Chapter 15
BACK AT DOBODURA, GENERAL HARDING had just gotten the news of Stutterin’ Smith’s success. In the big picture, the breakthrough did not amount to much. Buna Village and Buna Government Station had not been touched. With the rest of the 126th—the 1st and 3rd Battalions were still fighting alongside the Australians west of the Girua River—Harding figured that he might have been able to overwhelm the Japanese. But without a numerical advantage, he would have to continue probing their positions for a weak spot. It was a slow, costly business that was bound to keep the grave diggers busy.
On the coast, his 128th Infantry Regiment was bogged down, too. Though Colonel Mott had shaken things up by relieving two officers, the change did nothing to affect the tactical situation. The Japanese were dug in too well. Only tanks or more troops would change that.
Earlier that morning, as Stutterin’ Smith’s troops pressed the attack, General Sutherland flew in from Port Moresby and Australia’s General Herring came in from Popondetta to meet with Harding. Though they had ostensibly come to discuss battle strategies, from Harding’s perspective, the generals had already reached their own conclusions. Sitting on empty ammunition boxes under a small grove of trees at the edge of a kunai field, neither Sutherland nor Herring appeared very interested in listening. But Harding continued to press the issue. Having already argued for tanks and artillery, he asked for the 127th Infantry, which had arrived in Port Moresby on Thanksgiving Day. He reminded the generals that he barely had a third of his 126th Regiment.
By lunchtime, Herring was on his way back to Popondetta. Sutherland, though, stayed on. He and Harding were making small talk when suddenly Sutherland dropped his bomb: MacArthur, he said, was “worried about the caliber of his infantry” and the aggressiveness of its officers. Sutherland wanted to know how Harding intended to rectify the situation. The general bluntly defended his men. Anyone, he said, who thought that his troops were not fighting “didn’t know the facts.” Sutherland then asked him if he intended to replace any of his top officers. Harding replied that he did not.
Sutherland had heard enough. That afternoon he returned to Port Moresby and recommended to MacArthur that he relieve Harding of his duties. What was lacking at Buna, Sutherland said, was not artillery, troops, tanks, or planes. What was missing was inspired leadership. That Sutherland had not even been to the front lines to assess the situation did not prevent him from commenting on Harding’s alleged inability to motivate his men. Harding would later say that Sutherland’s report to MacArthur must have been a “masterpiece of imaginative writing.”
MacArthur had already ordered Major General Robert L. Eichelberger, I Corps commander, to report to him in Port Moresby. MacArthur had great faith in the general. If anyone could remedy the situation at Buna, it was Bob Eichelberger.
Though he had never commanded troops in battle, Eichelberger’s résumé was top-notch. Early in his career, he had served in Panama and on the U.S.-Mexico border. Later, at the tail end of World War I, while assigned to the American Expeditionary Force in Siberia, he had been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for acts of bravery. Having attended the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth and the Army War College, after which he became superintendent of West Point, Eichelberger possessed superb leadership and organizational skills and a keen understanding of military theory.
On November 29 when MacArthur summoned him, Eichelberger was at Rockhampton, Australia, training the 41st Division in jungle warfare. Early the next morning, as Sutherland was on his way to Dobodura to talk with Harding, Eichelberger boarded a plane for Port Moresby.
At MacArthur’s headquarters, Eichelberger and his chief of staff found MacArthur with Generals Kenney and Sutherland. Sutherland had already told MacArthur of his meeting with Harding, and it took only a moment for Eichelberger to discern MacArthur’s mood. Almost before Eichelberger sat down, MacArthur was talking heatedly, striding up and down the veranda, holding his pipe like a weapon.
The 32nd Division’s troops were sick and tired and poorly trained for war in the jungle, but that was no excuse for cowardice, MacArthur said, citing the reports of his operations staff officers.
“A real leader, “he insisted, “could take these same men and capture Buna.”
MacArthur continued, “Bob, the number of troops employed there is no indication of the importance I attach to this job…. The fact that I’ve sent for you, with your rank, indicates how much importance I attach to the taking of Buna…. Never did I think I’d see Americans quit.” MacArthur then told Eichelberger that he was to leave for the front the following morning because “time was of the essence.” The Japanese, MacArthur said, might send in reinforcements “any night.” Eichelberger was to relieve Harding and his subordinate commanders, or MacArthur threatened, “I will relieve them myself and you too.” MacArthur continued testily, “Go out there, Bob, and take Buna or don’t come back alive.” Then he added, “And that goes for your chief of staff, Clovis, too.”
At breakfast the following morning, MacArthur had apparently mellowed. Pulling Eichelberger aside, he wished him luck and god-speed and told him that he was “no use to him dead.” Eichelberger must have felt great relief. Just the day before, he had written Harding, his good friend and former West Point classmate, to express confidence in him.
But then MacArthur’s mood again turned cold. Promising to decorate him if he took Buna, MacArthur told Eichelberger that he was to push the battle regardless of casualties.
“That was our send-off,” Eichelberger later wrote, “and hardly a merry one.”
By 1:00 p.m. that same day, Eichelberger took command of all U.S. troops in the Buna area. The next day a medical officer reported to Eichelberger on the condition of his men. The troops, he said within earshot of General Harding, looked like “Christ off the cross.” Considering their depleted condition, he added, the men were carrying on heroically. It was difficult for Harding not to feel a degree of satisfaction. It was what he had been saying all along.
The men of the 32nd had been subsisting on short rations for well over a month. Because fires were not allowed at the front—the wet wood sent up billows of smoke and attracted too much attention—they ate their rations cold. Their feet swelled and bled. Their fingernails and toenails fell off. They were suffering from jungle rot, malaria, dengue fever, dysentery, ringworm, dehydration, and heat prostration. And there was a shortage of everything they needed to stay healthy—quinine, salt and chlorination tablets, bismuth, and vitamin pills. Because of the sand, mud, water, and humidity, they could not depend on their weapons either. BARs, M-1s, and machine guns jammed. When precious gun oil and patches reached the front, they came in large containers and were difficult to distribute. Spare parts were nearly impossible to find. Ammunition and medical supplies ran short. Soldiers who had lost their entrenching tools were still waiting for replacements.
As a consequence, the morale of the troops was low. To make matters worse, their battlefield successes were few. Although Stutterin’s Smith’s troops had punched a hole in the Japanese perimeter, the Japanese had not yielded much valuable ground. Their positions were impregnable and Harding’s troops lacked the weaponry to reduce them. Mortars, artillery, and air bombardments had proved to be largely ineffective. The only other possibility was for a soldier to rush a bunker and stick a grenade through a firing slit, a feat that took monumental courage and a lifetime of good luck. It was a heartbreaking, ridiculous way to bust a bunker. According to Stutterin’ Smith, “Many more failed than succeeded.”
The day after arriving at Dobodura, Eichelberger was eager to tour the front.
Eichelberger did not know it, but after days of fighting, things had finally died down. And he did not like what he saw—men resting at aid stations, men dozing at the roots of trees, unshaven men wearing dirty, tattered uniforms, and empty ration tins surrounded by flies.
Jastrzembski was one of those dirty, unshaven men. His fatigues were caked in mud and diarrhea. He had sweated out the malaria attack, but his limbs were still trembling. His right eye quivered uncontrollably. Just the thought of the previous day’s battle, of cradling his buddy, of staring into the hole in La Venture’s belly knowing that he was a goner, made the bile well in Jastrzembski’s mouth. He tried to put the image out of his head. He was on his way back to the aid station where a buddy had told him they were passing out new jeans. Now more than anything else he just wanted a new pair of jeans. That is when he looked up and saw the general and “lots of brass” walking toward him. Immediately, he realized the general was new. Eichelberger wore his insignia of rank—no officer who had spent any time on the front dared to do that. A Japanese sniper would pick him off in a matter of minutes.
“Soldier, show me the front,” Eichelberger said.
Jastrzembski hardly heard him.
“The front, soldier, the front. I want to see the front,” Eichelberger demanded.
“Follow me,” Corporal Jastrzembski said.
Eichelberger, who was already irritated by the lack of discipline he had witnessed, scowled. He was a three-star general. Who did this soldier think he was talking to him like that?
After walking a hundred yards or so, Eichelberger asked Jastrzembski where the command post was, and Jastrzembski pointed down the trail. Then the general reached in his pocket and handed him a pack of cigarettes. Jastrzembski was a cigar man, but he took the cigarettes anyway. He knew he could trade them later for chewing gum.
Eichelberger stopped at the command post, and then farther down the trail he encountered three soldiers hiding in the long grass at the trail’s edge. When Eichelberger asked them what lay ahead, the men answered that an enemy machine gunner had fired on them hours before. Eichelberger was surprised. Hadn’t they bothered to scout the trail since? The men told the general that they had not. Eichelberger then offered to decorate any one of them brave enough to move forward. When no one volunteered, the general was incensed.
Later, Eichelberger held a meeting of his senior officers at Stutterin’ Smith’s command post, which was nothing more than a collection of tables around a large hollow tree stump. Smith had a field phone, which was connected to other field phones by single-strand Australian wire. When Smith phoned his company commanders, every phone in the jungle rang—including the Japanese ones.
Harding also attended the meeting. It was the first time since early October that he had seen Smith, and Harding did not recognize him at first. The gaunt, bearded Smith, Harding wrote in his diary, looked like a “member of the Army of the Potomac.”
The gathering was a heated one. According to Smith, Eichelberger acted “like a bull in a china shop,” and made some “caustic comments” about what he had seen at the front, including the incident with the three men. Smith kept his mouth shut. Years later, recalling the general’s anger, he wrote, “Decorations look damn artificial to a soldier who is filthy, fever ridden, practically starved, living in a tidal swamp and frustrated from seeing his buddies killed.” Listening to Eichelberger denigrate his men, Colonel Mott could no longer hold his temper.
“Dammit,” Mott said. “Anybody who thinks the men aren’t fighting, doesn’t know beans. Do you have any idea of what it’s like out there? The mountains were hell on the men. And now they’re fighting in swamp water up to their chests. You want to know why? Because the Japs have every piece of high ground from here to Australia.”
Harding threw his cigarette to the ground and snuffed it out. He agreed.
Then, Eichelberger’s voice rose, “You’re licked!” he said, looking at Mott and Harding. “Your men aren’t fighting; they’re cowards!”
The meeting broke up shortly after that and Eichelberger buttonholed Smith and asked him what his assessment was.
“It’s tough, damn tough,” Smith said. “It doesn’t pay to attack. The plan should be really basic: To edge up slowly every day. But even that’s not working. We’re not getting anywhere.”
Eichelberger was under no illusions. He could plainly see that American forces “were prisoners of geography,” and that Buna was going to be “siege warfare…the bitterest and most punishing kind.” But that was no excuse for faintheartedness. With MacArthur’s warning ringing in his ears, Eichelberger looked Smith straight in the eye. “I don’t think you’re trying hard enough.”
Back at his tent in Dobodura, Harding tried to understand Eichelberger’s attitude. His old West Point classmate was under enormous pressure. MacArthur had given him “an earful” and appointed him his executioner. Was Eichelberger simply carrying out orders? Despite trying to see both sides, it was difficult for Harding not to be bitter.
Harding had been determined to avoid what he called the “butcher’s bill run up by the generals of World War I,” and obviously he had not pressed the battle hard enough for MacArthur’s tastes. In France, the 32nd’s Red Arrow men, facing rapid-firing artillery and machine guns, had developed a reputation for bravery. But Harding knew that it had come at a huge cost to the division: In five months, the 32nd Division lost three thousand men and counted almost fourteen thousand among the wounded.
Harding refused to repeat that kind of carnage at Buna. To order headlong attacks on the Japanese positions was “Civil War tactics,” pure madness. While at Fort Benning Infantry School, Harding had been one of a group of instructors who attempted to define and implement a new set of battle tactics that put a premium on ingenuity and discouraged high casualty rates. George C. Marshall was the school’s assistant commandant at the time, and Harding had Marshall’s blessing. He and his fellow officers developed and taught flanking movements and other innovative battlefield techniques.
Harding also edited a seminal study of small-unit engagements during World War I, and enumerated a list of lessons learned. One of those was: “To assault by day an organized position, manned by good troops equipped with automatic weapons, without providing for adequate support by (artillery) fire or tanks, is folly.”
In 1937, in his position as editor of the Infantry Journal, he elaborated on this point. “Since wars began,” he opined, “this ‘do something’ obsession has driven leaders to order attacks with no prospect of success…. The enemy’s position is immensely strong, but our masters are impatient. We attack and the history of military disaster is enriched by another bloody repulse.”
In another editorial, Harding blasted senior commanders during World War I for firing junior officers whenever things did not turn out as planned. According to writer and historian Tom Doherty, “The qualities that Harding emphasized in his writings boiled down to this: A good leader possesses the courage and self-discipline to protect his organization from his own rash impulses and from the anxieties crashing down from the chain of command….” Harding, Doherty elaborates, “had expressed these convictions years ago in peacetime, but did he have the courage to act upon them at Buna, where he was caught between enemy fortifications worthy of the Western Front and a living legend who insisted on victory at any price?”
According to Doherty, many of the men who served under Harding at Buna believed the answer to this question was yes. “They were convinced,” Doherty adds, “that far from being too weak to succeed…Forrest Harding was too principled to add…‘another bloody repulse’ to history’s long roll of military disasters by sacrificing his soldiers on the altar of Douglas MacArthur’s impatience.”
Harding sat down with his diary. Eichelberger, he wrote, “showed no appreciation of what the men had been through, or the spirit shown by most of them in carrying on despite heavy casualties, the roughest kind of opposition, and the most trying conditions.”
Once he was done writing, Harding went to Eichelberger’s tent to bury the hatchet and to discuss a new plan of attack. Eichelberger only half listened and then interrupted Harding to object once again to what he had discovered at the front. Harding guessed at Eichelberger’s intent.
“You were probably sent here to get heads,” Harding said. “Maybe mine is one of them.”
“You are right,” Eichelberger answered briskly.
“I take it I am to return to Moresby.”
“Yes,” Eichelberger replied.
Then Harding stood up and stepped out into the night.
The next morning, after a night’s downpour, Eichelberger woke to a stream running through his tent. The water was thigh deep and his personal possessions were floating away. If he was irritated by the previous day’s events, he was really aggravated now. Having dismissed Harding, he wasted no time in instructing his staff to relieve Harding’s top commanders, including Mott.
Then, over breakfast, Eichelberger apologized to Harding, insisting that he had no choice in the matter. Harding, ever the gentleman, accepted his friend’s word. Later he excused Eichelberger in his diary, writing, “It was probably either his head or mine.”
Harding’s staff was not so forgiving. It was a “dirty deal,” one of them insisted. Harding was being scapegoated. Weeks before, the general had wanted to cut off the Japs as they retreated from Kokoda to the coast. The Red Arrow men might have wiped out Horii’s army, but Blamey had insisted that the Australians be in on the kill, and MacArthur agreed. Consequently, Harding lost three pivotal weeks. In the meantime, the Japanese were able to land reinforcements.
Word of Harding’s dismissal made the rounds. While his staff collected his belongings, he paid a last visit to a nearby portable hospital. Stretcher bearers were bringing in wounded soldiers. Harding, visibly moved, apologized to the men for letting them down. An injured soldier overheard. “Hell, no, General,” he said. “We let you down!”
Later that day, Harding left Dobodura for Port Moresby. Buna was now Eichelberger’s alone to try to take.
The problem, which Harding tried to articulate, was that Buna, as Eichelberger would soon discover, was a “Leavenworth Nightmare.” The U.S. Army Command and General Staff School in Leavenworth, Kansas, did not teach solutions to such dismal tactical pictures. The Japanese defensive position was superb. They commanded the high ground up and down the coast. The Americans were relegated to the blackwater creeks and swamps, thick with viciously spiked nipa and sago palms that made the coordination of advances impossible. Companies were scattered all over the place. Classic military maneuvers like the double envelopment, where an enemy’s flanks are attacked simultaneously in a kind of pinching motion, were unworkable. Fronts, at least in the conventional sense, did not exist.
While Eichelberger set out to reorder his units, which had become “scrambled like eggs,” his new officers struggled to come to grips with the reality of their commands. One complained about a “lack of almost everything with which to operate.”
Eichelberger also decided to move his command post closer to the front. While this was going on, Stutterin’ Smith sensed that the Japanese were growing weak. Acting on a hunch, he sent out small patrols to harass the Japanese positions. They were “colonial tactics,” according to Smith, designed to keep pressure on the enemy and gather intelligence, while Eichelberger figured out the division’s next move.
Smith’s hunch proved correct: Up and down the eleven-mile front, Japanese soldiers were suffering. Sergeant Phil Ishio, a Japanese-American from Salt Lake City who worked as a translator with I Corps, had just translated some of the diaries that Smith’s men discovered when they raided the Japanese shacks on November 30.
The Japanese were short on food and medical supplies. Unlike American soldiers, who were discouraged from keeping diaries for fear that they might end up in the wrong hands, the Japanese had obviously not had any security briefings. Ishio was surprised by the candor of the daily entries. On the morning of the November 30 battle, a Corporal Tanaka wrote, “At the break of dawn, the enemy charged. We repulsed them…. It is now merely a case of waiting for death…there isn’t much we can do…. We have not eaten for over a week and have no energy. As soldiers, we are ready to die gallantly.”
Twice a day, American patrols attacked the Japanese and then retreated to their company command posts. Company E was so close to enemy lines that the GIs could hear the Japanese chattering. The patrols could not get too close because the Japanese had run trip vines up and down their lines. Behind the vines, though, the Japanese had grown lackadaisical. Swede Nelson and squad leader Sergeant Ned Myers took advantage of their inattention. Armed with tommy guns, the two men sneaked within thirty yards of a Japanese pillbox without being detected. Fifteen enemy soldiers were laughing and smoking when Nelson and Myers opened fire, killing twelve of them.
At night, the Americans ceased their attacks and stuck to their miserable, water-filled foxholes, which most men had dug using the pans from their mess kits because they did not have entrenching tools. They stayed put, two men to a hole for protection, listening to the sounds of the jungle, trying to distinguish the swamp rats scurring through the long grass from Japanese soldiers creeping in for a closer shot.
The Americans took little comfort in the foxholes. “Even with a guy right there, you’d wake up in the middle of the night and just lie there, listening and staring at the black,” Lutjens explained.
In contrast to Smith’s daytime raids, the Japanese did their dirty work at night. “The night,” emphasized a training slogan, “is one million reinforcements.” Japanese soldiers yelled out, “Tonight you die,” and then they worked their rifle bolts back and forth. Bizarrely, they were especially fond of Eleanor Roosevelt insults. “Eleanor eats shit!” they would often yell out. Sometimes they fired sudden shots that pierced the darkness, or set off firecrackers. It was their version of psychological warfare, designed to deprive the battle-weary Americans of sleep and peace of mind. And sometimes they would silently infiltrate an enemy camp, climb a tree, tie themselves in, and wait until daylight to do their damage.
One morning in early December, Captain Melvin Schultz, commander of Company E, spied a Japanese sniper just outside his command post. The sniper could have easily killed him but was waiting for more men to arrive. Schultz calmly went about his business and then whirled around and pumped eight shots into him. The sniper fell from his perch. His bullet-ridden body dangled above the ground for all to see.
Under extreme pressure for results, Eichelberger did not waste any time ordering his first attack. The plan was a basic one. On December 4, Stutterin’ Smith and his Ghost Mountain boys would close in on Buna Village, while Colonel Smith’s men from the 128th got in position to deflect a counterattack from Buna Government Station.
On the evening of December 3, the troops had their first hot meal in weeks. Eichelberger had demanded it—half-starved soldiers, he said, could not be counted on to fight. With full bellies, men found the energy to slip back to the Japanese bivouac that they had stormed two days earlier to search for souvenirs. Fearing booby traps, company commanders had issued strict orders to leave the stuff alone, but few of the men felt the need to comply with the order. The jungle was so thick that even in broad daylight they could sneak back to the Japanese outpost without being noticed.
That night, nine Zeros flying fifty feet off the ground dropped food supplies to Japanese troops at Buna Government Station. Eichelberger regarded the drop as a good omen. It was further evidence that the enemy was tired, sick, and running low on food and ammunition.
All of this was true. Some Japanese soldiers charged with holding the beachhead did not even have weapons to defend themselves. Colonel Yokoyama commanded these men to tie bayonets to poles. Those without bayonets he ordered to fashion spears or clubs out of wood.
Major General Tsuyuo Yamagata, who had just landed with five hundred troops north of Basabua at the mouth of the Kumusi River, warned his men of the situation at the front. The battlefield, he said, was a “continuous swampland…devoid of supplies.” The health situation was also extremely bad. “Until now,” he continued, “conditions as severe as these have been unheard of during the China and Greater East Asia conflict.” Then he urged the men on, adding, “I have not the slightest doubt that you will conquer hardships and privation and that with one blow you will annihilate the blue-eyed enemy and their black slaves which will be the key to the completion of the Southern operations.”
Veteran troops who had made the long retreat from Ioribaiwa confirmed Yamagata’s appraisal. Although they had fought in the Singapore, Malay, and Bataan campaigns, they had never seen a worse battlefield. Reaching the coast, they discovered that Japanese doctors were ill equipped to care for them. Hospital conditions were deplorable. Sick and wounded soldiers were forced to lie on straw mats outside the overcrowded hospital. Reeking swamp water had seeped into the wards, causing clothes, bedding, and medical supplies to mold, rot, or rust. Those doctors who had not been forced into infantry duty had almost no medicine to treat patients. They performed operations without anaesthetic. The very ill were simply left to die.
For those suffering from malnutrition, there was little food to nurse them back to health. The detachment supply officer gave orders to slaughter the remaining horses. For many of the sickest soldiers, though, the meat was of no help. For the past month they had eaten anything they could—leaves, grass, roots, dirt, even their leather rifle straps. Now their digestive systems were incapable of processing regular food. According to one Japanese journalist, many of them “vomited blood and died.”
General Horii’s section leader, who penned agonized diary entries from Ioribaiwa Ridge, now turned his attention to the Imperial army’s disintegration. “Thinking reinforcements will come,” he wrote in late November, “we have waited every night…. As the battle stretches from day to day the number of men killed and wounded increases. The patients are all collapsing. We don’t know how great our losses are…but we are holding out, hoping for a miracle. In the meantime…we find that our Bn Comdrs and Coy Comdrs have all been hiding in trenches under trees and not one has come out.”
On the evening of December 3 he wrote, “Parents! Wife! Brother and Sister! I have fought with all my strength. I believe by all means that the violent efforts of BASA (Basabua) Garrison will be handed down to posterity…. But now my fighting strength is weakened and I am about to expose my dead body on the seashore of BASA. My comrades have already died, though my heart is filled with joy because I can become the guardian spirit of my country. I will fight and crush the enemy. I will protect the seashore of BASA forever.”
First Lieutenant Jitsutaro Kamio expressed many of the same sentiments. On November 30, he wrote in his diary, “Even though there is little to eat a warrior must bear it.” A day later he wrote, “Human beings must die once. I only ask for a good place to die.”
West of the Girua River at the oval-shaped clearing that had already become known as the “roadblock,” Captains Keast and Shirley were barely hanging on. The American position on the track was a precarious one. Two hundred fifty yards long by 150 yards wide, and only 300 yards south of a Japanese position on the track, the roadblock represented the only high, open ground for what might have been miles. Though the Americans were dug in, Japanese snipers tucked into the tops of trees had clear shots, and the dense undergrowth made them vulnerable to surprise attacks. Isolated nearly a mile behind the main Japanese position on the Sanananda track, Keast and Shirley were unable to communicate with anyone but their own men. Their phone lines had been cut, and their radios could not reach the American command post fifteen hundred yards to the southwest.
Keast instructed two machine gun squads to man positions to the north and south of the garrison. Shirley’s men dug in to the west and placed two 60 mm mortars, which could fire thirty rounds per minute, inside their perimeter while Keast took his Antitank Company men to the eastern perimeter.
Outmanned several times over and unable to call for reinforcements, Keast and Shirley, and what remained of their troops after the brutal bayonet charge spent the night of November 30 repulsing raid after Japanese raid. The position was nearly impossible to defend.
The following morning, his eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, Keast offered to execute a probing attack and take a patrol off the southwest perimeter. Though Shirley knew how dangerous this was, he also knew that they would have to find a gap in the Japanese position at some point. Without ammunition, food, or reinforcements, the Americans would not be able to hold the roadblock for very long.
Just three miles to the north, the waves of the Solomon Sea washed over the dark sands of Sanananda Point, and the first rays of the sun glistened in the morning sky. In the swamp, Keast and his men moved through the mist and sago palms like ghosts of the war’s dead. The spikes of the trees ripped at their clothes. Raw from jungle rot, their feet burned with every step. At every sound their fingers tightened on their triggers. So far they had been lucky; they had not walked into a slaughter. Then the jungle closed in around them and they had to suppress the desire to burst into a mad, clumsy rush.
For a moment Keast, the former teacher and coach, allowed himself to dream of home. Marquette, Michigan, bordered by Lake Superior and great forests of white pine and red and sugar maples, had been a good place for the Keasts. Roger, Ruth, and their young son Harry had been there for just fifteen months when the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor. As a lieutenant in the Reserve Officer Corps, Roger must have known that his time at home was drawing to a close. The family’s time in Marquette, though brief, had “meant a great deal” to all the Keasts. The school and the community had embraced them. To show their appreciation, the school held a series of farewell parties that included hams, chili and cake, card games, songs, and jokes about how Keast enjoyed “singing in the showers” and his efforts to teach the high school boys to dance. Though the school paper declared that “depressing talk of any kind was not allowed,” more than a few people left the parties with “lumps in their throats.” At the official school send-off, Keast was told that the 1941 yearbook was being dedicated to him. The dedication, the speaker said, was for Keast’s “splendid loyalty shown in furthering athletics and a better school spirit.” The speaker added, “the staff bestows this honor upon you and hopes that in the years to come you will always remind us of our duty to our country and to our school.” Then the crowd broke into song. It began with “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” and ended with “Auld Lang Syne.”
But Keast was as far from Marquette as he could be now. He and his men had not made much progress when they were hit by a wave of rifle and machine gun fire. When one of his men, a company cook by the name of Johnson, stopped, Keast patted him on the back. Johnson was wild-eyed with adrenaline, and Keast tried to calm him. “Don’t let it bother you, soldier, let’s go right in there and keep our eyes open.” Keast knew the situation was desperate. Jap snipers were moving to surround them. Their only hope was to keep shooting, to keep moving straight ahead in the direction of Medendorp and his men. Keast must have known that if Medendorp knew that they had fallen into a trap, he would try to bail them out.
Keast took a few more steps, and then gunfire burst at point-blank range from the jungle ahead. There was a brief flash. Johnson might have heard the dull thud of a bullet entering flesh. Then Keast fell. Johnson could see Keast “lying on the ground on his side, his empty pistol holster exposed above the grass.” He wanted to go to his captain. He needed to get his captain, to pull him out of the jungle and scream for a medic, but bullets snapped and hummed around him. Soon the decision was made for him. The Japanese attacked, and he and the others who had not been hit stumbled back to the roadblock.
The following day, December 2, a party under the command of Captain Meredith Huggins left the battalion command post a mile back on the track. Five hours later, after dodging enemy snipers, Huggins reached the roadblock’s southern perimeter. In need of ammunition and rations, Shirley was overjoyed to see Huggins, but he had bad news for him: Roger Keast was probably dead.
Huggins had no time to mourn his friend. Just minutes after he arrived, a large Japanese force attacked. According to Johnson, who had seen Keast go down the day before, Shirley was “everywhere,” shouting orders and beating back the enemy. Not long after noon, though, Shirley’s luck ran out. A medic saw him go down, ran to him and dragged him into a trench. Shirley wanted to know how bad his wound was. “You’ll be okay,” the medic lied. According to Johnson, Shirley “just slipped off into death.”
As the highest-ranking officer, Huggins was suddenly in charge of the roadblock. In a matter of seven hours he had gone from a supply man to a battlefield commander. Now, battalion headquarters wanted to know: Could he hold the garrison?
Huggins replied, “I’ll hold that place until hell freezes over.”