The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea--The Forgotten War of the South Pacific (40 page)

Regarding what was called the “Brisbane Line,” in his book
1942
, Winston Groom suggests that MacArthur was having “none of” it, and that early on he had decided to take the war to New Guinea. William Manchester remains skeptical of the claim. It was revisionist and self-serving, a fiction first advanced by MacArthur in order to portray himself to history as a decisive commander. MacArthur, Manchester maintains, sent Australian and American troops to New Guinea only when there was no other course of action available to him. In his book
There’s a War to Be Won
, Geoffrey Perret is critical of MacArthur’s tendency for self-promotion. “This banal truth,” Perret wrote of MacArthur’s decision to accept Australia’s defensive posture, “would seem to be in conflict with the legend of MacArthur the Bold.” According to Perret and David Horner, too, MacArthur bolstered his own image by promoting a “fiction in which he’d found the Australians craven and defeatist.”

Regarding the threat to Australia, there is an ongoing and heated discussion taking place in Australia about whether or not Japan ever intended to invade. Dr. Peter Stanley delivered a paper titled “He’s (Not) Coming South: The Invasion That Wasn’t” at an Australian War Memorial conference. To this day, many people believe that Australia was Japan’s target. Yet Japanese war documents indicate that on March 15, 1942, the Army and Navy Sections of the Imperial General Headquarters dismissed the idea of an attack on the Australian mainland. The Japanese navy championed the idea, but the army demurred. After the war, Premier Hideki Tojo argued that Japan had dismissed the idea of invading Australia as early as March 1942 because it would require too many troops. Instead, Japan opted for a plan to seize Port Moresby, occupy the southern Solomon Islands, and isolate Australia by controlling the air space and the oceans so that the Americans could not use it as a base for offensive actions. Neither Allied Headquarters, Australia’s Joint Chiefs, nor the people of Australia were privy to this information, though. Stanley maintains that Prime Minister Curtin in particular exaggerated the threat.

On the subject of the Japanese invasion, army historian Samuel Milner seems to be of two minds. He writes: “Instead of approving an operation against the Australian mainland, the Japanese agreed to seize Port Moresby as planned and then, with the parallel occupation of the southern Solomons, ‘to isolate Australia’ by seizing Fiji, Samoa, and New Caledonia…. The plan said nothing about invading Australia; it did not have to. If everything went well and all objectives were taken, there would be enough time to begin planning for the invasion…. It was clear from the circumstances that the Japanese had not given up on the idea of invading Australia. They had merely laid it aside….”

For a description of the panic that existed in Australia, I relied Paul Ham’s
Kokoda,
Peter Brune’s books, and David Day’s
The Great Betrayal
and
The Politics of War.
Milner and Ham both do an excellent job of presenting the jockeying and deal making that went on after MacArthur arrived in Australia.

Regarding MacArthur’s burning ambition to return to the Philippines in triumph, General Brett provides interesting insights into MacArthur’s character. He writes, “The fulfillment of his promise to return to the Philippines seemed years away. He was a disappointed and unhappy man…. MacArthur retired into his ivory tower to plan the campaigns ahead. The planning was long range…. I don’t believe he gave much thought to our immediate problems.” Brett compares MacArthur to Marshall. Marshall, he says was “one of the clearest-thinking, least temperamental men” he had ever known. On the other hand, MacArthur was, in his opinion, a “brilliant, temperamental egoist.”

Chapter 2. A Train Heading West

For the general history of the 32nd Division, I relied primarily on three books: Major General H. W. Blakeley’s
The 32nd Infantry Division in World War II; Wisconsin’s Red Arrow Division;
and
32nd Division, Les Terribles
. Herbert Smith’s books and division files at the National Archives also provide excellent details on the division’s Louisiana experience, the train ride, etc.

Regarding the warning signs, Brett writes in
The MacArthur I Knew
, “A reconnaissance picked up information of a concentration of troops and shipping at Rabaul…everything pointed to an active gathering of enemy forces. It seemed evident that they would head for some point on the north coast of New Guinea, and even attempt to go all the way around to Port Moresby. General MacArthur’s headquarters was kept apprised of the situation, but made little comment, and gave practically no suggestions or advice.” Brett, elaborating on MacArthur’s preoccupation with the Philippines, writes, “Not once, while I was in Australia, did the Supreme Commander go north to visit the advance bases…. MacArthur stuck to his desk.”

Toland writes that Churchill, when he heard of the attack on Pearl Harbor, slept well, knowing that the U.S. was now officially on his side. Toland also describes in vivid detail the simultaneous attacks on Pearl Harbor and Singapore Island. He also describes the euphoria that seized Japan.

Much of my portrayal of America immediately following Pearl Harbor comes from two outstanding books, Geoffrey Perret’s
Days of Sadness, Years of Triumph
and Paul Fussell’s
Wartime.

Chapter 3. Arrival Down Under

Again, Smith’s books provide wonderful details of the soldiers’ experience at the Cow Palace and the three-week trip to Australia. In
Gentle Knight,
General Edwin Forrest Harding’s biographer Leslie Anders also writes about the experience. Clarence Jungwirth left behind a wonderful account of his experiences (
Diary of a National Guardsman in World War II
). Lenord Sill’s
Buna & Beyond
and Howard Kelley’s
Born in the U.S.A. Raised in New Guinea
were also very helpful.

Some of the details of the American soldiers’ relationship to the Australians and the returning Australian soldiers are from C. P. Murdock’s
Saturday Evening Post
article, “The Red Arrow Pierced Every Line,” E. J. Kahn’s
G.I. Jungle,
and
Gentle Knight.

For the personal details on General Harding, I depended upon Leslie Anders’ wonderful biography
Gentle Knight.

When Harding left San Franciso, his son Davis, who was finishing up his doctoral dissertation in English, wrote him. “Good luck, dad,” Davis wrote. “I like the idea of having you for a father.” Harding, Anders writes, responded with appropriate lines from Kipling:

The troopship’s on the tide, my boys, the troopship’s on the tide, O it’s “special train for Atkins” when the trooper’s on the tide.

E. J. Kahn wrote that soldiers knew so little about Australia they expected to be “met at a primitive wharf by aborigine porters on kangaroos.”

For details on the division’s training in Australia, I relied on Milner’s book, his interview with Harding, which can be found at the Office of the Chief of Military History, and Anders’ biography.

When Harding renamed Tamborine Camp Cable, Sergeant Gerald Cable’s mother wrote him, thanking him for “the high honor you have done my son’s name.”

To discuss the medical problems in the South Pacific, I used Simon Warmenhoven’s letters and a number of splendid books and articles, many written by Mary Ellen Condon-Rall.

Medical Department, United States Army in World War II,
a series published in Washington, D.C., by the Army’s Office of the Surgeon General, provides both organizational studies and numerous physician-written accounts of the clinical problems encountered in the war against Japan. The Medical Department produced forty-eight books on World War II. They are divided into a number of sub-series dealing with preventive medicine, internal medicine, surgery, etc. One very helpful book is on preventive medicine:
Communicable Disease: Malaria,
edited by Ebbe Curtis Hoff. There are seven other volumes in this sub-series that deal with medical problems other than malaria. I also used a book published by the U.S. Army’s Center of Military History in Washington, D.C., in its
United States Army in World War II
series. It is coauthored by Mary Ellen Condon-Rall, titled
The Medical Department: Medical Service in the War Against Japan.
Chapter IV deals with jungle warfare. Three more publications were of enormous help. They are Condon-Rall’s “Allied Cooperation in Malaria Prevention and Control: The World War II Southwest Pacific Experience” (
Journal of the History of Medicine,
Vol. 46, October 1991, pp. 493-513), her “Malaria in the Southwest Pacific in World War II” (in Roy M. MacLeod, editor, The University of Sydney, Australia,
Science and the Pacific War, Science and Survival in the Pacific, 1939-1945,
Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht/Boston/London, 2000), and her “The Army’s War against Malaria: Collaboration in Drug Research during World War II” (
Armed Forces and Society,
Vol. 21, No. 1, fall 1994, pp. 129-143).

Milner and Ham describe in detail the intelligence reports that said Japan was planning to invade New Guinea.

The early days of the Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit (ANGAU) and Major General Basil Morris’ dismissal of the possibility of a Japanese overland invasion, and the subsequent invasion, are found in Alan Powell’s wonderful book
The Third Force.

An especially gruesome piece of history is the story of Miss May Hayman and Miss Mavis Parkinson, two young Anglican sisters assigned to the Gona Mission, who fled the Yokoyama Advance Force on July 21, 1942. When hundreds of Japanese troops slid down ropes onto barges to be transported through the puzzle of reefs to shore, Hayman and Parkinson plunged deep into the jungle with only a compass. Father James Benson, who ran the mission at Gona, led them. For months he had urged the sisters to leave Papua along with the rest of the white population that had evacuated, but they had refused. “Lighten our darkness, O Lord,” Father Benson prayed as they fled the Japanese.

Benson, Hayman, and Parkinson eluded the Japanese advance troops of the Tsukamoto Battalion until a native collaborator named Emboge from the Orokaivan people betrayed them near the village of Doboduru. The two sisters were taken to a plantation near the village of Buna, not far from the Japanese landing site, and were bayoneted to death. Mavis Parkinson was the first to go. A Japanese soldier forced her into an embrace. When she struggled to free herself, he dug his bayonet deep into her side. May Hayman, who held a towel over her eyes, was bayoneted in the throat as she listened to her friend die.

Emboge and his accomplices were later arrested and hanged.

“What else could we do?” Emboge pleaded. “The kiawa [white men] treated us badly before the war and they deserted the people when the Japanese landed at Buna.”

A sympathetic ANGAU officer witnessed the hanging. “I lay awake most of the night,” he wrote, “listening to the drums beating, and the wailing of the mourners…. I had seen death in various forms during the preceding twelve months, but nothing affected me as much as the hanging…. Perhaps it was the courage they displayed when the time came for them to die. Be that as it may, the punishment meted out to them was in accordance with their own tribal code of ‘an eye for an eye.’”

Arthur Duna’s quote is found in John Dadeno Waiko’s book,
PNG: A History of Our Time.
Duna’s account of the invasion is substantiated by a number of interviews that I conducted in Buna in 2005 and 2006. More information on the Japanese invasion can be found in Waiko’s “Damp Soil My Bed; Rotten Log My Pillow: A Villager’s Experience of the Japanese Invasion.”

Regarding the invasion from the Japanese perspective, I relied on a number of sources:
Nankai Shitai, War Book of the 144th Regiment; Lost Troops; Southern Cross
, and also a collection of ATIS documents at the National Archives. Milner also provides details. A whole host of Australian authors, including Ham, David Horner, Les McAulay, Peter Brune, Victor Austin, and Raymond Paull have written riveting, well-researched books about the battle along the Kokoda track.

All personal details on Herman Bottcher come from soldiers’ recollections and two articles: “Fire and Blood in the Jungle” by George L. Moorad in the July 3, 1943 issue of
Liberty Magazine
and Mark Sufrin’s article “Take Buna or don’t come back alive” in the
Historical Times.

Chapter 4. Sons of Heaven

Details on General Horii are taken from Lida Mayo’s book,
Bloody Buna.

Using G-2 daily summaries housed at the National Archives and Milner, I was able to detail Allied intelligence failures.

There are a number of excellent books on the militarization of Japanese society: John Toland’s
The Rising Sun, Soldiers of the Sun
by Meirion and Susie Harries,
Tojo and the Coming of the War
by Robert Butow, David James’
The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Empire, Japan’s War
by Edwin Hoyt, and Ruth Benedict’s
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East, which investigated Japanese war crimes after the war, harshly condemned bushido. Although a willingness to die in the execution of one’s duty was a genuine part of the historic samurai ethic, the original conception of bushido left room for honorable surrender, both for the samurai and his enemies. Bushido’s twentieth-century perversion, however, engendered what military historian Eric Beregrud called “a cult of death,” in which no compassion was given and none was received.

Japanese quotes and diary entries are from ATIS documents.

The Australian perspective is from Ham, Brune, and Horner.

Chapter 5. Cannibal Island

Excerpts from Harding’s letters home appear in Anders’ biography and lend insight into Harding’s humanity.

Excerpts from MacArthur’s speech are taken from Blakeley. Anders also includes portions of MacArthur’s speech.

For a perspective on just how much it rains on the island of New Guinea, consider that Seattle, Washington, which is often considered the wettest place in the United States, gets an average of about seventy to eighty inches of rain per year. Milne Bay, one of the wettest places on the island’s eastern half (Papua New Guinea), regularly gets two and a half to three times that.