Chapter 9
ALFRED MEDENDORP WAS AT THE VILLAGE of Laruni when the 2nd Battalion got the go-ahead. Though Major Simon Warmenhoven worried about the myriad medical needs of nine hundred men marching across New Guinea, there was little he could do now. A team of medics and a platoon of engineers would accompany the battalion. Warmenhoven could only hope for the best.
Company E led the way for the 2nd Battalion with the battalion’s other companies—F, G, H, and Headquarters—following at one-day intervals.
It was fitting for Company E to be out front. When General Harding came to Amberley Airfield to see the company off on September 15, he told the men that they had been selected to go first because they “were the best in the outfit.” He called them the “spearhead of the spearhead of the spearhead.” Lutjens and his men liked the sound of it and began referring to themselves as “The Three Spearheads.” It was a distinction the company could be proud of: The 32nd was the first combat division of the U.S. Army to embark on an offensive mission against the Japanese. That meant that Company E was leading the way for the whole division.
Private Art Edson, who had scouted the coastal route to Gabagaba with Lutjens, took a moment to write his sweetheart.
Dearest Lois,
I take the chance to drop you a line as I may not have the chance again for a long time, as we are now some where in New Guinea…. This island is the Hell Hole of the world. I never expected to see natives used for pack horses or dressed like you see in shows, grass skirts and that is all…. Have seen quite a few crocodiles and have shot a couple. We shot a snake today, nine feet long. Will write more as soon as possible.
Love Forever, Art
On October 13, the day before Company E set out, Lutjens made a brief entry in his diary: “Been three weeks in New Guinea…I’m afraid it will become much worse than this. We are now starting into the foothills of the Owen Stanley Range…. We are going to carry six days’ rations—one pound of rice, one handful of green tea, a little sugar and two cans of bully beef. Plus our field equipment.”
What Lutjens described was a situation in which each man was carrying an almost impossible amount of weight. Provisions and field equipment, ammunition, plus a weapon—a ten-pound M-1, or a nine-pound model 1903 Springfield rifle, or a twelve-pound Thompson .45 caliber submachine gun, or a twenty-pound Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR)—meant that the average man in Company E carried nearly as much as Medendorp’s men—sixty to eighty pounds. In other words, no one had learned from Medendorp’s experience.
The machine gunners had it the worst. A .30 caliber machine gun alone weighed thirty pounds, not counting the tripod and ammunition. Together the gun, tripod, and ammunition were so heavy they were divided among three men. Still, the machine gunners struggled under loads that would have broken lesser men trekking across the flat fields of Kansas.
The men lugged 60 mm mortars over the mountains, too. One carried the fourteen-pound baseplate, another carried the long, eighteen-pound tube or cannon, another the legs, which weighed just over fifteen pounds, and three men lugged the mortars—three four-pound rounds per man.
Company E’s trek began, ironically, with a party. At Nepeana, the natives danced and sang and lavished them with rice, yams, and paw-paws. The day after, reality set in with pelting monsoonal downpours that drenched the soldiers to the bone and turned the trail into a river of mud and clay.
Lutjens described what would become an ordinary day:
We’d start at six in the morning by cooking rice, or trying to. Two guys would work together. If they could start a fire, which was hard because the wood was wet even when you cut deep into the center of a log, they’d mix a little bully beef (canned mutton) in a canteen cup with rice, to get the starchy taste out of it. Sometimes we’d take turns blowing on sparks, trying to start a fire, and keep it up for two hours without success. I could hardly describe the country. It would take five or six hours to go a mile, edging along cliff walls, hanging on to vines, up and down, up and down. The men got weaker; guys began to lag back. It would rain from three in the afternoon on, soaking through everything. The rivers we crossed were so swift that if you slipped it was just too bad. It was every man for himself. No one waited for anyone else, unless he was hurt. An officer stayed at the end of the column to keep driving the stragglers. There wasn’t any way of evacuating to the rear. Men with sprained ankles hobbled along…. If they hadn’t made it, they’d have died.
The engineers did their best to remove roots, deadfall, and large rocks from the trail. At river crossings, they toppled trees that could reach the far bank. At steep ascents and descents and along treacherous cliffs, they sometimes erected handrails.
On the way to Strinimu, the men of Company E, like Medendorp’s men, began to jettison equipment they considered extraneous. After all, what need would they have for a gas mask or a razor or a mess kit? The guys got together in groups of three; one kept a spoon, another a knife, another a fork. Later, they would share the utensils. One guy would dip into a can of beans, take the biggest bite he could, and pass on the spoon.
As they approached the mountains, Lutjens watched as men discarded equipment regardless of its utility. They threw out blankets, raincoats, mosquito nets, and extra underwear. They cut their pants off just below the knees and their shirts at the shoulders. They sliced off the extra leather at the top of their boots. Some ripped the buttons from their shirts. They kept their toothbrushes, though; they needed something to clean their rifles.
The waste delighted the native carriers, many of whom brought along nothing more than tobacco, a machete, and a string bag. The practice of platoon leaders like Lutjens was to stop every hour for a ten-minute rest. While the men rested, the carriers set down their loads and backtracked, scavenging everything they could fit in their bags.
When Company E finally reached Laruni, the rain came down in waves. Lutjens was huddled under a shelter half with his best friend, Staff Sergeant Peeper, and Sergeant John Fredericks. All were wet and caked with mud. Their bodies ached, but they were too hungry and exhausted to sleep. What they did was to talk about food. Back home on the farm in Michigan, Fredericks had been a great eater, so Lutjens and Peeper deferred to him.
Fredericks did not disappoint them. He talked about sprawling farm breakfasts and heaping suppers, and about canning apples. When Lutjens and Peeper joined in they discussed Christmas dinners and swore that if they made it out of New Guinea and back home alive that they would devote their lives to the joyous pursuit of food and eating. In other shelter halves, men were discussing the same thing. The subject of women never came up, at least not in a sexual way. When they talked about women, they fondly remembered the smells of their mothers’ kitchens, the comforting odor of cookies and apple pies baking in the oven.
What they might have craved more than anything else was salt. Lutjens later wrote, “The sweat in that drippy, oozy place took all the salt out of our bodies.” He dreamed of “good salty bacon or a dill pickle.”
Up until Laruni, food consisted of Australian bully beef and half a canteen cup of rice, which the soldiers stored in a sock that they knotted at the top. Even the hungriest of men considered the bully beef too vile to eat. Some, like Lutjens, could stomach it only when mixed with rice in what Lutjens called a “hobo’s stew.” If Lutjens ate it plain, he got “sick as a dog.” But at Laruni, Company E got lucky. One morning, a pilot making a drop dove dangerously low, skimming over the tops of the trees. Men rushed to recover the boxes, dreaming of the possibility of finding a chocolate bar. According to Lutjens, a guy “would sell” his “soul for a chocolate bar.” They thought they were fantasizing, when instead of chocolate, they found another treat—hard candy! Lutjens wrote that the candy dropped “from the jungle vines overhead like a hail storm,” and was scattered across the rain forest from “hell to breakfast.”
The soldiers’ joy at discovering the candy was short-lived. Beyond Laruni, wrote Lutjens, the march became “one green hell.” Still, Company E kept moving, motivated by a curious sense of pride. “No one,” according to Lutjens, “wanted to get passed by another unit.”
As bad as Company E had it, the men of Companies F, G, and H had it worse. The boots of nearly two hundred soldiers—those of Company E—had turned every square foot of trail into something resembling a pig wallow.
It was man against jungle, and it was obvious to Don Stout, a platoon sergeant from Muskegon, Michigan, that the jungle was winning. Stout had joined the Michigan National Guard in 1939 at the age of fifteen. He had never liked school anyway and if the recruiter sensed that Stout was too young, he chose to ignore the Guard’s eighteen-year-old requirement. Stout was proud of his new uniform, though he had to contend with people who called him a freeloader living off the federal government.
When Stout joined the Guard, he never envisioned himself slogging through the jungles of New Guinea.
“You should have seen ’em,” Stout says. “Guys were straggled out so far along the trail. When they were too sick or tired to move, they would set up a pup tent—if they hadn’t tossed it already—and pray that they would get better before the last company came past.”
At twenty-five, Don Ritter, a staff sergeant also from Muskegon, was something of an old-timer, especially compared to Stout. But he certainly did not lack for strength. “One hundred and seventy-five pounds and not an ounce of fat,” he says. “That’s how much I weighed when I started.” When the malarial fevers hit, though, they laid waste to his body. The first full-blown attack struck one day out of Nepeana. Ritter could not understand it. The jungle was a humid 100 degrees, but his body shook as if he were back in Muskegon walking shirtless on a chilly October morning. By the time the medic was able to check him out two days later, Ritter’s chill had turned into a 103-degree fever. On the trail he walked like a zombie. His buddy Russell Buys helped him out, but Buys was himself exhausted. Ritter’s legs were buckling on him, and his teeth rattled like a train going over the tracks. He drifted in and out of delirium. Thousands of parasites were reproducing at will inside his liver and exploding into his bloodstream.
“I don’t know if I can make it,” Ritter told Buys. “I’m sicker than a dog. Just leave me here.”
Buys, though, insisted that his friend keep moving. “And somehow,” Ritter says, “I did. I didn’t have a choice. It was walk or die. They couldn’t get you out. Evacuation just wasn’t a possibility.”
Stanley Jastrzembski says, “Everybody had malaria, and everybody was throwing stuff out of their packs. The guys with quinine pills were popping them like gumballs. Things got really bad when guys started getting dysentery, too. Then we all damn near died. I had ‘jungle guts’ so bad, I could scrape the crap off my legs with a tin ration can. Some guys had to go thirty times a day and all that came out was blood.”
The food and water did not help the situation. If there was not a nearby stream or river, men drank from muddy jungle puddles. And often when they reached camp, they were so tired they did not bother to cook their rice. “We just soaked it in water to soften it and then ground it up in our mouths like animals. It was hell on our bellies,” says Jastrzembski.
A stench followed Company G through the jungle. Jastrzembski’s body soured with the smell of encrusted sweat, excrement, and oozing sores. The worst dysentery cases dropped their pants and voided their bowels where they stood, or, like toddlers, fouled themselves as they walked, too tired to take down their pants. Some resorted to cutting the backs out of their pants and relieved themselves whenever nature “called.”
DISEASE HAS ALWAYS been the enemy of armies. MacArthur witnessed this firsthand in the Philippines and, before that, as a divisional commander in World War I, when trench foot and the flu ravaged battalions. In the Philippines, dysentery, ringworm, hookworm, dhobi itch, and especially malaria disabled countless men. By March 1942, the combat efficiency of MacArthur’s troops had fallen by more than 75 percent due to disease and malnutrition. But MacArthur had never encountered anyplace like New Guinea. It was the perfect incubator for a host of debilitating tropical diseases. The bodies of the men—of Stout, Ritter, Jastrzembski, and countless others—who made the march across the Papuan Peninsula coursed with pathogens. Although the dysentery outbreaks might have been avoided through better hygiene, the men were largely defenseless against insect-borne diseases like malaria.
The 32nd Division suffered several types of malaria, especially vivax and falciparum. Vivax debilitated its victims, making them susceptible to potentially lethal secondary infections. Falciparum, vivax’s wicked cousin, sometimes caused men to go mad, and occasionally, if left untreated, caused death. Despite the prevalence of malaria, however, army physicians knew very little about treatment of the disease.
Traditionally, soldiers fighting in malarial regions of the world relied on quinine as a malaria suppressant. An alkaloid extracted from the bark of the cinchona tree, quinine was discovered by Spanish missionaries in the seventeenth century in Peru and Bolivia. Though quinine masks the effects of malaria, it does nothing to cure it, as some of the men of the 2nd Battalion discovered. Quinine was unreliable in more than one way. It had become a sole-source commodity, grown only on the island of Java, which fell to the Japanese in January 1942. Quinine shortages proved disastrous in New Guinea. Eventually, soldiers fighting there would have an alternative—atabrine (quinacrine hydrochloride), which, ironically, had been developed as a synthetic substitute for quinine by the Germans in the early 1930s. In 1939, realizing atabrine’s potential, the United States began a crash program to become independent of foreign sources. But atabrine had its drawbacks. It was so new that medical officers, experimenting with dosage, feared its toxicity and worried about potential “atabrine psychosis.” More basically, soldiers loathed the taste of it. Company commanders trying to enforce a daily regimen were also up against a rumor that atabrine caused impotency and sterility. When their skin took on the yellow hue of an “atabrine tan,” soldiers did not need any more convincing. They were young men who hoped to return to wives and girlfriends. They would take their chances with malaria.
But in October 1942, all that was available to soldiers like Ritter and Jastrzembski was quinine. Without the aid of waterproof containers, though, the quinine was almost impossible to preserve. In the heat and humidity, the pills dissolved in their pockets before they could use them. Some men did not care. The quinine made their ears ring so badly they refused to take it. If a guy could not trust his ears, he was as good as dead.
In addition to malaria, New Guinea served as a breeding ground for a variety of other nasty diseases: dengue or breakbone fever, which was carried by the aedes mosquito (the same breed that causes yellow fever) and was accompanied by terrific headaches and throbbing body pains; and the dreaded scrub typhus, which brought on high fevers, hallucinations, and severe, sometimes fatal hemorrhaging. The culprit, in the case of scrub typhus, was not the mosquito, but a tiny chigger. Just as dangerous for the men of the 2nd Battalion were jungle rot and leishmaniasis (caused by the bite of sandflies), both of which were characterized by open sores. Because they could lead to serious complications, and because most soliders tended to ignore the sores, jungle rot and leishmaniasis scared the hell out of the medics. Then there was beriberi, directly linked to the soldiers’ diet of polished white rice. Caused by a thiamine deficiency, beriberi presented a whole assortment of debilitating symptoms, including vomiting, confusion, loss of sensation in the hands and feet, edema, and rapid heart rate.
The U.S. Army in New Guinea forfeited huge numbers of men to disease. This raises the question: How could MacArthur have failed to give sufficient consideration to the effects of fatigue, climate, landscape, and the ravages of jungle-borne pathogens on a physically depleted army? In September 1942 he told the head surgeon in the G-4 Section at his General Headquarters that malaria had played such an important part in his defeat in the Philippines that he wanted to keep it under control in New Guinea. Despite this, General Headquarters never implemented a determined plan to deal with disease in New Guinea. This omission would prove to be ruinous for the entire 32nd Division.
The medics of the 19th Portable Hospital, who accompanied the 2nd Battalion across the mountains, bore the brunt of this oversight. After the dysentery epidemic struck, they divided into four teams, established way stations along the trail, and treated the men as best they could given their limited resources. All the while they were cursing General Headquarters because even when medical supplies did make it to Australia, they often did not make it north to New Guinea.
Although the medics were seemingly working miracles, they could do nothing for Lieutenant Colonel Henry Geerds, the 2nd Battalion’s commander, who suffered a heart attack outside of Strinimu. Geerds was an “old-timer,” a veteran of World War I. The march across the Papuan Peninsula was simply too much for him.
Stutterin’ Smith, who was running a radio detail at the trailhead at the time, received the news of the battalion commander’s heart attack that evening. Using the landline, Smith notified regimental headquarters. The following day, Colonel Quinn ordered him to catch up with and take command of the battalion. Smith had not been pleased about being left behind at the trailhead in some rear echelon job while the men that he had helped to train trudged off to fight the Japanese. But now he must have wondered: Could he lead a battalion across New Guinea?
Smith may have experienced a moment of doubt, but Colonel Quinn had no such reservations. Smith had no airs about him. He was a rough, likable straight shooter, an “enlisted man’s officer.”
Late on the second day, Smith and his small team, which included Captain John Boet, an accomplished doctor whom Warmenhoven had instructed to accompany Smith, reached Strinimu. Smith and Boet were “lame and tired,” and if initially Smith underestimated the difficulty of the hike, he did not anymore. The following morning, he recruited a local guide. Romee was a slender, athletic-looking native man, who soon rendered himself indispensable to Smith. Romee could speak and read and write English, and became the group’s chief cook, translator, and fire builder, too. Romee’s greatest gift, though, was as a trader. At villages along the trail, Romee often used the small group’s supply of salt tablets and safety matches to barter for precious fruits and vegetables.
AS SMITH AND HIS PARTY of men hustled to overtake the rest of the battalion, Lutjens and Company E entered the high mountains north of Laruni. According to Captain Schultz, the trail became so narrow, with sheer cliffs on either side, that “even a jack rabbit couldn’t leave it.” The men kept plodding forward, oblivious to almost everything but the trail itself.
“One day, I swear, I saw gold nuggets in the bottom of a stream,” Lutjens would later recount. “There’s gold nuggets, but what the hell’s gold, you can’t eat it. It must have been a beautiful country, but all you could see was mud and the guy’s feet ahead of you…. The only time anybody really commented on anything would be when he fell down, and then he would cuss because it was so hard to drag yourself back up.”
In all likelihood, Lutjens was not imagining it when he thought he spotted gold. Adventurous prospectors had discovered gold in the mountains of the Papuan Peninsula in the early 1900s. Wau-Bulolo, northwest of the Kapa Kapa (in what is today Papua New Guinea’s Eastern Highlands Province), was the scene of a two-decade gold rush that began to taper off by the start of World War II. The gold rush drew young men from all over the world, including Errol Flynn, who arrived in New Guinea in 1928. In addition to working as a patrol officer, a tobacco farmer, and a slave trader, Flynn managed a small claim in the mountains before landing in Hollywood and embarking on his movie career.
By late afternoon on October 23, Company E confronted Ghost Mountain. It was a day they had dreaded, and one that they would never forget. The native carriers, who had been such a great help on the jungle trail, now balked. Lutjens understood their fear. Ghost Mountain, he recalled, “was the eeriest place” he had ever seen.
The trees were covered with green moss half a foot thick. We would walk along a hog’s back, straddling the trail, with a sheer drop of thousands of feet two feet on either side of us. We kept hearing water running somewhere, but we couldn’t find any. We could thrust a stick six feet down through the spongy stuff…without hitting anything real solid. It was ungodly cold. There wasn’t a sign of life. Not a bird. Not a fly. Not a sound. It was the strangest feeling I ever had. If we stopped, we froze. If we moved, we sweated.
You can hardly realize how wild and ghostlike this mountain country is. Almost perpetual rain and steam…. We have been traveling over an almost impassable trail. Our strength is gone. Most of us have dysentery. Boys are falling out and dropping back with fever. Continuous downpour of rain. It’s hard to cook our rice and tea. Bully beef makes us sick. We seem to climb straight up for hours, then down again. God, will it never end?
When Company E finally dragged itself into Jaure late in the day on October 25, Lutjens regarded it as a small miracle. For the previous two days, they had not been able to march for more than fifteen minutes at a stretch without lying down to catch their breath. Their hearts felt like they would burst from the exertion. It took them seven hours to ascend Ghost Mountain’s final two thousand feet. Men were crawling on their hands and knees. According to Lutjens, by the time Company E reached Jaure, “We were down to a shadow. Our eyes were sunk deep in our heads. We were gaunt as wolves and just as hungry.”
By the time Company E reached Jaure, Company G was already in Laruni. At the dropping ground operated by the Wairopi Patrol’s Captain Roger Keast, whose knee was still mending, Company G picked up sweaters and replenished its rations. “God, what a gift the sweaters were” says Stanley Jastrzembski. “The jungle got so cold at night.”
The rations—soup, biscuits, and even chocolate D-bars—were a godsend, too. “We were hungrier than we’d ever been in our lives, but still we couldn’t eat the bully beef,” says Russell Buys. “Guys tried to choke it down, but they couldn’t; they’d just retch.” Worse yet, the beef was often contaminated. It came in four-or five-pound tins. After opening the tins, the beef spoiled quickly, especially in the hot jungle.
Laruni revived the men, but they had no time to linger; they needed to be back on the trail, moving as fast as they could in the direction of Jaure.
A day out of Laruni, Sam DiMaggio was disconcerted by the change of weather. In the lowland jungles he had been as hot as he was when he stoked the stoves at the Malleable Iron Company. Now, he was hiking in his sweater to cut the cold.
Two days out, somber gray clouds slid down from the mountains, and it began to rain—a cold, lashing rain that must have reminded Corporal Carl Stenberg of an early spring day on Lake Michigan.
Stenberg had worked on and off with his cousins on the big lake as a commercial fisherman. It was a tough, cold, dangerous way to make a living, especially in early spring and late fall, twenty miles out, with a set of thirty nets. But it was the Depression, too, and people did what they could to get by. If a storm blew in, especially out of the north where the fetch had over a hundred miles to build, they would have to make a run for dry land. Stenberg had seen his share of storms, more times than he cared to count. Still, he never got used to them.
Stenberg had joined the Guard to escape a hard, uncertain life on Lake Michigan and because he did not want to be drafted. He feared he would be one of the first guys chosen and the Selective Service Act contained a sentence about serving six months after the end of the conflict. Stenberg did not like that clause. “When it’s over it’s over,” he thought.
The day after he and his buddy O’Donnell O’Brien joined the Guard, they were inducted into federal service. The toughest part about the whole thing was telling his girlfriend Frances. They had been going steady since 1939, and he had not mentioned anything to her about joining up. A week later, Stenberg was forced to say good-bye to Frances, and he and O’Brien were on a train bound for Louisiana. Had he gone with his gut, he would have joined the navy. He had always loved the water. And in the navy he would have had a bunk to sleep in and decent food.
Now, here he was, carrying a Thompson submachine gun, 250 rounds of ammunition, and a field pack to boot. Stenberg had it better than some of his buddies, though. He still had not come down with malaria.
Even Herman Bottcher, a hardened veteran of the Spanish Civil War, suffered. “We were never dry,” Bottcher said. “Sometimes in twelve hours’ marching we would make three miles—some days only a mile.” Fortunately, according to Bottcher, the native carriers showed the soldiers how to find dry wood by “sounding trees.” Like lumberjacks, the carriers would use their machetes to strike the trunk of a tree, listening for the vibrations. A hollow sound meant the wood was damp and decaying and would be no good for building a fire.
The natives who accompanied Company G proved to be invaluable. Lieutenant James Hunt, who had helped Company E build the coastal road, writes of one terrible climb. Exhausted, he lay down and closed his eyes. “When I opened them,” he writes,
I was surrounded by a small group of native men, who were silently watching me. When I started to move, they helped me to my feet, took my pack and assisted me on the way. I had stopped within a few hundred yards of the top of a hill, and when we reached it one of the men climbed a coconut tree and got a fresh coconut, which their leader opened so I could drink the milk, which was cool and refreshing. They then went with me down to the bottom of the hill to our camp site…. I thanked them and gave each one a cigarette, which pleased them greatly. I then lay down on a canvas litter…. The afternoon rain started…but I was so exhausted I just lay there in the rain.
At midday, Gus Bailey called for a brief rest. Bailey had never seen anything like what confronted him on the trail. Here he was, a lieutenant in the role of a captain, and his company was falling apart. Bailey wrote his wife Katherine that the men were so weakened by dysentery that sometimes he had to carry his own pack as well as the packs of two other men. Katherine would later write him back, telling him to take it easy, to avoid being a hero. According to Katherine, his response was always the same: “I won’t ask my men to do anything I will not do myself.”
One of Bailey’s second lieutenants remembers that despite the circumstances, Lieutenant Bailey never appeared discouraged. Jungle rot had left the skin on his ankles and feet as brittle as onionskin. The skin peeled off as he walked and blood seeped through his socks.
When, late in the day, Bailey called for the men to stop and set up camp, Stenberg was relieved. His muscles were shot. He breathed shallowly in the rarified air and chewed on a piece of foot-long sugarcane he had cut from one of the native gardens. The sugarcane hung like an amulet from a sock stretched and fastened to either end and worn around his neck.
Around him, men staggered; some fell to the ground and lay there as if dead. Men who could still walk searched for flat ground on which to set up their shelter halves. Some did not see any point in trying. After regaining some of their strength, a number of men tried to build fires, but the wood was soaked.
When all the men were situated, Bailey finally sat down. He removed his boots for the first time in days. Jastrzembski could see that his feet were raw, but Bailey never even grimaced. In fact, he told a few jokes, and the men listened and laughed.
A few even remember Bailey singing, which was odd because he was not a singer. Home was the theme: “Home on the Range” “Show Me the Way to Go Home.” The mood was lighter, and when Jastrzembski discovered a large vine, he called some of the guys over.
“Watch this,” he said, grabbing the vine and swinging. “I’m Tarzan.” Then he let out a deep woods yodel. The others joined in, each man trying to swing higher and farther than the rest.
That night, after taking care of his feet, Bailey treated his men to a recitation of his favorite poem—Robert Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” “There are strange things done in the midnight sun / By the men who moil for gold / The Arctic trails have their secret tales / That would make your blood run cold; / The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, / But the queerest they ever did see / Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge / I cremated Sam McGee.”
For Bailey it felt good to say the words. The poem reminded him of Katherine. In Indiana when they went out for a drive, Bailey would recite it for her.
But New Guinea was not the back roads of Indiana. Later that evening, it began to rain again, and it grew cold in the mountains. They were lucky, according to Jastrzembski, if they managed to doze for ten or fifteen minutes. Most stayed awake talking, trying to comfort themselves with fond memories of Australia.
Had Carl Stenberg overheard the talk, he would have reminded the men that Australia had not been all roses. Australian Imperial Force troops, who had fought overseas, had begun to return while the 32nd was still in Australia. They were national heroes, and they were worshipped. Australia is a huge country, but it was not big enough to accommodate both the 32nd and the returning AIF fighters. Russell Buys explains the problem. “These men came back to find their wives pregnant and their daughters knocked up. They knew that the American army was there, and they weren’t a bit happy about it.” Inevitably, brawls erupted in the streets and in the pubs of Brisbane and Melbourne. An Australian general described the confrontations as “a most despicable thing between allies.” Carl Stenberg recalled that when an outmanned group of American soldiers was jumped by a larger group of Australian soldiers, the Australians’ battle cry had been, “Put the bloody boots to ’em!” Things were so bad that General Harding assembled his officers and told them that he wanted them to make certain their men were avoiding “altercations with Australian soldiers…particularly when there is…liquor involved.”
The Japanese were smart enough to exploit the situation. One wartime cartoon depicted an American soldier having sex with a young Australian woman. “Take your sweet time at the front, Aussie,” it read. “I got my hands full right now with your sweet tootsie at home.”
While the single men dreamed of their Australian girlfriends, Gus Bailey conjured images of what it would be like when he saw Katherine again. Together, they would tour the landscapes of the West that he had admired on the train ride from Massachusetts to California. No longer, though, would it be just the two of them. Cladie Alyn Bailey, a boy, had been born only one-and-a-half months before Company G had begun its march. On the day Katherine returned from the hospital, the postman arrived at her door with a present. The postman waited as she opened the package. When Katherine pulled out an opal ring that Bailey had sent from Australia, the postman was beaming, too. A picture arrived sometime after Katherine received the present. The picture showed a proud Gus Bailey reading to his men the telegram that announced the birth of his son.
When G Company reached Ghost Mountain and the bizarre realm of the cloud forest, they were as spooked as Medendorp’s men and Company E had been. In the heavy fog, the trees—huge, moss-draped oaks and beeches—looked like apparitions. Ghost Mountain was a world all its own, where time seemed suspended in perpetual twilight. The soldiers tiptoed along a series of limestone ridges. Occasionally, a man would slip and he would hear rocks tumble into the abyss.
Two days later, Company G crossed the divide, where Major Stutterin’ Smith’s party overtook it. Though Smith was cheered by the reunion, he was appalled by the condition of Gus Bailey’s men. They looked “haggard, tired and tattered.” He wondered how he looked to them—a tall, gaunt bag of bones. How had any of them made it through the jungle and over the mountains?
General Harding had been under no illusions about the preparedness of his men, but neither he nor Smith could have anticipated the trek’s toll on them. Harding would later write, “I have no quarrel with the general thesis that the 32nd was by no means adequately trained for combat—particularly jungle combat…. Unfortunately we had no opportunity to work through a systematic program for correcting deficiencies. From February when I took over until November when we went into battle we were always getting ready to move, on the move, or getting settled after a move. No sooner would we get a systematic training program started than orders for a move came along to interrupt it…”
On October 28, Smith’s small party and Companies G and H arrived in Jaure. According to Smith, it was a day of “mud, washes and wading.” His boots were rotting off his feet. The trail from what Smith called Umi Creek to Jaure was especially grueling. Though not given to expressions of self-pity, Smith called it “torture.”
En route to Jaure was Lieutenant Robert Odell, who would later command a platoon in Company F. Only three months before, he had been the assistant military attaché in Wellington, New Zealand. Now, he was in charge of a small group of men bringing up the rear of the battalion. His team had departed the trailhead camp at Kalikodobu after Major Smith’s crew, and it was hustling now to catch up with the rest of the battalion. Odell and his men made good time, but what they saw along the trail to Jaure filled them with dismay. Piles of discarded government-issue equipment told a tale of the battalion’s ordeal.
Though Bailey was hoping to rest his troops once they reached Jaure, Boice, who was still in Jaure keeping a handle on things, informed him that Company G was to join him and Company F on the march to Natunga early the following morning. Lutjens and Company E had left for Natunga the previous day.
Prior to leaving Jaure for Natunga, Boice received a message from Colonel Quinn.
Your Msg Signed Six Forty Five Morning Two Seven Referring To Batting Average And Confidence Just Received Stop Sorry If I Have Said Anything To Raise Such Questions Stop Same Farthest From Thoughts Stop Have Utmost Confidence [in] Your Ability And Loyalty Stop Have Tried to Show It By Turning Whole Show Over To You Stop You Are Not Only Leading The League In Batting But Have Been Unanimously Selected Most Valuable Player Stop I Am Personally Interested In You And Every Man Out There And Wish I Could Be With You Stop Its Tough Being So Far Away Stop I Know You Will Win Repeat I Know You Will Win Stop Keep Your Chin Up Jim Back Here We Are All Pulling For You Hundred Per Cent
What precipitated the exchange between Quinn and Boice has been lost to history. Perhaps as the one who gave the go-ahead for the march across the peninsula, Boice was burdened by a sense of uncertainty about whether he had done the right thing. Had the trek indeed been too much for the men? They had made Jaure, but each and every one of them had suffered mightily. Had Quinn sensed Boice’s ambivalence and sent the message to bolster his sagging spirits? Or perhaps it was the colonel who initially voiced his worries about the men’s condition. Maybe Boice interpreted his inquiry as a vote of no confidence. Whatever the reason for the exchange of messages, the one irrefutable fact is that the trek from New Guinea’s south coast to Jaure brought each man face-to-face with the limits of his physical and emotional endurance.
As Boice and Companies F and G were preparing to proceed to Natunga, Smith assumed his new role as battalion commander. His first responsibility was an unusual one: Romee asked if the carriers could hold a celebratory dance.
Though the prospect of sixty dancing natives did not thrill Smith, he told Romee that he would, at least, consider the idea. Smith then called a meeting of his company commanders.
“What do you think, boys?” Smith asked. “I think it’s imperative to keep the porters happy. We can post guards just in case they get carried away.”
The setting for the celebration could not have been more perfect. The natives found a natural amphitheater at the base of a “gently rising slope.” As the sun slid behind the Owen Stanleys, the men began a slow dance to the accompaniment of reed and bamboo panpipes and small drums with heads made of dried reptile skins. As darkness advanced, the tempo increased, and Romee joined Smith on the hill overlooking the celebration grounds. Romee explained that the dancers were reenacting historic battles between the mountain tribes and the coastal natives, which often centered on the precious commodity of salt. The mountain people would come to the sea to evaporate seawater and obtain salt. When they did this, they were trespassing on the tribal lands of the coastal people. Romee assured Smith, though, that the dancers had no intention of becoming warlike.
Herman Bottcher describes the mood at Jaure that had seized everyone, soldiers and carriers alike. It was electric.
The Owen Stanleys were behind us and far in the distance we could see the beautiful green lowlands of the Buna Peninsula. We were overjoyed—particularly the faithful native porters…. We made our first comfortable camp, and the natives gathered coconuts, green bananas, squash, taro roots, sugar cane, paws-paws, limes…. We had an orgy of eating and they stayed up all night, dancing and beating on the tom-toms…. We had accomplished the…march with only about twenty casualties…one man died.
Early the next morning, Companies F and G hit the trail for Natunga, two days’ march northeast of Jaure. Once they reached the village, the bulk of their journey would be behind them. Situated in the steep foothills of the Owen Stanley Mountains, Natunga was roughly thirty miles south of the Buna coast.
Smith and Company H stayed in Jaure until 9:30 a.m. while a message from Colonel Quinn containing new orders was received and decoded: The entire battalion was to lay over in the village of Natunga. Forward scouts had indicated that the village was an ideal location for an airdrop; it sat on a prominent hilltop with fifteen acres of open grasslands. Colonel Quinn complimented Smith and the rest of the battalion on its determination. He also passed along some uplifting news: The Japanese were in full retreat on the Kokoda track. Then he added, “Hug and kiss Jim Boice for all of us.”