The Ghost Mountain Boys

by James Campbell

  By October 26, the Australians had been bogged down at Eora Creek for four days, and MacArthur’s temper boiled over. Again, he had a message sent to the front: “In spite of your superior strength enemy appears able to delay advance at will. Essential that forward commanders should control situation and NOT allow situation to control them. Delay in seizing KOKODA may cost us unique opportunity of driving enemy out of NEW GUINEA.”

  A day later, acting as MacArthur’s personal henchman, General Blamey relieved Allen of his duties. Then, mounting a furious attack from a nearby ridge, the Australians descended on Horii’s troops. Those enemy soldiers who fled into the jungle survived; those who fought died. The Japanese lost hundreds of men at Eora Creek, but the Australians, too, paid a dear price for victory. Nearly three hundred Australian soldiers were killed or wounded.

  By late October, Major-General George Vasey was leading the Australian counteroffensive. Vasey was a man of courage, driven to succeed. On November 1, as the Australians bore down on Kokoda, he told his officers, in words reminiscent of General Horii’s, “The enemy is beaten. Give him no rest and we will annihilate him.”

  As Vasey spoke of defeating Horii’s army, the Japanese general, having been told that Rabaul would provide him with 20,000 reinforcements, resurrected his dream of capturing Port Moresby.

  The following day, Horii and his army abandoned Kokoda. He chose the west side of the Kumusi River, near the villages of Oivi and Gorari, to make his stand.

  “We will hold the position until reinforcements arrive,” wrote an exuberant Lieutenant Sakamoto. “The tide is turning in our favor.”

  A mile separated the villages of Oivi and Gorari. Though Horii had three thousand soldiers at his disposal, many were so weak they could barely shoulder their weapons. Desperate for protein, they killed horses, and then again resorted to cannibalism. This time, though, the Japanese soldiers were not eating Australians. “We ran short of rations,” Sakamoto wrote on November 4. “We devoured our own kind to stave off starvation.”

  Five days later, according to Sakamoto, the “enemy began its offensive. They have encircled us, while throughout the morning their planes bombed and machine-gunned us.”

  Cutting off all their possible escape routes, Vasey had laid a death trap for the Japanese. On the dark and rainy night of November 11, four thousand Australian troops, wrote Dudley McCarthy, the official army historian of the Kokoda campaign, “were gathering themselves for the kill.” When they attacked, they came at the Japanese from all sides, nursing a hatred of the Imperial army so intense that only slaughter could satisfy it. Lieutenant Sakamoto died in the fighting.

  General Horii, however, escaped. Hoping to reach the coast and reassemble his army with the addition of reinforcements, he fled to the Kumusi River. Swelled by recent rains, the Kumusi surged at its banks. The bridge was gone, bombed into rubble by Allied pilots. Realizing that the river was too deep to ford, Horii fled on a raft with a small group of officers, leaving Colonel Yazawa at the river’s edge to tend to nearly three thousand men.

  Yazawa had to act quickly. Soon, Vasey would be in hot pursuit. Yazawa ordered the men to construct basic rafts. Shoving them into the slashing current, they prayed that their rafts would hold up. Some did, but others fell apart, sending the soldiers tumbling into the river. Men drowned by the dozens as the river pulled them into its muddy depths and swept them downstream. Trucks waited to transport those who had made it across. With room enough only for the seriously wounded, most were forced to walk.

  Seizo Okada, the war correspondent who had landed in New Guinea with the Yokoyama Advance Force in late July, vividly described the scene. “Their [the Japanese soldiers’] uniforms were soiled with blood and mud and sweat, and torn to pieces. There were infantrymen without rifles, men walking on bare feet, men wearing blankets or straw rice bags instead of uniforms, men reduced to skin and bones plodding along with the help of a stick, men gasping and crawling on the ground…some of them lying there for a while and struggling to their feet again, while others stirred no more.”

  A mile and a half downriver, Horii’s raft ran aground, and he and his party scrambled up the bank, followed the river toward the coast, and discovered a native canoe. The canoe, though, was too small to accommodate the entire party. The decision was an easy one. While the rest of the party stumbled its way toward Awala, Horii, his staff officer, and his personal orderly floated down the river toward the coast, his mad hope of reinforcements shattered. The troops Rabaul had promised were being diverted to the Solomons.

  No one would ever see the general again. Accounts of his death differ. Some say that the canoe overturned and Horii drowned. Others suggest that he paddled out to sea where the canoe, hit by fierce winds, capsized. Horii’s staff officer drowned and the general and his orderly attempted to swim to shore. Miles out, Horii tired. With enough energy for a final dramatic gesture, legend has it he raised his hands over his head, and in a resounding voice, shouted, “Tennoheika Banzai!” (“Long Live the Emperor!”)

  Back at Gorari, the Australians celebrated. Vasey was heralded as a hero. From Port Moresby Blamey effused, “The greatest factor in pressing the continuous advance has been General Vasey’s drive and personality.”

  Vasey, though, was hardly satisfied with half a victory. The Japanese were still firmly entrenched on New Guinea’s north coast, and Vasey was envisioning a final, decisive battle.

  It’s “Buna or bust,” he told his men, “And we will not bust.”

  In the mountains things were not going well for Stutterin’ Smith’s Ghost Mountain boys. Short of food, they marched from Jaure to Natunga, raiding gardens, shooting domesticated pigs, and scrounging whatever they could find along the way, especially bananas and papayas to guard against scurvy. Out of desperation they disobeyed one rule that Medendorp insisted was unbreakable—never touch the natives’ property.

  By the time the battalion reached Natunga, many of the men flopped down in the mud at the village’s edge and lay there without moving, more dead than alive. “Malnutrition, malaria, dysentery,” Lutjens wrote. “Shoes and clothes are all shot to hell.”

  Back at regimental headquarters on the south coast, Colonel Quinn had grown increasingly concerned about the condition of his troops. When Smith alerted him that the men needed food and medical supplies to continue, Quinn took matters into his own hands. He would personally oversee the airdrop.

  Natunga looked to Smith like the perfect spot for a drop. In the distance, Mount Lamington loomed blue and ominous, its peak obscured by clouds. Heavy jungle stretched from Natunga to the mountain’s steep slopes and north along the rain-swollen Girua River, but Natunga itself sat in a large meadow on a hilltop. Smith realized that it might be the battalion’s last chance to resupply before going into battle.

  Natunga also had a ready supply of healthy, well-fed natives to carry provisions. They were stout and strong men, who sported full body tattoos that they had acquired during elaborate initiation ceremonies. They wore their hair in long plaits interwoven with cloth made from the tapa tree, and plucked their beards and their body hair.

  For days, the sky hung low over the village. Smith was beginning to despair when on November 5, the weather broke. Smith sent Quinn an urgent message: “Weather clear. Drop. Drop.”

  When Quinn left Seven-Mile Drome outside Port Moresby, the jagged peaks of the Owen Stanleys pressed up against a cloudless sky. Perhaps, at last, Lady Luck would be on the 2nd Battalion’s side. Looking down from the plane, Colonel Quinn would have been able to see the terrain that Smith’s men had covered. It must have made him shudder. Solid jungle sprawled in every direction.

  As the plane neared Natunga, Quinn spotted the clearing. The pilot made a pass and Quinn, who was at the door, prepared to kick out the wrapped and bound packages to which they had attached parachutes to improve the recovery ratio.

  Below, everyone—the soldiers, the native carriers, and the villagers of Natunga—watched in horror as one of t
he parachutes opened sooner than it should have. It billowed out of the cargo door and became entangled in the plane’s tail assembly. The plane wavered and then plunged nose-first into a nearby hill. Not everyone saw the crash, but they all heard the explosion. Hoping that maybe someone had survived the crash, Smith sent out a salvage team.

  While the salvage team was out, Smith learned from regimental headquarters that Colonel Quinn had been aboard the plane that had crashed. Privates, corporals, and officers alike wept when they learned that Quinn was one of the casualties. Medendorp, upon learning of the colonel’s death, captured the mood of the entire regiment. “To our sorrow,” he wrote, “our magnificent Colonel was killed.”

  When Sam DiMaggio heard the news, he trembled. Back at Camp Livingston, Colonel Quinn had asked him to be his personal runner, and DiMaggio had seriously considered the offer. All the men knew that Quinn was a “stand-up guy.” He was a regimental commander who really cared about his soldiers. There was another attraction, though. As Quinn’s personal runner, it was likely that if a war broke out, DiMaggio would be spared front-line duty. In other words, he would have a better chance of making it home alive. Joining Quinn, however, would have meant leaving his buddies in Company G. As a draftee, it had taken a long time for him to gain the acceptance of the Muskegon boys from G Company, but they had become his family. So when Quinn presented the idea, DiMaggio respectfully declined. There were times when he kicked himself for passing on the offer. On November 5 in Natunga, DiMaggio realized that had he accepted the invitation, he probably would have been aboard Quinn’s plane.

  Jim Boice must have been devastated by Quinn’s death. Initially, they had both been outsiders in the 126th—Boice was an Indianan; Quinn was an Oklahoman, ten years his senior, who had fought in World War I and had been awarded the Silver Star and a Purple Heart. Both were family men. Boice had one son and Quinn had a daughter, June. Perhaps because of a similarity of circumstance, they developed a friendship, which is reflected in the messages they traded as Boice was making his way toward Buna.

  On October 23, Quinn sent Boice a message that had a paternalistic quality: “You have done a grand job and we are all proud as hell of you.”

  Two days later, on October 25, Quinn sent Boice another one: “My Birthday ninth November. Would like very much have tea with you in Buna that day. Good luck.” It was vintage Quinn—funny, encouraging.

  Later that day, Boice responded, “Please have faith in us. We will lick [the] hell out of them.”

  A few days later Boice received another message from Quinn, which Quinn asked him to read to the troops. The colonel wrote: A few weeks ago this force was assigned a mission described by many as “impossible.” You have advanced with your arms and equipment over the “impossible” Owen Stanley range. You have overcome almost unsurmountable obstacles. You have proven yourselves to be rough and rugged field soldiers of the highest order. Today I am especially proud of you.

  Now comes the second phase of this “impossible” operation, the advance to contact, the attack and the destruction of the enemy. I know you are tired…but I also know that your morale is high and that your spirit of never say die is stronger than ever…I know you will advance boldly, destroy the enemy wherever you meet him and once again accomplish the “impossible.”

  Yet despite the sense of loss Boice must have experienced when he learned of Quinn’s death, he mentions it only briefly in his diary: “Col. Quinn killed.” The entry says less perhaps about Boice and his relationship to Quinn than it does the nature of war. In the face of death, resignation is the only defense.

  After the initial shock, Smith, too, reacted soberly to Quinn’s death. There was little time to mourn. He radioed Captain Keast at Laruni and ordered Father Stephen Dzienis sent forward to perform the burial ceremony.

  Lutjens had just returned from the village of Pongani, where he and Art Edson had been directed to make contact with the 128th in order to get its radio frequency so that Smith could stay in touch with General Hanford MacNider and his coastal force. Upon arriving in Natunga, Lutjens noted that the salvage team pulled out “mashed bodies” with one hand and enjoyed undamaged fruitcake it had found among the wreckage with the other. For the minute or two it took the men to devour the cake, hunger trumped grief.

  Affected perhaps by Quinn’s death, Art Edson felt the need to write his sweetheart, though he could not have known if the letter would even make it out of New Guinea.

  Dearest Lois,

  Just a few lines to let you know that I’m still alive and kicking. We are still in New Guinea.

  Forever, Love Art

  On the other side of the mountains, General Harding knew that the 32nd had just lost a good man and his “best regimental commander, and that by a wide margin.”

  On November 8, the 126th held a memorial for Colonel Quinn in Port Moresby. The regimental chaplain presided over the service. “He is not present to lead the regiment,” the chaplain said, “but Larry Quinn marches on and will lead this regiment. What he put in you will not be lost in this war or after. But when you go, and you will go soon and you will go far, I am sure as I stand here that the spirit of Larry Quinn will go forward with you and join with you in making the name of ‘Les Terribles’ death in the eyes of our enemy.”

  Chapter 11

  FEVER RIDGE

  ON NOVEMBER 6, 1942, the day after Colonel Quinn died in the plane crash, MacArthur moved his headquarters from Brisbane to Port Moresby, leaving behind his wife and son. Upon arriving in New Guinea, MacArthur settled into the comfortable Government House, which had been the residence of the colonial governor for the last fifty years. The house had been refurbished for his arrival. It was probably the only building on the entire island of New Guinea with modern plumbing. It was appointed with fine tropical furniture, hardwood floors, and even a library. MacArthur enjoyed a menu of fresh eggs, milk, salad, and meat. He also had a staff of nine native boys, who wore serving gloves and pressed white lap-laps decorated with blue stars and red stripes.

  The house, which the soldiers referred to as the “Ivory Tower,” was situated in a grove of stately coconut palms on a grassy hill overlooking the port area. From its spacious veranda, adorned with bougainvillea, hibiscus, and pink frangipani, MacArthur could lounge in his silk dressing gown with a black dragon emblazoned on the back, enjoy the breeze, and admire his handiwork. He had ordered his chief engineer officer to transform the port into a first-rate base, and the officer had done just that.

  Four days before leaving Australia, MacArthur established a tentative date for the Allied attack on the Buna coast, postponing it by two weeks from the original plan. The 128th Infantry Regiment, which had been waiting for orders to move out since arriving at Wanigela by plane, greeted the announcement with anger and frustration.

  After arriving at Wanigela during the third week of October, the 128th had begun marching in the direction of Pongani. En route there, however, the regiment got mired in the vast swamps of the Musa River delta, which slowed its movement to a crawl. When it became obvious that the regiment could not continue its journey on foot, the men hiked back to Wanigela, where they were picked up and transported north to the village by a small flotilla of shallow-draft luggers, the only vessels MacArthur had at his disposal.

  Pongani, roughly thirty miles southeast of Buna, was a sweltering, sun-beaten hellhole infested with sand fleas, flies, and mosquitoes. After setting up camp, the men waited for orders to move on Buna.

  Conditions at Pongani, which the men christened “Fever Ridge,” were dreadful. According to Lieutenant Colonel Stanley Hollenback, commander of the portable surgical hospital there, the hospital was filled way beyond capacity with malaria and dengue fever cases, and quinine was in short supply. Dysentery, which the men came down with shortly after arriving in Port Moresby in late September, raged through the camp. Everyone, it seemed, had a case of jungle rot. Boots that had gotten wet on the aborted walk from Wanigela to Pongani never dried out. Tren
chfoot became a problem. Men’s feet swelled and numbed and turned bluish-white. It felt as if they were walking on wood blocks. As the trenchfoot grew worse, their feet blistered. When the blisters burst, men were in such pain that they could barely stand up. To make matters worse, the soldiers began to suffer from malnutrition, too. Their daily intake amounted to “one-third of a C-ration and a couple of spoonfuls of rice a day,” hardly more than a thousand calories.

  The weather added to their misery. The camp felt like a sauna. Soldiers withered from lack of fresh water. When it rained they collected it in their helmets; when it was not raining, the tropical sun burned their backs red. Many of the men were so sunburned that it hurt to move.

  After two weeks a general malaise set in. Men stopped washing; they did not bother about the bugs; they did not see the point in sterilizing their mess kits; they grew absentminded and forgot to drop an iodine tablet in their water; those who had quinine discarded it because it made them sick.

  According to a ground forces observer at Pongani, “the lid really blew off” when they heard the news of MacArthur’s decision. He wrote:

  The reason for the order was, of course, to gain time to stockpile supplies for the impending advance, but the division, restive and eager to be “up and at ’em” did not see it that way. Opinions were freely expressed by officers of all ranks…that the only reason for the order was a political one. GHQ was afraid to turn the Americans loose and let them capture Buna because it would be a blow to the prestige of the Australians who had fought the long hard battle all through the Owen Stanley Mountains, and who therefore should be the ones to capture Buna.

  MacArthur also postponed the attack because he was reluctant to concentrate large numbers of Allied troops on the Buna coast until the situation on Guadalcanal clarified itself. Recalling the tragedy of Bataan, what he feared most was that if the Japanese took Guadalcanal they could commit the full might of their forces to an invasion of New Guinea. The Americans would then be trapped on the north coast.