Chapter 8
OCTOBER 6, 1942. As Captain Jim Boice was lying low in the mountain village of Jaure on the north side of the Owen Stanley divide, he scribbled a note in his diary: “Lonesome for back home. Rain and rest.”
If Boice was enjoying a rare moment of self-congratulation, the situation warranted it. He had just led a reconnaissance team for seventeen days across the mountains via an obscure trail that the Americans came to call the Kapa Kapa, which no one other than native hunters and a 1917 government patrol had ever walked.
The Australians had counseled MacArthur against using Boice’s route, and the Australians knew what they were talking about. They had been locked in a death grip with the Japanese on the Kokoda since late July, a campaign made fiercer by the terrain. But the Kokoda was what the Australians called a “track.” A difficult, but established trail, it served as a government mail route, stretching from outside Port Moresby north across the Owen Stanley Mountains.
Since inheriting Papua from the British in 1906, the Australians had explored portions of the Papuan Peninsula, imposing a kind of Pax Australiana over the territory. According to its twenty-five-year-old colonial patrol report, the terrain over which MacArthur proposed to send a battalion, and possibly an entire regiment, though only thirty miles east of the Kokoda track, traversed much rougher country. The trail was too rugged, they said, the rivers too fast, and the mountain passes too high.
If anyone had the guts to scout a trail across the Papuan Peninsula, it was Jim Boice.
Boice did not look the part of a pioneer. He was a nearly bald, plain-looking man, and at thirty-eight, he was hardly young. He was also one of General Harding’s favorites: intelligent, confident but unpretentious, undersized but tough, as Harding himself was. In fact, Boice was so small that he had been afraid that the army would reject him. One week before his physical he stuffed himself with food and water to make the Army’s minimum weight requirement.
Boice liked the look of Jaure. With its large meadow, he knew it would be ideal for airdrops. The jungle had been a dense mesh of trees, leaves, vines, and fronds, but here, for the first time in weeks, the forest opened up and he could see in every direction. Flocks of white parrots, mountain pigeons, and green lorikeets flashed across the sky. Hawks and swiftlets cruised on updrafts.
Two days earlier, after sending a runner with his trail notes back toward Gabagaba, Boice radioed the divisional command post. The route across the mountains, roughly eighty miles from the coast, as the crow flies, was “taxing,” he said, “but practicable.”
Although Jim Boice may have been a reflective man, neither his message nor his diary offers many clues about how tough the trek really was. The reality was that by the time his small patrol reached the Owen Stanleys, the trail lost six hundred feet for every thousand feet it gained, climbing steeply up mountainsides, then plunging at sixty-degree angles into surrounding valleys. Some days, hiking from dawn till dusk, Boice and his men covered no more than two miles, though progress was difficult to measure because Boice’s map included only approximate distances. It was so cold in the mountains that they would have to worry about hypothermia. The airdrops that they depended on were days late and inaccurate, and much food that the crews pushed out of the planes was lost to the jungle.
By the time they reached Jaure, Boice’s feet were swollen and sore, and it was impossible for him to get his boots off. For two and a half weeks he had hiked in them, crossed rivers in them, and slept in them. Now the leather seemed glued to his feet. If he yanked at the heel, his skin felt as if it would tear. Finally, out of frustration, he may have taken his knife and cut slits in the leather to relieve the pressure. It did not matter; the boots were worthless anyway. They were rotting off his feet. Until the next airdrop, he was better off going barefoot like the carriers.
On the evening of October 6, a cold mountain fog settled in, and the rain came down in icy, gray sheets. Boice huddled under his shelter half. He had been lucky. He had made it to Jaure through tangled rain forest and clouds of mosquitoes and sweat bees, across gushing rivers, and over the Owen Stanley spine, without a serious mishap. Considering that he knew nothing of the route before he set out, it was an amazing accomplishment. Now the mountains lay behind him surrounded by clouds.
As was his habit, Boice removed two photos from a tin rations box. One of the photos was of Billy sitting in a Scout Flyer wagon. The other was of Zelma, Billy, and the family dog standing in the front yard of their Swayzee home. Boice held the photos in his hands until his fingers grew cold, then put them back in the rations box and took his diary out of his pack. Boice stored the diary in a large sheet of tinfoil. It was a small black pocketbook version that his wife Zelma had given him at Fort Devens. Boice set it on his lap and pulled out his prized fountain pen, the pen he had used to mark his high school students’ papers back in Swayzee, Indiana. Swayzee: Even the name sounded breezy, slow-paced, and peaceful.
No matter how miserable he was, no matter how short the entry, Boice was dutiful about writing. He liked the feeling of the diary in his hands. Just to hold it seemed to fill him with Zelma’s love. And the act of writing allowed him to conjure walking with Zelma through the quiet neighborhood while Billy slept in his arms and friends sat on their front porches sipping lemonade in the still, hot summer air. It enabled Boice to live, if only for a moment, in his former life.
With Boice’s message that the Kapa Kapa trail was “taxing, but practicable,” MacArthur’s plan for an overland advance on Buna was ready to be put into motion. The crux of the plan was this: The 250-man Wairopi Patrol, under Captain Alfred Medendorp’s command, would set out first. It would be followed by troops from the 126th Infantry Regiment, with the regiment’s 2nd Battalion leading the way. From the Australians’ experiences on the Kokoda track, the U.S. Army knew that a large group of soldiers could not rely on carriers alone. They got sick, they deserted, they needed food. Medendorp’s job, therefore, was to establish drop sites along the route that pilots could easily identify. He and his men would also be counted on to clear the trail of Japanese interference. The 2nd Battalion did not need to be fighting its way north across the mountains.
MacArthur originally wanted the 126th to penetrate and cross the Owen Stanleys, cut west, and sneak in at the rear of the Japanese on the Kokoda track, where it would ambush Horii’s army, cut off his supply line, or at the very least, hasten the Japanese army’s retreat to the north coast. Because of Boice’s report, however, MacArthur knew that he could never get a large number of troops over the mountains fast enough, so he amended his strategy. The 126th’s new mission was to reach Jaure and secure the Kumusi River valley west to Wairopi on the Buna-Kokoda track, a maneuver designed to cover the right flank of the advancing Australians. In time, the 126th would push north to the villages of Buna and Sanananda, where the Japanese army had established its coastal stronghold.
The blast-furnace heat was crippling. At Nepeana, Captain Alfred Medendorp stood in the shade of a coconut palm, trying to escape the sun, waiting for General Harding’s jeep to arrive.
Working from dawn till dusk, Company E and the 91st Engineers had slashed a road not just to Gobaregari, but another ten miles upriver to the village of Nepeana. Although the road, which Company E dubbed “Michigan Avenue,” was nothing more than a “peep trail,” a bone-jarring path that quarter-ton vehicles could negotiate, it allowed the Americans to transport supplies farther inland. The advance base was located just south of Gobaregari at Kalikodobu, which the Michigan boys, following a theme, called “Kalamazoo.” The name also brought to mind a favorite 1940s song—“I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo.”
Like Boice, Medendorp might have been trying to conjure images of home. Autumn in lower Michigan: the yellow-orange hickories shining in an electric blue sky; ducks in the sloughs; field corn ready to be picked; crisp nights and a big, shining harvest moon. He might have tucked in his shirt and massaged his hair into place. How absurd, to care about his looks in a place like New Guinea.
Growing up in his hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan, Medendorp had been regarded as a handsome ladies’ man. Unlike many other young men his age, his popularity with the opposite sex did not stem from his ability as an athlete. In fact his father, a Dutch immigrant, had never liked the brutality of football, and refused to let his son play on the high school team. Instead, Medendorp focused on music. He had a talent for it. Just out of high school he started a jazz band in which he played the saxophone and clarinet. At five foot eleven and 190 pounds, he was strong and built like an athlete, and he was proud of that. Dorothy Schutt was one of his many admirers. After meeting at a dance where Medendorp’s band played, they dated and a year later married.
Now, Medendorp and his men were preparing for the day’s march. In the blue-green haze, they yawned and stretched, and shaded their eyes from the glare of the tropical morning. A few were shaving. Who knew when they would get the chance again? Native carriers with vines tied around their ankles for traction shinnied up long, bare trunks to the tops of coconut trees, where they cut off coconuts and threw them down to waiting GIs.
Some of the other carriers, using fiber ropes, were tying bags of food to poles fashioned out of saplings, which they would carry on their shoulders, two men to a pole, one in front and one in back. An Australian sergeant barked at the carriers and told anyone willing to listen, “You gotta treat them with a firm hand, or they’ll run all over you.”
Medendorp had not had much experience with natives, but he had watched other Australians manage natives, and he knew that he did not like this sergeant’s style. Besides, he understood that the patrol, as he would later write, “depended on them utterly,” and they were to be treated as kindly as possible.
An old native man collected stray cigarette butts, taking a few remaining puffs. Other natives sat on their haunches passing a bamboo pipe in which they smoked a pungent trade tobacco. They were all fabulously decorated and tattooed, and the soldiers looked on as if they were watching an exotic movie; their eyes, according to Medendorp, “popped out at the sight.” The native men wore lap-laps—colorful skirts with a waistband and a small codpiece—shell earrings and strings of shells around their necks and woven bracelets of dyed fiber high on their muscular arms. Their teeth were stained a deep red from chewing betel nut. Their bare feet were broad and calloused. Pigs, the natives’ prized possessions, snorted and trotted around casually, as if they were used to having the run of the place. When the bony hunting dogs ventured too close, the men kicked at them and shooed them away. The native women and children remained out of sight.
The men of the Wairopi Patrol oiled their weapons and sorted through their fieldpacks. They moved in slow motion, already listless from the heat. Sergeant Ralph Schmidt watched them. Schmidt was a bear of a man who had grown up on a farm in Coopersville, Michigan. Baling hay, he could outwork any man in the county. If Medendorp needed to rely on someone to keep the men on their toes, it was him.
When General Harding arrived in Nepeana by jeep over Michigan Avenue, he, like everyone who tried to negotiate the road, was splattered with mud and dripping sweat. No matter; he was eager to hear of the patrol’s ten-mile march from Kalikodobu to Nepeana. Medendorp did not intend to paint a pretty picture; he knew that Harding would want the unvarnished truth.
Medendorp told General Harding that for many of his men the trail had been a nightmare. The men of the Wairopi Patrol carried eighty pounds from “the skin out”: the clothes on their backs, their backpacks, ten-pound M-1 rifles, two bandoliers of ammunition, and pineapple grenades. It was too much weight. Under a battering tropical sun, through jungle and rolling savanna country with mosquitoes teeming in the long grass, they walked sluggishly. Nothing in their training—no twenty-five-mile hike through the tablelands of Australia, no Louisiana Maneuvers—could have prepared them for the strain of it.
Medendorp’s assessment of that first day must have left Harding uneasy. Harding could see General MacArthur’s grand plan for an overland assault collapsing before his eyes. He instructed Medendorp to assemble his men, and did his best to rally them, reminding them of their crucial task. Only thirty miles to the west, on the Kokoda track, the Australian army was battling against the Japanese. The Australians were some of the world’s best soldiers, but they could not lick the Japanese alone.
Harding then ordered the men to lighten their loads. They could cut down on their ammunition—twenty rounds per riflemen, eighty rounds for automatic weapons—and leave their “brain buckets” (steel helmets) behind.
As he watched the patrol move out, Harding, who had taught history as an assistant professor at West Point, must have wondered if New Guinea was to be Medendorp’s Gedrosian desert. In 326 B.C. Alexander the Great led his army through the Gedrosian desert in what is now Iran. According to Plutarch, during the sixty-day crossing, Alexander lost three-quarters of his men to exhaustion and starvation.
Strinumu.
It had been only three days and roughly twenty miles into the Wairopi Patrol’s crossing of New Guinea’s Papuan Peninsula, but Captain Medendorp could not shake the feeling that he was on a fool’s errand.
New Guinea was nature gone mad. The trail, what there was of it, was no wider than a garden row of beets, hemmed in by jungle “so dense,” according to Medendorp, “as to afford almost constant shade.” In backbreaking bursts, Medendorp’s men scrambled up and down over a series of forested, hogbacked hills. Their rifles kept slipping off their shoulders. They frothed at the mouth and grunted like pack animals in the choking humidity.
Captain Boice had called the trail “practicable,” but Medendorp knew Boice; Boice did not know the word quit. When Boice boarded the native lugger outside Port Moresby on September 17 for the twenty-four-hour trip to the trailhead, Medendorp was on hand to see him off. If Jim Boice had called the trail “taxing,” Medendorp might have guessed that it would be sheer hell.
Only three days out and already the terrain and climate made a mockery of military order. Seeing the condition of his men, Medendorp must have realized that drastic measures were needed. A devoted officer, it is easy to imagine him walking up and down the line, shouting words of encouragement, coaxing the patrol along. Fortunately, he had one man with him he would not have to coax, and that was Roger Keast.
Keast was head officer of the Antitank Company and Medendorp’s second-in-command. According to Medendorp, Keast was “loved and admired” by everyone who knew him. He was also the perfect complement to Medendorp. Medendorp was a cautious rule maker and follower. Keast was more impulsive. He had great physical strength and charisma and regarded all things military with a healthy dose of skepticism.
At Lansing Central High in Michigan, Keast had been movie-idol handsome and a star athlete—a football, basketball, and track man—famous for returning a fumble for the game’s only touchdown against rival Lansing Eastern. After graduating from Central, he went on to a stellar career in football, basketball, and track at Michigan State. As the fifth fastest quarter-miler in the country, Keast made All-American in 1932. After setting the mile and two-mile relay records, Keast’s team was invited to take part in the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Because of illness, though, the team had to withdraw.
After graduating, Keast worked as a teacher and coach. He was a natural-born motivator, and in 1940 his basketball team at Graveraet High School in Marquette, Michigan, won Michigan’s Upper Peninsula Class B championship. Keast was already a lieutenant in the Army Reserves when in the spring of 1941 he was called up and reported for duty at Camp Beauregard, Louisiana.
North of Strinumu, where the cold, mountain-born Mimani and Lala Rivers feed into the Kemp Welch, Medendorp and Keast stopped for a rest. At any other time of year the soldiers would have been able to fill their canteens, but now the rivers were swollen from recent rains. The water was undrinkable, so men resorted to licking the salt off the palms of their hands and sucking the sweat off their arms, or lapping at the raindrops that dripped from their faces.
Farther down the trail the lead platoon again caught sight of water—according to their simple map, the Arokoro River. The men rushed the river and cupped their hands and drank, as if the water had been sent from heaven. Many of them were resolved never to walk again, yet when the patrol moved out, they did too, driven on by the fear of being left behind.
Each and every American soldier had heard the stories: The Japanese were jungle supermen who liked to attack in the night. They would slither through the forest and disembowel a man or slit his throat and then crawl back to their units without being noticed.
After drinking at the stream, the men slowed to a snail’s pace, their bellies full of water. Medendorp, Keast, and Schmidt did their best to keep them moving. It must have been unnerving, though—already the Wairopi Patrol was being undone by the jungle.
The first steep ascent nearly killed them. Boice had reported that soldiers would need hobnail boots. Rubber heels, he said, “were of no value.” It did not take long for the Wairopi Patrol to discover just how right Boice was. Men slipped, stumbled, and fell, and got up, only to slip and stumble and fall again. Some leaned on wooden sticks slashed from trees. Others used creepers and vines and ferns, which cut and tore their hands, to pull themselves up the steep inclines. Parrots screeched as if heckling them.
According to Medendorp, the trail “told a tale of exhaustion and misery.” Strong young men in their late teens and early twenties, men hardened by the Depression and manual labor, high school and college athletes, lay at the side of the trail in a stream of ochre-colored mud, cursing their fate. Their legs had given out, their chests heaved and they gasped for air. Some retched, coughing up volumes of water.
Later Medendorp would write: “We had to go slowly. We struggled through thick tangles of brush, over steep hills, over slippery stream bottoms. The column was like a long snake. Our sick were in the rear, staggering along with the help of the faithful aid men.”
Many of the men opened their packs and discarded what they could: Some things, leather toilet seats, for instance, were ridiculous, a testament to just how little the U.S. Army knew about outfitting its soldiers for jungle warfare. But they threw out essentials, too—soap, towels, extra socks, shelter halves, mosquito netting, blankets, underwear, and raincoats. Later, many of the men would come to regret it. How could they have known that in the mountains a World War I-era raincoat would be worth the two or three extra pounds?
Near dusk a native runner reported that Captain Keast had located a bivouac site two miles up the trail. In different terrain, two miles would have been a cinch. But two miles in New Guinea was like walking fifteen or twenty through the hills of Australia. However, that evening, Medendorp and the main body of the patrol finally limped in. Dusk had fallen and the jungle came alive with shrieking birds, the incessant yodeling of millions of frogs and whistling crickets, cracking branches, and the rustling of leaves. The men’s imaginations were in overdrive. The rain on the forest canopy sounded like footsteps.
Long after the men had curled up like wet dogs under their shelter halves, which were nothing more than two sheets of canvas fastened together at the ridge line, Lieutenant Lester Segal, one of the medical officers assigned to the patrol, walked in with what Medendorp called a “flock of cripples.” The stragglers were soaked, dazed, and weary.
In the few days on the trail, Lieutenant Segal had already proved himself equal to just about any task. He not only carried his pack like the others, but had to lug a heavy load of medical supplies, too. It was a pleasant surprise for Medendorp, who had been nursing a grudge against Segal, and was none too pleased that the lieutenant had been assigned to the patrol. Months before at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, Segal had raked Medendorp’s Service Company sergeant over the coals for keeping a dirty kitchen, and had written a request that the sergeant be busted to private. Medendorp was incensed. The company had been at Fort Devens for only a few days and was working day and night to tidy up the kitchen.
Watching Segal in action, though, Medendorp forgave him. There was no denying it; Segal was good. He was strong and imperturbable, part medic, coach, and tough-as-nails drill sergeant.
Segal led his men through the maze of shelter halves and reported to Medendorp. Medendorp expressed concern about the condition of the men. They needed food and water, their sores bandaged, and antibacterial lotion to treat their jungle rot.
This, the patrol’s third night on the trail, was “miserable,” according to Medendorp. The men were unable to build fires and the rain forest canopy choked out what little light the stars might have offered. Frightened men searched in vain for a glimpse of a buddy. Only the carriers slept comfortably. Medendorp wrote that they “constructed frail huts to keep off the rain, built a fire by rubbing sticks and slept naked around the fire like a tangle of snakes.”
A day later, Medendorp and his men reached Arapara, thirty miles inland. The patrol had been making slightly more than seven miles a day, two-thirds of a mile an hour, but Arapara was the gateway to the high mountains, and Medendorp knew that the next fifty miles would be much harder on his men.
Private Boyd Swem felt the chill of the approaching night. After accepting Captain Medendorp’s invitation to join the patrol, Swem acted as Medendorp’s “faithful orderly and friend.” Medendorp recalled that Swem looked like the “most woebegone soldier in the column,” and that “everything seemed to hang loosely on his frame.” Still, each and every night, Swem found the energy to build a fire for Medendorp.
At Arapara, Swem crouched over a small pile of damp wood shavings and struck a match. The shavings caught, but only for a moment. Swem leaned toward a flickering spark and blew, trying to coax a fire. He was an irrepressible, happy-go-lucky character who kept the men entertained along the trail with his constant banter and off-key tenor. But as the fire fizzled, Swem was as irritable as the rest of the men. All around him, men were cursing: There was not a goddamned dry piece of wood in the entire jungle.
Ten minutes later, Swem and the entire patrol stared slack-jawed at what confronted them. All at once flashlights were aimed at a group of soldiers in shredded uniforms. At first, the men of the Wairopi Patrol thought they were seeing ghosts. But they were real enough: thirty-five Australians who had been fighting the Japanese on the Kokoda track thirty miles to the west. Segal opened his aid station. As he tended to the men, their story circulated among the Americans.
The Japanese had cut off the men from the main body of their battalion at Isurava on the Kokoda track. The group’s leader, Captain Ben Buckler, sent a platoon commander to seek help, while he and his men hid out in the hills above Eora Creek. For six days the group lay low, fearing that they would be captured and tortured. They lived off sugar cane and sweet potatoes, not daring to move during daylight. Eventually they set off to the northeast through the jungle in the direction of the coast. Almost three weeks later, Buckler’s group stumbled into the village of Sangai, where the village men carried twelve-foot pig spears. Buckler and his men expected to be killed, and possibly eaten, but instead they were given shelter and food. Buckler left behind his wounded and walked with the rest of his troops back inland.
At Wairopi, he and his men headed up the Kumusi River valley, past Kovio and the Owalama Divide, bound for Jaure. At Jaure, they turned south and headed over the wilderness of the Owen Stanleys, the same terrain that the Wairopi Patrol proposed to navigate. After more than a month of walking, they were already broken men when they entered the mountains, but the peaks north of Arapara nearly killed them.
The sight of Captain Buckler and his troops haunted the men of the Wairopi Patrol. What kind of place was this New Guinea? In a matter of a day, Medendorp’s men had gone from the heat of the hill country to the frigid mountains.
Nothing about Captain Buckler’s story, though, unsettled them as much as the possibility of torture at the hands of the Japanese. The barbarism of the Japanese army was legendary. A Japanese soldier would put a gun to his head, or hold a live grenade in his hand, or perform seppuku, gutting himself before he allowed himself to be captured. If captured, he expected to be tortured because that is what he would do in turn. Though they had signed the Geneva Convention of 1929, which articulated a policy for the humane treatment of POWs, the Japanese never ratified it. At the onset of the war, Prime Minister Tojo boasted that “In Japan, we have our own ideology concerning prisoners of war…”
In late January 1942, Japan’s famed South Seas Detachment—the Nankai Shitai—ran their barges ashore and captured almost a thousand Australians at the Rabaul garrison. The Japanese soldiers tied 160 Australian prisoners to coconut palms at Tol Plantation. While the remaining Aussies looked on, Japanese trainees used the men for bayonet practice. Bayoneting was officially sanctioned by the Japanese military. It was said to “eradicate a sense of fear in raw soldiers.” The plantation was filled with the cries of dying men and the grunts of Japanese recruits digging their bayonets into the bellies of their Australian captives. Privately, some of the Japanese soldiers expressed their revulsion, but publicly they kept quiet for fear of being perceived as cowards.
Arapara to Imiduru.
Mendendorp was upset about the lack of trail discipline. It was not only unmilitary, it was dangerous. From Arapara on, Medendorp insisted that platoons and companies stick together. With each day, the column was getting closer to the possibility of a Japanese ambush.
The men hardly heard him. The Wairopi Patrol was not made up of superbly conditioned soldiers specially trained in jungle and mountain survival. Prior to the march, many had never even climbed a hill higher than a thousand feet.
The soldiers who made up the patrol were not even infantrymen. They were heavy weapons guys of the Cannon and Antitank Companies, new units formed in Australia as part the division’s streamlining. But with no antitank weapons or tanks to shoot at, they became foot soldiers, pressed into duty because the 126th Infantry Regiment’s commanding officer, Colonel Quinn, did not want to disrupt his own battalions by providing the patrol with riflemen.
Lieutenant Segal must have been completely perplexed by the assignment, too. He was a doctor, after all. He had not been trained to walk a mile, much less be part of a grueling hike across the Papuan Peninsula. Even Medendorp—especially Medendorp—was no infantryman. He was a supply specialist. He had been an assistant Service Company commander. Supply often attracted talented rascals, jokers, and iconoclasts who enjoyed “wheeling and dealing” and the challenge of breaking army rules and getting away with it. But it also appealed to meticulous, can-do soldiers who followed army regulations to a T. Medendorp was the latter. He liked a good pair of socks, a knife with a blade sharp enough to cut paper, and clean silverware. When the general in charge of supply for the entire Southwest Pacific area was looking for a conscientious supply professional to identify airdrop sites at four-day intervals along Boice’s route, he chose Medendorp. It was a daunting task under the best of circumstances. Nine hundred men of the 2nd Battalion were scheduled to follow Medendorp’s patrol. Although it would use hundreds of native carriers, it would still need to resupply along the trail.
What Medendorp did not know was that some of the men from his former company were happy to see him go. He was an able officer, but he could also be a vain, demanding man. “He was always talking about separating the men from the boys,” says a former Service Company soldier. “He rode the guys hard, but he was a physical man, and could back it up.”
After scaling Turner’s Bluff outside Arapara, the men knew they were in the mountains for real. A series of imposing, razorback ridges stretched as far as they could see. “Sometimes,” Medendorp wrote, “the patrol was marching above the clouds.”
Even Keast, the former star athlete, found the trail grueling. In a letter to his brother Bob in Lansing, Michigan, he wrote, “We are…in the clouds about 20 hours out of 24. You can guess from that that it’s pretty wet most of the time. The sun is really hot when it’s clear. The country here is supposed to be the most geologically disturbed (25 cent word) in the world. Most mountainous country is continuous ranges but this is many short ranges and cross ranges. There is absolutely no flat ground…. Mountains all around with deep valleysin between. There are no roads…just a narrow ‘goat’ trail that winds over the mountains or along the streams with steaming jungle growth on all sides.”
The march to Imiduru, the patrol’s fifth day on the trail, gave Medendorp reason to hope. The patrol climbed three thousand feet in four hours of hiking, and platoons stayed together.
But that evening Medendorp’s hopes were dashed. The men’s feet were shot, and their backs ached. Medendorp knew he could not afford to lose any of them, so he instructed Sergeant Schmidt to let the men who were worst off use the abandoned native huts instead of their leaky shelter halves (later in the Pacific war, soldiers would use jungle hammocks with a rainproof cover and mosquito netting). At first, the men were relieved to get out of the rain. But once they turned off their flashlights, rats nibbled at their toes and cockroaches as big as mice crawled over them. Even so, the men hardly moved a muscle—rats and cockroaches were a price they were willing to pay to have a roof over their heads.
The next morning, Medendorp had to contend with more bad news. The native huts had been teeming with fleas, and the men who had slept there were now infested. To make matters worse, all but twenty of the patrol’s carriers “went bush,” fleeing in the middle of the night and hiding with other villagers in secluded jungle caves. Their pay—a shilling a day, plus rations, a stick of tobacco, and maybe some salt—was not enough for them to overcome their fear of the mountains. They hailed from societies governed by an intricate web of magic, myth, and sorcery, and the sight of Buckler’s emaciated men trudging out of the darkness confirmed their superstitions; the mountains were a place of bad spirits—masalai—and ghosts. The carriers warned that anyone who ventured into the high country would go blind, that his nose and ears would rot away, and his teeth would get so cold they would shatter in his mouth.
As Medendorp later noted, the carriers were also concerned about the patrol’s supply of food. They had no concept of an airdrop. According to them the patrol was marching “straight into starvation.”
After losing the bulk of his carrier force, Medendorp was livid. Who was going to lug the food through the mountains? How was he going to feed his men? Could he ask them to carry more? Could he hope for an airdrop at Laruni?
Medendorp made the only decision available to him. He instructed his men to shoulder as much extra weight as they felt they could. Then he told the remaining carriers that anyone caught trying to desert would be shot on sight.
Two days outside of Arapara, and fifty miles from the south coast, the Wairopi Patrol stopped near the village of Laruni on the banks of the Mimani River, which, fed by daylong rains, now barreled out of the mountains. No one could have been more surprised that Medendorp had made it that far than General Harding’s intelligence officer, who had just taken part in an aerial reconnaissance of the trail. On October 9, he wrote in his diary, “never saw such mountains…all jumbled together in no arrangement of ranges—just a tangled mass with ridges and spurs running in all directions, a creek in every draw and the whole thing covered with jungle so dense that the ground was nowhere visible.”
Standing at the banks of the river, one of the carriers pointed to the clouds. Medendorp looked up. “Laruni?” he asked, and the carrier nodded.
Medendorp knew that his men would never be able to make the climb. Loaded down with extra weight, they were exhausted. Medendorp instructed them to make camp; he would hike up to the village along with the patrol’s radio crew. From there he would radio regimental headquarters and request a special airdrop.
Keast set down his pack and leaned against the trunk of a tree. Earlier in the day, he had wrenched his knee. It was sore and swollen. To take his mind off the pain, he took out of his fieldpack the only two photos he had brought with him to New Guinea. In one, his pretty wife Ruth was sitting on the running board of the family car, holding their baby son. In the other, his oldest boy Harry was standing in front of the car, smiling at the world.
Keast had not seen his family since the summer of 1941. Unlike Zelma Boice and Katherine Bailey, Ruth Keast never made it to Fort Devens. That would have required traveling by train or car from Michigan with young Harry, who was six at the time, and with Roger Jr., who was very young. Keast did not mind Ruth not being there. He felt more comfortable knowing that she was at her parents’ farm with the boys. Besides, she had already said good-bye when she and Harry left Georgia.
While Keast was at Fort Benning during the summer of 1941, Ruth and young Harry rented a shack the size of a one-car garage outside town. Farther back off the road, a creek coursed through the woods and alligators lounged along its muddy banks. Occasionally, feral pigs emerged from the thickets, raiding and spilling the garbage cans and rooting among their contents. Ruth could tolerate the alligators and the pigs; what she could not stand was the humidity. Though she had grown up on a farm outside of Dimondale, Michigan, and was no stranger to the outdoors, she wilted in Georgia’s sticky summer heat.
Back in New Guinea, Medendorp needed a cigarette and a break before climbing into the clouds, and sat down next to Keast. Wiping his dirty hands on his sleeves, Medendorp asked his friend for a look at the pictures. He had seen them before, but that did not diminish his interest. He enjoyed Keast’s photos almost as much as he enjoyed his own. Medendorp smiled—it was good for a guy to remember that he had family back home.
After looking at the photos, he and Keast studied their crude map of the trail. Even with the map, both knew that navigating the terrain ahead would require a good amount of guesswork—accurate depictions of the Papuan Peninsula extended only fifteen miles inland. Daunting river crossings also awaited them. If a guy lost his balance and fell, the Mimani’s current would wash him away before his buddies had time to drag him out of the water.
Medendorp was certain of another thing—the march to Jaure would be a “daily hell.” The route took a roller-coaster ride through the mountains, falling abruptly from cloud-covered peaks into deep, dripping valleys. Medendorp and Keast were discussing what lay ahead when someone interrupted them.
It might have been Sergeant Schmidt.
“We lost eight more, Captain,” the sergeant said.
“What do you mean, Sergeant?”
“Carriers, sir. Eight more ran out on us.”
The warnings had clearly had little effect.
Medendorp kicked the ground in disgust, and leaving Keast in charge of the camp, he assembled the radio crew and climbed to the village. He knew from Boice’s report that the patrol would need to resupply before it entered the high mountains. Despite the assumption that Laruni was a poor choice for an airdrop, Medendorp inspected the area and realized it would be ideal. The village was located on a broad ridge among bare grasslands. From the ridge, Medendorp radioed regimental headquarters. Maybe the weather would clear long enough to allow the planes in.
Medendorp wanted “50 raincoats, 75 shelter halves, 50 native blankets, leggings, sweaters, denim coats, pants, handkerchiefs, flashlights, batteries, matches, and mail.” The men had not received any mail in over a month, and Medendorp hoped that a letter from home would serve as a spirit booster. Leaving behind a radioman to wait for an answer, Medendorp slid back down to the bivouac site.
At dusk, the communications team descended the mountain in the fading light and rushed to the makeshift hut the carriers had erected for Medendorp to report that they had received a message from Boice: Boice and his pathfinder patrol were still in Jaure and had sighted a group of Japanese. They did not have an accurate count, but the Japanese looked to be marching to meet Medendorp and his men.
That night Medendorp posted sentries. If he thought that this precaution would ensure his men a night of rest, he was mistaken—no one could possibly sleep with a Japanese patrol in the area.
The next two nights passed uneventfully, and then on the morning of the patrol’s third day in Laruni, three C-47s with fighter escort rumbled out of the clouds. The men were jubilant at the sight of the planes. They grabbed each other and danced and jumped in celebration. The U.S. Army had not forgotten about them.
Their elation was short-lived, though; the drop was a disappointment. The regimental band members who assisted with the drops kicked the food out of the side of the planes. Much of it, though, fell into the surrounding valleys, and lay scattered in the rain forest. The men knew that it would be their job to retrieve it, and the prospect filled them with dread. Finding small bundles of food in the jungle was like searching for needles in a haystack.
That afternoon Medendorp and the Wairopi Patrol set out for Jaure already tired from the morning’s food hunt. Medendorp left Laruni with a heavy heart. Because of the injury to his knee, Keast was unable to walk and Medendorp ordered him to remain behind. He hated to leave behind the man he described as “an intimate personal friend,” and knew that he would miss Keast’s spirit and physical strength. “Keast,” he wrote, “had more endurance than anybody else. Each morning he went ahead and selected a bivouac area for the night, and took care of the tired troops as they came in.”
But Medendorp had spent the last two nights listening to Keast “crying out with pain.” Although he was concerned about his friend’s health, he was even more concerned about the patrol. They needed to make good time, and they needed to be mobile, especially if Japanese soldiers were marching to meet them. With Keast, Medendorp left behind Sergeant Ludwig and fifty-two men who Medendorp decided were unfit to cross the mountains.
It was a mixed bag for the men who stayed behind. They were grateful for the much-needed rest, but being left behind frightened them. Keast and Ludwig were accomplished soldiers, but fifty-two tired men would be no match for a sizable Japanese patrol.
Before setting off for Jaure, Medendorp radioed regimental headquarters. Using the code words that the regiment had established for the villages along the route, which the men had named after cities in Michigan, Medendorp informed Colonel Quinn that Keast would remain in Laruni.
“Starting for Holland,” Medendorp said, referring to Jaure by its code name. “Keast has bad knee. He is staying at Coldwater (Laruni) with fifty men. Received supplies.”
Only a mile out of Laruni, it looked like the end of the line for the Wairopi Patrol. A dense fog crawled up the mountains, and the trail disappeared. The native carriers were almost a liability now. In the jungle they had often helped Medendorp to locate the trail; to find cold, pure water, filtered by stones; to distinguish between harmless and killer snakes; and to forage for food to supplement the soldiers’ rations. But in the mountains, they were lost and terrified, and had to be alternately encouraged and berated to continue.
Everything that Medendorp had feared about the march to Jaure was coming true. “Words,” he wrote later, “cannot describe the hardships of that march over the mountains.” The rain that fell the previous evening turned the trail into a pit of shin-high mud that sucked at the men’s boots. The patrol made excruciatingly slow progress over tier after tier of sharp mountain peaks, and dangerous descents on slippery trails. Sometimes men lost their balance and tumbled into the jungle. When they struggled to their feet, they were covered in half-inch-long leeches. Getting them off after they had attached themselves was not only a chore, but the leeches left small, stinging red wounds that, if not treated, invited infection. The men also discovered that the forest teemed with something like stinging nettles. The natives called it “salat,” and rubbed the leaf on tired muscles to relieve soreness. They had to choose carefully, though—just a touch from the wrong salat leaf left behind a painful red rash.
Massive trees with trunks the size of army jeeps, adorned with lianas and wrapped in a swarm of vines resembling large pythons, flanked the trail. At first the men marveled at them, but less than an hour into the hike, they were incapable of admiration. The faint hunting trail rose nearly straight up, and soon they were on all fours, slopping through the mud, grabbing at roots, trees, ferns, bushes, sharp-edged leaves, anything they could grasp to keep from falling backward down the slippery mountain. Everything they reached for came equipped with spurs or thorns or tiny but sharp bristles, and often swarms of angry red ants.
Medendorp had to keep his troops moving. “We were marching,” he wrote, “again with only the rations we could carry…. If we couldn’t get to the next dropping ground…we would be stuck in the jungle without supplies.”
Two days out of Laruni, after a series of false summits, surrounded by frigid, swirling mists, the Wairopi Patrol confronted the highest point on the trail, the 9,500-foot Mount Suwemalla, which sat in the midst of the cloud forest, a strange, icy, god-forsaken place where the sun never shone. Glowing moss and phosphorescent fungus covered every tree, and subterranean rivers roared beneath the men’s feet. They were convinced that the peak was haunted and promptly dubbed it Ghost Mountain.
Ghost Mountain—the men could not wait to leave it behind. Soaked in sweat and trembling from the cold and rain, which “fell without ceasing,” Medendorp’s patrol began its descent. “At one place,” Medendorp wrote later, “we right-stepped over the face of a stone cliff with our bellies pressed against the stone and our arms outstretched like a Moses in prayer…. It is still a miracle to me that all of our men got over that point safely.” As darkness fell, the patrol made it to level ground. Medendorp continued, “Finally, we reached the bottom and made camp beside a clear running stream, and in a constant rain.” Too exhausted to prepare camp or to build fires, they ate their rations cold and shivered in the chilly night air. As much as they had hated the heat of Nepeana, the men longed to be warm again.
By noon of the next day, the patrol reached Suwari. Medendorp wrote that the village’s “wild” natives fled in terror. Despite the probability of fleas, the native huts looked too warm and dry to pass up, so Medendorp halted the patrol. They would spend the rest of the day and the night in the village. Then Medendorp issued a warning: “No souvenirs.” Nothing was to be touched. The soldiers were to leave tobacco behind as a thank-you. Medendorp wanted the people to know they could trust the American soldiers.
Medendorp’s precaution was a smart one. The patrol had reached the north side of the mountains, and that meant the possibility of Japanese. The last thing the patrol needed was angry natives who could report its presence to the Japanese and spoil the entire plan—or worse yet, get a lot of people killed.
In the middle of October 1942, many New Guinea natives had still not allied themselves with either the Japanese or the Americans and the Australians. They were waiting for the outcome of the early battles and watching to see who treated them best. It was an unsentimental calculus on their part. They wanted, simply, to side with the winning army in order to minimize the war’s impact on their people.
That night, the eight remaining natives—four more carriers had fled before the patrol began its ascent of Ghost Mountain—sang and danced in their hut until morning. Whether they were singing out of gratitude for their safe passage over Ghost Mountain, or fear, no one knew. Medendorp allowed them to celebrate, though. Anything to keep them happy.
Before setting out for Jaure the following morning, Medendorp left behind a platoon under a lieutenant to guard the village. If the Japanese sneaked into the village, they could ambush the 2nd Battalion, which Medendorp knew from periodic radio reports was slowly making its way north.
Two days out of Suwari, and fourteen days after setting out on the trail, Medendorp and the Wairopi Patrol walked into Jaure, at the headwaters of the Kumusi and Musa Rivers. It had taken the patrol nearly a week to travel the last sixteen miles. At Jaure, they discovered Boice’s pathfinder patrol, from which they had not heard anything since Laruni. Everyone, it seemed, was okay—after sighting the Japanese patrol, Boice decided that it was safer not to try to make radio contact.
Boice, who had been out scouting, returned to the village. What he saw stunned him: Medendorp and his men were a pitiful sight. For a moment Boice may have experienced a twinge of doubt. Had his report on the feasibility of the route across the mountains consigned hundreds of men to misery? For him and his small patrol, the trail had been extraordinarily tough, but it was “practicable.” But what would become of an entire battalion? What would happen when the monsoons arrived? Would the trail be “practicable” then?
Boice did not express any of these reservations to his friend.
“Well Al, you old son of a gun,” he said, shaking Medendorp’s hand.
Hoping to achieve a bit of humor, Medendorp paraphrased Stanley encountering Livingston.
“Jungle Jim, I presume.”
The following day, Medendorp dispatched a fifty-man detachment into the Kumusi River valley. When Sergeant Jimmy Dannenberg’s group left Jaure, everyone was outfitted with new boots that had been dropped days before. Few had a pair that fit well, but no one cared. New boots, ill fitting or not, were something to be grateful for.
Medendorp stayed behind to radio Colonel Quinn. Then, because every porter with whom he had begun the hike had deserted, he spent the day rounding up seventy-five native carriers.
Medendorp described the new carriers as “wild” looking. To be sure, the natives of Jaure were some of the most isolated people on the Papuan Peninsula. Except for infrequent contact with Australian colonial patrols and perhaps the odd prospector, they had no exposure to the outside world. They were tattooed men, who wore bone necklaces, ear and nose ornaments, loincloths of beaten bark, and fur hats; they smeared their bodies with pig fat to protect against the cold. They believed in sorcerers, supernatural forces, the dream world, and spirits that had to be propitiated through elaborate rituals.
Lieutenant Segal examined the natives. Many were covered in bug bites, and because of a vitamin B deficiency, they also had skin diseases, festering sores, peeling skin, and grayish scales. In truth, Segal was only able to give them basic care. He had sent numerous radio messages requesting surgical instruments, and though food and ammunition came, the instruments never did. It was a constant frustration for Segal. How was he to care for an entire patrol and its carriers with only one scalpel and a few hemostats?
Using that one scalpel and his knife, Segal first took care of the soldiers’ boils and ulcers. Some of the men had skin ulcers where their fatigues had rubbed and the straps of their backpacks had pressed against their shoulders. Some had malaria, with temperatures hovering at 103 degrees. They complained of tender bellies, aching joints, confusion, impaired vision, and nightmares. For them there was nothing Segal could do. He was almost out of quinine.
Late that night, Medendorp limped over to Segal. He had an ulcer on his leg that had been causing him pain since Ghost Mountain. He had ignored the advice of Boice’s patrol to treat “small wounds,” because they “fester rapidly.” Segal sterilized his knife over the fire and sliced into the ulcer. Medendorp tightened his jaw and clenched his fists. The ulcer oozed a putrid, yellowish-brown pus.
Three days later, Medendorp and his men dragged themselves into Barumbila, a village down the Kumusi River in the shadow of Mount Lamington, about ten miles southeast of Wairopi. Medendorp was “weak from almost constant dysentery and…a fever.” At Barumbila, which was an ideal site for a dropping ground, he spent the day recruiting a large force of natives to collect and carry supplies for the approaching 2nd Battalion. Soon after, he learned that General Kenney and his Fifth Air Force had airlifted the entire 128th U.S. Infantry Regiment to a village called Wanigela on the Papuan Peninsula’s north coast, where pilots put down on a crude airstrip carved out of the kunai grass by missionaries and area villagers. MacArthur had discovered a better way to get troops across the mountains.