BATTLE OF BUNA: A DAY AT THE FRONT
With American Forces in New Guinea—December 24, 1942
(Delayed)
The bitter battle of Buna grows harsher as it progresses. Today on the right flank, where the prize is a mud-slogged airdrome with two wrecked Jap fighters on it, tanks again pushed our line farther up the field in what resembled a bloody gain for yardage upon some incredible football stadium of enormous size.
Meanwhile, on the left flank, American troops—with Australians on their way from the “island” in the mouth of Entrance Creek—succeeded in reaching the sea with a gallant effort which your correspondent witnessed under fire. By this hazardous, courageous charge the American infantry, in alternating rain and spasms of sunlight that left the ground steaming, once more fought their way to the borders of the black beach while Jap snipers in trees plied their carbines.
“Spray trees” has been the order of the still-unnameable American general commanding both countries' forces here, an order punctiliously observed.
Twice today your correspondent crossed that 60-foot mud-choked malarial stream which surrounded the island, once in a squashy, mud-smeared rubber boat run upon wires by an infantryman crouching in the lee of a coconut log, once over the crazyquilt bridge built under fire. Another bridge was needed to approach the labyrinth of entrenched Japs on this marshy tongue of land and coconut palms which occupies the west of the outthrust campo between Buna Village and Buna Mission. Called Government Gardens, it is simply more stinking Papuan swamp.
From lying half-crouched in the palpitating rubber boat's mud-filled interior, the writer then followed the men as they methodically darted from tree to tree. Every man nearby lay in a mudhole behind a log or thickveined tree while the rain pattered on green shirts sour with sweat. As machine guns clattered, the smell of the first bodies came to us across Government Gardens.
Captain Byron Bradford, whose group of men are advancing through this difficult, steaming marsh, today talked with this correspondent in a grassy hole behind the firing line while heavy weapons crashed in the trees. He pointed out that his runners and his lieutenants have been outstanding.
“Were it not for Lieutenant Kleinschmidt silencing a machine gun that was sweeping this creek, our advance today would have been impossible,” he said. “And that is the best jungle fighter here,” he said, pointing to Lieutenant Roger Upton, a narrow-faced, sharp-eyed officer of about twenty-six. Upton explained: “We simply use the Jap trick of giving them bait at the side, then slipping around and attacking from the rear. Anybody can work these things if he has training.”
The time was nearly ripe for the main attack toward the beach, shortly before noon. After talking quietly in the trench, we crawled out and everyone took cover behind piles of captured Jap stuff including beautifully chromed radio receivers.
INTREPID YANKS TURN PILLBOXES INTO JAP TOMBS
Daring Maneuver Destroys Defenses at Buna After Frontal Attack Fails
With American Forces in New Guinea—December 29, 1942
(Delayed by Censor)
The bloody triangle of Buna broke today amid the thunder of mortar fire and the song of shells whamming into retreating Japs. With his head lowered like the infantrymen in front and behind, your correspondent ran through sniper fire across this pillbox-pockmarked triangle to reach the advanced post where lay, under fire, three of the men responsible for this achievement.
A few yards ahead was a continual mighty threshing of undulant foliage as crawling tommy-gunners hosed them endlessly with .45 slugs. I lay at the foot of a tree spattered with blood where one sniper had just been shot down. In another's branches dangled the silvery wing-panel of a Zero. Concealed in foliage under the motherly protection of a thick-rooted tree, I heard the story of this taking of the bloody triangle directly from the soldiers who accomplished this costly task.
I reached the outpost, on a field dominated by Jap fire, by a twisting course around another field. On my back I wore the knapsack of a runner who had been sent for water. The runner carried filled flasks, strung by chains upon a stick. Two tommy-gunners covered us as we ran across the field. At the bridge a fusillade burst out and I flung myself flat. The others crossed amid the enemy fire, which then stopped. When I began my dash across the final fifty yards, the Japs opened up again. But in the last dash I reached the company that had broken the triangle.
The triangle is that scarred swamp of pandanus and betel nut trees, and thick grass, where the roads to Buna Village and Buna Mission diverge left (west) and right (east). “Road” means a trail big enough for a bicycle, not for a four-wheel vehicle such as a peep. It is a partly dry lane, lifted above the surrounding morass.
To take Buna Village two weeks ago the Americans hewed a jungle path to the left of the westward road. They desired to go straight through simultaneously on both roads, but were prevented on the right by a Jap pillbox—heavy palmetto logs filled in with earth—lying athwart the trail. Deep quagmire flanked both sides.
For nearly a fortnight Americans launched every conceivable infantry attack against the right-hand fork, to Buna Mission. Our first heavy attack came ten days ago, preceded by a 25-pounder barrage. These shells, however, bounded off the tops of the dugouts. Japs could be heard calling, “Hello, boy,” in apparent derision.
After the failure of a first attack, the commanding general said he would give high honors to any group of men who reached the pillboxes.
Last Thursday (December 24) a second attack pressed with great courage but was unable to penetrate Jap fire. When the American general reiterated that this fork was the key to Buna Mission and must be conquered, his own aide volunteered. The aide led a new attack, but losses obliged him to withdraw like his predecessors.
When all efforts to circumvent the pillboxes failed, Sergeant Harold Huyck led an assault straight down the ditches flanking the foot-wide path. This four-man party managed to make it forty yards from the foremost pillbox before the bullfrog-like mouth belched machine-gun fire. (These men described their attack to the writer after emerging from the swamp with faces blackened with mud, mired to the hips.)
The thankless task now fell to Captain James Alford, a dark-haired, friendly Mississippian, thin and modest, and usually helmetless.
“First, we decided to go through the swamp and see how the pillboxes looked from the rear,” said Alford, as though this day-long pull through shoulder-deep, sniper-filled swamp were a Sunday stroll. Alford established a small sniper-free area in the jungle bordering upon the creek and coconut grove at the enemy rear.
“We began by killing tree snipers. Our best shot got two.”
“And you got three yourself,” prompted a sergeant.
Having cleaned out the snipers, and learned the Jap trick of suspending a straw-filled dummy in the same tree with a sniper to reveal the sources of fire, Alford's company then established a treetop lookout, Jap-style. Their first important discovery from this vantage point—within enemy lines, it should be remembered—was that they were confronted not with three, but fourteen pillboxes. The Japs had spent weeks preparing this system against either rear or frontal attacks.
Alford's next attempt was to start a bushfire, hoping to burn off the foliage cover. It was partly successful, revealing some pillboxes, but the Japs put an end to it. Alford now called for mortars. Even though the palmettos threw them off, the projectiles made it possible to harry the Japs in their holes. But their fire continued.
The turning point came today.
Without telling Alford, a sergeant with a revolver and a weaponless runner started for the pillboxes. This duo made a series of daring, circuitous approaches. Finally they got to within ten yards of one heavy-lidded pillbox. The question arose how to make the test. They lacked sufficient arms. Finally, Sergeant Wagner exposed himself slightly and, getting no action, stood up. There was sniper fire from above but, again, nothing from within. Wagner sat down. Green, the runner, stood up. Again nothing from the silent pillboxes.
They crawled back—the journey taking almost an hour—to Alford and confessed their trip. They asked permission to take out a party. This time Charles Logsdon, a thin-faced chap with a small mustache, asked to be in the advance with them. A group of sixteen volunteers formed a larger rear party.
The group was broken up into three parties with Wagner, Green and Logsdon in the lead. They crept from shellhole to shellhole and finally got within five yards. Each was carrying a torpedo. They made the last rush, threw the torpedos inside and ran. The pillbox blew up. Then the whole party rushed the pillboxes, one by one.
Hours were spent burying the dead from both sides in pits full of blankets, wornout snipers' sandals and unfired ammunition.
The writer doubled back through the blackened pillboxes between spurts caused by a sniper to the east. Every so often the sniper would use a “firecracker bullet.” These explode with such a sharp noise—part of the Jap game of unsettling nerves—that one imagines the sniper is near. These firecrackers are safe enough so long as they hit the tree above you.
And then began, over this fought-for ground, a long, long walk to the peep-head.
JAPANESE IGNORE RED CROSS, BOMB NEW GUINEA HOSPITAL
With American Forces in New Guinea—December 31, 1942
With your water bottle spanking your sweat-soaked shorts and your knife case soaked black with perspiration, you stop at the intersection of a dozen little rabbit paths, all unmarked and all leading in different directions into the vine-netted screen. All are ankle-deep in the slipperiest, skiddiest mud in the world. Some lead into Japanese lines, some into yours.
American machine guns are chopping their way to the sea through Buna Mission nearby. The sun is hot and high. Every time you doff your helmet to clean the rivulets from your brow, you feel the sun trying to bring your brains to a thirty-second boil.
It has only been a few minutes since that three-man tommy-gun patrol you accompanied struck off into the jungle. That was back by those manylegged pandanus trees. You have no compass, because compasses here are rare.
You can hear shells from the 25-pounders going over and bursting almost immediately ahead. It is sensible to turn away. But your eyes keep watching the jungle on that side; you are unarmed, as regulations require. It would be pleasant to have that tommy-gun patrol nearby. And then a voice speaks from the shadows at your side: “Well, how did that operation turn out? How are you feeling now?”
These doctors never forget. It's Major Neil Swinton, of Boston. The last time you heard him say something like that was exactly two years ago when you came out from under his ether cone in a Boston hospital. Then it was plain Dr. Swinton. Now, standing by the trail waiting for the black boys to bring the litters of wounded from the front, Swinton speaks to you from the shadows once more.
This time, instead of the swirl of an ether dream, it's from the barely discernible path through the muddy lane leading to his hospital.
The hospital is hardly identifiable as such. It is a cluster of five huts, each about as big as a large drawing room. Its floors are not some polished urban surface but a grassy jungle floor. The supports are slender poles of grey betel nut, held together with vines. Overhead are tiers of grass, laced together, packed in rows like bunches of celery. Above are interwoven branches of thick trees. The hospital was placed in a clearing but got bombed despite its Geneva cross markings.
As you stand there, four black boongs carry in an American with shrapnel in his leg. Enemy artillery is still not wholly silenced. Two other boongs trot behind, watching carefully to see that the big banana leaf which covers the soldier's face does not slip aside. The other relieves if one bearer flags with fatigue.
Major Swinton gets busy immediately.
Swinton's hospital is one of several such portables flown across the Owen Stanleys. Although Swinton is not a Harvard man, two of the three other doctors are, and this is one of the portables which have been called Harvard units. Here in the front lines, all the nurses are helmeted soldiers. The nearest nurse in skirts is on the other side of the mountains, in Port Moresby.
At the other Harvard hospital, a couple of hundred yards deeper in the jungle, crisscrossed with the boots of three armies, you find gallant officers recuperating from the attack on Buna Mission. Here the doctors are headed by Major George Marks of Massachusetts General Hospital, a busy man with blondish hair, in shorts and naked to the waist. In a straight line, his cluster of grass roofs is probably slightly nearer to the Jap lines than Swinton's. Amputations have been carried out with the surgeon's flashlight drawing sniper bullets through the roofs.
Here young Captain Lawrence, a graduate from the University of Chicago, is just getting some rest under the mosquito net on his canvas cot. You leave the trail to fill your canteen at the bulging green udder of the hospital water bag. Mortars are belching into the enemy lines.
“The Japs raided us the second day,” Lawrence says. His hair is clipped short, crew-cut style. “The first day the Japs sent over reccies, presumably to take photos. The next day what looked like navy-type dive bombers dropped both wing bombs on us. They are light but they were accurate. We had five personnel killed even before we started working. We make no atrocity claim, because we had not yet even had time to get our cross spread on the ground. But we believe the deep, dark bush better protection than any cross.”
Captain Lawrence added that though the Japs generally shoot men going out to rescue the wounded, once on this front the litter-bearers brought in a man without being fired upon. But in the same spot the next day, rescuers were shot. “So you cannot make a rule even for a given patch of ground,” he concluded.
The creek behind this hospital sometimes rises eight feet in a single rain and floods the wards. It took fifteen days of climbing slippery rocks in the continuous rain and mud of the “Roof of the World” for this portable to reach the Buna plain.
LESSONS LEARNED AT BUNA WILL PAY OFF
FROM NOW ON
With the Allied Forces in New Guinea—January 2, 1943 (Delayed by Censor)
With Buna Mission fallen into our hands and Giropa Point swept clean by Australian tanks, the Allied command made clear today that the Sanananda front of Papua's triple beachheads remains high on the list of unsettled affairs. Gona is taken on the left, Buna on the right, but Sanananda in the middle remains.
Even as Old Glory rose over the handful of smoking shacks on stilts that had been Buna Mission, and snipers who had slipped through our lines in a desperate effort to escape were tumbling from their treetops to the rattle of tommy guns, the lessons of this bitter prolonged campaign were being discussed among Americans and Australians in many foxholes and on the hard steel seat of many a jeep as it bounced over the corduroy trails.
Papua cannot be ours until the hundreds of Japs dug in along the Sanananda trail are uprooted by the same combination of air attacks, tanks and heavy weapons as eventually broke Buna to the east. The last heavy Jap bombings on Christmas Eve were made by full moon and the Buna victory came in the dark of the moon, just before the regular rainy season. In this sodden, mud-slogged country, weather is everything—one element that modern warfare has left unchanged.
Smoke ascending from the last pillbox on the old air field announced that the Australians had literally smoked out the last Japs. The pillbox, which contains the bodies of over a hundred Japs, resisted for seventy minutes against the assault of three Australian-manned tanks, which delivered 150 shells at point-blank range. The tanks bored through the logs by concentrating their fire on a single spot.
Tonight our artillery was silent for the first time, but the Japs had offered no mortar fire for about ten days. Their sole defense has been a network of snipers in the highest, densest trees, combined with deeply dug trenches venting continuous automatic-weapon fire. The narrow defiles, flanked by armpit-deep quagmire and backed by the sea, compensated for the fact that they were at all times outnumbered.
Our mortars carried off the honors as an offensive
weapon. Their high projectiles, beautifully controlled from forward command posts, gave confidence to the troops, unaccustomed to seeing high explosives from their own lines fall less than thirty yards away.
In the jungles, where it is commonplace for patrols to approach within twenty yards of each other's lines, the mortar becomes more and more the ace played close to the fighter's belt—sometimes so close that it is terrifying. Mortar crews, often exposed to enemy counter-fire and sniper attack, are among the coolest, most admirable, least-known soldiers we possess. When a fuse cut by fractions of an inch may determine whether shells fall within their lines or ours, the mortarist becomes the William Tell of forest war.
Ask any heat-weary, black-bearded fighter with mud impregnated in every pore as he lies in Buna's bypaths—tommy gun at his side, still scanning the trees for snipers—whether this has been an amphibious war. He will part his mud-caked lips slightly, lift his mud-heavy eyelids and answer, “Don't I look it?”
Yet this has been an amphibious war in only a narrow sense. All attacks, both American and Australian, including Gona, Buna and Cape Endaiadere, have been delivered from land. There has been none of the leapfrogging from beach to beach, from river-mouth to inlet, that characterized the Jap offensive in Malaya. But many Middle Westerners have been forced to swim through mud-clogged streams under fire, alone, sometimes knocking aside others. And in the break-up of both Buna and Cape Endaiadere, many Japs swam ineffectually seaward for their lives.
Kitchener's saying, “You can attempt anything with an enemy who does not move,” was modified here by the discovery that there is much you can do which costs you more than it costs the enemy.
The unaccustomed jungle fighting has kept alive the American genius for improvisation. What everyone, from the blackest dogface to the commanding general himself, seems to agree on is that the American spirit lacks nothing for this foul, energy-sapping and tricky war against unfriendly nature, canned food, diarrhetic water, malarial swamps, suffocating heat and a merciless, extremely cunning enemy, who believes he becomes a god by dying on the field of battle.
Weller's War Page 44
