The Ghost Mountain Boys

by James Campbell

  “It won’t be any pushover tomorrow,” Keast said, when he and Medendorp left Tomlinson.

  Medendorp’s account of Tomlinson’s speech was infused with sarcasm: “Properly impressed with the necessity of giving the enemy a killing, we started out on the half-day march to get into position.”

  As the men were assembling, Father Stephen Dzienis paid the soldiers a visit. By now Dzienis had proved himself. He had earned Medendorp’s respect on the long, cold journey from Camp Livingston, Louisiana, to Fort Devens, Massachusetts, when instead of going by troop train he went with Medendorp in an unheated army-issue truck with a canvas top and side curtains. More recently, he had volunteered to march across the mountains with the 2nd Battalion. Never again would he be thought of as a pampered chaplain.

  Dzienis had a great field of a beard. As always, he was filled with spirit and good cheer, though his legs, Medendorp noticed, were a “mass of running sores.” At one point, Dzienis pulled Medendorp aside. “Be sure,” he winked, “to use plenty of hand grenades, Skipper. They’re buried up to their eyebrows.”

  Medendorp carried Tomlinson’s orders for the attack in his pocket. When he and Keast got to the front, Medendorp turned them over to the battalion’s executive officer, who scratched out a diagram of the plan in the soft, black jungle humus. The orders called for Medendorp and Keast to attack eastward from the left flank on November 30. Another group of men would attack head on, and one would advance from the right. The goal of the attack was to establish a roadblock north of the main Japanese position on the Soputa-Sanananda track.

  “We’ll get those bastards,” Captain John D. Shirley assured the battalion XO after the meeting. “Tomorrow, we’ll get those bastards.”

  Captain John D. Shirley was from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and he and Medendorp had been inducted together as second lieutenants in the National Guard. Shirley pointed to a position just down the track where a platoon commanded by Lieutenant Hershel Horton was set up, and volunteered to escort his old friend and Keast there. Medendorp gladly accepted.

  “Shirley was a bundle of energy,” Medendorp would later write. “Every move he made was on the double. I couldn’t keep up with him, for I had already been in the jungle for two months. I could get where it was necessary to go, but couldn’t put out any spurts of energy. The trail to Horton’s position led through kunai grass. Shirley bent forward and ran along like a pheasant.”

  It was not the first time Medendorp realized just how hard he had pushed himself in the last two months. But he and his men were in the same boat—they were all weary, even the youngest of the soldiers. Now, trying to keep up with a relatively fresh soldier, it was obvious that he was not up to it. Just what had the last two months done to him? Medendorp knew that he had lost weight, maybe forty pounds, since entering the jungle in early October; he could feel his ribs and his hipbones and the sharp corners of his shoulders. Now only 150 pounds, he tired easily. On the short hike to Lieutenant Horton’s position, he had to stop a number of times to catch his breath. Then there was the ulcer that looked like it might never heal.

  Shirley dropped off Medendorp and Keast with Lieutenant Horton. Keast flashed Horton a smile. They had known and competed against each other since their college days when Horton was a track man at Notre Dame.

  “Hello Horton. Glad to see you again,” Medendorp said.

  “Quiet,” Horton snapped. “And get down.”

  Medendorp, Keast, and Horton lay on their bellies like snakes in the sharp three-foot kunai grass. The hot sun beat down on them and the air was thick and wet. Except for the occasional shot, the front was largely silent. Even the birds grew quiet.

  Horton, Keast, and Medendorp went over the plans for the following morning.

  “This is how it’s gonna happen, boys,” Horton told them. “I’ll fire two shots with my pistol and that will be the signal to begin the attack.”

  Keast said, nodding in agreement, “Two shots.”

  That night Keast, like the other men, drifted in and out of sleep. He would doze off and then wake with a start, his heart pounding, his head cobwebbed with images. His son Harry moved in and out of his dreams as if he were real. Sometimes, it was as if Keast could reach out and hug him; he would pull Harry in close and hold him in his arms. Awake, his head cleared and his eyes adjusted. All he could see was darkness and the phantom shape of trees. Then the dank smell of the jungle would fill his nostrils, and he would remember where he was.

  On the morning of November 30, the men were stretched tighter than piano wires, and smeared in mud with sweat dripping off their foreheads. The combination of salt and dirt clouded and stung their eyes—how in the hell were they supposed to kill Japs when they could hardly see?

  In tense whispers, they passed the word down the line.

  “Two shots. Listen for ’em. And then we go.”

  As they waited, touching their triggers and trying not to hyperventilate, they imagined the various ways they might die. “Keep a tight asshole,” someone said. “Now is not the time to be shittin’ your pants!”

  Squinting and adjusting his gaze, Keast tried to make sense of the shapeless jungle. Where was the enemy? All he could see was the morning haze cut by a dim sun, shimmering trees, and in some areas where the 3rd Battalion and the Australians had already clashed with the Japanese, bare patches where trees had been stripped of their leaves.

  Lying in the kunai grass waiting for Horton to give the signal, Keast recalled the details of his photographs: Ruth sitting on the running board of the family car holding their baby son; Harry with his perfect doll face, smiling at the world. Where were they now? What were they doing? For a moment he might have dreamed of the future: chasing his sons in the back yard; watching them swing their arms in that exaggerated way kids did when they ran; throwing the football with Harry; seeing Roger Jr. heave a basketball up to a rim, all coiled up, launching the too-big ball with all his might.

  Keast’s feet were burning and a dull ache had settled into his knee. The rest in Laruni had helped, but the knee was still weak.

  Then, two shots. Gunfire exploded from the line. To pull the trigger after waiting for so long gave the men a giddy sense of release. Soldiers shot in the general direction of the enemy and hoped that their bullets struck flesh. Japanese troops returned fire. The volley was loud, theatrical, but brief. Medendorp heard the sound of empty clips popping out of rifles. He turned to Keast.

  “Sure,” he said, “Only half a dozen sick Japs!”

  After ten minutes of artillery, with Medendorp assisting Lieutenant Daniels, the Australian Artillery forward observer, in registering the shots, the telephone operator got on the phone. “Guns off,” he said.

  Medendorp and Daniels stepped in front of the lines to assess the damage. Company I, under Captain Shirley, was ready now. Company I and the Antitank Company under Captain Keast moved forward supported by fusillade from Medendorp’s men.

  “Follow the sun,” Shirley shouted. “Follow the sun.”

  Medendorp watched as the “advancing men crawled over wounded and dead.” He was startled by the fury of the Japanese response. They “gave back every bit they received.” The .25 caliber Japanese Arisaka rifles had a peculiar, high-pitched sound—like the “crack of a bull whip.” Each of those cracks was answered by the coarse bark of American .30 caliber M-1 rifles.

  While bullets ripped through the jungle and dense kunai grass, Medendorp leaned against a large, rotten tree stump, consulting his compass and trying to get bearings on the Japanese locations. Enemy bullets hit the tree stump, splattering wood chips all around him. Somewhere in the jungle a Japanese Juki machine gunner opened up. Medendorp could tell it was a Juki by its slow, heavy thud.

  Just behind the front line, Lieutenant Segal worked, according to Medendorp, “as calmly as in a hospital at home.” His aid station was nothing more than a thatched hut with a mud floor and assistants with flashlights.

  On the battlefield soldiers improvised stretchers
of balsa wood or split bamboo, wrapped them with telephone wire or denim jackets, and went out to recover the wounded. They had to act fast; it did not take long for open wounds to become infected, even gangrenous. Once off the line, they carried their comrades into slit trenches to protect them from rifle fire and mortar fragments. There, the wounded lay wrapped in dirty, blood-soaked battle dressings until Segal could attend to them. Though Segal was sick himself—over the past two months, Medendorp had watched him grow thinner and paler—he worked mightily to stabilize the wounded before they were carried back to the regimental station. There were times, though, when even a talented medical doctor like Segal was powerless. That is when Father Dzienis took over. Dzienis had buried his first man—Colonel Quinn—at Natunga, surrounded by the mountains and the green solitude of the jungle. Here, he walked along the slit trench, holding his rosary, administering last rites to the dying while the battle raged around him.

  Back at the front, Shirley and Keast’s assault was stalled after four hundred yards by withering enemy fire. Notified that the advance had bogged down, the battalion executive officer rushed to the front to rally his troops and led the way across a large kunai field. When the attack slammed up against a wide stretch of swamp through which the Japanese had cut lanes of fire, the jungle vibrated with the sound of machine guns, and the executive officer was killed. Realizing that the only way across the swamp was through the machine gun nests, one of Shirley’s sergeants assembled a patrol—ten men with two automatic rifles, a tommy gun, and a bunch of grenades between them.

  As they crept and slithered through the swamp, bullets ripped through the trees and over their heads. The men knew that the Japanese were firing indiscriminately. If the machine gunners actually spotted them, however, it would be like a carnival shoot. The Japanese could wipe them out in a matter of seconds.

  When the patrol got within thirty feet of the machine gun nests, the men decided not to push their luck. They rose and tossed their grenades. The barrage stopped.

  Seeing their opening, Keast and Shirley drove their men through the Japanese line. When the Japanese retreated, the two captains agreed to rest the troops. They had gained another six hundred yards. In the jungle, where success was measured in double-digit increments, it was a tremendous accomplishment.

  Late in the afternoon, as a gray mist settled over the jungle and fruit bats gathered in the darkening sky, Shirley’s scouts located an enemy bivouac off the main Soputa-Sanananda track. Shirley and Keast realized that if they hoped to make a move on the enemy stronghold, they would have to do it before nightfall.

  “Fix your bayonets and let’s cut the guts out of them,” Shirley said.

  If his men, who had been locked in battle for almost the entire day, were surprised by the order, they should not have been. Shirley’s ferocity was well known. Do or die, he was determined to get the bastards.

  Shirley and Keast divided their companies into three platoons and then they led the charge through the jungle.

  “Keep moving,” someone yelled out. Giant ferns and vines ripped at their legs. Branches gashed their faces. They did not know where the Japs were until they saw the muzzle flashes, then they hit a solid mass of enemy soldiers. Men fired at each other at point-blank range and slashed and lunged with their bayonets. Blood splattered everywhere. Shirley had hold of a man’s neck, and he could feel the Japanese soldier thrashing under his hands.

  When the Japanese defenders scattered, Shirley and Keast wasted no time securing the track. They dug in and placed rifle squads in all directions around the new position. The men were wet with sweat and covered in muck. Their hands were sticky with blood. But they had succeeded, beating the Japanese at their own game. They had established a perimeter three hundred yards to the rear of the Japanese position on the track, and had isolated the enemy’s forward units. But as dusk fell, they realized the precariousness of their own position. Surrounded by Japanese snipers and machine gunners, they were cut off from the main body of the Americans by more than a mile of thick jungle.

  Shirley knew he had to get word back to battalion headquarters. “Where the hell is the phone?” he wanted to know. When one of the signalmen confessed that he had left it a hundred yards back in a kunai patch, Shirley ordered him to get it.

  News of Shirley’s and Keast’s attack electrified battalion headquarters. But the victory had come at a price. On the way back to the command post, Medendorp saw the graves of the men lost that day. “There were more,” he wrote, “but they were out there between the lines where they could not be gotten.” He heard wounded men crying out and saw corpses already bloated by the heat. That night, a breeze came in off the coast, cooling the jungle. Then, Medendorp said of the unrecovered bodies, “We could smell them.”

  East of the Girua River, as Colonel Smith began moving on the Triangle, he was heartened by the arrival of Major Stutterin’ Smith’s 2nd Battalion.

  Smith, too, was happy to be back among familiar faces. The 128th had been his home for more than twenty years. One of the first people he saw was Lieutenant Mack Fradette, an old friend. Fradette was stunned by the condition of Smith and his men. Smith, who had always had problems keeping weight on, was as thin as a cornstalk. He had also just recovered from a bout of malaria. His men all wore long beards and in Fradette’s opinion looked like “walking skeletons.”

  As the battalion got settled, Colonel Smith gave Stutterin’ Smith a quick tour of the area. However, the major would have very little time to familiarize himself with the lay of the land; the attack was scheduled for the following day. He must have hesitated for a moment when he saw the battlefield. “Buna,” Smith wrote, “was a nightmare…of jungle…kunai grass higher than a man’s head…and swamps…that rose and fell with the tides…. The Japs had built bunkers” with “excellent fields of fire covering approaches from inland routes…. These bunkers” were “practically invisible.”

  That night, Stutterin’ Smith put Lieutenant Odell in charge of a platoon in Company F. Odell was forty pounds lighter than when he had come to New Guinea. Still, he realized that the “hardships thus far encountered were nothing compared with the hell that was to come.”

  Just short of midnight on November 23, Colonel Smith and Stutterin’ Smith held a council of war at the colonel’s command post, which was situated along the Soputa-Buna track three-quarters of a mile short of the Triangle. They had already resolved the confusion that might arise from two battalions fighting side by side, each one commanded by a Herbert Smith. Stutterin’ Smith became Red Smith and Colonel Smith was White Smith. They also laid out the plans for the following day’s attack. It would come from three directions and would begin at 0800 with bombing and strafing by American pilots. Before the troops moved out, four 25-pounders, new to the front, would open up on the Triangle.

  Despite the plans, both Smiths knew that they would be flying by the seat of their pants. They had no topographical maps of the area and their aerial photographs proved worthless; a large cloud covered the zone in which the attack was supposed to take place.

  Dawn came in with a rush and at 0800 the planes appeared. Twelve P-40s strafed the Triangle, but for some reason the bombers never showed. Worse yet, the P-40 pilots completely missed their target. Both Smiths hesitated. They could not possibly send their men into the Triangle now; it would be a suicide mission. They called for more planes, which arrived five hours later—but only four of the twelve they had requested. Rather than firing on the Triangle, though, the four P-40s, unable to identify their targets in the thick foliage, turned their guns on Colonel Smith’s command post.

  It was chaos. Men screamed at the top of their lungs and dove into the jungle. “We’re Americans, you stupid bastards! We’re goddamn Americans!”

  The strafing stopped as quickly as it had begun. When Major Smith assessed the damage, he was relieved to discover that it had not been as disastrous as he feared. Only one man had been wounded. The Triangle, though, had been untouched.

 
; But there was no turning back. Though fully conscious of the dangers of sending men into the maw of the Triangle, the decision had been made—the attack would go as planned. Both Smiths felt the pressure to push the offensive. According to headquarters in Port Moresby, they were to have taken Buna half a week earlier.

  Before the men pushed off, 60 mm mortars fired on the Triangle. From Ango, the 25-pounders with ranges of nearly eight miles boomed. At 2:28 that afternoon the troops jumped off.

  On the left, Captain Melvin Schultz and Sergeant Lutjens and the men of Company E swung wide around the Triangle. The night before, after the company received its orders, Lutjens had taken a moment to scribble a few lines in his diary. “God only knows what we are about to face,” he wrote. “If I said I am not afraid I would be a liar. Reread an old letter trying to place myself back in the states. To find something to fight for…I’m afraid of dying as much as anybody else. Maybe life wasn’t so pleasant for me, but God it seems good now. If I don’t come through this it will be God’s will.”

  The plan called for Company E to cross Entrance Creek and sneak in behind the Japanese stronghold. Although the 128th’s Company F had made some progress on the left three days before, it took Company E eight hours to advance eight hundred yards across the dense swamp. The men could not see more than ten feet in any direction and they were under strict instructions to hold their fire even if fired at. Their mission was reconnaissance.

  Men swore under their breath about how easy it would be for a bunch of Japs to ambush them in the swamp—they were goddamn sitting ducks. A Juki machine gun could wipe them out before they knew what had hit them.

  When the first shot rang through the swamp, “everybody,” according to Lutjens, “flopped down and sank his face into the mud. I don’t know exactly how the rest of the guys felt, but it scared the hell out of me. Somebody whispered, ‘That’s a Jap.’”