Chapter 16
BACK AT THE Buna Front, Eichelberger was gearing up for the December 4 attack. After consulting with Colonel John Grose, though, he agreed to postpone the attack, but only by a single day.
Grose had been I Corps inspector general, but now that I Corps was taking over, Eichelberger was replacing Harding’s officers with his own. Grose was an odd choice for a battlefield commander. In a matter of a few days, the colonel went from shuffling papers to leading men.
Grose immediately rubbed the troops the wrong way. According to Stutterin’ Smith, he “arrived like a potentate.”
Grose was taken aback by the condition of the troops, especially Stutterin’ Smith’s men. Some of them, Grose wrote, were on the brink of “nervous exhaustion,” and most of them had fevers, too. Malaria did not keep men off the front lines, either. A soldier’s temperature had to reach 103 degrees before Smith could send him back to an aid station. Smith hated to see sick men going into battle, but he was so shorthanded that he took anyone he could get, fever or not. Searching for troops, he had already stripped the regiment’s Headquarters and Service Companies. Cooks, too, were fighting as riflemen.
At 10:00 on Saturday, December 5, Eichelberger’s attack began with nine B-25 bombers swooping in on Buna Government Station. Artillery and mortars pounded Buna Village. Some of them landed short of the village and burst in the trees just above the heads of Lutjens and his men. Had the shells landed twenty feet shorter, Company E would have been wiped out by friendly fire. Half an hour later, the barrage ended. Then, according to Lutjens, “it was deathly still.”
The troops waded into the jungle. The Japanese were flinging mortars, and Lutjens took cover in an artillery shell hole as rounds crashed through the trees and burst. Shrapnel flew and splinters of wood cut the air. Everywhere around him men lay plastered to the ground in rain puddles.
After waiting out the mortar bombardment, Lutjens and his men were back on their feet. They had advanced only twenty yards when Japanese machine gunners opened up on them. Bullets struck flesh, and six men fell. Blood clouds floated in the air. Then everyone dove for cover, except Sergeant Harold Graber. With his machine gun at his hip, Graber stormed the Japanese. Inspired by Graber’s example, one of Lutjens’ lieutenants attacked, too. Lutjens heard firing, and then saw the lieutenant fall. Seconds later the man got up, stumbled ten more yards, and was hit by another burst of fire. Then Graber went down. Another one of Company E’s men raced forward. Lutjens heard the pop of a grenade fuse and then the sputter. When it blew, he knew he had lost another good man.
Though Graber had taken out a bunker before he was killed, there were still Japanese everywhere, and Lutjens’ platoon was surrounded. Lutjens knew his only hope was to get a message to Captain Schultz. Perhaps Schultz could send the rest of the company forward.
Lutjens decided to try to get through himself. Because the chances of success were slim, he knew it was a job he could not ask any of his men to do. He took only a few steps when a Japanese soldier spotted him and hurled a grenade. The concussion rocked him, then another grenade lodged in the mud next to him. He lunged forward just as it went off, and the grenade tossed him through the air. Lying in the mud, he noticed that the barrel of his tommy gun was bent. Now he did not even have a gun to defend himself, but he was not sure it mattered. He was afraid to reach down, positive the grenade had taken him apart at the hips. At the thought, the strength seeped from his body. His arms felt as heavy as dumbbells. He shivered and then retched.
Lutjens lay there, then slowly he moved his hand down his legs. He was terrified they would be gone, severed below the knee. But they were still there—wet with blood, yes, but they were still there. Lutjens experienced a moment of joy until the soldier who had thrown the grenade started shooting. Lutjens rolled to his side and dragged himself along using his elbows. Disoriented, he nearly slithered into his enemy’s lap.
A bullet ripped through his shirt and another creased his eye. One struck him in the thigh. The pain was enough to make him vomit again. Another bullet slapped dirt in his face. I’m a dead man, he thought. For some reason, though, the Japanese soldier held back. It didn’t make any sense. He could have sauntered over to Lutjens and banged his head in with the butt of his rifle.
Lutjens struggled back to his elbows. This time, he tried to make some sense of where he was. Then he crawled again.
It was a miracle: Somehow he snaked his way to a medic who was sitting in a foxhole with his hands in a man’s gut. Scattered around him lay dead and wounded soldiers. The medic gave Lutjens a handful of sulfanilamide pills, and went back to work on the soldier. Lutjens was full of shrapnel and lead, but the belly wounds came first.
Lutjens eventually pulled himself through the muck back to a field hospital. His pulse was weak, his breathing shallow. He was losing consciousness and the shock was wearing off. His whole body burned as if it were on fire until a medic gave him a shot of morphine.
Like Lutjens’ men, Gus Bailey’s G Company was stranded in the jungle. Eichelberger was furious. He wanted Buna Village taken and called F Company out of reserve. Grose protested—nothing would be gained by throwing another company at the Japanese; they were dug in too well. Stutterin’ Smith also weighed in.
“Sir,” he said. “Pulling F Company out of reserve isn’t going to work.”
Eichelberger was not listening. He had been sent in by MacArthur to capture Buna, and MacArthur was growing impatient. Adamant that Buna fall that day, the three-star general was on the front, directing the troops.
“You will attack!” Eichelberger ordered.
Eichelberger called for Lieutenant Odell and told him what he wanted. Odell was to get as much information from the forward troops as he could and do a brief reconnaissance. Then he was to split up his company, sending half his men up one side of the trail and taking the rest up the other side.
Company F, the general said, was to storm the village and capture Buna. Odell was not sure he heard the general right—take Buna?
“Yes,” Eichelberger said, they were to “finish the job,” and they had need little more than their bayonets to do it.
Odell had his good luck Japanese bayonet that he had taken on November 30. But now he didn’t feel so lucky. None of the other companies had made it to Buna. What the hell made the general think he and his men were going to succeed?
Some of the men, realizing they would be walking into a death trap, refused to go ahead. “If you don’t get going, I have the right to shoot you,” Odell snapped.
“I heard safeties being clicked off,” says one of the soldiers who witnessed the altercation. “Fortunately, someone stepped in and cooler heads prevailed. I do believe that someone would have gladly put a bullet in Lieutenant Odell.”
Reluctantly, Odell’s platoon advanced. In front of the soldiers lay the bodies of other Americans who had tried to take Buna. Odell stepped over the corpses and when he and his men were in position they rushed the village. A storm of Japanese bullets greeted them. Odell screamed for everyone to get down, but not before the Japanese had taken out a number of men.
On the other side, Sergeant George Pravda organized his men. He was only a sergeant, but the company had already lost all its lieutenants. Besides, Pravda was as cool as they came and had already won a Silver Star for an attack on November 30.
Just a few days before, Pravda had come to a buddy’s rescue. Sergeant Jack Olsen had been doing reconnaisance work at Buna Government Station when he was shot in the leg. Unable to walk, he lay in the jungle waiting for someone to find him. He prayed it would be an American and not a Jap. He dared not yell out, though. His unit was not far behind. If he screamed, he would give away its position.
Olson swallowed twelve sulfa pills and waited. Twenty-four hours later, George Pravda found him. Pravda cut the bottom off Olsen’s fatigues, filled the wound with sulfa powder and wrapped it with the piece of cloth, then signaled to some litter men who managed to get Olsen out.
Now Pravda hesitated. He knew the trail ahead was a death trap. The last thing he wanted to do was to send these men forward. They were more than friends; they were family, brothers. While F Company trained in Louisiana, Pravda served as its reporter for the Daily Tribune in Grand Haven, Michigan. He knew who came down with measles, who was sunburned, who was a regular at the weekend picture shows, who was homesick, and because it was his job to check them in at night, who liked to carouse and who did not. He knew their wives and sweethearts, their mothers and fathers, the names of their dogs, their company nicknames—Baby Dumpling, the Bugler, Wrong Entrance—and laced his correspondences with amusing anecdotes and folksy yarns about life in Louisiana. He wrote about the heat, mosquitoes, mud, cotton and watermelon, fried chicken, funny deep-South drawls, black shoeshine boys.
The men of Company F relied on Sergeant Pravda’s discretion, and Pravda never disappointed them. He never printed anything that might give family members back home reason for alarm or sweethearts cause to worry about whether their men were straying. But after earning their trust, how could he now send them up against Japanese snipers, machine gunners, and mortarmen when he knew some of them were going to be killed?
Pravda instructed his men to remove their bayonets. It was an unorthodox way to run an attack, plus Odell had just ordered them to insert bayonets, but Pravda had been at Buna long enough to make the call.
“No bayonets?” asked one of his corporals.
“That’s right,” answered Pravda. “No bayonets.”
Pravda was worried that with bayonets the men would get hung up in the jungle’s swarm of vines and limbs.
Pravda and his men made it all the way to the mouth of Entrance Creek and inadvertently crossed over into Buna Government Station. When Pravda realized where he was, he called for reinforcements. He had made a wrong turn and now he and his men were staring at the biggest prize of all—the Government Station.
No one could believe the news. “He’s at the goddamn Government Station! We gotta get him some men!”
But the men never arrived, and Pravda was forced to pull back. Not before he was shot and seriously wounded, though. The bullet entered his arm, traveled through his back and exited at his neck. A few more inches and it would have severed his spine. Now he was being carried out on a stretcher while Japanese snipers tried to pick off the litter men.
Back at the field hospital, where Pravda would spend the night, doctors were working to keep men alive. On December 3, when Russell Buys was shot and went back for medical attention, he warned the medics to expect heavy casualties because soon there was going to be a “big push on.”
Buys knew what he was talking about. Though he was a cook, cooks at Buna did not get a break. They fought shoulder to shoulder with the riflemen. In fact, Buys had already taken a few Japs and risked his life in the process.
While guarding the company command post, he had seen enemy soldiers crossing Entrance Creek by way of the wood bridge. When he reported the activity to Gus Bailey, Bailey treated him like anything but a cook.
“Well, then, get up there and shoot ’em” was all Bailey said.
Buys had something of a reputation in the company. He had grown up on a farm in Muskegon, where he was always shooting something. At Camp Beauregard he had finished at the top of the company on the firing range, using .22s and .30-06 bolt-action rifles. When the scores came in, the officer in charge chided the rest of the guys. “You guys let a cook beat you!” he roared. “You sorry SOBs, you let a goddamn cook beat you!”
Buys crept up toward the creek and squeezed between some mangrove roots. Then he put his M-1 to his shoulder and sighted in on a spot about two hundred yards away on the bridge. When a group of Japanese soldiers tried crossing he sent three of them spilling into the creek.
On the day Buys was shot, Bailey had sent him to the front lines to get hot rice to the troops. On the way back a firefight broke out, and Buys took a blow to his shoulder that felt as if a heavyweight fighter had unloaded on him. Turning around to punch the SOB who had hit him, Buys realized that he had been shot. He did not know if it was a Jap sniper or one of his own guys. It did not matter to him—a Jap bullet or friendly fire, “it hurt the same.” Another bullet flew just past his head, and Buys dropped to the ground. When the shooting stopped, he crouched down low and hustled back to the aid station. The medic on duty told him he was a lucky man—the wound would get him out of Buna and they would not have to amputate his arm. The bullet had just missed shattering his shoulder bone.
East of the trail, Herman Bottcher looked sternly at Jastrzembski and DiMaggio. “I want eighteen men,” he said. They didn’t dare say no.
Per instructions from Bailey and Captain Hantlemann, Bottcher had already scouted the approach to Buna, where the Americans had run into murderous fire from snipers, machine gunners, and roving patrols. If he and his men could get around the interlocking bunkers and pillboxes, they could isolate the village from Buna Government Station.
Far to the right of the trail, Bottcher and his men slipped through a field of kunai grass and pushed north through jungle packed thick with sago and nipa palms. Overhead, the trees’ branches were knotted and twisted. “Watch the trees,” Bottcher warned. “Be on the lookout for snipers.”
It was late in the afternoon. Already the fruit bats were gathering in the sky. Like the late-day rains, the men could always count on the bats. They left their treetop lairs and swirled through the forest canopy on wings the size of a hawk’s.
Ahead Jastrzembski saw it—a pillbox. What the hell were they going to do now? He had no sooner said the words than he saw Bottcher bent over at the waist zigzagging with slabs of mud stuck to his boots. He slipped a grenade through the firing slit of the pillbox and dove into the jungle. Jastrzembski watched with relief as the grenade exploded.
After taking out the pillbox, they forded a tidal creek, holding their guns high over their heads, knowing that one Japanese machine gunner or one well-tossed grenade could take them all out. They watched for crocodiles, too—Buna’s rivers and creeks were full of crocodiles dining on dead bodies. Eventually the creeks and rivers filled with corpses, and even the men with chlorination tablets refused to drink the water.
Scrambling up the muddy banks of the creek, the men discovered a large dead snake rotting in the sun. The stench was overwhelming. Then, following the creek north, before they knew it they were at the edge of the beach, and suddenly Japanese soldiers opened fire on them. In less than five minutes, three of Bottcher’s group were dead and four more wounded. One of Bottcher’s men volunteered to try to take out the Japanese machine gun nest that had done the damage. As he ran forward, grenades landed at his feet, throwing him and a cloud of sand into the air. Wounded, the man squirmed in the sand.
“Lie still!” Bottcher yelled. “Lie still!”
Some of the men went out to get him and dragged him back. As the sun disappeared, they dug in. Bottcher radioed back to Gus Bailey, telling him that they were at the beach smack in the middle of Buna Village and the Government Station.
Bottcher and his men had not taken Buna, but they had broken the stalemate. In a matter of hours they had gained more ground than anyone had on either the Urbana or Warren Front in the two and a half weeks since the battle began.
Boice had not heard yet and had already written in his diary that the assault on Buna “was not successful.” And back at the command post, Eichelberger was fretting over the day’s failures. While he had been inspecting the front, a Japanese sniper almost blew his head off. Though Eichelberger escaped death by a whisker, the bullet struck his aide, a young man for whom he had great affection. “Full of grief,” Eichelberger carried him back to the field hospital, where doctors fought to save his life.
News from the Warren Front was that the all-out attack had failed miserably. Twenty minutes into the attack, the recently delivered Bren gun carriers—small, open-air tanklike vehicles—bogged down in the mud and got stuck on the tree stumps of the Duropa Plantation. The Japanese assaulted the carriers with machine guns, an antitank gun, hand grenades, and “sticky” bombs.
The Americans who advanced in support of the Australians manning the carriers fared no better. Under the blazing tropical sun, those who were not killed or wounded were laid low by heat prostration. According to the colonel in charge of the attack, the Americans had “hit” Colonel Yamamoto’s forces and “bounced off.”
For Eichelberger, the defeat was very discouraging. Freighters had brought the carriers up from Milne Bay along the newly charted water route. Once they reached the front, Higgins boats put them ashore. The Higgins boats were the first landing craft to reach New Guinea, and Eichelberger had hoped that the boats and what they were capable of delivering might help turn the tide of the battle.
Rather than turning the tide of the battle, though, the events of December 5 convinced Eichelberger that he was in for the fight of his life. Still, he had to deal with MacArthur, whose headquarters, according to one Australian general, reminded him of a “bloody barometer in a cyclone, up and down every two minutes.” If only MacArthur would take the time to visit the battlefield, he could see what Eichelberger and his men were up against.
In the eyes of many of the Red Arrow men, December 5 solidified Eichelberger’s poor reputation. He was a general who was willing to lose good soldiers in heedless frontal attacks. He was the “Butcher of Buna,” “Eichelbutcher.” Later, with equal parts bitterness and black humor, they would call the cemetery at Buna “Eichelberger Square.”
Eichelberger was not without self-reflection, however. He would later write of that battle: “I had seen the litters coming back. I had seen walking wounded being led from the front. I had seen men lying in ditches, weeping with battle shock. I had visited dressing stations. Yet there were advances to be made, and decisions which must not be governed by my own weaknesses or emotions.”
In a letter he wrote to his wife that night, Eichelberger said that the December 5 battle “will always remain with me as long as I live.”
By the time he wrote to Sutherland later that evening, though, Eichelberger’s mood had bounced back. Bottcher’s breakthrough had redeemed an utter failure on both fronts. Eichelberger was now full of praise for the Red Arrow men. “The number of our troops,” he said, “that tried to avoid combat today could be numbered on your fingers.”
Grose, too, was moved to revise his opinion of Smith’s Ghost Mountain boys. “The battalion’s men,” he wrote in his diary, “have been courageous and willing, but they have been pushed almost beyond the limit of human endurance.”
At dawn on December 6, after a “terrific rainstorm” the Japanese assaulted “Bottcher’s Corner” from two directions. Expecting the raids, Bottcher had set up a machine gun the night before, and he and his small group repelled both attacks.
That night, according to Sam DiMaggio, the men “fixed their bayonets in preparation for hand-to-hand combat.” It was impossible to sleep. DiMaggio licked at the dried salt that had formed around his mouth and wondered about the turn his life had taken. He had left the Malleable Iron Company, vowing never to go back. Now here he was, a soldier fighting for his life.
Land crabs skittered along the beach, through the palm leaves and the delicate snailshells, birds whistled from the nearby trees, and waves slapped against the barges. Jastrzembski was holding himself together through sheer force of will. His senses deceived him. Everywhere he saw Japanese slithering through the sand. Every noise sounded to him like an enemy soldier poised to bayonet him in the belly. He could almost feel it, ripping through his body, tearing apart his insides.
At 4:00 a.m., the false dawn lapsed back into darkness. Jastrzembski studied the sky and the unfamiliar stars, and then his eyes grew heavy. All he wanted to do was sleep and then he smelled it: the jungle. In the past two months he had grown accustomed to it, but there it was again, the odor of rot and decay.
Two hours later, Japanese troops crept toward Bottcher’s Corner, but a forward scout, Corporal Harold Mitchell, caught a glimpse of them. Mitchell let out a yell and charged the Japanese with a fixed bayonet. The Japanese were so startled by the rush that they failed to attack. Bottcher grabbed one of the machine guns, and together with the other machine gunner and his riflemen raked the beach, the brush, and the small coconut grove. During the skirmish, Bottcher was hit in the hand by an enemy bullet, but one of his men wrapped it and Bottcher returned to the machine gun. Mitchell made it back to their position unscathed.
That afternoon, Company E, minus its longtime leader Lutjens, and Company G made another stab at taking the village. When the attack bogged down, Stutterin’ Smith came forward, moved out front with Gus Bailey, and led the charge. It was as dark as the sky before a summer storm and in no time the companies lost sight of each other. Smith groped his way forward through the airless jungle.
Smith had not gone more than twenty yards when the Japanese began a rhythmic chant. It was the first time he had ever heard it, the precursor to a banzai charge. He took cover behind a tree and waited just as a mortar landed over his head. Hot metal fragments rained down. Five of his men fell. Smith wondered how he had escaped getting hit and then he moved his hand across his neck and up and down his back. He felt blood, and the next thing he knew an aidman was running toward him to put a dressing on his wound. Smith protested that it was just a shallow flesh wound. But the aidman insisted on bandaging it anyway, and encouraged Smith to return to the aid station. The attack had stalled; otherwise Smith would never have agreed to go back.
Back at the aid station Smith ran into Captain Boet, the battalion surgeon with whom he had crossed the Owen Stanleys. Boet took a look at the wound. Hell, Smith thought, what’s the big deal; it’s just a flesh wound. When Boet finished, though, Smith knew it was serious.
“It hit the kidney,” Boet said to his friend. “It’s a bad deal.”
“Hell no,” Smith replied. “I’m alive.”
Boet then summoned four native litter bearers and instructed them to carry the major to the portable hospital.
Lacking the equipment to treat him, the doctors at the portable hospital sent him on to the Evacuation Hospital. At the Evac Hospital, doctors stripped Smith and threw his putrid clothes and shabby boots into a fire. When they put him on a scale Smith was astonished by the weight he had lost. He was down to 138 pounds. At six feet three inches that meant he was nothing but skin and bones. After they had picked the metal fragments out of his back, they confirmed Boet’s diagnosis: Smith’s kidney had been damaged. They would have to get him back to Port Moresby and on to Australia as soon as possible.
That evening, a dull pain settled into Smith’s side. The carriers lay him in a makeshift cot, which they had fashioned using poles lashed together with a webbing of bush vines. Smith felt self-conscious. Around him, badly injured soldiers lay in their cots groaning. His wound was much worse than he knew.
Word was sent forward to the companies of the 2nd Battalion that Smith had been seriously injured, but probably would recover. Gus Bailey must have been relieved to hear that. He liked Smith as much as Smith liked him. How often would you find a battalion commander out front leading his men into battle? It was the exact principle that Bailey had adhered to: Never ask a man to do something you won’t do yourself. Anyway, Bailey was glad that he would not have to mark Smith down in his journal in which each day he recorded the names of G Company men and battalion officers killed in battle.
Captain Jim Boice took over for Smith, and his first order was to direct a platoon under the command of Lieutenant Odell to try to creep or shoot its way to the beach. No attempt had been made to reinforce Bottcher and his troops, and they were struggling to hold on. Boice realized that to lose the beach would set the American effort back three weeks.
Odell’s task was to get to the beach and then to extend Bottcher’s line to the sea. In the process he would have to destroy two enemy outposts: one not far from Bottcher and his men, the other in the direction of the village. Odell and twelve men made it to Bottcher without a fight, then threw grenades at the nearest outpost. When no one fired back, they went to investigate, running part of the way and then dropping to their bellies and crawling. Odell led the way. When they reached the pillbox, they discovered a number of Japanese soldiers either dead or dying, and bayoneted them all.
Next, they moved on the second outpost. Not far down, they encountered fifteen Japanese soldiers huddled in a shallow trench. Using English, one of the Japanese soldiers shouted that he and his men were prepared to surrender. Odell suspected a hoax. Without responding to the Japanese soldier’s request, he and his men rushed the trench, shot and bayoneted the enemy soldiers, and then closed in on the village. From the village, machine guns answered. Odell had now lost the element of surprise. He and his men retreated to the first outpost near Bottcher’s Corner where they set up another machine gun.
They had just settled into foxholes when Japanese soldiers from Buna Government Station fired on them. The bullets were zipping over their heads. “It was quite a sensation,” according to Odell, “stretched out in a foxhole (8 inches deep in water…) watching the leaves of the trees and bushes above your head rapidly assuming the appearance of cheese cloth.”
Odell was plastered against the sand wall of his foxhole waiting for the firing to subside when fifty screaming enemy soldiers attacked firing rifle grenades. One of Odell’s men raked the beach with the machine gun and stopped the assault. For the next few hours, Japanese soldiers crawled around the perimeter. Just after sunset, a dozen men pushed their way to the beach to reinforce Odell’s position, which was so close to both the village and the Government Station that Odell could hear the Japanese “talking and walking about.”
Sitting in their sandpit, some of Bottcher and Odell’s men watched in the direction of the village. The others kept their eyes on the Government Station. Bottcher heard something suspicious out on the water. Then Jastrzembski caught sight of a Japanese barge trying to get reinforcements to Buna Village. Bottcher and the other machine gunner were behind their machine guns, and as soon as they spotted the silhouette of the lead boat, tracers cut through the darkness. The barrels of their machine guns grew so hot that DiMaggio poured water from his canteen over them. Suddenly, an explosion rocked DiMaggio. Then he saw the barge go up in a shock of flames. Japanese soldiers dove overboard. Swinging his machine gun back and forth, Bottcher hit them as they swam for shore. Jastrzembski saw the bodies, illuminated by the glowing phosphorescence, roll in on breakers. The following morning, as the sun radiated through great clouds that had spilled rain on the north coast for the entire night, Jastrzembski saw that the waves had deposited the corpses onto the beach like driftwood.
That morning, Jim Boice hoped to capitalize on Bottcher’s breakthrough. With the help of two well-used flamethrowers that had just come in by lugger, and with Bottcher on the beach preventing Japanese reinforcements from reaching Buna Village, he hoped to overwhelm the bunker that had stymied the battalion’s advance for weeks.
The flamethrower’s operator advanced on the bunker. Twenty men covered him. He got within thirty feet of the Japanese position, stepped into a clearing, and turned on the weapon. The flame singed his eyebrows and sputtered. It lit the field on fire but fell well short of the Japanese. Then the Japanese opened up on the operator and three of the cover men, killing them instantly.
The weapon that Boice hoped would end the stalemate at the front was defective. Once again, the soldiers of the 2nd Battalion would have to resort to direct assaults on Japanese positions, a primitive tactic that guaranteed the battalion would lose more good men.
By December 8, 1942, Japan’s hold on the north coast of the Papuan Peninsula was slipping. The jubilation that had followed the attack on Pearl Harbor and the beginning of Japan’s “Great East Asia War” one year before had turned to despair.
On December 8, First Lieutenant Jitsutaro Kamio wrote in his diary: “Today is finally the one year anniversary. We should have a ceremony but everyone is exhausted.”
Although Allied ground forces had registered few significant gains, with the opening of new airfields at Dobodura and Popondetta, General Kenney’s pilots stepped up the pressure on the Japanese, slowly tightening the noose, making it almost impossible for ships to deliver troops, food, medicine, or ammunition.
Kuba Satonao, a first-class mechanic in a naval transport unit, wrote that because of the shortage of ammunition, officers had instructed soldiers to “make every bullet count.”
The Allied supply situation, on the other hand, had vastly improved. Supplies that Harding had requisitioned weeks before being dismissed began to arrive. Engineers had just completed the Dobodura-Siremi jeep track and a number of other important supply tracks. New coastal luggers to replace those that had been destroyed in mid-November had just arrived at Oro Bay. The Americans now had mortars and large artillery and enough ammunition, including delayed-action mortar shells, to do real damage. They also had a new four-inch-to-one-mile Buna map, which forward artillery and air observers used to help operators of the big guns zero in on their targets.
As a consequence, the Americans hammered the coast. Kuba Satonao wrote, “All we do is get severely bombed. Buna is gradually falling into a state of danger.” A few days later, he wrote again, “now they are coming over at night. We lived till today, but it is something unusual. There are tears in my eyes as I realize the meaning of the fact that I am alive.” Days passed before he was able to write again: “From early morning today there was mortar fire around us. From the left there is considerable large artillery fire…. There is a constant flight of enemy planes overhead. We are now in a delaying and holding action. The amount of provisions is small and there is no chance of replenishing ammunition. But we have bullets of flesh. No matter what comes we are not afraid. If they come, let them come…. We have the aid of Heaven. We are warriors of Yamato.”
When Satonao writes of “bullets of flesh,” he is referring to the suicide squad. Later in the war, as the Japanese turned to acts of desperation, suicide squads, of which the kamikaze was a manifestation, became common. Early on, the suicide squad still served a practical purpose—to incite terror in the hearts of the enemy. At Buna, as elsewhere, the suicide squad or “Kesshi Tai” (literally “Determined-to-Die Unit”) had no shortage of volunteers.
The sun dropped fast on the evening of December 8, and Captain Yasuda made one last attempt to reach Buna Village. As a diversion, he had a force of forty attack from Buna Village. Then he sent out a hundred men from the Government Station, hoping they might slip into the village without being detected. But Bottcher, Odell, and their troops caught them moving on the beach and gunned them down, finishing off the wounded with their bayonets. Inland, Boice’s troops repelled them, too. With machine guns and mortars, they drove the Japanese back.
On the afternoon of December 9, Lieutenant James Downer, who was now commanding Company E, volunteered to lead a patrol against the main Japanese bunker position at the southern edge of the village: the one that the flamethrower had failed to reduce the previous day.
Downer’s plan, though, was the same one that had failed time and time again—he would storm the bunker and try to stick a grenade through the firing slit while the rest of the patrol covered him. Downer bravely set off through the jungle but was picked off by an enemy sniper. Two of his men crawled out to get him, pulling themselves along on their elbows. But when they reached him, they realized he was dead and dragged him back. For the rest of the day, Company E tried to maneuver around the bunker, drawing blistering fire from the Japanese defenders. That night the shooting stopped and Downer’s patrol managed to get close enough to see that the bunker had been abandoned. Perhaps their constant pressure had worn down the Japanese. Whatever the reason, the important thing was that the bunker fell at last to Downer’s patrol.
Eichelberger was heartened by the news. To his eye, the men were fighting now like real soldiers.
One Japanese soldier noted the change. Early on he’d written that “The American is untrained, afraid, and stumbles about in the jungle…. They fire at any sound or shadow, wasting ammunition, giving their positions away…. They are like scared children who cannot learn…. We can kill them all….” By mid-December he wrote, “The enemy is very hard to see in the jungle…. Enemy tactics are to hurl heavy mortar fire on us and rush in close behind.”
While the Red Arrow men had “learned their business,” as the official army historian said, three weeks of constant fighting had exacted a toll, especially on the men at Bottcher’s Corner.
On December 11, twenty-six soldiers from the 127th U.S. Infantry fought their way to the beach to relieve Bottcher, Odell, and their men. For soldiers new to the front, the sight of decomposing corpses lying strewn across the sand must have been deeply unsettling. The stench, according to Odell, was “unendurable.” The new men buried the bodies and then took over Bottcher’s position.
Before leaving the beach, Bottcher had to make good on an order he had received. Allied Intelligence, G-2, wanted a prisoner to interrogate. Bottcher and Corporal Mitchell discovered a wounded Japanese soldier huddling in a foxhole. When the man reached for his gun, Mitchell knocked him out with the butt of his rifle.
Mitchell washed the dried blood and sand from the soldier’s face. The soldier came to, and when he did, he was terrified, expecting the Americans to slit his throat. Instead, Bottcher gave him a drink and poured water on his chest. Then he and Mitchell bandaged the soldier’s leg, gave him a piece of chocolate, and delivered the prisoner to an aid station.
As worn out as the men at Bottcher’s Corner were, the rest of the battalion was in no better shape. After twelve all-out attacks on Buna Village in three weeks, Stutterin’ Smith’s 2nd Battalion was barely capable of holding the ground they had won. Companies had been reduced to the size of platoons, platoons to the size of squads. Companies E and F each had fewer than fifty soldiers left to fight, a quarter of their original strength. The battalion that had crossed Ghost Mountain with nearly nine hundred soldiers now had fewer than three hundred men left.
At the roadblock four miles southwest of Bottcher’s Corner, on the other side of the Girua River, the Japanese attacked, and time and again Huggins and his men held.
“The situation was utter chaos,” Huggins recalled. “Nobody knew what was going on. We were green kids….”
Second Lieutenant Bill Sikkel saw the chaos first hand. He and Captain Russ Wildey managed to sneak and shoot their way north toward the roadblock. The foray took the better part of a day, and because they had not been issued compasses, they had to guess their way through the jungle. They arrived just in time: Huggins and his men had been under attack for thirty-two hours and were running low on ammunition.
Sikkel was struck by the scene. Bodies of the Japanese dead lay scattered around the flanks. The Americans hugged the inside of the slit trench waiting for the next Japanese attack.
The patrol spent the night, and the following morning Sikkel and Wildey brought out seventeen wounded and sick men and navigated their way back to the battalion command post. Sikkel was used to the jungle. Two weeks before, on the eve of his twenty-second birthday, just before setting out on his first patrol, he had emptied his pockets and told Father Dzienis to send the contents back to his mother in case he did not make it. He had been maneuvering through the swamps and the tangled forest each and every day since then. Doing it with wounded men, though, was especially dicey. He kept a close eye out for the deer-like imprint of the split-toed Japanese tong. It was a sure sign that snipers lurked nearby.
Back up the track from where Sikkel had come, not far outside the southwest perimeter of the roadblock, Lieutenant Hershel Horton had gone out on what he called a “mercy patrol” to pick up the dog tags of Keast’s group. After hearing the story of the ambush, he figured Keast was dead, but part of him could not help but hope. Perhaps his friend was lying somewhere in the jungle, still breathing.
When shots burst from behind a thicket of sago palms, Horton and the three men with him dove for cover. Horton was hit. His buddies tried to crawl to him, but Japanese snipers had them pinned down. When the shooting subsided, Horton realized that his buddies had somehow made it out. He then dragged himself forty feet through the mud to what he described as a “grass shanty.” Wounded, with bullet holes in his hip and right leg, “semi-delirious,” and without food or water, Horton waited for two days for his friends to return. Finally, on December 3, one of his buddies, accompanied by a medic, was able to reach him. But the two men could not lift Horton, so the medic gave Horton a drink of water, which he lapped at like a thirsty dog, then bandaged his wounds and promised to return as soon as possible with help. True to his word, the medic came back with help the following day. He gave Horton water again, but when an enemy sniper shot and killed his assistant, the medic was forced to crawl away. Lying in the hot sun, Horton craved fluids and pawed at the jungle humus, trying to dig a hole deep enough to reach water. “Life,” he wrote in his diary, had become a “terrible nightmare.”
On December 5, while Horton was waiting for his buddies to retrieve him, Lieutenant Pete Dal Ponte led a sixty-man ration and ammunition party through the jungle. Dal Ponte knew he had to reach Huggins. Dal Ponte’s party, though, was not made up of choice riflemen. His men were cooks, clerks, and mortarmen who had been pressed into duty. Each man carried forty pounds of supplies. Though only a mile separated them from the roadblock, Dal Ponte had to contend with hip-deep swamps and Tsukamoto’s troops, who lay dug in like badgers between the American command post and Huggins.
Dal Ponte and his men had not gone far when Tsukamoto’s troops sprung upon them. Despite the heavy loads and their lack of fighting experience, Dal Ponte’s men drove them back, and at one juncture almost penetrated their defense and pushed through close to the southern end of roadblock. But the Japanese rallied and surrounded them. Dal Ponte and his men were fighting for their lives.
Late in the day, Dal Ponte’s party managed to blast its way back to the American command post, limping in with half a dozen casualties and two dead soldiers.
For the next two days, supply parties tried to reach the roadblock, only to be turned away by Japanese fire.
The signalmen, struggling to keep the lines of communication open, had it just as hard—they had never strung wire across a tropical wilderness before. They could not run it along an established trail because as soon as the Japs saw it, they had cut it. So they had to hide it, wading into swamps, risking their lives in the sniper-infested jungle. The signalmen divided into two-man teams. Acting as a lookout, one soldier toted a rifle while the other carried a little reel of braided copper and metal combat wire.
While supply parties tried to push through to Huggins and the signalmen strung and repaired wire, the Australians tried to dislodge Tsukamoto’s forces. They met with no better luck than the Americans. Tsukamoto had positioned his men throughout the jungle, and they subjected the bewildered Australians to a fierce cross fire. After two days of fighting, the Australians counted 350 men dead or wounded. Unable to withstand those kind of casualties, the Australians would not mount another attack for almost two weeks.
Dal Ponte, though, was not to be denied by Tsukamoto’s firepower. He had friends at the roadblock and he knew the situation was desperate. Early in the morning on December 8, he and his party trudged into the jungle determined once again to reach Huggins. Sunlight flickered through branches, cockatoos screeched, and crowned pigeons darted through the trees. Three hundred yards south of the roadblock, the jungle erupted with gunfire. From both sides of the trail, machine gun fire bore down on the men.
Dal Ponte knew they would be mowed down if they could not locate the guns. His plan was a crazy one: He would expose himself to fire while his men got a bead on the machine gunners. His men must have wondered if he had a death wish. He would be cut down in seconds.
Before anyone could stop him, Dal Ponte dashed out from behind a copse of trees. Bullets slapped through the underbrush all around Dal Ponte, but miraculously he was untouched. And now his men knew where the shooting was coming from. Slipping into the forest with his band of cooks, clerks, and mortarmen, Dal Ponte stalked the snipers. When they reached the enemy positions, the Japanese were gone.
That afternoon, Dal Ponte made it to the roadblock (now called Huggins Roadblock) where Huggins had established a double perimeter, two men to a foxhole. The men were alive, but starving and nearly out of ammunition. The Japanese had since established another roadblock farther to the north and surrounded Huggins’ position with snipers.
When Dal Ponte arrived, he discovered that one of those snipers had put a bullet in Huggins’ head. Huggins, though, had the luck of the Irish, and was busy directing his men despite his wound. Dal Ponte could see that Huggins needed medical attention, and reluctantly Huggins agreed to turn over command to him and let Dal Ponte’s party lead him out of the roadblock.
That evening, having made it through the gauntlet of Tsukamoto’s troops, Huggins briefed Medendorp. At the roadblock, men were burning up with malaria fevers. They had ringworm and their feet were going bad. They lived in filthy holes, unable to dispose of their feces. Corpses festered in the hot sun and it rained every night. Of the 225 men holding the garrison, barely half of them were able to fight. Medical supplies, food, and ammunition were almost nonexistent. Perhaps worst of all, the troops were subjected to repeated attacks and did not dare sleep. Sometimes at night the Japanese crept so close that the Americans reached out and grabbed their ankles. Pulling them into their trenches, they slashed the Japanese soldiers’ throats with razor-sharp knives and bayonets.
Though Medendorp’s Cannon Company and the men of the 3rd Battalion’s Company K were not engaged in near-constant combat, the conditions they were enduring were hardly better than those Huggins described at the roadblock. A soldier wrote in K Company’s journal that “between mosquitoes, Japs, heat, bad water, and short rations, it has sure been hell…. What is left of the company is a pretty sickbunch of boys.” All the officers who had crossed the mountains with Medendorp were “gone, dead, wounded or sick.”
Sick or not, men were forced to go out on patrols and were often the targets of Japanese snipers and machine gunners, especially at dawn and dusk, when the Japanese liked to attack. Patrols often returned with wounded men. The dead, though, they left behind. It was especially painful to leave dead buddies lying in mud puddles. The Japanese picked them clean as a bone, grabbing anything of value—grenades, lighters, knives, rings—and mementos. Photographs, though, they discarded—often, soldiers would find wedding pictures and photographs of children alongside the trail. But the Americans had no choice but to leave their buddies behind. Carrying them through the swamp in order to bury them back at the command post was an impossible feat, so they gritted their teeth and turned their heads in shame.
Not even Father Dzienis, despite his efforts, was able to retrieve many of the bodies. When he succeeded, he and a volunteer or two would carry the corpse back to the little cemetery he had built just behind the front lines. Dzienis remained utterly devoted to his men. Even in the midst of battle he held services for them—Catholics, Lutherans, agnostics, it did not matter to him. Though his legs “were one mass of running sores,” when he was not at the aid station comforting wounded men, maintaining morale, delivering last rites, or inviting soldiers to worship with him, he crawled out to the front lines to “visit his flock.” The soldiers were always glad to see him. “Chaplain Dzienis is here!” Soldiers would pass along the news from slit trench to slit trench.
The day after Dal Ponte’s men pulled Huggins out of the roadblock, soldiers on all fronts learned that the Australians had taken Gona.
Prior to the Japanese invasion in July 1942, Gona had been one of the prettiest spots on the peninsula’s north coast, with a church built of woven sago leaves and a handsome mission building with a red tin roof that caught rainwater. On the grounds, shaded by elegant palms and tulip trees, sat a school and a green, groomed cricket field. The pathways were lined with red hibiscus. Just down from the mission, the blue waters of the Solomon Sea washed over an idyllic stretch of black sand.
When the Australians seized Gona four and a half months later, they were horrified by what they saw. The Japanese had reinforced their bunkers, which doubled as latrines, with their own dead. Inside, they had used corpses as firing steps. They had stacked them with their rice and ammunition. They slept beside them. The bunkers reeked so badly the Japanese soldiers had resorted to fighting in gas masks. Partially decayed bodies floated in nearby lagoons.
In two days, the Australians buried almost a thousand Japanese bodies. Not a single enemy soldier remained alive.
For the Australians, the cost of victory at Gona was huge. One brigade lost over 40 percent of its troops. The victory must have given General Vasey pause. Perhaps he should have resisted the urge to “annihilate” the Japanese. By cutting off their supply and troop pipeline, he could have watched and waited while they starved.
There was a lesson to be learned at Gona. MacArthur, though, failed to recognize it.
The day after the Australians stormed Gona, another ration party made it to the roadblock. Upon returning to the command post, the leader of the ration party delivered another worrisome report. The men at the roadblock continued to deteriorate. If they hoped to survive, they needed to be supplied at least once every two days.
Medendorp had nothing but admiration for the men supplying Huggins. “These patrols,” he wrote later, “marched the flesh right off their feet, leaving in many cases sores that were so deep that they showed red meat.”
On December 12, Lieutenant Horton waited not far from the trail, hoping that someone might find him. Weak and able to dig for only seconds at a time, it had taken him four days to reach water. Even though it was “polluted by the rotting bodies” that lay around him, he slurped at the muddy puddle. A day later, he heard a rescue party traipsing through the jungle. They were looking for him, but a blinding rainstorm and Japanese snipers drove them away. Horton dared not call out. “The Japanese are living within 15 yards of me,” Horton wrote. “I see them every day.”
Horton tried to make a splint for his leg. He rose to his feet unsteadily, but his strength gave out. When he sat down and leaned against a tree, a Japanese sniper, who had seen him moving, shot him in the neck and shoulder. Horton lay at the base of the tree, waiting for the next bullet. “Why has God forsaken me?” he wrote in his diary. “Why is he making me suffer this terrible end?” Later, he continued, “I have imagined several other rescue parties…. My right hip is broken and my right leg, both compound fractures; else I could have been out of here in those first couple of days, wounds or no wounds. My life has been good, but I am so young and have so many things undone that a man of 29 should do…. I shall continue to pray for a miracle of rescue…. God bless you my loved ones…. I shall see you all again some day. I prepare to meet my Maker. Love, Hershel.”
Horton died that day, lying fifty feet from his friend Roger Keast.