Chapter 17

CAGED BIRDS

The caged bird, in his dreams

Returns to his homeland

Forgetting my own self, every day and night,

I think of my father and mother in the homeland

And wonder how they are

I look upon the river

And it is like the one

I knew so well in childhood

far from here.

IN MID-DECEMBER, Cannon Company and Company K moved from their position southwest of the trail to the rear. In a letter to his youngest sister, Alice, Alfred Medendorp wrote that his teeth were falling out because of a vitamin deficiency. But even the rear offered little relief. Company K’s journal keeper wrote, “The men are getting sicker. Their nerves are cracking. They are praying for relief. [They] must have it soon.”

The soldiers had all seen enough. A GI was brought in with the entire top of his head blown off. Another’s face was missing. Another had been shot between the shoulder blades. Medendorp witnessed the man’s agony: “The spinal cord lay exposed. The muscles could be seen and their contractions watched; the lungs were torn open in spots and with every exhalation of the breath several fine sprays of blood shot up.” Worse yet was the smell of the dead. “It is with us always,” wrote Medendorp, “and flies by the millions.”

East of the Girua River, General Eichelberger relieved the 2nd Battalion. He replaced it with the 127th, which had arrived at Dobodura, preparing to end what the Ghost Mountain boys had begun.

For MacArthur, the 127th could not attack soon enough. On December 13, a convoy carrying Major General Kensaku Oda, who was to take control of Horii’s South Seas Detachment, landed with eight hundred troops. When MacArthur got the news he panicked and immediately wrote Eichelberger.

Dear Bob:

Time is fleeting and our dangers increase with its passage. However admirable individual acts of courage may be however spendid and electrical your presence has proven; remember that your mission is to take Buna. All other things are merely subsidiary to this. No alchemy is going to produce this for you; it can only be done in battle and sooner or later this battle must be engaged. Hasten your preparations, and when you are ready—strike, for as I have said, time is working desperately against us.

Cordially, MacArthur

The following morning, the troops of the 127th stormed Buna Village. Expecting to have to wrest the village at bayonet point, the men were surprised when they entered unopposed. Suspecting a trap, they scoured the area for enemy soldiers. The Japanese were gone. After clinging to the village for three weeks, the enemy had vacated without a fight, as they had done three months earlier at Ioribaiwa Ridge.

The men of the 127th were shocked by what they discovered: a blighted landscape of scarred and beheaded trees, shell holes filled with water and mud and excrement, unburied bodies, the ruins of native huts, discarded clothing and ration cans, abandoned guns, very little food, and only basic medical supplies. But the Japanese bunkers stood intact even after direct mortar and artillery hits.

Two days later, Eichelberger’s troops registered another mini-victory. Colonel White Smith’s 2nd Battalion, 128th U.S. Infantry, down to only 350 effectives, stormed and took the Coconut Grove, the second major Japanese position west of Entrance Creek.

MacArthur’s headquarters wasted no time trumpeting the news, and on December 15, the lead headline of the New York Times blared, “ALLIES TAKE BUNA IN NEW GUINEA.”

It was typical MacArthur-esque hyperbole. What the front-page story omitted was that Buna Government Station east of Entrance Creek, the Allies’ main objective, was still firmly in Japanese hands. It also failed to mention was that the Japanese possessed a large chunk of land—the Warren Front—east of the Government Station, and another one west of the Girua River at Sanananda.

Despite the triumphant New York Times headline, the reality was that the war in New Guinea had already dragged on much longer than the Americans or the Australians thought it would. There had been successes—Buna Village and Gona—but in the big picture they were minor victories. Early on, the plan had been to envelop the eleven-mile-long front as if a giant hand were closing inexorably around the Japanese. The Americans would come up the coast while the Australians moved down. A combined American-Australian army would move north via the Sanananda track, while an entirely American force would attack the Triangle.

A week and a half before the capture of Buna Village, after the failure of his December 5 assault on the Warren Front, Eichelberger realized that this plan would not work—at least not east of the Girua River. Japanese positions were just too strong, and the terrain was dismal.

The Americans, Eichelberger decided, would soften up the Japanese positions by infiltration and aggressive patrolling, the kind of mobile, small-unit maneuver tactics that General Forrest Harding had pioneered at the Infantry School at Fort Benning.

Eichelberger’s plan was for reconnaissance platoons to identify enemy positions. He would then use artillery, especially the 105 mm howitzer—code named “Dusty”—with its high angle of fire and delayed fuses, to pound those positions into submission. Following bombardment, patrols would knock out the bunkers one by one, with rifles, grenades, grenade launchers, and mortars. If that failed, Eichelberger resolved to let starvation take its toll.

In the abstract, the plan seemed sound. The reality, though, was much more complicated. The terrain made even small-unit patrolling nearly impossible. While soldiers used grenade launchers with punishing effectiveness, their supply was limited, and they soon ran out of grenades. The 105 mm howitzer sat unused for days after firing a few hundred rounds because of a lack of ammunition. Eichelberger was again forced to resort to mortars and 37 mm guns, which hardly fazed the bunkers, and 3.7-inch mountain howitzers and 25-pounders that fired rounds with super-quick fuses that blew up on impact, leaving the Japanese positions undisturbed.

In mid-December, however, Eichelberger’s luck changed. Tanks arrived: four light American M-3 General Stuarts that General Harding had fought so hard for and that had been denied to him time and time again. They saved the day, sparing Eichelberger a career-ending decision; MacArthur, who demanded daily battle reports, never would have tolerated Eichelberger’s plan to let attrition take its toll.

A day after receiving the tanks, Eichelberger began to prepare for an all-out assault on Captain Yasuda’s and Colonel Yamamoto’s forces on the Urbana and Warren Fronts. In the waning light on the evening of December 17, five hundred Australian infantrymen assembled near the front. The Australians were the same troops who had defeated the Japanese at Milne Bay. They were new to the Warren Front and would lead the attack, while the Americans were held in reserve.

At sunup on December 18, the tanks and the camouflaged Australian troops moved out. Ahead of them sat the stranded Bren gun carriers that had failed to dent the Japanese defenses two weeks earlier. Farther ahead was the Duropa Plantation, with its elegant coconut palms swaying in the slight breeze. Underneath the trees in the long kunai, Colonel Yamamoto’s elite 144th and 229th Infantry troops hid in their bunkers and machine gun nests, unaware of the approaching battle.

Just before 7:00 a.m., artillery battered the plantation. Ten minutes later, even before the smoke cleared, the Australians advanced. The General Stuarts opened up on the bunkers with their 37 mm guns. An American officer described the results: “The tanks really did the job. They apparently completely demoralized the Japs [who] fought like cornered rats.” The Australians, wielding tommy guns and hurling grenades, moved forward in the wake of the tanks and caught Yamamoto’s men by surprise.

Except for heavy Australian casualties, the day was a success. The Allies now controlled everything east of the Girua River except the Old Strip and Giropa Point.

In a letter to Sutherland that evening (each night Eichelberger penned a letter to MacArthur’s headquarters and to his wife Emmaline), Eichelberger wrote, “I am glad he [Brigadier Wooten] has the tanks to help him. I do not believe he or anyone else would have gone very far without them.”

General Harding had been vindicated. The tanks, however, had not arrived in time to save his career.

Meanwhile, Major General Yamagata was trying to rally the Japanese troops on the Urbana Front. On December 17, he issued a message to the front’s commanders, calling for the “complete annihilation and expulsion of the enemy from the soil of New Guinea.”

At the same time, Eichelberger was putting his men into position for an assault on the Government Station.

With the entire 127th at his disposal, Eichelberger relieved White Smith’s 2nd Battalion, sending them to the village of Siremi for a well-deserved rest. To make up for the loss of White Smith’s men, he pulled the Ghost Mountain Battalion, under Jim Boice, out of reserve after barely a week’s rest. Boice moved a portion of his men into the Coconut Grove and the rest of his troops into the Triangle east of Entrance Creek.

At the Triangle, bunkers, firing trenches, and chest-high swamp guarded every possible approach to the raised track that led to the Government Station. The plan was for two companies to attack the Triangle from the Coconut Grove via the bridge that spanned Entrance Creek, while a third company moved on the point of the Triangle from the south. Prior to the assault, the area would be subjected to an air strike and 81 mm mortar fire.

At 10:00 p.m. the evening before the assault, Boice and Bailey and their men maneuvered into position through thick sago swamp. Bailey felt the same poignant ache for home he always felt on the eve of battle. Only a week earlier he had received a packet of seventeen letters from Katherine. He read the letters hungrily and then he reread each one slowly three or four times until he knew their details by heart.

Katherine had also sent along three baby photos of Cladie Alyn. Swelling with pride, Bailey passed them out among the company.

Back at home Katherine and Cladie Alyn were on their way to the Bailey farm to share Bailey’s most recent letter with his mother, Mamie. Mamie loved to have Katherine read the letters aloud to her, to hear the cadence of the sentences, her son’s words.

Katherine looked forward to the visits, too. Even when she and Cladie were dating, she enjoyed going to the Bailey farm. She loved its simple grace: the white house with a porch across the front, the barn that Jim Bailey, Cladie’s father, had built with lumber cut and milled on the farm, the fenced-in yard with the big oak, and the creek that wandered through the pasture behind the house. Now Katherine imagined how it would be when her husband returned. She and Cladie and Cladie Alyn would go down to the creek. They would roll up their pants and wade in the summer trickle.

Jim Boice was feeling good. He knew Christmas was approaching and while in Australia, he had made arrangements with Block’s Department Store in Indianapolis to have presents delivered to Zelma and Billy and his mom. It was a special service the family owned store offered to soldiers. Boice imagined Zelma and Billy’s surprise when they received the gifts. For Billy, he had ordered a pedal fire truck; for Zelma, hard-to-come-by nylon stockings and perfume; and for his mother perfume, too.

Boice was no pessimist, but sometimes it was hard, even for a man who had been taught since he was a small boy to look on the bright side, to imagine getting out of the jungle alive. He had been lucky; he had made it over the mountains. Once he got to Buna, Lady Luck was still at his side. In battle he had not been scratched. Somehow he had avoided the sniper’s bullet on scouting trips. All the while, men were dying around him. He had prayed, but so had the others. Why did God hear one man’s prayers and not another’s?

Perhaps God would spare him long enough to let him hold Zelma again and to bounce Billy on his lap. Perhaps next year he would make it home for Christmas.

Boice would have given anything to be home. Instead, he was preparing to try to take the Government Station, the toughest target yet. Perhaps, though, God really was listening to his prayers. On Sunday, December 13, while in reserve, the battalion found time to conduct church services. Boice kneeled, laid his rifle down beside him, and bowed his head. The following day, the 127th captured Buna Village. Now, as they prepared to attack the Government Station, Boice hoped that perhaps it could be accomplished as easily. He had seen enough good men die.

At first light on December 19, Boice ordered the men to inspect their weapons. Jastrzembski, DiMaggio, and Stenberg had checked and rechecked theirs all night long. They knew how to care for their weapons. One of the guys in the company joked that he could take apart and put together his M-1 almost as fast as he could get his girlfriend’s dress off.

Shortly before 7:00 a.m., the first part of the plan went into action. Nine B-25s dropped 100-and 500-pound bombs on the Government Station. Fifteen minutes later a dozen A-20s bombed and strafed the coastal track between the station and Giropa Point. At 7:30 the mortars began firing. The bombardment lasted fifteen minutes.

At 7:45, Boice and Bailey led their men in the attack with the support of a rolling mortar barrage. They had not covered more than twenty yards when they got caught in fierce cross fire. The barrage had done little but antagonize the Japanese.

Out front, his feet raw and swollen, Boice ran, ducked, and crawled, trying to keep his men moving over the bridge.

“Move boys, keep on going!” he yelled. It wasn’t any use, though; they were pinned down.

Boice ordered the men to retreat. In a large patch of kunai grass, some found cover while others pawed at the ground, carving out shallow foxholes. DiMaggio flopped down on his belly in the grass, thinking that he had just survived another close call. At Bottcher’s Corner, after one Japanese attack, he realized that a bullet had come close enough to knock the bayonet off his rifle. During another battle, a rifle grenade had landed and exploded a foot from his head, and he was not even scratched.

Just then a Japanese soldier on the other side of the river fired a rifle grenade, and shrapnel flew everywhere. DiMaggio felt hot metal stick into the side of his face and embed itself in his jawbone. Minutes later, an aidman was at his side. Unable to extract the shrapnel, he bandaged DiMaggio’s face and asked if he could walk back to the portable hospital. DiMaggio said he could.

A hundred yards back, a doctor informed DiMaggio that the piece of metal would be his ticket out of New Guinea.

Carl Stenberg had been even closer to the explosion than DiMaggio, and was thrown ten feet through the air when the grenade blew. When he landed, he felt for his limbs. They were all there. But his ear rang like a siren; he had ruptured his left eardrum.

Stanley Jastrzembski was sitting in his foxhole burning up with malaria. He had felt the explosion, but was far enough away from it that he was safe. Like everyone else, his nerves were frayed. “Damn jungle,” he thought. “A guy can hardly see two feet in front of his face even in the daylight.” Suddenly he felt someone jump next to him. “A Jap,” he thought. “I’m a goner now.” He whipped around to defend himself and then he heard an American voice.

“Hey, it’s me Chet.”

It was not unusual for Jastrzembski and Sokoloski to be together. They had gone to St. Michaels and later they enlisted in the Guard together. “A pair of Poles,” they used to joke. But Sokoloski was supposed to be twenty yards away in his own foxhole.

“What the hell you doing over here? I thought you was a Jap. I almost shot you.”

“I just saw some Japs,” Sokoloski replied.

“So,” Jastrzembski said. “Get back there and shoot them. That’s why we’re here, ain’t we?”

“Sure as shit,” Sokoloski thought. “I better get back.”

“Keep your head down, you stupid Pole,” Jastrzembski said to the shadow at the edge of his foxhole.

As soon as Sokoloski left, Jastrzembski felt alone and scared. It would have been nice to have someone with him. They could have said a prayer in Polish. They could have whispered the words right there in the mud with the Japs on the other side of the creek.

“Keep your head down, you stupid Pole,” he hissed again.

An hour went by, then two. The Americans were still on the west side of the bridge. Boice knew that if they could not cross over and clear out the Triangle, the plan to take the Government Station was dead on arrival. Boice jumped up. Maybe, just maybe, they could make it over the bridge. He waved his arm and his men slipped out of the kunai and followed.

Boice might have heard the whine of the mortar shell, but there was not time to jump out of the way. The mortar landed at his feet and blew him into the air. Two of his men grabbed for him, and pulled him away from the bridge. When a medic arrived he checked Boice’s vital signs, then called for a team of litter bearers. At 9:45, on December 19, only feet from the bridge over Entrance Creek, and only two days after being pulled out of reserve, Jim Boice was killed.

For hours, Boice’s men made stabs at crossing the bridge, but by early afternoon, they were still stranded on the west side of the creek.

When Eichelberger heard the news, he ordered the mortarmen to lay down a wall of white phosphorous smoke as cover. The battalion, trailing the smoke, gained a few yards but was stopped short again. Two hours later the mortars fired another seven hundred rounds. The whole Triangle rumbled. No way, Bailey thought, no possible way the Jap bunkers could stand up to that kind of bombardment. The men tried to move forward again. They were hit by a fusillade of fire even before many made it out of their hiding spots.

At the Triangle, Bob Hartman, a recent addition to Company E, was leading a platoon through the jungle. His orders were to take out a pillbox. He was dumbfounded by the assignment. He had spent his entire military career in Service Company, and now because the 2nd Battalion needed healthy riflemen, he was in charge of an attack.

Hartman had never even seen a pillbox before, and his platoon was made up of guys as as green as he. Hartman and his men were moving through eight-foot-high kunai grass when he spotted an elevated trail. At last, he thought, now we won’t have to trudge through the grass. He got to the trail and in a flash realized where he was. A fire lane! He dove into the kunai at the trail’s edge. Just then a machine gunner opened up on him, and he felt the bullet hit. Fortunately, it had just scraped his arm. It was then that he realized his men might try to come to his aid.

“Stay over there,” he yelled. “I’m okay.”

As darkness crept into the jungle, Hartman pulled his platoon out and rendezvoused with Gus Bailey’s men at the Coconut Grove. Jastrzembski had survived another battle and thanked God for sparing his life. Out of the 107 men who began the attack, only sixty-seven remained.

The portable hospital was buzzing. It had not been set up to handle this many casualties. Every bed was full. The less seriously wounded lay in the mud, waiting to be taken care of.

One of the doctors was attending to Stenberg, but was more concerned about Stenberg’s 104-degree temperature than his eardrum. He gave Stenberg six 5-grain quinine tablets, which he took all at once. A half an hour later, Stenberg could barely move or see.

No one knew what had become of Gus Bailey. He had led the attack. No one had seen him go down, and nobody had heard him scream. Just where was he, then?

Bailey was sitting against the base of a tree. He had taken a bullet, which had lodged in the meaty portion of his upper thigh. Rather than call for a medic, he had wrapped it himself, and continued to fight. Now, he obviously needed a doctor’s attention. Bailey waited while Warmenhoven and the other doctors treated the soldiers with chest and abdominal wounds and head injuries. He was losing blood, and his leg was stiffening up, but he knew that he would make it.

The following day, the Ghost Mountain Battalion went into reserve again, and Gus Bailey was evacuated to Port Moresby.

Badly off as the Ghost Mountain Battalion was, Phil Ishio and William Hirashima knew from the diaries they had translated and the few prisoners they had interrogated that the Japanese were in even worse shape. They had very little food, no quinine, and according to Hirashima, “were almost dead from malaria.”

The next day, Eichelberger turned over the job of taking Buna Government Station entirely to the 127th. Herman Bottcher, who was now a captain thanks to a rare field promotion, stayed behind to assist. Even with Bottcher’s help, though, the 127th was unable to infiltrate the Triangle. In fact, its attack failed miserably. The lead company lost 40 percent of its troops, including Bottcher, who was wounded in the arm by a machine gunner and taken to the hospital at Dobodura.

At Dobodura, Bottcher was reunited with Harold Mitchell, who had been badly wounded during the December 19 attack. Mitchell, smiling wanly, was happy to see his friend, who, he had been told, had been killed with Captain Boice.

That night Mitchell died with Bottcher sitting at his side.

After the failure at the Triangle, Eichelberger was forced to reassess his strategy. Late on the evening of December 19, in a letter to Sutherland, he explained how he would cross Entrance Creek farther downstream, bypassing the Triangle. “General Herring,” he wrote, “is very anxious for me to take the track junction, and I am most willing, but the enemy is…strong there and is able to reinforce his position at will. I am going to put in artillery on him…and I am going to continue that tomorrow morning. Then I am going to find a weak spot across Government Gardens.”

It was a tidy plan.

On the morning of December 24, with five companies of the 127th in position, Eichelberger ordered a major attack. It began with artillery and mortars opening up on Government Gardens and the Government Station. Fifteen minutes later, the infantry moved out. What separated the 127th from its destination, though, was an obstacle course of thick, chest-high kunai grass, a swamp as wide as a football field, and a 300-yard coconut plantation. Eichelberger believed this to be the epicenter of the Japanese position. Captain Yasuda had prepared the entire area with bunkers, foxholes, firing pits, and snipers hiding in trees.

The regiment had advanced barely a hundred yards when it came up against blistering enemy fire that cut the companies to ribbons. Even with Eichelberger’s artillery officer directing mortar fire from a coconut tree not far from Yasuda’s lines, the Americans managed to carve out only another fifty yards. After being wounded in the back by a shell fragment, the artillery officer tied himself into the tree like a Japanese sniper and continued to direct the mortar fire until he lost so much blood that he lapsed into unconsciousness, and had to be evacuated.

Eichelberger, who was at the front for much of the day directing troop movements like a young lieutenant, was devastated by the failure of the attack. Christmas Eve day, 1942, he reported to MacArthur “was the low point of my life.” MacArthur, though, did not want to hear it. He wanted results. Earlier he had callously told an Australian officer, who had complained that Eichelberger would get himself killed if he insisted on leading troops into battle, “I want him to die if he doesn’t get Buna.”

Back at the evac hospital in Dobodura, which was nothing more than a big tent with rows of cots, Stanley Jastrzembski was riding out a fever. He knew that the Americans had made a big push that day by the number of casualties that kept coming in. The worst were the belly wounds; those poor guys would moan and scream out all night long. What had really gotten to him, though, was Jim Broner. Broner had been shot in the leg in the battle on November 30.

Jastrzembski did not know what to say to him. His brother, Willard, was already dead. Had he heard?

“How ya doing?” Jastrzembski said, avoiding the subject.

Broner was lying on a cot and fumbled for words. Then he blurted it out. “Tomorrow,” he said, “they’re going to take my leg off.”

What the hell for, Jastrzembksi thought to himself. The poor SOB is gonna lose his leg over some godforsaken island.

Toward evening, Jastrzembski’s buddy Chet Sokoloski came in with a big smile on his face. Jastrzembski sat at the side of his cot and grimaced. His feet throbbed. They were raw and inflamed, and the skin was peeling off in small sheets like waxed paper.

“Why the smile?” Jastrzembski winced. “Just because you ain’t dead, right?”

“Nope,” Sokoloski replied. “It’s Christmas Eve. Did you forget?”

“Christmas,” Jastrzembski groaned. “In this hellhole of a place.”

“I got you a package,” Sokoloski said.

Sure enough. Jastrzembski looked at the return address. It was from one of his sisters. He shook his head. “All the way from Muskegon.”

Jastrzembski was too weak to open the package, so Sokoloski did the honors. Tearing off the newspaper and opening the box, Sokoloski was dumbfounded. “Candy and cake,” he said.

You’re putting me on, Jastrzembski thought. Then Sokoloski passed him the box. There it was, a big Christmas cake.

“The damn thing’s full of mold.”

“Here,” Sokoloski said. Taking his bayonet, he cut off the top two inches. Then Jastrzembski and Sokoloski—a pair of Poles—devoured it on Christmas Eve in New Guinea.

On Christmas Day, instead of regrouping and allowing his men to rest, Eichelberger decided to force the issue, returning to the Urbana Front again to direct operations personally.

When a company of the 127th pounded its way over hundreds of yards through Government Gardens, ending up on the coast near the coconut plantation, Eichelberger thought that perhaps his luck was changing. The Japanese quickly rallied, though, and surrounded the company, inflicting heavy losses. When reinforcements attempted to come to its rescue, they were ambushed, and an entire platoon was wiped out.

Eichelberger’s Christmas Day attack had been a mistake, and he wondered if Buna would become “an American military disaster.”

That night, returning to the command post, he found Sutherland waiting for him with disturbing news. The Australians, Sutherland said, were again mocking MacArthur. Despite a distinct numerical advantage, American troops had been unable to take Buna Government Station. Eichelberger argued that he had whole battalions—Stutterin Smith’s Ghost Mountain boys and White Smith’s men—that were no longer capable of fighting.

Sutherland then handed him a letter.

“What’s this?’ Eichelberger asked.

“MacArthur,” Sutherland answered.

Later, Eichelberger sat down to read the letter. Although MacArthur had never visited the battlefield, he was full of “Ivory Tower” advice, all of which revealed his ignorance of frontline conditions at Buna. Urging Eichelberger to use his superior numbers, he wrote:

Where you have a company on your firing line, you should have a battalion; and where you have a battalion, you should have a regiment. And your attacks, instead of being made up of two or three hundred rifles, should be made by two or three thousand…. It will be an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth…. Your battle casualties to date compared with your total strength are slight so that you have a big margin still to work with.

I beg of you to throw every ounce of energy you have into carrying out this word of advice from me, as I feel convinced that our time is strictly limited and that if results are not achieved shortly, the whole picture may radically change.

With the memory of December 5 still fresh, Eichelberger must have been taken aback by MacArthur’s letter. The general clearly wanted to see more casualties. It was a bloody calculus: dead and wounded soldiers were a sign of initiative.

Eichelberger’s command was in jeopardy, and he knew it, so he sat down and penned a reply to the general. He was pushing the offensive, he wrote, with the kinds of numbers he felt the situation necessitated. And his men were indeed fighting gallantly. “I hope you will not let any Australian generals talk down their noses at you.” Then he assured MacArthur that his men would “push on to victory.” His earlier notion of letting attrition do the dirty work was no longer even a consideration.

Late on Christmas night a Japanese submarine, having escaped prowling American PT boats, unloaded rations and ammunition at Buna Government Station and shelled Allied positions on the Warren Front.

On the morning of December 28, Sutherland again showed up at Eichelberger’s command post. This time, though, he arrived with good news: The 41st Division’s 163rd Regiment, a unit of fit, superbly trained National Guardsmen from Montana, had just reached Port Moresby, and soon it would be sent to the Urbana Front. It was exactly what Eichelberger needed to hear. The previous night, he had read MacArthur’s latest piece of fiction. It had left him fuming mad. “On Christmas Day,” the communiqué read, “our activities were limited to routine safety precautions. Divine services were held.”

Together, Eichelberger and Sutherland visited Colonel Grose’s command post. Grose informed Eichelberger that he was pulling out the 127th’s exhausted 3rd Battalion, which had made the Entrance Creek crossing and had born the brunt of the battle in Government Gardens.

Eichelberger’s response shocked him.

“No John,” Eichelberger replied. “That’s not the plan. This afternoon I want you to attack the station.”

Grose could not believe his ears, and asked for confirmation. When Eichelberger told him that was indeed his plan, it was left for Grose to implement some kind of strategy.

Deciding that one prong of the attack had to come from Musida Island, which separated Buna Village from the Government Station, Grose sent out five boats. Their objective was to engage the Japanese east of the island while engineers repaired the bridge that spanned the creek between the island and the Government Station.

The boats pushed off in the late afternoon. Disoriented, they went west instead of east, and American troops who were dug in on the sand spit northwest of the island figured they were enemy boats and opened up on them. A lieutenant from the lead boat, which sunk immediately, struggled to shore and managed to reach the spit without being killed by friendly fire.

The lieutenant shouted, “You’re firing on Americans!” By the time the troops realized what they were doing and stopped, all five vessels had been sunk. Luckily no one had been killed.

Back at the bridge, 3rd Battalion troops tried to reach the station. At the far end of the bridge, though, the new pilings collapsed and the soldiers fell into the creek. Eichelberger, according to Grose, “ranted and raved like a caged lion.” He had hoped to impress Sutherland. Sutherland, though, left Grose’s command post in disgust. He had not been on hand to see the dramatic seizure of the Government Station, but instead witnessed the Keystone Kops in action.

The following day, Eichelberger’s command was saved by a patrol’s discovery: Captain Yasuda’s men had evacuated the Triangle.

Later, on the same morning, the original Urbana Force—White Smith’s 2nd Battalion 128th, and the Ghost Mountain Battalion, minus Gus Bailey—was pulled out of reserve again and sent forward.

For Stenberg, being sent back into battle was a blow. At the battalion’s bivouac site, he had sweated out another fever, and his left ear was worthless. He wondered now if he could hear well enough to save his own life. Would he be able to hear a stick crack just before a Jap gashed open his belly, or the shifting of a sniper hiding in the crook of a tree? He had been lucky on December 19, and he knew it. Now, he was being sent back in two days before the end of the year.

Stenberg and what remained of the 126th’s 2nd Battalion took up a holding position at the southeast end of Government Gardens. White Smith’s men moved into the Triangle. While the two battalions were en route, a company of the 127th pushed past the Government Station and established a pivotal two-hundred-foot frontage along the beach just west of Giropa Point.

While the Americans had finally fixed their supply problems—two hundred tons of cargo were coming in via freighter and lugger—the Japanese garrisons were being bombed into oblivion. At Girua, at the head of the Sanananda truck, Kiyoshi Wada, a member of the signal unit, chronicled the garrison’s collapse.

On December 20, Wada wrote, “At this rate I’ll become a dried-up human being.” Three days later, he wrote again, “When we made our first attack I had no consideration for life or death…. However, nowadays, somehow I am full of the desire to go back home alive just once more.”

The day after Christmas, Wada again found time to write: “The area around our tent is a desolate field. At about 8 o’clock, Hagino [Wada is referring to Private Mitsuo Hagino of the 144th Infantry Regiment’s 3rd Battalion] next to me, was hit. Since so many patients came pouring in, the medical men are shorthanded and I was forced to stop the bleeding and bandage Hagino outside in the pitch dark.” On December 28, Wada wrote despairingly. “Went to get water from the stream. On the way the jungle was full of dead, killed by shrapnel. There is something awful about the smell of the dead…. Everyone has taken cover in the jungle, but since there is no one to carry Hagino and take care of him, I cannot leave him behind. I have decided to stay…. All officers, even though there is such a scarcity of food, eat relatively well. The condition is one in which the majority is starving. This is indeed a deplorable state of affairs for the Imperial Army. I took out a picture of my parents and looked at it.”

The next day, Wada continued, “What a discouraging and miserable state of affairs—and too, when the New Year is just ahead. What is going to happen to us? I pray to the morning sun that our situation of battle be reversed. All of the patrol (guard) unit has fled and at the present time, there are only four of us…. I pray with the charm of the clan deity in my hand.”

On the Warren Front, a Japanese soldier read a leaflet dropped by Allied planes: “SOLDIERS OF THE JAPANESE ARMY,” it said, “Our Allied Forces are steadily advancing on all fronts…. You are already doomed. Your situation is hopeless.”

When he read the leaflet on December 21 the day it was dropped, he scoffed at it. The Old Strip was surrounded by swamp and littered with trenches and bunkers. The Japanese believed it was unassailable. Colonel Yamamoto’s men were also heavily armed with machine guns and mortars, two 75 mm guns, two 37 mm guns, automatic cannons, and 3-inch naval guns. A week later, though, as Allied forces bore down on Japanese positions in the Old Strip and on Giropa Point, he was forced to take its message seriously. Officers continued to promise reinforcements, but even the lowliest Formosan conscripts knew what was happening.

Masaji Kohase, a First Class Seaman with the Yokosuka Special Naval Landing Force, watched the Allied advance. “The enemy,” he wrote, “is trying to squeeze us out of our vital position by shelling the whole of Buna with mortar and artillery fire. Their tanks came rumbling forward and finally the time has come when we may meet our end any day, but we will fight till the last as our commander has ordered.” As he wrote in his diary, his buddy may have been reading a letter from his twelve-year-old sister, and dreaming of home. Dated October 15, her letter read, “In the place, where you are now, there will be plenty pineapples, bananas, coconuts and other fruits, I think. I want to go and see the South Seas myself, sometime.”

The following day the Allies captured the Old Strip. Now only Giropa Point remained.

On December 30, Eichelberger found out that Blamey had petitioned MacArthur for the 163rd and MacArthur had buckled. Reversing his earlier decision, MacArthur now agreed that the regiment should go to the Sanananda Front. From General Herring, Eichelberger also learned that the Australians were in no hurry to see the Americans capture Buna Government Station before Wooten took Giropa Point.

Eichelberger was mad as hell, and though he had planned to rest his troops on December 31, he called for an all-out attack that would precede Wooten’s offensive. His troops would seize the Government Station first.

Counting on the element of surprise, Eichelberger’s troops jumped off well before the sun crested the horizon. When they spotted two Japanese landing barges stranded on the beach, however, a number of men disregarded the strict “no fire” rule and tossed hand grenades at the barges. It was a stupid stunt, and gave away their position. The Japanese immediately lit up the area with flares and fired on the Americans wading through the shallows northeast of Musida Island.

Abandoning the attack, the Americans retreated as fast as they could. Colonel Grose intercepted them and ordered them forward. The attack had failed in general, but thanks to an alert company of 128th Infantry troops that had dug in at the sand spit, the Americans had their first real grasp on the Government Station. Eichelberger knew now that it was only a matter of time. The Japanese were caught in the Allied vise.

That night, Eichelberger wrote a note to Sutherland. “Little by little,” he said, “we are getting those devils penned in and perhaps we shall be able to finish them shortly.”

Glory was not to be Eichelberger’s, though. By dusk on New Year’s Day, as a terrific lightning storm bore down on Buna, Wooten’s tanks were clearing out the last pockets of enemy resistance on the Warren Front. On patrol, Stenberg and the small reconnaissance group he was a part of met up with a patrol from there. They exchanged greetings and smiles and then went about the dirty business of clearing out pockets of Japanese resistance. All could sense that the end was near.

Simon Warmenhoven had been moving between the Triangle and the Sanananda Front, stitching up troops and supervising the portable hospitals, making sure that they were performing as intended. For the last month and a half, he had only had one break and that was when he himself was hospitalized with a temperature of 105 degrees. Now, he finally had a moment to write home again.

Dearest Lover:

And how’s my Mandy to-day? Been patiently waiting for the letters that just don’t come any more lately? Well, honey, from now on they’ll be coming in like old times. I’ll be writing at least three a week again. It just couldn’t be helped for awhile, and I’m sure you realize the reason. Hope you didn’t worry too much about it. I’ll assure you I’m safe and sound for which I’m very thankful. Will say that I’ve said plenty of prayers. I assure you on that point too that if anything happened, I wouldn’t be afraid, but I do hope that we all may be together again…. I sure want to see my Mandy again, and Muriel and Ann, and also Simon Jr. I’ll bet he’s getting to be quite a boy already. Another two months and he’ll be sitting at the high chair pounding with a spoon for his meals…. I had the lovesick dream last night…. when I woke up…. I found myself lying in my cot in our native hut. I dreamed that I’d returned back home, and that we didn’t get along…. Wish I could dream that I was making love to you…. Remember New Year’s Eve last year? Walking in New Orleans…. Well, Goodbye darling. Love to the children.

All my heart’s true love.

Sam

Flashes of lightning lit up the coast. Before dawn on January 2, Japanese troops were fleeing any way they could. Twenty Japanese soldiers, carrying heavy packs, food, medicine, and three machine guns, tried to make a run for the stranded landing barges, hoping to somehow get them into the water. A company of 127th soldiers caught them in the act, and cut them down with machine guns and rifles.

Not long after, as the first rays of sunlight filtered through the clouds and splashed across the sea, White Smith’s troops and the men of the 128th Infantry’s 1st Battalion, which had established a stronghold between the Government Station and Giropa Point, saw Japanese soldiers swimming up the coast.

By daylight, in a scene reminiscent of General Horii’s attempted escape two months earlier, Japanese soldiers by the hundreds, grabbing on to anything that would float, took to the sea. American and Australian machine gunners sprayed them with bullets. Then the artillery opened up. By 10 o’clock that morning, the air force was strafing the remaining swimmers. Those who had not already drowned were shot to death.

At the same time, American artillery pulverized Buna Government Station, and white phosphorous smoke shells set the entire area ablaze. Japanese soldiers ran from their bunkers, and American troops cut them down. Some of the Japanese were carrying M-1s and wearing American helmets and fatigues.

Stenberg’s patrol went from bunker to bunker and destroyed each one with grenades. Sometimes the Japanese burst out swinging swords or bayonets. A number of Japanese climbed trees and hid, or rushed into the swamps. Those who remained in their bunkers, refusing to surrender or run, were buried alive.

While the Americans stormed Buna Government Station and flushed out the last of its defenders, Australian tanks were destroying the remaining bunkers at Giropa Point. As the Australians approached what had been Colonel Yamamoto’s command post, two Japanese officers appeared. One was Yamamoto and the other Captain Yasuda, who earlier had left the Government Station to join Yamamoto.

“Surrender,” the Australian commander shouted to the two officers. “You must surrender.”

Yasuda and Yamamoto pretended not to hear the order. Yasuda drifted off into a grove of coconut trees, while Yamamoto appeared to be washing himself in the muddy waters of Siremi Creek. When he finished he rose and bowed three times in the direction of the morning sun. Then turning to the Australians, he stood saber straight.

“I’ll give you until I count ten to surrender,” the Australian commander shouted.

Again Yamamoto did not respond. He tied a Japanese flag to the blade of his sword. Then with one hand he raised the sword and with the other he stretched the flag across his breast.

“Nine,” yelled the Australian commander. A second later, the Australian riflemen shot Yamamoto dead. Later they found Yasuda. He had committed suicide by cutting open his belly in the fashion befitting a Japanese soldier.

That afternoon, Allied troops took control of Buna Government Station. The beach looked like a charnel house as the corpses of dead Japanese, some of which had been chewed on by sharks, rolled in on the waves. They swelled in the sun and in no time were filled with maggots.

The following day, January 3, as Allied patrols hunted down enemy stragglers, soldiers at “Maggot Beach” removed their boots and rolled up their pant legs and walked barefoot in the warm sand. Some men took the opportunity to wash their filthy clothes; some swam naked in the bay. Others lay sprawled under the scarred trunks of coconut palms or curled up in remnant foxholes.

Blamey and Herring sent messages congratulating Eichelberger. The general’s sense of accomplishment, however, was tempered by the realization that he had sent too many soldiers to their deaths. In a letter to Emmaline, Eichelberger confessed, “To see those boys with their bellies out of the mud and their eyes in the sun…. made me choke, and then I spent a moment looking over the American cemetery which my orders of necessity have filled from nothing.”

Curiously, no message came from MacArthur. When two days later there was still nothing from the commander in chief, Eichelberger penned a brief letter to Sutherland, “Is your secretary sick?” he asked.

Nearly a week after American forces took Buna Government Station, MacArthur finally wrote Eichelberger. If the general was hoping for gushing praise, MacArthur disappointed him.

Dear Bob,

I am returning to G.H.Q., Brisbane, Saturday morning the 9th so will not see you until some later time. I have been wanting to personally congratulate you on the success that has been achieved. As soon as Fuller [Major General Horace Fuller, commanding general of the 41st Division] takes hold, I want you to return to the mainland. There are many important things with reference to rehabilitation and training that will necessitate your immediate effort. The 32nd Division should be evacuated as soon as possible so that it can be rejuvenated.

I am so glad that you were not injured in the fighting. I always feared that your incessant exposure might result fatally.

With a hearty slap on the back,

Most cordially,

MacArthur

On that same day, MacArthur issued a communiqué stating that the campaign in New Guinea was “in its final closing phase.” “The Sanananda position has now been completely enveloped,” MacArthur told correspondents. “A remnant of the enemy’s forces is entrenched there and faces certain destruction…. This can now be regarded as accomplished.”

Although MacArthur and his staff had described Sanananda as a “mopping up operation,” Eichelberger and the Australians knew otherwise. Barely able to contain his disgust, Eichelberger would exclaim, “If there is another war, I recommend that the military…. and everyone else concerned, drop the phrase ‘mopping up’ from their vocabularies. It is not a good enough phrase to die for.” Eichelberger added, “The best plan” for Sanananda “would seem to be to surround the area and cut off all supplies, accompanied by plenty of mortar fire and constant harassing. This seems to me very slow work, but I realize that any other decision may result in a tremendous loss of personnel without commensurate gains.”

It was the exact approach that he and MacArthur had rejected at Buna.

Had the Allies known that Japanese Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo had issued orders via Rabaul calling for the withdrawal of forces up the coast, they might have been content to ambush the fleeing soldiers and cut off the supply lines to the beachhead, condemning the Japanese who remained at Sanananda to a slow but certain death. Instead, they moved in for the kill.

The Americans who had arrived on the Sanananda Front late in November would not be part of the final offensive. Of the fourteen hundred men who had gone into battle, only 165 remained. In no condition to fight, they were pulled off the front before the final Allied assault on Sanananda.

Alfred Medendorp was not one of the 165. In late December, incapacitated by malaria and fifty-five pounds lighter than when he had left Nepeana in early October to cross the mountains, he was shipped to the evacuation hospital at Dobodura. The next day he and a group he described as “battered, filthy, long haired, gaunt, festering, stinking wretches” boarded a plane for Port Moresby.

Lieutenant Lester Segal was not one of them either. After a month on the Sanananda Front, he was transferred to Buna to attend to the men wounded in the siege of the Government Station. Because of a shortage of medics, he stayed on in the aftermath of the battle. Eventually, he, too, was evacuated to Port Moresby. Seriously ill—perhaps with scrub typhus—it was a “miracle,” according to Medendorp, that Segal was still alive.

Of the 165 men, only ninety-five were able to march to the bivouac site at Siremi east of the Girua River. Father Dzienis was one of them. “Only then,” Medendorp later learned, “did he surrender his festering, fever-ridden body to a hospital to begin a long fight for recovery.”

At Siremi, Dzienis and the others washed and shaved for the first time in months, and were issued shelter halves and mosquito nets. Two days later, Eichelberger held a ceremony for them. “I received the troops,” he wrote, “with band music. It was a melancholy homecoming. Sickness, death, and wounds,” he wrote, “had taken an appalling toll. [The men] were so ragged and so pitiful that when I greeted them my eyes were wet.”

On January 16, the 127th and the 163rd Infantry Regiments were ordered to attack the Japanese garrison at Sanananda. The 127th was to advance on the coastal track from Buna Village, blocking any attempt by the Japanese to flee east. Meanwhile, one battalion of the 163rd was to move up the Sanananda track to the coast while another battalion sealed off the escape route west of Huggins Roadblock. After clearing out the Japanese positions south of the roadblock, the men of the 163rd were to join Australia’s 18th Brigade and advance north along the track.

On January 17, as the Allies converged on Sanananda, General Yamagata determined that the evacuation plan could not wait. The wounded and sick were to leave by landing barge. The rest of the troops were to escape any way they could—on foot, or by swimming up the coast. Upon reaching the mouth of the Kumusi or the Mambare River, they would be shipped even farther up the coast to Lae and Salamaua.

Kiyoshi Wada wondered if he would make it out alive. “I am left to take charge in this place,” he wrote. “We think that tonight will be the last night for Girua and we talk about swimming together to Lae. Wonder if we can get away? Wakaichi will not leave us behind.”

Late the following night, Wada, who had also read the Allied leaflets, continued, “We looked forward to getting on the boat tonight but because the wounded were put on first, we could not get on…. Reinforcements haven’t come. There are no provisions. Things are happening just as the enemy says…. I don’t think Wakaichi will leave us behind.”

The next day, Yamagata delivered the evacuation orders to General Oda and sent an aide to carry them to Colonel Yazawa. That night Yamagata and his staff and over a hundred sick and wounded soldiers left Girua in two large motor launches. Later, a prisoner of war stated that the general made “room for himself by taking off the patients and men already loaded on the barge.”

Oda was indignant: Yamagata, he believed, had taken the coward’s way out. Early the next morning, Oda, Yazawa, and a large number of troops plunged into the swamp and ran smack into an Australian outpost. Yazawa, who had been in New Guinea since the overland assault on Port Moresby, was killed and, by some accounts, Oda was too. Other reports contend that Oda stayed behind. Realizing that his end was near, he told a soldier that he was going off “to smoke one cigarette at leisure.” Soon afterward, the soldier heard two pistol shots and ran back to assist Oda. There he found the general and his supply officer lying on a cloak on the ground where they had killed themselves.

As the last evacuation boats pulled anchor, Kyoshi Wada was left standing on the beach, longing for home. He returned to the hospital and was killed by mortar fire early the following morning.

A day later, on January 22, 1943, the Buna-Gona-Sanananda campaign officially ended. Advancing Allied troops caught starved and weary enemy soldiers in their shelters or trying to escape and mowed them down. By day’s end more than five hundred Japanese lay dead. It was the largest single-day slaughter since Gorari nearly three months earlier.

Carl Stenberg, like most of the men of Ghost Mountain battalion and the 128th Infantry Regiment, was already in Port Moresby, waiting to be transported south to Australia. Days before the fall of Sanananda, he had left Dobodura and was flown over the Owen Stanley mountains. The entire trip took forty-five minutes.

Stenberg had been marching or fighting for over three months. His ear throbbed and bled and he was woozy with malaria. His lower legs were a patchwork of jungle sores. And when he slept the nightmares came: He was stranded in a swamp, stuck up to his hips in mud that gripped like quicksand. The tide was in and the water crept to his chest. He held his head high to breathe as rats glided by, making their way through the black scum.

Stanley Jastrzembski was lying in a hospital bed not far from Stenberg. Early in January, after a nine-day regimen of quinine, atabrine, and plasmochin, Jastrzembski’s fever broke; but now it was soaring again. Wrapped in towels and ice, he lay on a cot, unable to escape the smell. He was back in the jungle, waiting and watching. Bodies bloated by the heat floated past. They were smiling. He could see their gold fillings.

In late December 1942, Simon Warmenhoven was appointed division surgeon at the request of General Eichelberger and received a rare battlefield promotion to lieutenant colonel. In mid-January, as the Allied attack on the Sanananda and Girua garrisons was about to begin, Warmenhoven turned thirty-three and was still performing surgeries in a poorly lit tent. On January 20, he learned that he was being sent back to Port Moresby. He arrived in Australia not long afterward and went directly to a hospital for treatment of hookworm. In late February he returned to Camp Cable, where he took up residence in a small wooden house. The first thing he did was to put pictures of his family on his dresser. Warmenhoven was now a celebrated doctor. Articles in newspapers across the U.S. were praising his bravery in New Guinea and his medical achievements just behind the front lines. In early March, his picture was on the front page of the New York Times.

Back in Australia, Warmenhoven did not feel like a celebrity. He worked around the clock seven days a week nursing the Red Arrow men back to health while neglecting his own needs. In early April, exhausted, he suffered a malaria attack and was hospitalized for three weeks. At the time, doctors little understood the possible toxic effects of large doses of atabrine and quinine. The term “atabrine psychosis,” characterized by drug-induced manic depression and schizophrenic episodes, had only recently been coined. Nevertheless, Warmenhoven was treated aggressively. Upon returning to Camp Cable three and a half weeks later, he learned that MacArthur was preparing to send the 32nd back into combat. As division surgeon, he was asked to sign a medical release stating that the division was healthy enough to return to active duty.

He refused.

On Monday night May 3, 1943, he wrote Mandy.

Dearest Lover:

Had a lovely letter from you yesterday, darling. Came at the right time too believe me. Sure had the “blues” here for a couple of days. That’s why I haven’t written you. I don’t often allow myself to get that way but after all, when one is away from his best friend in the world you my wife, and away from such grand children, you just can’t help it. I love the way you ended your letter, Sweetheart, about “not being so far apart because we’ll live forever in each other’s hearts.”

Lovingly Always, Sam

Two days later, Lieutenant Colonel Simon “Sam” Warmenhoven shot himself in the head.