stanley Hollenbeck. Simon Warmenhoven’s letters were important sources of information. The letters provided me with insight into a remarkable man. Art Edson’s letters were also very helpful. Maclaren Hiari’s account of his father’s experiences as a carrier for the Allied Forces in New Guinea was also quite helpful. The Wisconsin Veterans Museum (and its very capable staff) proved to be a treasure trove of information. The museum has a large collection of letters, diaries, audio interviews, and photographs donated by veterans and/or their families.

This book would have been impossible to write without the help of a number of secondary sources:
Victory in Papua,
written by Samuel Milner, the offical U.S. Army historian of the campaign;
Bloody Buna
by Lida Mayo;
Kokoda
by Paul Ham; Eric Bergerud’s
Touched with Fire;
Harry Gailey’s
MacArthur Strikes Back; Papuan Campaign, the Buna-Sanananda Operation,
put out by the Center of Military History, U.S. Army; and the “Report of the Commanding General Buna Forces on the Buna Campaign.”

In order to portray the Japanese experience and some of the soldiers whom this book mentions, I used the National Archives’ collection of Allied Translator and Interpreter Section (ATIS) diaries and interrogation reports. Other primary sources were
Nankai Shitai, War Book of the 144th Regiment,
translated by F. C Jorgensen, Seizo Okada’s
Lost Troops,
and
Southern Cross
, translated by Doris Hart.

I have also used my personal observations of the landscapes to inform certain scenes and to describe some of the settings for the story. I have visited Papua New Guinea five times. My first trip was in 1989. Fascinated with the country, I kept coming back, and that is how I discovered the story of the Ghost Mountain boys.

It is impossible to spend any time in New Guinea without encountering World War II history. Strewn across the mountains are pieces of planes that went down during the war. The coastal waters teem with reminders, too. While scuba diving, I saw submarine caverns, downed planes, remnants of transport ships and luggers, and large, twisted pieces of metal dating back to the war.

In the mountain villages along the Kapa Kapa trail, people still tell stories of the U.S. Army’s march across the mountains. Villagers showed me where soldiers collapsed in the mud, unable to go on, where they camped, and where the few soldiers who died on the trek were buried. One of my most fortuitous encounters was with a man named Berua, whom I met in the village of Laruni. Berua was only seven when his parents were chosen to serve as carriers for the American army. Frightened that he would never see them again, he followed his parents and the American army over the Owen Stanleys. It was an experience he would never forget.

On the coast, villagers still talk of the war. These war stories have become part of the local mythology, passed down by people from one generation to the next around the fire. Fascination and resentment linger. The war destroyed villages and innocent people’s lives.

In many cases the locals’ stories resembled the accepted historical version. However, in some cases, they have been wildly, and interestingly, embellished. One man suggested that it was a native sorcerer who had warned the Allies of the Japanese invasion. He went on to say that the sorcerer later flew over Japanese positions on the coast and alerted American artillerymen so that they could sight their big guns. Another man said that the war ended when a native sorcerer killed Japan’s most important general.

In the summer of 2005, I made a one-month trip to Papua New Guinea. I spent that month researching the war and the trail. I also visited Gabagaba, Doboduru, Buna, Siremi, Oro Bay, Pongani, Wanigela, and a number of inland villages, where I interviewed elders who had witnessed the war. In Buna, I heard stories of the Japanese invasion. In Gabagaba, people talked about the arrival of the Americans, especially the African-American engineers.

In the United States, during the summer of 2005, prior to my trip to Papua New Guinea, I attended a five-day 32nd Division Old Timers gathering at Fort McCoy, Wisconsin. Our accommodations were army barracks. On my first day, I watched a man make his bed as if a tough sergeant would be inspecting his work: Not a crease in the top sheet, the corners tucked in, the pillow fluffed like a cumulous cloud.

Although it was only early June, it was already in the high 90s. Enormous fans cooled the barracks, but they only did so much. I did not understand how the older guys could take it until they set me straight.

“This is a breeze compared to New Guinea,” one said.

I was in the real old-timers’ barracks. Bill Barnes, who was a second lieutenant at Buna, was ninety-five. He wore big Coke-bottle glasses and had a pacemaker but looked like he could still run a marathon. Lawrence Chester Dennis was 93. At Buna, he had run messages from headquarters to various companies across the front, earning him the nickname “moving target.” Dennis was nearly blind now, so the guys set out his clothes, made his bed, took him to the bathroom, and made sure he got to the events on time.

Then there was Roy Gormanson, who, the first time I met him, took off his tie and shirt and showed me his mangled left shoulder. “Took three operations to get it this good,” he said. “And still I can’t lift my arm over my head.”

Many of the guys in my barracks had trouble walking. Nearly everyone had diabetes. A bunch had been through heart bypasses. They all took an assortment of pills. Yet for five days they joked with each other as if they were young GIs. They joked wherever they went—in the mess hall, in the communal showers, as they peed into a large trough, and in the morning on the “shitter” that sat in plain view of five or six others.

“No goddamn privacy in the army,” an old-timer commented.

One morning one of the guys announced as he settled onto a toilet seat that he was going to die, but not of a stroke or a heart attack or colon cancer. “I want to be shot by an irate husband,” he said. The entire bathrooom roared.

At night the guys played poker in the mess hall and drank beer. And sometimes they talked about the war. Mostly, though, it was a subject they avoided. Red Lawler, who was in his nineties and ran a pizza parlor in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, said, “I saw so much death in New Guinea, I like to forget. It was a horrible place.”

One man—I never did learn his name—told me that when the battle for Buna was almost over and the Americans were mopping up, looking for stray Japanese soldiers, he and a young private stood on a beach. The private had just finished showing him a photo of his wife and little boy. “Sure can’t wait to get back to them,” the private said. Just then a shot cracked out of the jungle, and the private fell. The bullet had taken away half his head.

After the Old Timers event I spent the next six months interviewing and collecting stories. I drove across the Midwest and called Texas, Boston, New York, Florida, Ohio, Washington, D.C., and California.

I heard the same from almost every veteran. “There are few of us left. You should have done this book ten years ago. Hurry up and finish so I’m around to read it.”

One man from Michigan had a list of everyone from his company, and started reading off the names. “Gone,” he said. “Dead. He’s gone, too. He passed away not too long ago. He’s dead, too, now. Goddammit,” he said, as if realizing it for the first time, “they’re all gone.”

Eventually it was clear that with so many of the guys gone I would have to start contacting sons and daughters, even grandkids. That search brought me to southern Indiana.

William “Jim” Boice, the man who had led the initial reconnaissance patrol across the island, was from Indiana, and his son still lives there. Bill Boice Jr., in his mid-sixties, runs a manufacturing business, and walks and talks with an unlit cigar in his mouth. After giving me a tour of his plant, he and his wife Joyce kindly invited me to their house, where together we went through old newspaper clippings and photos that his mother had saved. Then we had lunch. After lunch we read entries from his father’s diary and then we got to his father’s letters.

When Bill Jr. read them, his voice shook. Handing the letters to me, he said, “Read ’em, I can’t.” Neither could I.

It was after my visit to Bill Boice that I began writing. And it was then that I decided I was going to walk across New Guinea in the footsteps of the Ghost Mountain boys.

My journey began with my scouting trip in August 2005. Almost everyone I met in Papua New Guinea warned me not to try to repeat the march. The Kapa Kapa was a rugged hunting and trading trail in 1942. No one knew if it still existed. Besides, they said, the country was too rough: cliffs, rivers, snakes, mountains, mosquitoes, leeches, and disease. And who knows, they said, whether the people will let you walk through their tribal lands. Some of those mountain villagers barely know the outside world exists. They still hunt with spears and slingshots.

In June 2006 I began the trip, accompanied by a friend and part-time filmmaker from Chicago, an Alaskan pal, an Australian expat living in Port Moresby who had spent lots of time in the New Guinea bush, a photographer from Hong Kong, and three Papua New Guinea cameramen from Port Moresby’s POM Productions. If we succeeded, our expedition would be an historic event; no outsider had attempted to walk the entire trail since the soldiers did it in 1942.

On the first day, climbing down to a river on a red clay trail as slippery as lake ice, I fell, tumbling head over heels with a sixty-seven-pound pack on my back. When I got to my feet, I knew that I had torn a ligament in my knee. I limped for another three hours until I could walk no more. My pulse was fast and thready, my vision blurred. I knew I could not make it, so I turned back and walked out. My friend George from Chicago accompanied me.

That night we slept in a village in a hut made of woven bamboo, and we were told to be on the lookout for ill-intentioned sorcerers. The following day we stumbled out of the mountains and hitched a ride to Port Moresby.

Four days later, equipped with painkillers and anti-inflammatories, and determined to follow in the footsteps of the Ghost Mountain boys, we were helicoptered back into the jungle.

Introduction

My remarks on the supply and equipment problems derive in part from a document titled “Comments on the Buna Campaign by a Quartermaster,” which is part of the Hanson Baldwin Collection at the George C. Marshall Research Library in Lexington, Virginia. War correspondent Jules Archer wrote an article for
Man’s Magazine
called “Why the 32nd Division Won’t Forgive General MacArthur.” It was very helpful, as was Tillman Durdin’s article, “The Grim Hide-and-Seek of Jungle War,” which appeared in the March 1943 edition of
The New York Times Magazine.

Chapter 1. Escape to the South

There are a variety of people, including General Charles Willoughby, MacArthur’s head of Intelligence, who address MacArthur’s exchange with Wainwright and his subsequent flight from Corregidor. All seem to have a slightly different take on what transpired. In his superbly researched book,
American Caesar
, William Manchester describes MacArthur’s escape from Corregidor, his arrival in Australia, and his state of mind. To a large extent this is the account that I have relied on.

As for the legend about MacArthur’s fear of flying, General George Brett, who for a short time was MacArthur’s commander of American forces in Australia, may be the author. In “The MacArthur I Knew,” Brett states that MacArthur “hated to fly,” “suffered from airsickness,” and “would not get into a plane unless he knew it was perfect.” Brett also has some insightful comments about MacArthur’s psyche and his time in Australia, and the exclusivity of the Bataan Gang. And he dispels once and for all the tale that MacArthur fled Corregidor with a mattress full of gold pesos.

Regarding MacArthur’s famous speech, Harry Gailey, author of
MacArthur Strikes Back
, says that MacArthur uttered his famous words “I shall return” for the first time to reporters at Batchelor Field. In
Reminiscences
, MacArthur says the same. General Charles Willoughby says it happened in Alice Springs, as does John Toland in
The Rising Sun.
In other words, there does not seem to be a definitive, universally accepted account of what happened, or where. It may be that MacArthur uttered the three words at Batchelor Field, but according to Manchester, the speech heard round the world was made in Adelaide. Manchester describes how MacArthur labored over what he would say: MacArthur was concerned about the first sentence, writing and re-writing it many times. But it was the last sentence that caught on, becoming, according to historian Winston Groom, as memorable as “The British are coming!” or “Remember the Alamo.” MacArthur’s detractors trashed the speech, citing it as an example of the general’s megalomania. Why had he used “I”? It seemed silly and pompous, they said. Why had he not said, “
We
shall return”?