This book would have been impossible to write without the help of a number of secondary sources: Victory in Papua, written by Samuel Milner, the offical U.S. Army historian of the campaign; Bloody Buna by Lida Mayo; Kokoda by Paul Ham; Eric Bergerud’s Touched with Fire; Harry Gailey’s MacArthur Strikes Back; Papuan Campaign, the Buna-Sanananda Operation, put out by the Center of Military History, U.S. Army; and the “Report of the Commanding General Buna Forces on the Buna Campaign.”
In order to portray the Japanese experience and some of the soldiers whom this book mentions, I used the National Archives’ collection of Allied Translator and Interpreter Section (ATIS) diaries and interrogation reports. Other primary sources were Nankai Shitai, War Book of the 144th Regiment, translated by F. C Jorgensen, Seizo Okada’s Lost Troops, and Southern Cross, translated by Doris Hart.
I have also used my personal observations of the landscapes to inform certain scenes and to describe some of the settings for the story. I have visited Papua New Guinea five times. My first trip was in 1989. Fascinated with the country, I kept coming back, and that is how I discovered the story of the Ghost Mountain boys.
It is impossible to spend any time in New Guinea without encountering World War II history. Strewn across the mountains are pieces of planes that went down during the war. The coastal waters teem with reminders, too. While scuba diving, I saw submarine caverns, downed planes, remnants of transport ships and luggers, and large, twisted pieces of metal dating back to the war.
In the mountain villages along the Kapa Kapa trail, people still tell stories of the U.S. Army’s march across the mountains. Villagers showed me where soldiers collapsed in the mud, unable to go on, where they camped, and where the few soldiers who died on the trek were buried. One of my most fortuitous encounters was with a man named Berua, whom I met in the village of Laruni. Berua was only seven when his parents were chosen to serve as carriers for the American army. Frightened that he would never see them again, he followed his parents and the American army over the Owen Stanleys. It was an experience he would never forget.
On the coast, villagers still talk of the war. These war stories have become part of the local mythology, passed down by people from one generation to the next around the fire. Fascination and resentment linger. The war destroyed villages and innocent people’s lives.
In many cases the locals’ stories resembled the accepted historical version. However, in some cases, they have been wildly, and interestingly, embellished. One man suggested that it was a native sorcerer who had warned the Allies of the Japanese invasion. He went on to say that the sorcerer later flew over Japanese positions on the coast and alerted American artillerymen so that they could sight their big guns. Another man said that the war ended when a native sorcerer killed Japan’s most important general.
In the summer of 2005, I made a one-month trip to Papua New Guinea. I spent that month researching the war and the trail. I also visited Gabagaba, Doboduru, Buna, Siremi, Oro Bay, Pongani, Wanigela, and a number of inland villages, where I interviewed elders who had witnessed the war. In Buna, I heard stories of the Japanese invasion. In Gabagaba, people talked about the arrival of the Americans, especially the African-American engineers.
In the United States, during the summer of 2005, prior to my trip to Papua New Guinea, I attended a five-day 32nd Division Old Timers gathering at Fort McCoy, Wisconsin. Our accommodations were army barracks. On my first day, I watched a man make his bed as if a tough sergeant would be inspecting his work: Not a crease in the top sheet, the corners tucked in, the pillow fluffed like a cumulous cloud.
Although it was only early June, it was already in the high 90s. Enormous fans cooled the barracks, but they only did so much. I did not understand how the older guys could take it until they set me straight.
“This is a breeze compared to New Guinea,” one said.
I was in the real old-timers’ barracks. Bill Barnes, who was a second lieutenant at Buna, was ninety-five. He wore big Coke-bottle glasses and had a pacemaker but looked like he could still run a marathon. Lawrence Chester Dennis was 93. At Buna, he had run messages from headquarters to various companies across the front, earning him the nickname “moving target.” Dennis was nearly blind now, so the guys set out his clothes, made his bed, took him to the bathroom, and made sure he got to the events on time.
Then there was Roy Gormanson, who, the first time I met him, took off his tie and shirt and showed me his mangled left shoulder. “Took three operations to get it this good,” he said. “And still I can’t lift my arm over my head.”
Many of the guys in my barracks had trouble walking. Nearly everyone had diabetes. A bunch had been through heart bypasses. They all took an assortment of pills. Yet for five days they joked with each other as if they were young GIs. They joked wherever they went—in the mess hall, in the communal showers, as they peed into a large trough, and in the morning on the “shitter” that sat in plain view of five or six others.
“No goddamn privacy in the army,” an old-timer commented.
One morning one of the guys announced as he settled onto a toilet seat that he was going to die, but not of a stroke or a heart attack or colon cancer. “I want to be shot by an irate husband,” he said. The entire bathrooom roared.
At night the guys played poker in the mess hall and drank beer. And sometimes they talked about the war. Mostly, though, it was a subject they avoided. Red Lawler, who was in his nineties and ran a pizza parlor in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, said, “I saw so much death in New Guinea, I like to forget. It was a horrible place.”
One man—I never did learn his name—told me that when the battle for Buna was almost over and the Americans were mopping up, looking for stray Japanese soldiers, he and a young private stood on a beach. The private had just finished showing him a photo of his wife and little boy. “Sure can’t wait to get back to them,” the private said. Just then a shot cracked out of the jungle, and the private fell. The bullet had taken away half his head.
After the Old Timers event I spent the next six months interviewing and collecting stories. I drove across the Midwest and called Texas, Boston, New York, Florida, Ohio, Washington, D.C., and California.
I heard the same from almost every veteran. “There are few of us left. You should have done this book ten years ago. Hurry up and finish so I’m around to read it.”
One man from Michigan had a list of everyone from his company, and started reading off the names. “Gone,” he said. “Dead. He’s gone, too. He passed away not too long ago. He’s dead, too, now. Goddammit,” he said, as if realizing it for the first time, “they’re all gone.”
Eventually it was clear that with so many of the guys gone I would have to start contacting sons and daughters, even grandkids. That search brought me to southern Indiana.
William “Jim” Boice, the man who had led the initial reconnaissance patrol across the island, was from Indiana, and his son still lives there. Bill Boice Jr., in his mid-sixties, runs a manufacturing business, and walks and talks with an unlit cigar in his mouth. After giving me a tour of his plant, he and his wife Joyce kindly invited me to their house, where together we went through old newspaper clippings and photos that his mother had saved. Then we had lunch. After lunch we read entries from his father’s diary and then we got to his father’s letters.
When Bill Jr. read them, his voice shook. Handing the letters to me, he said, “Read ’em, I can’t.” Neither could I.
It was after my visit to Bill Boice that I began writing. And it was then that I decided I was going to walk across New Guinea in the footsteps of the Ghost Mountain boys.
My journey began with my scouting trip in August 2005. Almost everyone I met in Papua New Guinea warned me not to try to repeat the march. The Kapa Kapa was a rugged hunting and trading trail in 1942. No one knew if it still existed. Besides, they said, the country was too rough: cliffs, rivers, snakes, mountains, mosquitoes, leeches, and disease. And who knows, they said, whether the people will let
you walk through their tribal lands. Some of those mountain villagers barely know the outside world exists. They still hunt with spears and slingshots.
In June 2006 I began the trip, accompanied by a friend and part-time filmmaker from Chicago, an Alaskan pal, an Australian expat living in Port Moresby who had spent lots of time in the New Guinea bush, a photographer from Hong Kong, and three Papua New Guinea cameramen from Port Moresby’s POM Productions. If we succeeded, our expedition would be an historic event; no outsider had attempted to walk the entire trail since the soldiers did it in 1942.
On the first day, climbing down to a river on a red clay trail as slippery as lake ice, I fell, tumbling head over heels with a sixty-seven-pound pack on my back. When I got to my feet, I knew that I had torn a ligament in my knee. I limped for another three hours until I could walk no more. My pulse was fast and thready, my vision blurred. I knew I could not make it, so I turned back and walked out. My friend George from Chicago accompanied me.
That night we slept in a village in a hut made of woven bamboo, and we were told to be on the lookout for ill-intentioned sorcerers. The following day we stumbled out of the mountains and hitched a ride to Port Moresby.
Four days later, equipped with painkillers and anti-inflammatories, and determined to follow in the footsteps of the Ghost Mountain boys, we were helicoptered back into the jungle.
Introduction
My remarks on the supply and equipment problems derive in part from a document titled “Comments on the Buna Campaign by a Quartermaster,” which is part of the Hanson Baldwin Collection at the George C. Marshall Research Library in Lexington, Virginia. War correspondent Jules Archer wrote an article for Man’s Magazine called “Why the 32nd Division Won’t Forgive General MacArthur.” It was very helpful, as was Tillman Durdin’s article, “The Grim Hide-and-Seek of Jungle War,” which appeared in the March 1943 edition of The New York Times Magazine.
Chapter 1. Escape to the South
There are a variety of people, including General Charles Willoughby, MacArthur’s head of Intelligence, who address MacArthur’s exchange with Wainwright and his subsequent flight from Corregidor. All seem to have a slightly different take on what transpired. In his superbly researched book, American Caesar, William Manchester describes MacArthur’s escape from Corregidor, his arrival in Australia, and his state of mind. To a large extent this is the account that I have relied on.
As for the legend about MacArthur’s fear of flying, General George Brett, who for a short time was MacArthur’s commander of American forces in Australia, may be the author. In “The MacArthur I Knew,” Brett states that MacArthur “hated to fly,” “suffered from airsickness,” and “would not get into a plane unless he knew it was perfect.” Brett also has some insightful comments about MacArthur’s psyche and his time in Australia, and the exclusivity of the Bataan Gang. And he dispels once and for all the tale that MacArthur fled Corregidor with a mattress full of gold pesos.
Regarding MacArthur’s famous speech, Harry Gailey, author of MacArthur Strikes Back, says that MacArthur uttered his famous words “I shall return” for the first time to reporters at Batchelor Field. In Reminiscences, MacArthur says the same. General Charles Willoughby says it happened in Alice Springs, as does John Toland in The Rising Sun. In other words, there does not seem to be a definitive, universally accepted account of what happened, or where. It may be that MacArthur uttered the three words at Batchelor Field, but according to Manchester, the speech heard round the world was made in Adelaide. Manchester describes how MacArthur labored over what he would say: MacArthur was concerned about the first sentence, writing and re-writing it many times. But it was the last sentence that caught on, becoming, according to historian Winston Groom, as memorable as “The British are coming!” or “Remember the Alamo.” MacArthur’s detractors trashed the speech, citing it as an example of the general’s megalomania. Why had he used “I”? It seemed silly and pompous, they said. Why had he not said, “We shall return”?
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 warnin
g 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.
The Ghost Mountain Boys Page 32
