Weller's War

by George Weller

  The word, in jungle fighting, means any area where you can dig an encircling line of foxholes around a command post and maintain fire directed out. It is the jungle equivalent of the pioneers' wagon train circle to repel Indians. Within such a perimeter one is always exposed to sniper fire from the outside.

  Digging their foxholes with short shovels, the Americans were under the impression they were only 600 yards beyond their own lines. In fact, as aerial photos later revealed, they were cut off 1800 yards—more than a mile—behind the Jap front lines, just 2½ miles along the road from the Jap beachhead, and they could hear the enemy's single precious anti-aircraft gun belching.

  The Lost Company was now cut off from Baetcke, their commanding officer. The phone line running through quagmire, giant fern, kunai grass, clearing and more quagmire was immediately severed by the Japs. Walkie-talkies were unworkable.

  This meant the force could communicate only by runner. It required one whole day for a runner to get to the front lines and the next to return, with excellent prospects of being ambushed. So it was necessary to repair the phone lines and get messages across before the Japs severed them, as they did sometimes twice daily.

  The two phone men for the Lost Company who attempted to keep the line working back to the advanced battalion command post established in the jungle were Marcellus Nye and Gerwin Dollinger. Nye, a short, stocky 28-year-old, used to work for a phone company, but gave up the work because he preferred driving a cab. Nye says: “Mostly we worked in water to our knees. Those Jap clippers tried cute tricks. They would nearly always remove the wire, sixty or a hundred feet, increasing each time to more than I could carry. Their idea was to make me go back for wire and lose another day. Once they cut out the longest piece yet. The gap was a full 120 yards. But they left a piece coiled up, as though accidentally. When I began working to join the ends across the swamp I got pretty well along before I discovered they'd cut off just enough so the ends would not quite meet.”

  According to orders, Nye at first went out only with the columns trains which carried food and ammo up and wounded or feverish back. But the trains could not wait while Nye searched for breaks; besides, the wire was sometimes cut three-quarters of an hour after being spliced. At one time Captain Peter Dalponte ordered him to remain within the perimeter two days, Jap fire being especially heavy.

  The roadblock party was completely cut off during this time. Nye, restless, asked for two tommy-gunners but led them himself, carrying a tommy gun. Fingering the wire backward, he reached the famous log.

  “I noticed something funny. There was a bush growing. I had crawled by the other end often and never remembered seeing the bush. I signaled the other guys to keep quiet. Pretty soon the bush moved a little. I saw a Jap's legs and arms behind. The bush was tied around his waist and he had more bush on his helmet. I was pretty far off but I took aim and squeezed out a short burst. That bush got up from the end of the log and ran into the jungle.”

  The Japs kept a phone line on the other side of the road, and once Nye found an experimental wire made from American splicings, which he gleefully rendered unworkable. Nye failed to splice our wire only four days.

  The Americans' first decision after finding they were isolated by phone cuts was to attack. For three days the enemy had been throwing explosive mortars at the Americans lying in water in their foxholes. There was a Japanese encampment southeast of the roadblock; an attack on it turned into another bayonet assault where one of the bravest was Sergeant Robert Devereaux, who had already contracted malaria. Not until his temperature touched 106° could Devereaux be evacuated over the perilous trail back through the jungle to recover.

  Everything about this campaign is incredible, and probably fevers this high are unbelievable. They mean somewhat less in Papua where fatigue brings out fevers latent in nearly everyone. The writer has often worked for considerable periods with a temperature over 100°. He has seen men still fighting with their temperature at 102°. On the Sanananda front he saw five men with temperatures 104° and above pull themselves from foxholes and reach a hospital on foot. Many men with temperatures of over 106° have been evacuated by air and lived. At the American roadblock in the Jap rear, litters were few and evacuation through snipers dangerous and long, but when fevers reached 104°, the men went back, sometimes protestingly carried by men with temperatures of 102°.

  Today, when the American roadblock is no longer isolated, disturbed only by furtive shots from the last remaining snipers in the trees, it is no longer known as the Lost Company, but as Huggins—as it doubtless will be marked on historical maps.

  Captain Meredith Huggins, of Salem, Oregon, was one of two officers who led the island on the Jap road for eight days. He became commander when, after taking a ration party across the jungle to a tiny encampment, on starting back he learned from Baetcke that enemy fire had thinned the officers in the outpost.

  Asked whether he could hold the Japs, he replied: “I'll hold that place until hell freezes over,” and returned to the inferno of mortar fire and sniping.

  It was appropriate that the Huggins roadblock should be named after the man who, ordinarily an operational officer, should go in a single day from being leader of a ration train harassed by snipers to the commander of the “lost” garrison. For the supply trains kept the Americans in the jungle alive. Even Dalponte, his successor after Huggins was wounded, came in as supply column leader and found himself commanding the garrison. Columns were frequently full of men who throbbed with fever, loaded down with ammunition and food. Supply trains went if possible every two days from the command post—itself deep in the jungle behind the Jap lines—to Huggins. Anyone who made the eight-hour journey through the ambush-ridden swamp was a hero.

  The most frequent leader of such trains was Lieutenant Zina Carter, now Captain. Very much alive today, he says quietly: “The trail was just a death trap from one end to the other. You hated to start out. You knew the Japs were always waiting and you had to run their fire in at least two places—at the log, and at another place where their machine guns had a fire lane under which we crawled through the grass. But when you got there and saw how those guys were living and saw their expressions when you came through the jungle, that paid for everything. Their faces were thinner than ours, but the way they lighted up when they saw we'd got through again was worth everything. They knew then that we hadn't let them down. It was like a little Bataan, but harder for them in a way because they knew they could sneak out any time they wanted. It was only their willpower that kept them together, and the fact they knew that if it was possible to fight through the Jap lines we'd get there.”

  The Lost Company drew four full-scale attacks from different directions. Two occurred while Shirley was in command, and two more while Huggins headed the sniper-surrounded garrison. Usually the enemy were divided into squads of ten or twelve men, trying to find a loophole in the American rectangle of machine-gun flanked potholes. When these attacks all failed, the Japs tried to make Huggins useless by building more pillboxes on both sides of the road. (The writer has seen these pillboxes bombarded day after day with mortar fire. One, taken this afternoon, revealed 150 bodies. Three other such strongpoints in the jungle remain but will probably have been hammered into muddy death by the time these words are read.)

  The American response was to send harassing patrols. The enemy response was to put their mountain gun, in addition to mortars, on Huggins. If a man lived past the morning shelling at 5:30 a.m., he was certain of life—except for mortars and snipers—until the 6 p.m. evening shelling. Japs continually wandered into the perimeter of roadside foxholes stretching along the jungle's edge. Some were dazed, and half starved, some only in shorts; many past recovery, full of malaria or dysentery. Behind them were plenty of well-fed Japs with plenty of ammunition.

  Volunteer patrols often ran into snipers. Frequent rains held the Americans to their inundated foxholes. Once Dalponte (in command from December 9 until Christmas Day) had a whole party
pinned down en route to Huggins with food and ammunition. The point members ran into a figure dressed in an American uniform in a kunai field. His skin looked white and they said, reassuringly, “It's alright, fella; this is only a ration party going through.” As the man fled into the jungle, they saw it was a Jap.

  Among the more successful patrol leaders was Sergeant George Zietlow, who authored the famous “Zietlow system” for keeping down itchy fingers when the enemy were fishing for machine-gun locations. The Japs have many tricks for this, from throwing chains of firecrackers (to simulate an automatic weapon) to exposing a single soldier as a target. Zietlow also tried the Jap trick of moving the machine guns' location frequently, and found it worked.

  Meanwhile the swamp trail was getting constantly more dangerous.

  For seven days, from December 9 to 15, the Lost Company was literally lost in its roadblock behind Japanese lines. Dysentery, malaria and ringworm infected some men in the water-filled foxholes and the cases increased faster than they could be evacuated. Food ran lower and lower. Discouragement, too, made inroads in the weakening men under Dalponte, a tall, thin, resilient young commander. To keep the garrison well deployed along the 350 yards of sniper-surrounded road, it was ordered that no more than two or three men should ever gather.

  Dalponte, who knew the jungle trail better than anyone, assured his men that even though the phone was cut, food would come through. It was impossible to drop supplies from aircraft because the Japs dominated the air with their machine guns. Sometimes supply trains were halted by the besieged and needy themselves. At least one time the train was stopped midway by telephoneman Joseph Kramarz—one of the men who proved their courage dozens of times—who said: “Don't come in today. We just had a counter-attack from the Japs. It's too tough for you to make.”

  Then came the afternoon of the 15th, when Lieutenant Zina Carter broke through the jungle with a long line of green-clad perspiring men plugging along behind him. They had shot their way through two lanes of fire. Dirty, hungry men dragged themselves from foxholes and met the newcomers with hope in their eyes.

  The “guys back there” had kept faith and not abandoned them. There were belts of gleaming cartridges for their guns, cans of beef and beans, quinine to batter down their fever, more bars of chocolate and more crackers. Best of all, there was something incredibly wonderful in the sacks on the backs of the men drenched to the waist. There was canned heat.

  For days, unable to light fires to heat water, they had lain in the coffin-shaped foxholes in rainwater, under the whispering bullets of snipers. Not once had a warm drink brought life to their diarrhetic insides. Now there was heat—heat that was safe, heat without smoke. At their first drink of tea, for which the men tottered from their holes, life began to come back. Their deeply-lined, bearded, mud-marked faces relaxed as the first warmth in days made itself felt deep in their cold stomachs.

  The original plan was a line of communications both to left and right of the road, where enemy fortifications were stiffest, but Buna had drained the manpower necessary for the double-pincer operations. More than three weeks of fighting under Major Bert Zeeff were required before the line of dugouts could be pierced.

  The attack was launched from the banana plantation held by Captain John Blamey, nephew of the Allied ground force commander. The Japs were dug in across the stream bisecting the plantation.

  In the first fight, from a kunai grass patch, this force ambushed a marching column of thirty Japs by early moonlight. The grass was seven feet tall and this American use of their own tactics surprised the enemy. Their machine guns aimed too high but when they used firecrackers to draw fire the trick was partly successful.

  The small Jap counter-attack was eerie. They crossed the road in four waves of four men each, crouched over. They wore leggings and helmets and kept saying “Good day, good day.” Every Jap was killed or wounded.

  The force under Zeeff, however, found itself under heavy sniper fire during five days' isolation—three on the right side of the road, two on the left. But the phone wire back to Blamey's was never cut.

  After passing through the banana plantation, the Japs' main force held the west and 150 Americans and 60 Aussies the east. Daily rations at Blamey's were one can of meat and beans, four crackers, and a chocolate bar, until the Aussies captured three tons of Jap rice with canned cabbage and onions, lifting the crisis.

  The Americans attacked across the creek and captured two machine guns. In this attack Captain Blamey was killed, but the Japs were cleaned out.

  Zeeff's two and a half platoons, ignorant exactly where the isolated Huggins-Dalponte roadblock was, had bogged down in the swamp and itself become cut off. But now the Japs had their only path of motor transport from the beachhead to their front line stopped in two places by American forces. The Japs attacked viciously.

  Zeeff, to whom your correspondent talked, like other Sanananda leaders said immediately on emerging from the jungle that he asked by phone for reinforcements but they were unavailable. In the words of Private Eddie Eben, “We simply dug in with everything we had. We hacked into the mud with mess kits, spoons, bayonets, as well as short shovels and axes, and got six inches of earth around us—enough to protect us from Jap machine-gun fire sweeping the road.”

  Finally rain, through the noise on millions of leaves, made escape possible though it made the swamp deeper. Zeeff led them out in utter darkness, lighted only by the storm's flashes. The fact that the Japs did not cut the phone line made it possible for Zeeff to retrace the wire through his fingers after days of isolation.

  Another attack on enemy lines from Blamey's banana grove started early on December 5—machine-gun fire preceded by a creeping barrage of artillery. Mortar shells hit a Jap dugout of seven ground snipers; only three came out alive.

  The Americans advanced fifty yards but were soon halted by machine-gun fire and snipers. James Kelly described his experience: “Another fellow and I were lying twenty yards from a Jap pillbox. We got about eight Japs before being pinned down. We lay in the sun, not moving, for three and a half hours. The kunai grass was short, we knew the Japs were watching. I suggested we run. He said, ‘You go first.’ I agreed but said he should wait fifteen minutes, then run, not crawl. I ran, but he decided to crawl. They got him through the spine.”

  In these attacks, the Americans under Lieutenant William Johnson, a young Grand Rapids lawyer, followed the practice established by Boerem and Baetcke of talking over attacks beforehand. Chances were weighed, suggestions invited, and the purpose of relieving the isolated Huggins force kept always in view.

  The roadblock under Dalponte made efforts to meet Johnson's force by sending out patrols, but the jungle was getting more dangerous. Neither the Japs nor the Americans were certain of their location. All that was certain was how the two forces lay in stripes across the road. At the south were the American lines, then opposing Japs. Next came Zeeff's roadblock, then more Japs. Next came the isolated Huggins-Dalponte roadblock, and finally the solid force of hundreds of Japs stretching to Sanananda Beachhead, three miles away.

  Dalponte, after numerous Jap harassing attacks, sent a patrol on December 20 to reach the Johnson force, striving to create a communications line to right of the road. The patrol lost two men out of eight and returned without finding Johnson.

  Three days later, determined that the Lost Company should somehow be relieved before Christmas, Johnson talked over the possibility of staking everything on a final thrust. (Modest to the point of self-effacement, Johnson says: “I myself was reluctant but my men virtually pushed me into the thing.”)

  The Japs arranged the usual alarm system of vine fences but when their fire opened Sergeant Ray Evans took his men in, plastering the enemy with grenades. “Then we went brr—brr—brr with our tommy guns and they tried to get away.”

  All night the battle of grenades went on between the creeping Americans and Jap rear-line dugouts. Dalponte's force could hear the battle and sent out a force at J
ohnson's request. They ran through the Jap line of fire, losing two men, but made contact. With the help of Aussies who intended to relieve Dalponte, a trench was dug to ensure communication. In a final attack the Americans smashed through, and with the Australians on December 23 they reached the Lost Company who had endured fever, hunger and enemy fire for twenty-three days, surviving athwart the road 1800 yards behind the Jap lines.

  Dalponte says: “When we saw those Aussies and Americans break through, at first we could not believe we were actually going to be relieved. What with snipers and being shelled and getting counter-attacks, we had got so we believed it would never end. The Aussie commander was surprised when I said, ‘Until I see your men get down there in our foxholes, I won't be able to believe we can really go.’ Then they got down and we saw it was true.”

  A Chicagoan, Lawrence Ghilardi, said, “It seemed kind of hard to believe that we would ever get out of there. And when they reached us and told us we could go, I can't describe how I felt.”

  Jerome Stoffel said: “What I thought was, now maybe we'll be able to go somewhere and forget Sanananda.”

  The Aussies did not come empty-handed. They had stolen two loaves of bread, shipped them across the mountains by air, and brought them to the Yanks as a Christmas gift.

  [probably somewhere in Australia]

  July 9th, 1943.

  MISS ARLENE SHIRLEY,

  DETROIT, MICHIGAN

  Dear Miss Shirley,

  I have delayed replying to your letter about your brother until I could, as you asked me to do, positively confirm the news of his death which you received some six months ago.

  It grieves me to say to you and Captain Shirley's Mother that it is true that he is dead.

  You know already from my dispatches the gallant circumstances of his sacrifice.

  To this I can only add that I have visited the new grave in the formal American cemetery where he now lies. His body has been transferred from the temporary cemetery near the front to this more formal and possibly permanent resting place. The grave is clearly marked and the cemetery carefully cared for. His identification tag is bound on the cross on the grave.