The Ghost Mountain Boys

by James Campbell

  Powell contrasts the American soldiers’ relationship with the villagers with the way they were treated by the Australians. He writes, “The problem…was not merely that the Australians had and gave less, but that they actively discouraged or forbade the generosity of the Americans.” One villager said, “If an American was going to give something to me, he had to look around and make sure that none of the Angau were present. If an Angau saw an American give one of us something, then he would come and take it away.”

  Leslie Anders portrays Harding as the consummate renaissance man, a writer of prose and poetry, a voracious reader, and an avid and accomplished student of history.

  Details on Roger Keast are from interviews with his son Harry, interviews of men who served with Keast, and a variety of newspaper articles.

  It is occasionally dificult to track the patrol’s journeys, since no detailed maps of the area existed and often Medendorp did not use place names. Much of the country, including the rivers and the countless peaks, did not have names. Although some of the most prominent features had native names, many did not.

  Descriptions of the jungle are based in part on my own trek on the Kapa Kapa and my observations.

  American and Australian soldiers greatly feared the Japanese soldier. They viewed him as cunning, stealthy, and deadly, despite Allied commanders’ continual attempts to dispel the myth of the Japanese warrior’s superiority.

  Boyd Swem is one of the soldiers about whom Medendorp writes very fondly. Medendorp wrote, “Nothing dismayed Swem.” Swem was a member of Service Company when Mendedorp invited him to join the Wairopi Patrol.

  Captain Buckler’s group was just as stunned to discover the Americans. According to Raymond Paull in his book Retreat from Kokoda, the Americans were “an image of wishful thinking to a man who had endured a month of strain and vicissitude.” Lewis Sebring, a correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune who saw Buckler’s group when they reached the coast, described them much as Medendorp did: “Sunken eyes looked at us from bearded faces…” Mayo writes that it was Boice who encountered Buckler’s group, but Medendorp’s group surely encountered them, too, for Medendorp writes, “They were dirty, hungry, bearded, and many were nursing old wounds…” In additon to feeding them, Medendorp wrote that they were welcome to “all the food that they could carry, and with our blessing.”

  Details on the Japanese invasion of Rabaul are from Ham and Paull.

  That evening a runner from Boice’s Pathfinder Patrol also stumbled into Arapara. According to Medendorp, he had “malaria and was partly delirious.”

  I witnessed the natives’ lack of concern about rats and cockroaches; they consider our sqeamishness laughable.

  Details on the beliefs of carriers are derived from numerous interviews with people in Papua New Guinea, Powell’s book, and conversations and e-mails with Bill McKellin, a professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

  The quote is from Lieutenant William D. Hawkins, Harding’s G-2 (from Anders’ Gentle Knight).

  The old village of Laruni was situated on a hill overlooking the Mimani River, a one-hour climb from the present-day village of Laruni (or Larun), which lies on the western bank of the river.

  Medendorp was a cigar man, but almost everyone in the army learned to smoke cigarettes.

  All that Medendorp and Keast had to work with was a hand-drawn map listing the villages along the trail. The map did not even include mountain peaks and rivers. Medendorp and Keast would draw their own map, called Map C: Operations of the Wairopi Patrol, which would show villages and drainages along the Kumusi River from Jaure down to Wairopi on the Kokoda track. This map can be found at the National Archives.

  North of Laruni, the terrain becomes extremely steep, as we would discover on our trek. Natives, especially those recruited in Gabagaba and other coastal villages, would have been unfamiliar with the mountains and frightened by them. They believed that the mountains were populated with evil spirits. To this day, natives of seaside villages are reluctant to venture into the mountains. Mountain people are also frightened of the high peaks.

  I discovered some of Medendorp’s radio messages at the National Archives.

  Keast’s endurance is confirmed by veterans who took part in the Wairopi Patrol.

  The trail is infested with leeches that crawl up out of the mud and fall from overhanging branches.

  Initially the Japanese Imperial army took great care not to alienate the people of New Guinea. Orders were to “make them realise that the Imperial army will protect their lives and property…to ensure that all decisions made in local matters are fair, to respect their women and never approach them, to always pay a proper price for things bought or labor done.”

  Those who submitted to the Japanese were to be treated benevolently, but those who displayed hostility were to be “disposed of rigorously and without mercy.” A notebook of Second Lieutenant Hidetada Noda, captured near the village of Menari, contained information regarding treatment of natives: “No work at night. Do not hit them unless the reason for doing it is very obvious…. Treat them as human beings.” Initially, the Japanese were quite egalitarian, certainly more so than the ANGAU masters had been. The Japanese soldiers ate with the native New Guineans, and in some cases, lived with them.

  Details on the Jaure reunion can be found in Medendorp’s memoirs.

  Descriptions of porters are from Medendorp’s memoirs and Professor Bill McKellin, who lived for two years with the people of Central Papua.

  Segal’s complaints were widespread among the Medical Corps. In “The Fight Against Malaria in the Papua and New Guinea Campaigns,” John T. Greenwood writes, “Medical officers could not obtain the level of priority required for the shipment of supplies into or even within the theater.” He describes a puzzling lack of interest by line commanders and theater planners in the malaria threat.

  Milner writes of what was called the “Wanigela Operation.” Ivan Champion, a former colonial patrolman, had successfully mapped a channel from Milne Bay to Cape Nelson, up the coast from Wanigela, making the transport of the 128th and its supplies possible.

  General George Brett, who was no longer MacArthur’s commander of American forces in Australia, must have been surprised by MacArthur’s sudden faith in the air forces. Previously, according to Brett, he had nothing but “contempt and criticism for them.” In The MacArthur I Knew, Brett recalls a conversation where MacArthur said of the air force, “They lack discipline, organization, purposeful intent.”

  Flying over the Owen Stanley “hump,” where cloud banks sometimes reached 40,000 feet in the air, was no easy task.

  Chapter 9. One Green Hell

  Lutjens’ entries are from his diary and from E. J. Kahn’s article, “The Terrible Days of Company E.”

  The engineers who accompanied the 2nd Battalion were from the 114th Engineers, a Massachusetts Guard unit. The 114th Engineers replaced the division’s 107th Engineers who were already on their way to the ETO. The story of the engineers has never really been told. They performed miracles along the trail, which certainly saved lives.

  Native carriers were more than happy to pick up whatever equipment and clothing the soldiers left behind. Hare Bore of Gabagaba was one of the carriers for the 2nd Battalion. Remembering how the soldiers suffered in the heat and under the weight of their packs, he says, “I drop tears for them.”

  The story of soldiers tearing the buttons off their shirts seemed improbable to me. Veterans of the march, however, insist that they saw men do it.

  On my own trek—though our team, including carriers, never amounted to more than twenty-five—I saw how quickly the trail could turn into a path of shin-deep mud.

  Accounts of Company G’s march are from personal interviews with the men of Company G, friends who served with Bailey, and Wendell Trogdon’s book on Cladie Bailey.

  For an excellent history of malaria and efforts to stamp it out, read Mosquitoes, Malaria and Man by Gordon Ha
rrison, and Mary Ellen Condon-Rall’s books and articles.

  A number of other good books discuss tropical disease: a basic book called Tropical Infectious Diseases; Tropical Diseases from 50,000 BC to 2500 AD; and Douglas Haynes’ Imperial Medicine. Bergerud also has a section devoted to disease in the South Pacific war. Interestingly, he notes, “Up until the twentieth century, it [disease] was the primary killer during war.”

  In “The Fight Against Malaria in the Papua and New Guinea Campaigns,” John T. Greenwood writes, “The establishment in March 1942 of the Southwest Pacific Area as an Allied theater command under General Douglas MacArthur meant that one of the most primitive, remote, and disease-infested tropical areas in the world would become the scene of major military operations.” He adds that the medical department’s experience with the “huge amount of damages inflicted on American forces in Bataan, should have alerted American military and medical leaders to the impending danger…. Theater officers devoted little attention to developing an antimalaria program during 1942, however, because of their focus on more immediate operational requirements.”

  The army’s decision to let the soldiers rest in villages along the trail’s route seemed practical at the time, but it backfired. The soldiers were already suffering from dysentery, trenchfoot, and jungle ulcers when malaria hit them like a time bomb. Exposed to mosquitoes on the coast and in the long-grass savanna that bordered the hill country, many soldiers were wracked with chills and high fevers by the time they reached the mountains. Malaria devastated the 2nd Battalion, and eventually the entire 32nd Division. Eventually nearly 70 percent of the division would contract the disease.

  Bergerud also discusses at length the problems that malaria and other diseases caused for the American army in New Guinea.

  Malaria means “bad air” in Italian, a reference to the long-held notion that people contracted malaria by smelling the “bad air” of a swamp. The culprit, though, is a tiny parasite transmitted through the bite of the female anopheles mosquito, which teemed in the tidal swamps, open grasslands, and thick, dank jungles along the trail.

  Once in the blood, the parasites traveled to the soldiers’ livers and reproduced, burst, and released more parasites back into the soldiers’ bloodstreams. When other female anopheles fed on the infected blood, they, too, were infected. Worst of all, the parasites were hard to get rid of. In some cases, the men’s livers and red blood cells played host to the disease for years.

  Malaria is New Guinea’s scourge. Fort Coronation, the island’s first European settlement, a British colony established in 1793, was decimated by fever in less than a year. The next colony, a Dutch experiment called Merkusoord, lost seventy-five soldiers and nearly a hundred women and children in a seven-year period between 1828 and 1835. A French sailing vessel sighted the settlement in 1840, but discovered nothing more than a “citrus grove, coconut trees, a brick oven, ruined stone dwellings, and an overgrown road.”

  Near the middle of the century Dutch Protestants affiliated with a society called “The Christian Workman” attempted to establish a number of missions in northwestern New Guinea. After twenty-five years, an earthquake and a tidal wave, epidemics of smallpox and dysentery, and rampant malaria, the number of people to die from disease exceeded the number of natives baptized into Christ.

  Around the time of the missions’ collapse, a Russian biologist by the name of Nikolai Mikluho Maclay was making forays into New Guinea’s northeastern interior. After befriending the initially hostile natives, Maclay had to contend with an even more dangerous foe—malaria. One night while in his hut, Maclay described the symptoms. “He [the victim of malaria],” he wrote, “does not feel her [malaria’s] presence, but before long he feels his legs as filled with lead, his thoughts are interrupted by giddiness, a cold shiver passes through the limbs, his eyes become very sensitive to light and his eyelids droop in a powerless way. Images, some enormous monsters, some sad and slow, appear before his closed eyes. By and by the cold shivering changes into a heat, a dry endless heat…”

  Roughly a decade after Maclay’s adventures, Britain and Germany were competing for large parts of the island. In late 1884 Britain declared southeastern New Guinea a protectorate and not long after hoisted the Union Jack over Port Moresby. After the cheering subsided, Britain dispatched Major General Sir Peter Scratchley, the protectorate’s first commissioner. Scratchley, however, died of malaria after only three months in the territory.

  Germany’s colonial administration took the form of the Neu Guinea Kompagnie, which Germany’s chancellor Otto von Bismarck put in charge of the adventure. Commissioned by the Kompagnie to find sites for potential settlement, in what became known as Kaiser-Wilhelmsland, Dr. Otto Finch made five journeys to northeastern New Guinea, naming the region’s greatest river (the Sepik) the Kaiserin Augusta. In honor of Dr. Finch’s discoveries, the Kompagnie named its first settlement Finchhafen. In establishing the settlement, though, the Kompagnie could not have chosen more poorly. Finchhafen was a desperate place, beset by a hellishly humid climate, earthquakes, a lethal strain of malaria, and soul-deadening monotony. The chancellor’s nephew, who worked in the colony as a surveyor, wrote that one of the two most frequented spots in the town was the cemetery. Upon leaving Finchhafen, he wrote, “I am one of the few to get out of that malaria-hole Finchhafen with a whole skin because I treated the fever with alcohol instead of quinine, and the orders of the Neu Guinea Kompagnie similarly—with alcohol instead of respect.”

  Details from Smith’s books and details of the gold rush are in Souter’s New Guinea.

  In 1889, a half-century before Company G attempted to negotiate the high mountain country of the Owen Stanleys, Sir William MacGregor, a short, square, indomitable Scot, led the first official expedition into the mountains. MacGregor was appointed administrator over what was then known as British New Guinea, after Britain assumed sovereignty over the protectorate in 1888, and he was determined to investigate the Papuan Peninsula’s wild interior. MacGregor’s carriers, who were familiar with the terrain, said the mountains could not be reached. MacGregor was not deterred until he actually entered them. From Port Moresby it had taken his team nearly a month to reach the second highest peak in British New Guinea. It was 13,363 feet tall, and he named it Mt. Victoria. Much to his surprise, Mt. Victoria was not the gigantic, isolated mountain he had imagined. It was part of a huge, sprawling mountain chain.

  Regarding the drop sites, Medendorp and Keast’s team successfully pinpointed, and sometimes cleared, drop sites along the trail.

  The Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 was passed by the United States Congress on September 6, 1940, becoming the first peacetime conscription in U.S. history. The draft began in October 1940. By the early summer of 1941, FDR asked Congress to extend the term of duty for the draftees beyond twelve months. The House of Representatives approved the extension by a single vote. The terminal point of service would soon be extended to six months after the war.

  Bottcher’s description is from “Fire and Blood in the Jungle” by George Moorad. Lieutenant James Hunt’s recollection is found in his letter to Stutterin’ Smith.

  Odell also writes of the grueling nature of the hike in his diary.

  The Bailey quote is taken from interviews with Katherine (Bailey) Matthews.

  Problems between Australians and American soldiers were growing so bad that on August 15, Harding delivered a lecture on relations with Australian soldiers. Gangs were trying “to find stray American troops and to kill them.” One Australian general described the animosity as “a most despicable thing between allies.”

  According to Gailey there were a number of “embarrassing problems caused by the influx of American troops.” “Australia,” he writes, “had an all-white immigration policy. MacArthur had more than twice the percentage of black troops than in the European theater. The employment of these solders rankled many Australians and caused some friction.”

  Gailey adds, “the most vexing of all w
as the relations between off-duty American and Australian servicemen in the cities. Contrary to the myths that developed in the years after the war, they did not like one another.”

  Gailey goes on to tell the story of a brawl that erupted in Brisbane between U.S. military police and Australian soldiers. One Australian soldier was killed and nine were wounded.

  Messages between Colonel Quinn and and Captain Boice are in the National Archives.

  Chapter 10. To Swallow One’s Tears

  The details and quotes were taken from Japanese diaries translated by ATIS. At first, Allied translators were shocked by revelations of cannibalism that appeared in Japanese diaries, and asked for confirmation of their translations. It was indeed ironic that on an island legendary for its cannibals, it was the Japanese who were eating human flesh. In Papua, in the years before the war, the Australian colonial government had imposed on the people a western economic structure and the British system of law (Pax Australiana), and doled out harsh punishment for anyone suspected of cannibalism.

  Ham writes that when the Australians searched the Japanese camp at Templeton’s Crossing, they found “the flesh of Australian soldiers still cooking over the smoking embers of a campfire. More carved corpses,” Ham writes, “lay on the track nearby.”

  By the end of the war, human flesh had become a staple of the Japanese diet. Ham quotes one Australian soldier who said that when they entered the village of Sanananda, they saw “little billy tins of human flesh.”

  Of Allen’s firing, Horner writes, “Clearly Blamey felt he had to relieve Allen to placate MacArthur. Had Blamey stood up to MacArthur, he would have won the respect of the Australian army. As it was, he did MacArthur’s bidding and won the opprobrium of the troops.”

  Ham paints a wonderful portrait of General “Bloody George” Vasey: “His quick wit and independent character had happily survived his promotion up the ranks. He seemed free of…pomposity and self-importance.” He was a man of “rigid self-discipline and unyielding spirit,” and “swaggering indifference to danger,” but he had a “genuine concern for, and mingled with, his men.” Quoting Raymond Paull, Ham writes, “He never lost the common touch.”