IN PUTTING THIS BOOK TOGETHER, I have used countless interviews—with veterans of the march and the campaign, and wives, children, grandchildren, and friends of the participants—to elaborate on the official army narrative. I have also used self-published books, diaries, newspaper articles, and veterans’ printed recollections to bring the human history to life. Major Herbert M. “Stutterin’” Smith wrote three informative books about his experience: Four Score and Ten; 0-241957; and Hannibal Had Elephants II. The Indiana author Wendell Trogdon wrote a wonderful biography of Gus Bailey called Out Front: The Cladie Bailey Story. Sam DiMaggio dictated his biography to his son J. P. DiMaggio; it’s called “I Never Had It So Good.” Captain Alfred Medendorp left behind two detailed accounts of the march and the ensuing war. The first is an official document published by the Ground General School in October 1949, titled “The March and Operations of Antitank and Cannon Companies…(Personal Experience of a Patrol Commander).” The second is an extensive (over one hundred pages), untitled collection of personal memories. Walter Shauppner left behind a diary in which he detailed the day-by-day activities of the 127th Infantry Regiment, beginning with its arrival at Port Moresby Harbor. Lawrence Thayer wrote a revealing account of the 128th’s experiences. Clarence Jungwirth wrote Diary of a National Guardsman in WWII, an informative account of his experiences from 1940 to 1945. Paul Lutjens left behind a diary and the text of his lecture on the Papuan campaign. General Edwin Forrest Harding’s diary is also an excellent source of information. Courtesy of Walter Hunt, Jim Hunt’s brother, I have Lieutenant Hunt’s diary and an enlightening letter that Hunt sent to Major Herbert Smith after reading one of Smith’s books. Jim Boice’s diary was very useful, as were Lieutenant Colonel Bill Sikkel’s recollections and those of Gordon Zuverink, Herb Steenstra, and Stanley Hollenbeck. Simon Warmenhoven’s letters were important sources of information. The letters provided me with insight into a remarkable man. Art Edson’s letters were also very helpful. Maclaren Hiari’s account of his father’s experiences as a carrier for the Allied Forces in New Guinea was also quite helpful. The Wisconsin Veterans Museum (and its very capable staff) proved to be a treasure trove of information. The museum has a large collection of letters, diaries, audio interviews, and photographs donated by veterans and/or their families.
This book would have been impossible to write without the help of a number of secondary sources: Victory in Papua, written by Samuel Milner, the offical U.S. Army historian of the campaign; Bloody Buna by Lida Mayo; Kokoda by Paul Ham; Eric Bergerud’s Touched with Fire; Harry Gailey’s MacArthur Strikes Back; Papuan Campaign, the Buna-Sanananda Operation, put out by the Center of Military History, U.S. Army; and the “Report of the Commanding General Buna Forces on the Buna Campaign.”
In order to portray the Japanese experience and some of the soldiers whom this book mentions, I used the National Archives’ collection of Allied Translator and Interpreter Section (ATIS) diaries and interrogation reports. Other primary sources were Nankai Shitai, War Book of the 144th Regiment, translated by F. C Jorgensen, Seizo Okada’s Lost Troops, and Southern Cross, translated by Doris Hart.
I have also used my personal observations of the landscapes to inform certain scenes and to describe some of the settings for the story. I have visited Papua New Guinea five times. My first trip was in 1989. Fascinated with the country, I kept coming back, and that is how I discovered the story of the Ghost Mountain boys.
It is impossible to spend any time in New Guinea without encountering World War II history. Strewn across the mountains are pieces of planes that went down during the war. The coastal waters teem with reminders, too. While scuba diving, I saw submarine caverns, downed planes, remnants of transport ships and luggers, and large, twisted pieces of metal dating back to the war.
In the mountain villages along the Kapa Kapa trail, people still tell stories of the U.S. Army’s march across the mountains. Villagers showed me where soldiers collapsed in the mud, unable to go on, where they camped, and where the few soldiers who died on the trek were buried. One of my most fortuitous encounters was with a man named Berua, whom I met in the village of Laruni. Berua was only seven when his parents were chosen to serve as carriers for the American army. Frightened that he would never see them again, he followed his parents and the American army over the Owen Stanleys. It was an experience he would never forget.
On the coast, villagers still talk of the war. These war stories have become part of the local mythology, passed down by people from one generation to the next around the fire. Fascination and resentment linger. The war destroyed villages and innocent people’s lives.
In many cases the locals’ stories resembled the accepted historical version. However, in some cases, they have been wildly, and interestingly, embellished. One man suggested that it was a native sorcerer who had warned the Allies of the Japanese invasion. He went on to say that the sorcerer later flew over Japanese positions on the coast and alerted American artillerymen so that they could sight their big guns. Another man said that the war ended when a native sorcerer killed Japan’s most important general.
In the summer of 2005, I made a one-month trip to Papua New Guinea. I spent that month researching the war and the trail. I also visited Gabagaba, Doboduru, Buna, Siremi, Oro Bay, Pongani, Wanigela, and a number of inland villages, where I interviewed elders who had witnessed the war. In Buna, I heard stories of the Japanese invasion. In Gabagaba, people talked about the arrival of the Americans, especially the African-American engineers.
In the United States, during the summer of 2005, prior to my trip to Papua New Guinea, I attended a five-day 32nd Division Old Timers gathering at Fort McCoy, Wisconsin. Our accommodations were army barracks. On my first day, I watched a man make his bed as if a tough sergeant would be inspecting his work: Not a crease in the top sheet, the corners tucked in, the pillow fluffed like a cumulous cloud.
Although it was only early June, it was already in the high 90s. Enormous fans cooled the barracks, but they only did so much. I did not understand how the older guys could take it until they set me straight.
“This is a breeze compared to New Guinea,” one said.
I was in the real old-timers’ barracks. Bill Barnes, who was a second lieutenant at Buna, was ninety-five. He wore big Coke-bottle glasses and had a pacemaker but looked like he could still run a marathon. Lawrence Chester Dennis was 93. At Buna, he had run messages from headquarters to various companies across the front, earning him the nickname “moving target.” Dennis was nearly blind now, so the guys set out his clothes, made his bed, took him to the bathroom, and made sure he got to the events on time.
Then there was Roy Gormanson, who, the first time I met him, took off his tie and shirt and showed me his mangled left shoulder. “Took three operations to get it this good,” he said. “And still I can’t lift my arm over my head.”
Many of the guys in my barracks had trouble walking. Nearly everyone had diabetes. A bunch had been through heart bypasses. They all took an assortment of pills. Yet for five days they joked with each other as if they were young GIs. They joked wherever they went—in the mess hall, in the communal showers, as they peed into a large trough, and in the morning on the “shitter” that sat in plain view of five or six others.
“No goddamn privacy in the army,” an old-timer commented.
One morning one of the guys announced as he settled onto a toilet seat that he was going to die, but not of a stroke or a heart attack or colon cancer. “I want to be shot by an irate husband,” he said. The entire bathrooom roared.
At night the guys played poker in the mess hall and drank beer. And sometimes they talked about the war. Mostly, though, it was a subject they avoided. Red Lawler, who was in his nineties and ran a pizza parlor in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, said, “I saw so much death in New Guinea, I like to forget. It was a horrible place.”
One man—I never did learn his name—told me that when the battle for Buna was almost over and the Americans were mopping up, looking for stray Japanese soldiers, he and a young private stood on a beach. The private had just finished showing him a photo of his wife and little boy. “Sure can’t wait to get back to them,” the private said. Just then a shot cracked out of the jungle, and the private fell. The bullet had taken away half his head.
After the Old Timers event I spent the next six months interviewing and collecting stories. I drove across the Midwest and called Texas, Boston, New York, Florida, Ohio, Washington, D.C., and California.
I heard the same from almost every veteran. “There are few of us left. You should have done this book ten years ago. Hurry up and finish so I’m around to read it.”
One man from Michigan had a list of everyone from his company, and started reading off the names. “Gone,” he said. “Dead. He’s gone, too. He passed away not too long ago. He’s dead, too, now. Goddammit,” he said, as if realizing it for the first time, “they’re all gone.”
Eventually it was clear that with so many of the guys gone I would have to start contacting sons and daughters, even grandkids. That search brought me to southern Indiana.
William “Jim” Boice, the man who had led the initial reconnaissance patrol across the island, was from Indiana, and his son still lives there. Bill Boice Jr., in his mid-sixties, runs a manufacturing business, and walks and talks with an unlit cigar in his mouth. After giving me a tour of his plant, he and his wife Joyce kindly invited me to their house, where together we went through old newspaper clippings and photos that his mother had saved. Then we had lunch. After lunch we read entries from his father’s diary and then we got to his father’s letters.
When Bill Jr. read them, his voice shook. Handing the letters to me, he said, “Read ’em, I can’t.” Neither could I.
It was after my visit to Bill Boice that I began writing. And it was then that I decided I was going to walk across New Guinea in the footsteps of the Ghost Mountain boys.
My journey began with my scouting trip in August 2005. Almost everyone I met in Papua New Guinea warned me not to try to repeat the march. The Kapa Kapa was a rugged hunting and trading trail in 1942. No one knew if it still existed. Besides, they said, the country was too rough: cliffs, rivers, snakes, mountains, mosquitoes, leeches, and disease. And who knows, they said, whether the people will let you walk through their tribal lands. Some of those mountain villagers barely know the outside world exists. They still hunt with spears and slingshots.
In June 2006 I began the trip, accompanied by a friend and part-time filmmaker from Chicago, an Alaskan pal, an Australian expat living in Port Moresby who had spent lots of time in the New Guinea bush, a photographer from Hong Kong, and three Papua New Guinea cameramen from Port Moresby’s POM Productions. If we succeeded, our expedition would be an historic event; no outsider had attempted to walk the entire trail since the soldiers did it in 1942.
On the first day, climbing down to a river on a red clay trail as slippery as lake ice, I fell, tumbling head over heels with a sixty-seven-pound pack on my back. When I got to my feet, I knew that I had torn a ligament in my knee. I limped for another three hours until I could walk no more. My pulse was fast and thready, my vision blurred. I knew I could not make it, so I turned back and walked out. My friend George from Chicago accompanied me.
That night we slept in a village in a hut made of woven bamboo, and we were told to be on the lookout for ill-intentioned sorcerers. The following day we stumbled out of the mountains and hitched a ride to Port Moresby.
Four days later, equipped with painkillers and anti-inflammatories, and determined to follow in the footsteps of the Ghost Mountain boys, we were helicoptered back into the jungle.
Introduction
My remarks on the supply and equipment problems derive in part from a document titled “Comments on the Buna Campaign by a Quartermaster,” which is part of the Hanson Baldwin Collection at the George C. Marshall Research Library in Lexington, Virginia. War correspondent Jules Archer wrote an article for Man’s Magazine called “Why the 32nd Division Won’t Forgive General MacArthur.” It was very helpful, as was Tillman Durdin’s article, “The Grim Hide-and-Seek of Jungle War,” which appeared in the March 1943 edition of The New York Times Magazine.
Chapter 1. Escape to the South
There are a variety of people, including General Charles Willoughby, MacArthur’s head of Intelligence, who address MacArthur’s exchange with Wainwright and his subsequent flight from Corregidor. All seem to have a slightly different take on what transpired. In his superbly researched book, American Caesar, William Manchester describes MacArthur’s escape from Corregidor, his arrival in Australia, and his state of mind. To a large extent this is the account that I have relied on.
As for the legend about MacArthur’s fear of flying, General George Brett, who for a short time was MacArthur’s commander of American forces in Australia, may be the author. In “The MacArthur I Knew,” Brett states that MacArthur “hated to fly,” “suffered from airsickness,” and “would not get into a plane unless he knew it was perfect.” Brett also has some insightful comments about MacArthur’s psyche and his time in Australia, and the exclusivity of the Bataan Gang. And he dispels once and for all the tale that MacArthur fled Corregidor with a mattress full of gold pesos.
Regarding MacArthur’s famous speech, Harry Gailey, author of MacArthur Strikes Back, says that MacArthur uttered his famous words “I shall return” for the first time to reporters at Batchelor Field. In Reminiscences, MacArthur says the same. General Charles Willoughby says it happened in Alice Springs, as does John Toland in The Rising Sun. In other words, there does not seem to be a definitive, universally accepted account of what happened, or where. It may be that MacArthur uttered the three words at Batchelor Field, but according to Manchester, the speech heard round the world was made in Adelaide. Manchester describes how MacArthur labored over what he would say: MacArthur was concerned about the first sentence, writing and re-writing it many times. But it was the last sentence that caught on, becoming, according to historian Winston Groom, as memorable as “The British are coming!” or “Remember the Alamo.” MacArthur’s detractors trashed the speech, citing it as an example of the general’s megalomania. Why had he used “I”? It seemed silly and pompous, they said. Why had he not said, “We shall return”?
Regarding what was called the “Brisbane Line,” in his book 1942, Winston Groom suggests that MacArthur was having “none of” it, and that early on he had decided to take the war to New Guinea. William Manchester remains skeptical of the claim. It was revisionist and self-serving, a fiction first advanced by MacArthur in order to portray himself to history as a decisive commander. MacArthur, Manchester maintains, sent Australian and American troops to New Guinea only when there was no other course of action available to him. In his book There’s a War to Be Won, Geoffrey Perret is critical of MacArthur’s tendency for self-promotion. “This banal truth,” Perret wrote of MacArthur’s decision to accept Australia’s defensive posture, “would seem to be in conflict with the legend of MacArthur the Bold.” According to Perret and David Horner, too, MacArthur bolstered his own image by promoting a “fiction in which he’d found the Australians craven and defeatist.”
Regarding the threat to Australia, there is an ongoing and heated discussion taking place in Australia about whether or not Japan ever intended to invade. Dr. Peter Stanley delivered a paper titled “He’s (Not) Coming South: The Invasion That Wasn’t” at an Australian War Memorial conference. To this day, many people believe that Australia was Japan’s target. Yet Japanese war documents indicate that on March 15, 1942, the Army and Navy Sections of the Imperial General Headquarters dismissed the idea of an attack on the Australian mainland. The Japanese navy championed the idea, but the army demurred. After the war, Premier Hideki Tojo argued that Japan had dismissed the idea of invading Australia as early as March 1942 because it would require too many troops. Instead, Japan opted for a plan to seize Port Moresby, occupy the southern Solomon Islands, and isolate Australia by controlling the air space and the oceans so that the Americans could not use it as a base for offensive actions. Neither Allied Headquarters, Australia’s Joint Chiefs, nor the people of Australia were privy to this information, though. Stanley maintains that Prime Minister Curtin in particular exaggerated the threat.
On the subject of the Japanese invasion, army historian Samuel Milner seems to be of two minds. He writes: “Instead of approving an operation against the Australian mainland, the Japanese agreed to seize Port Moresby as planned and then, with the parallel occupation of the southern Solomons, ‘to isolate Australia’ by seizing Fiji, Samoa, and New Caledonia…. The plan said nothing about invading Australia; it did not have to. If everything went well and all objectives were taken, there would be enough time to begin planning for the invasion…. It was clear from the circumstances that the Japanese had not given up on the idea of invading Australia. They had merely laid it aside….”
For a description of the panic that existed in Australia, I relied Paul Ham’s Kokoda, Peter Brune’s books, and David Day’s The Great Betrayal and The Politics of War. Milner and Ham both do an excellent job of presenting the jockeying and deal making that went on after MacArthur arrived in Australia.
Regarding MacArthur’s burning ambition to return to the Philippines in triumph, General Brett provides interesting insights into MacArthur’s character. He writes, “The fulfillment of his promise to return to the Philippines seemed years away. He was a disappointed and unhappy man…. MacArthur retired into his ivory tower to plan the campaigns ahead. The planning was long range…. I don’t believe he gave much thought to our immediate problems.” Brett compares MacArthur to Marshall. Marshall, he says was “one of the clearest-thinking, least temperamental men” he had ever known. On the other hand, MacArthur was, in his opinion, a “brilliant, temperamental egoist.”
Chapter 2. A Train Heading West
For the general history of the 32nd Division, I relied primarily on three books: Major General H. W. Blakeley’s The 32nd Infantry Division in World War II; Wisconsin’s Red Arrow Division; and 32nd Division, Les Terribles. Herbert Smith’s books and division files at the National Archives also provide excellent details on the division’s Louisiana experience, the train ride, etc.
Regarding the warning signs, Brett writes in The MacArthur I Knew, “A reconnaissance picked up information of a concentration of troops and shipping at Rabaul…everything pointed to an active gathering of enemy forces. It seemed evident that they would head for some point on the north coast of New Guinea, and even attempt to go all the way around to Port Moresby. General MacArthur’s headquarters was kept apprised of the situation, but made little comment, and gave practically no suggestions or advice.” Brett, elaborating on MacArthur’s preoccupation with the Philippines, writes, “Not once, while I was in Australia, did the Supreme Commander go north to visit the advance bases…. MacArthur stuck to his desk.”
Toland writes that Churchill, when he heard of the attack on Pearl Harbor, slept well, knowing that the U.S. was now officially on his side. Toland also describes in vivid detail the simultaneous attacks on Pearl Harbor and Singapore Island. He also describes the euphoria that seized Japan.
Much of my portrayal of America immediately following Pearl Harbor comes from two outstanding books, Geoffrey Perret’s Days of Sadness, Years of Triumph and Paul Fussell’s Wartime.
Chapter 3. Arrival Down Under
Again, Smith’s books provide wonderful details of the soldiers’ experience at the Cow Palace and the three-week trip to Australia. In Gentle Knight, General Edwin Forrest Harding’s biographer Leslie Anders also writes about the experience. Clarence Jungwirth left behind a wonderful account of his experiences (Diary of a National Guardsman in World War II). Lenord Sill’s Buna & Beyond and Howard Kelley’s Born in the U.S.A. Raised in New Guinea were also very helpful.
Some of the details of the American soldiers’ relationship to the Australians and the returning Australian soldiers are from C. P. Murdock’s Saturday Evening Post article, “The Red Arrow Pierced Every Line,” E. J. Kahn’s G.I. Jungle, and Gentle Knight.
For the personal details on General Harding, I depended upon Leslie Anders’ wonderful biography Gentle Knight.
When Harding left San Franciso, his son Davis, who was finishing up his doctoral dissertation in English, wrote him. “Good luck, dad,” Davis wrote. “I like the idea of having you for a father.” Harding, Anders writes, responded with appropriate lines from Kipling:
The troopship’s on the tide, my boys, the troopship’s on the tide, O it’s “special train for Atkins” when the trooper’s on the tide.
E. J. Kahn wrote that soldiers knew so little about Australia they expected to be “met at a primitive wharf by aborigine porters on kangaroos.”
For details on the division’s training in Australia, I relied on Milner’s book, his interview with Harding, which can be found at the Office of the Chief of Military History, and Anders’ biography.
When Harding renamed Tamborine Camp Cable, Sergeant Gerald Cable’s mother wrote him, thanking him for “the high honor you have done my son’s name.”
To discuss the medical problems in the South Pacific, I used Simon Warmenhoven’s letters and a number of splendid books and articles, many written by Mary Ellen Condon-Rall.
Medical Department, United States Army in World War II, a series published in Washington, D.C., by the Army’s Office of the Surgeon General, provides both organizational studies and numerous physician-written accounts of the clinical problems encountered in the war against Japan. The Medical Department produced forty-eight books on World War II. They are divided into a number of sub-series dealing with preventive medicine, internal medicine, surgery, etc. One very helpful book is on preventive medicine: Communicable Disease: Malaria, edited by Ebbe Curtis Hoff. There are seven other volumes in this sub-series that deal with medical problems other than malaria. I also used a book published by the U.S. Army’s Center of Military History in Washington, D.C., in its United States Army in World War II series. It is coauthored by Mary Ellen Condon-Rall, titled The Medical Department: Medical Service in the War Against Japan. Chapter IV deals with jungle warfare. Three more publications were of enormous help. They are Condon-Rall’s “Allied Cooperation in Malaria Prevention and Control: The World War II Southwest Pacific Experience” (Journal of the History of Medicine, Vol. 46, October 1991, pp. 493-513), her “Malaria in the Southwest Pacific in World War II” (in Roy M. MacLeod, editor, The University of Sydney, Australia, Science and the Pacific War, Science and Survival in the Pacific, 1939-1945, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht/Boston/London, 2000), and her “The Army’s War against Malaria: Collaboration in Drug Research during World War II” (Armed Forces and Society, Vol. 21, No. 1, fall 1994, pp. 129-143).
Milner and Ham describe in detail the intelligence reports that said Japan was planning to invade New Guinea.
The early days of the Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit (ANGAU) and Major General Basil Morris’ dismissal of the possibility of a Japanese overland invasion, and the subsequent invasion, are found in Alan Powell’s wonderful book The Third Force.
An especially gruesome piece of history is the story of Miss May Hayman and Miss Mavis Parkinson, two young Anglican sisters assigned to the Gona Mission, who fled the Yokoyama Advance Force on July 21, 1942. When hundreds of Japanese troops slid down ropes onto barges to be transported through the puzzle of reefs to shore, Hayman and Parkinson plunged deep into the jungle with only a compass. Father James Benson, who ran the mission at Gona, led them. For months he had urged the sisters to leave Papua along with the rest of the white population that had evacuated, but they had refused. “Lighten our darkness, O Lord,” Father Benson prayed as they fled the Japanese.
Benson, Hayman, and Parkinson eluded the Japanese advance troops of the Tsukamoto Battalion until a native collaborator named Emboge from the Orokaivan people betrayed them near the village of Doboduru. The two sisters were taken to a plantation near the village of Buna, not far from the Japanese landing site, and were bayoneted to death. Mavis Parkinson was the first to go. A Japanese soldier forced her into an embrace. When she struggled to free herself, he dug his bayonet deep into her side. May Hayman, who held a towel over her eyes, was bayoneted in the throat as she listened to her friend die.
Emboge and his accomplices were later arrested and hanged.
“What else could we do?” Emboge pleaded. “The kiawa [white men] treated us badly before the war and they deserted the people when the Japanese landed at Buna.”
A sympathetic ANGAU officer witnessed the hanging. “I lay awake most of the night,” he wrote, “listening to the drums beating, and the wailing of the mourners…. I had seen death in various forms during the preceding twelve months, but nothing affected me as much as the hanging…. Perhaps it was the courage they displayed when the time came for them to die. Be that as it may, the punishment meted out to them was in accordance with their own tribal code of ‘an eye for an eye.’”
Arthur Duna’s quote is found in John Dadeno Waiko’s book, PNG: A History of Our Time. Duna’s account of the invasion is substantiated by a number of interviews that I conducted in Buna in 2005 and 2006. More information on the Japanese invasion can be found in Waiko’s “Damp Soil My Bed; Rotten Log My Pillow: A Villager’s Experience of the Japanese Invasion.”
Regarding the invasion from the Japanese perspective, I relied on a number of sources: Nankai Shitai, War Book of the 144th Regiment; Lost Troops; Southern Cross, and also a collection of ATIS documents at the National Archives. Milner also provides details. A whole host of Australian authors, including Ham, David Horner, Les McAulay, Peter Brune, Victor Austin, and Raymond Paull have written riveting, well-researched books about the battle along the Kokoda track.
All personal details on Herman Bottcher come from soldiers’ recollections and two articles: “Fire and Blood in the Jungle” by George L. Moorad in the July 3, 1943 issue of Liberty Magazine and Mark Sufrin’s article “Take Buna or don’t come back alive” in the Historical Times.
Chapter 4. Sons of Heaven
Details on General Horii are taken from Lida Mayo’s book, Bloody Buna.
Using G-2 daily summaries housed at the National Archives and Milner, I was able to detail Allied intelligence failures.
There are a number of excellent books on the militarization of Japanese society: John Toland’s The Rising Sun, Soldiers of the Sun by Meirion and Susie Harries, Tojo and the Coming of the War by Robert Butow, David James’ The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Empire, Japan’s War by Edwin Hoyt, and Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East, which investigated Japanese war crimes after the war, harshly condemned bushido. Although a willingness to die in the execution of one’s duty was a genuine part of the historic samurai ethic, the original conception of bushido left room for honorable surrender, both for the samurai and his enemies. Bushido’s twentieth-century perversion, however, engendered what military historian Eric Beregrud called “a cult of death,” in which no compassion was given and none was received.
Japanese quotes and diary entries are from ATIS documents.
The Australian perspective is from Ham, Brune, and Horner.
Chapter 5. Cannibal Island
Excerpts from Harding’s letters home appear in Anders’ biography and lend insight into Harding’s humanity.
Excerpts from MacArthur’s speech are taken from Blakeley. Anders also includes portions of MacArthur’s speech.
For a perspective on just how much it rains on the island of New Guinea, consider that Seattle, Washington, which is often considered the wettest place in the United States, gets an average of about seventy to eighty inches of rain per year. Milne Bay, one of the wettest places on the island’s eastern half (Papua New Guinea), regularly gets two and a half to three times that.
For this section I relied on a number of fascinating books: Gavin Souter’s New Guinea: The Last Unknown; Osmar White’s Green Armor and Parliament of a Thousand Tribes; New Guinea: Crossing Boundaries and History by Clive Moore, Documents and Readings in New Guinea History,edited by J. L. Whittaker and a host of others; Tim Flannery’s Throwim Way Leg; Prowling Through Papua by Frank Clune; W. N. Beaver’s Unexplored New Guinea; F. Hurley’s Pearls and Savages; L. M. D’Albertis’ New Guinea: What I Did and What I Saw; and Captain J. A, Lawson’s Wanderings in the Interior of New Guinea. Stephen Anderson’s article, “How Many Languages Are There in the World?” which appeared in the May 2004 edition of the Linguistic Society of America’s scholarly publication, was also very helpful.
Souter’s book, in particular, describes successive stages of exploration in New Guinea, and is full of fascinating anecdotes about the von Ehlers expedition and others.
First Contact tells the story of the “discovery” of the New Guinea Highlands by Australian gold prospectors Michael Leahy and his brothers. (There is also a film called First Contact based on Leahy’s film footage. It is widely considered an ethnographic classic.) The bulk of the book is about the events of 1933, when Leahy led a series of prospecting expeditions into the highlands and initiated the first contacts between highlanders and Europeans. The account is based on his diaries and later writings and on interviews with the native highlanders who witnessed the events. The book is full of photos taken at the time.
Chapter 6. Forlorn Hope
Many of the Company E details are derived from Lutjens’ diary, a series of lectures he delivered on the Papuan Campaign after returning to the United States, E. J. Kahn’s fascinating two-part series in the Saturday Evening Post called “The Terrible Days of Company E”, Art Edson’s letters home, James Hunt’s notes on the company’s early days in New Guinea, and his correspondence with Herbert “Stutterin’” Smith.
When General Kenney got news from Port Moresby that Lutjens and his men had arrived safely, he, in his own words, “rushed upstairs to General MacArthur’s office to give him the good news” and asked him if he could “haul the rest of the regiment.” Kenney continues, “He congratulated me most enthusiastically but told me that he had already ordered the rest of the regiment shipped by boat and that the loading had already begun. I said, ‘All right, give me the next regiment to go, the 128th, and I’ll have them in Port Moresby ahead of this gang that goes by boat.’”
Shortly after the 32nd landed in New Guinea, Harding’s staff threw him a birthday party in Australia. Harding made a speech, urging listeners to remember three important values: “time, equipment, and lives.” His preference was “to save human lives and take just a little longer to accomplish our mission.” As Anders notes, Harding wrote his wife: “I must admit,” he said, “that I rather like the idea that the men, that I’ve grown to think so much of, should think the ‘Old Man’ is all right. I hope that I never give them any reason to think otherwise during the tough times that we are destined to see together.”
Descriptions of the village of Gabagaba and its people are based on my 2005 and 2006 interviews with a number of village elders there, Lieutenant James Hunt’s recollections, and Art Edson’s letters home. The natives, according to Edson, “run around with nothing on.” Edson adds, “There is times when we feel like doing the same thing, and a lot of times too.” Edson also writes about how much weight the natives are able to carry. He says, “I saw one yesterday that carried a heavy pole about forty feet long on his shoulder.”
Native villages were decimated by ANGAU recruitment practices. In The Third Force, Alan Powell includes two native songs that reflect their sense of dislocation and sadness:
“All the women were standing by the river bank for their husbands.
All the children were standing by the riverbank for their fathers.
On the riverbank all were standing.
On the canoe bank all were standing.
When the husbands looked back they saw their wives and children were waving to them.”
“We have left our homes and beaches
To labour for the war in different places,
In far flung places. In these hard times
We wander aimlessly from home.
…In our little homes before the war
Partings from dear ones were unknown.
…We now wonder by our campfires
Of our homes, our dear ones, and our wives.
Longing, hoping, praying deeply.
To return to home once more.”
The first European to make contact with the simple, seafaring Motu people south of Port Moresby was Captain John Moresby. He spent days trading with them and asked in his diary, “What have these people to gain from civilization?”
During the early days of colonial occupation, a simplified Motu language, called “Police Motu,” was spread throughout the territory by native constables. In the nothern half of the island the German planters faced the same language barriers the British and Australians did in the south. The Germans’ solution was Pisin, a local word that became known as Pidgin. Pidgin has taken many words from various languages, including German and English. Be careful, for instance, is “Lukautim gut!”
A few of Gabagaba’s village elders remember how fascinated villagers were by America’s black engineers.
Chapter 7. The Bloody Track
Scenes of jubilation are taken from Seizo Okada’s Lost Troops. Captain Nakahashi’s quote is taken from Paul Ham’s Kokoda.
The Battle of Bloody Ridge was perhaps Guadalcanal’s most famous battle. In it, U.S. Marines repulsed an attack by the Japanese 35th Infantry Brigade. The Marines were defending Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, which they had captured from the Japanese in early August 1942. Kawaguchi’s unit was sent to Guadalcanal to recapture the airfield and drive the Allied forces from the island. Kawaguchi’s six thousand soldiers conducted several nighttime frontal assaults on the U.S. defenses. The main Japanese assault occurred on an unnamed ridge south of Henderson Field that was manned by troops from several U.S. Marine Corps units, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Merrit Edson. Although Kawaguchi’s men nearly defeated the Marines, the Americans held. The battle became known as the Battle of Edson’s Ridge or Bloody Ridge.
Accounts of General Horii’s deception and the Japanese supply situation are from Lida Mayo’s book. Specific quotes are from ATIS documents. Details of the messages received by General Horii and Horii’s horror at being asked to retreat are from Mayo’s book.
Ham writes that Captain Nakahashi uttered the same words about the message coming “like a bolt from the blue,” though the rest of the quote is different. Ham writes that Nakahashi said that the news, “caused an overflowing…of emotion, which could not be suppressed; it was compounded by feelings of anger, sorrow and frustration. The purpose, the dreams and the desires of the officers and soldiers of the South Seas Force had vanished in an instant.”
Ham writes that it took fifty Australian “sappers” using a powerful pulley system to get the cannon up the steep spur of Imita Ridge. The Australian engineers had cut two thousand steps ino the ridge, creating what the Australians called with irony the “Golden Staircase.”
Details on the beginning of the Australians counterattack are from William Crooks’ The Footsoldiers.
MacArthur’s quote to Brigadier John Edward Lloyd is from Ham.
MacArthur took great personal satisfaction from his appearance at Imita Ridge. American war correspondents had written that Port Moresby might go the way of Singapore. In reality, MacArthur was not anywhere near the front; it was five miles to the north at the village of Nauro.
According to McAulay, the 16th Brigade was made up of crack troops, Australia’s best. They had fought in the Middle East and in North Africa. Most, prior to returning to Australia, had also trained in the jungles of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). They were also well outfitted with camouflaged, long-sleeved shirts, long pants, gaiters, steel helmets with nets, and new boots with spikes.
In General Vasey’s War, Horner writes of Vasey’s speech to his commanders: “The Japanese are well trained in jungle warfare. In this form of warfare they are like tigers, cunning, silent and dangerous. Like tigers, too, they are vermin; they must be destroyed. One does not expect a live tiger to get to give himself up to capture so we must not expect the Japanese to surrender. He does not. He must be killed whether it is by shooting, bayoneting, throttling, knocking out his brains with a tin hat or by any other means our ingenuity can devise. Truly jungle warfare is a game of kill or be killed and to play it successfully demands alertness of all senses but particularly of ears and eyes.”
Chapter 8. Marching into the Clouds
Details on Jim Boice and his trek are from Boice’s diary, newspaper articles, and conversations with Boice’s son William Boice Jr.
Boice sent back 1st Lieutenant Bernard Howes with his trail notes, saying that he believed that subsequent groups would “take proportinately greater time on these trails.”
Details on the Kapa Kapa and plans for the overland advance are from Milner, Gailey, Mayo, the National Archives, the Wisconsin Veterans Museum, and interviews with veterans of the march.
Specifics of Medendorp’s march are from his report, his lengthy reminiscences, and interviews with his sons and his sister Alice.
Description of the carriers are based on Medendorp’s writings, conversations with villagers of Gabagaba, Powell’s book The Third Force, photographs, and T. E. Dutton’s comprehensive study, The Peopling of Central Papua.
Powell contrasts the American soldiers’ relationship with the villagers with the way they were treated by the Australians. He writes, “The problem…was not merely that the Australians had and gave less, but that they actively discouraged or forbade the generosity of the Americans.” One villager said, “If an American was going to give something to me, he had to look around and make sure that none of the Angau were present. If an Angau saw an American give one of us something, then he would come and take it away.”
Leslie Anders portrays Harding as the consummate renaissance man, a writer of prose and poetry, a voracious reader, and an avid and accomplished student of history.
Details on Roger Keast are from interviews with his son Harry, interviews of men who served with Keast, and a variety of newspaper articles.
It is occasionally dificult to track the patrol’s journeys, since no detailed maps of the area existed and often Medendorp did not use place names. Much of the country, including the rivers and the countless peaks, did not have names. Although some of the most prominent features had native names, many did not.
Descriptions of the jungle are based in part on my own trek on the Kapa Kapa and my observations.
American and Australian soldiers greatly feared the Japanese soldier. They viewed him as cunning, stealthy, and deadly, despite Allied commanders’ continual attempts to dispel the myth of the Japanese warrior’s superiority.
Boyd Swem is one of the soldiers about whom Medendorp writes very fondly. Medendorp wrote, “Nothing dismayed Swem.” Swem was a member of Service Company when Mendedorp invited him to join the Wairopi Patrol.
Captain Buckler’s group was just as stunned to discover the Americans. According to Raymond Paull in his book Retreat from Kokoda, the Americans were “an image of wishful thinking to a man who had endured a month of strain and vicissitude.” Lewis Sebring, a correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune who saw Buckler’s group when they reached the coast, described them much as Medendorp did: “Sunken eyes looked at us from bearded faces…” Mayo writes that it was Boice who encountered Buckler’s group, but Medendorp’s group surely encountered them, too, for Medendorp writes, “They were dirty, hungry, bearded, and many were nursing old wounds…” In additon to feeding them, Medendorp wrote that they were welcome to “all the food that they could carry, and with our blessing.”
Details on the Japanese invasion of Rabaul are from Ham and Paull.
That evening a runner from Boice’s Pathfinder Patrol also stumbled into Arapara. According to Medendorp, he had “malaria and was partly delirious.”
I witnessed the natives’ lack of concern about rats and cockroaches; they consider our sqeamishness laughable.
Details on the beliefs of carriers are derived from numerous interviews with people in Papua New Guinea, Powell’s book, and conversations and e-mails with Bill McKellin, a professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
The quote is from Lieutenant William D. Hawkins, Harding’s G-2 (from Anders’ Gentle Knight).
The old village of Laruni was situated on a hill overlooking the Mimani River, a one-hour climb from the present-day village of Laruni (or Larun), which lies on the western bank of the river.
Medendorp was a cigar man, but almost everyone in the army learned to smoke cigarettes.
All that Medendorp and Keast had to work with was a hand-drawn map listing the villages along the trail. The map did not even include mountain peaks and rivers. Medendorp and Keast would draw their own map, called Map C: Operations of the Wairopi Patrol, which would show villages and drainages along the Kumusi River from Jaure down to Wairopi on the Kokoda track. This map can be found at the National Archives.
North of Laruni, the terrain becomes extremely steep, as we would discover on our trek. Natives, especially those recruited in Gabagaba and other coastal villages, would have been unfamiliar with the mountains and frightened by them. They believed that the mountains were populated with evil spirits. To this day, natives of seaside villages are reluctant to venture into the mountains. Mountain people are also frightened of the high peaks.
I discovered some of Medendorp’s radio messages at the National Archives.
Keast’s endurance is confirmed by veterans who took part in the Wairopi Patrol.
The trail is infested with leeches that crawl up out of the mud and fall from overhanging branches.
Initially the Japanese Imperial army took great care not to alienate the people of New Guinea. Orders were to “make them realise that the Imperial army will protect their lives and property…to ensure that all decisions made in local matters are fair, to respect their women and never approach them, to always pay a proper price for things bought or labor done.”
Those who submitted to the Japanese were to be treated benevolently, but those who displayed hostility were to be “disposed of rigorously and without mercy.” A notebook of Second Lieutenant Hidetada Noda, captured near the village of Menari, contained information regarding treatment of natives: “No work at night. Do not hit them unless the reason for doing it is very obvious…. Treat them as human beings.” Initially, the Japanese were quite egalitarian, certainly more so than the ANGAU masters had been. The Japanese soldiers ate with the native New Guineans, and in some cases, lived with them.
Details on the Jaure reunion can be found in Medendorp’s memoirs.
Descriptions of porters are from Medendorp’s memoirs and Professor Bill McKellin, who lived for two years with the people of Central Papua.
Segal’s complaints were widespread among the Medical Corps. In “The Fight Against Malaria in the Papua and New Guinea Campaigns,” John T. Greenwood writes, “Medical officers could not obtain the level of priority required for the shipment of supplies into or even within the theater.” He describes a puzzling lack of interest by line commanders and theater planners in the malaria threat.
Milner writes of what was called the “Wanigela Operation.” Ivan Champion, a former colonial patrolman, had successfully mapped a channel from Milne Bay to Cape Nelson, up the coast from Wanigela, making the transport of the 128th and its supplies possible.
General George Brett, who was no longer MacArthur’s commander of American forces in Australia, must have been surprised by MacArthur’s sudden faith in the air forces. Previously, according to Brett, he had nothing but “contempt and criticism for them.” In The MacArthur I Knew,Brett recalls a conversation where MacArthur said of the air force, “They lack discipline, organization, purposeful intent.”
Flying over the Owen Stanley “hump,” where cloud banks sometimes reached 40,000 feet in the air, was no easy task.
Chapter 9. One Green Hell
Lutjens’ entries are from his diary and from E. J. Kahn’s article, “The Terrible Days of Company E.”
The engineers who accompanied the 2nd Battalion were from the 114th Engineers, a Massachusetts Guard unit. The 114th Engineers replaced the division’s 107th Engineers who were already on their way to the ETO. The story of the engineers has never really been told. They performed miracles along the trail, which certainly saved lives.
Native carriers were more than happy to pick up whatever equipment and clothing the soldiers left behind. Hare Bore of Gabagaba was one of the carriers for the 2nd Battalion. Remembering how the soldiers suffered in the heat and under the weight of their packs, he says, “I drop tears for them.”
The story of soldiers tearing the buttons off their shirts seemed improbable to me. Veterans of the march, however, insist that they saw men do it.
On my own trek—though our team, including carriers, never amounted to more than twenty-five—I saw how quickly the trail could turn into a path of shin-deep mud.
Accounts of Company G’s march are from personal interviews with the men of Company G, friends who served with Bailey, and Wendell Trogdon’s book on Cladie Bailey.
For an excellent history of malaria and efforts to stamp it out, read Mosquitoes, Malaria and Man by Gordon Harrison, and Mary Ellen Condon-Rall’s books and articles.
A number of other good books discuss tropical disease: a basic book called Tropical Infectious Diseases; Tropical Diseases from 50,000 BC to 2500 AD; and Douglas Haynes’ Imperial Medicine. Bergerud also has a section devoted to disease in the South Pacific war. Interestingly, he notes, “Up until the twentieth century, it [disease] was the primary killer during war.”
In “The Fight Against Malaria in the Papua and New Guinea Campaigns,” John T. Greenwood writes, “The establishment in March 1942 of the Southwest Pacific Area as an Allied theater command under General Douglas MacArthur meant that one of the most primitive, remote, and disease-infested tropical areas in the world would become the scene of major military operations.” He adds that the medical department’s experience with the “huge amount of damages inflicted on American forces in Bataan, should have alerted American military and medical leaders to the impending danger…. Theater officers devoted little attention to developing an antimalaria program during 1942, however, because of their focus on more immediate operational requirements.”
The army’s decision to let the soldiers rest in villages along the trail’s route seemed practical at the time, but it backfired. The soldiers were already suffering from dysentery, trenchfoot, and jungle ulcers when malaria hit them like a time bomb. Exposed to mosquitoes on the coast and in the long-grass savanna that bordered the hill country, many soldiers were wracked with chills and high fevers by the time they reached the mountains. Malaria devastated the 2nd Battalion, and eventually the entire 32nd Division. Eventually nearly 70 percent of the division would contract the disease.
Bergerud also discusses at length the problems that malaria and other diseases caused for the American army in New Guinea.
Malaria means “bad air” in Italian, a reference to the long-held notion that people contracted malaria by smelling the “bad air” of a swamp. The culprit, though, is a tiny parasite transmitted through the bite of the female anopheles mosquito, which teemed in the tidal swamps, open grasslands, and thick, dank jungles along the trail.
Once in the blood, the parasites traveled to the soldiers’ livers and reproduced, burst, and released more parasites back into the soldiers’ bloodstreams. When other female anopheles fed on the infected blood, they, too, were infected. Worst of all, the parasites were hard to get rid of. In some cases, the men’s livers and red blood cells played host to the disease for years.
Malaria is New Guinea’s scourge. Fort Coronation, the island’s first European settlement, a British colony established in 1793, was decimated by fever in less than a year. The next colony, a Dutch experiment called Merkusoord, lost seventy-five soldiers and nearly a hundred women and children in a seven-year period between 1828 and 1835. A French sailing vessel sighted the settlement in 1840, but discovered nothing more than a “citrus grove, coconut trees, a brick oven, ruined stone dwellings, and an overgrown road.”
Near the middle of the century Dutch Protestants affiliated with a society called “The Christian Workman” attempted to establish a number of missions in northwestern New Guinea. After twenty-five years, an earthquake and a tidal wave, epidemics of smallpox and dysentery, and rampant malaria, the number of people to die from disease exceeded the number of natives baptized into Christ.
Around the time of the missions’ collapse, a Russian biologist by the name of Nikolai Mikluho Maclay was making forays into New Guinea’s northeastern interior. After befriending the initially hostile natives, Maclay had to contend with an even more dangerous foe—malaria. One night while in his hut, Maclay described the symptoms. “He [the victim of malaria],” he wrote, “does not feel her [malaria’s] presence, but before long he feels his legs as filled with lead, his thoughts are interrupted by giddiness, a cold shiver passes through the limbs, his eyes become very sensitive to light and his eyelids droop in a powerless way. Images, some enormous monsters, some sad and slow, appear before his closed eyes. By and by the cold shivering changes into a heat, a dry endless heat…”
Roughly a decade after Maclay’s adventures, Britain and Germany were competing for large parts of the island. In late 1884 Britain declared southeastern New Guinea a protectorate and not long after hoisted the Union Jack over Port Moresby. After the cheering subsided, Britain dispatched Major General Sir Peter Scratchley, the protectorate’s first commissioner. Scratchley, however, died of malaria after only three months in the territory.
Germany’s colonial administration took the form of the Neu Guinea Kompagnie, which Germany’s chancellor Otto von Bismarck put in charge of the adventure. Commissioned by the Kompagnie to find sites for potential settlement, in what became known as Kaiser-Wilhelmsland, Dr. Otto Finch made five journeys to northeastern New Guinea, naming the region’s greatest river (the Sepik) the Kaiserin Augusta. In honor of Dr. Finch’s discoveries, the Kompagnie named its first settlement Finchhafen. In establishing the settlement, though, the Kompagnie could not have chosen more poorly. Finchhafen was a desperate place, beset by a hellishly humid climate, earthquakes, a lethal strain of malaria, and soul-deadening monotony. The chancellor’s nephew, who worked in the colony as a surveyor, wrote that one of the two most frequented spots in the town was the cemetery. Upon leaving Finchhafen, he wrote, “I am one of the few to get out of that malaria-hole Finchhafen with a whole skin because I treated the fever with alcohol instead of quinine, and the orders of the Neu Guinea Kompagnie similarly—with alcohol instead of respect.”
Details from Smith’s books and details of the gold rush are in Souter’s New Guinea.
In 1889, a half-century before Company G attempted to negotiate the high mountain country of the Owen Stanleys, Sir William MacGregor, a short, square, indomitable Scot, led the first official expedition into the mountains. MacGregor was appointed administrator over what was then known as British New Guinea, after Britain assumed sovereignty over the protectorate in 1888, and he was determined to investigate the Papuan Peninsula’s wild interior. MacGregor’s carriers, who were familiar with the terrain, said the mountains could not be reached. MacGregor was not deterred until he actually entered them. From Port Moresby it had taken his team nearly a month to reach the second highest peak in British New Guinea. It was 13,363 feet tall, and he named it Mt. Victoria. Much to his surprise, Mt. Victoria was not the gigantic, isolated mountain he had imagined. It was part of a huge, sprawling mountain chain.
Regarding the drop sites, Medendorp and Keast’s team successfully pinpointed, and sometimes cleared, drop sites along the trail.
The Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 was passed by the United States Congress on September 6, 1940, becoming the first peacetime conscription in U.S. history. The draft began in October 1940. By the early summer of 1941, FDR asked Congress to extend the term of duty for the draftees beyond twelve months. The House of Representatives approved the extension by a single vote. The terminal point of service would soon be extended to six months after the war.
Bottcher’s description is from “Fire and Blood in the Jungle” by George Moorad. Lieutenant James Hunt’s recollection is found in his letter to Stutterin’ Smith.
Odell also writes of the grueling nature of the hike in his diary.
The Bailey quote is taken from interviews with Katherine (Bailey) Matthews.
Problems between Australians and American soldiers were growing so bad that on August 15, Harding delivered a lecture on relations with Australian soldiers. Gangs were trying “to find stray American troops and to kill them.” One Australian general described the animosity as “a most despicable thing between allies.”
According to Gailey there were a number of “embarrassing problems caused by the influx of American troops.” “Australia,” he writes, “had an all-white immigration policy. MacArthur had more than twice the percentage of black troops than in the European theater. The employment of these solders rankled many Australians and caused some friction.”
Gailey adds, “the most vexing of all was the relations between off-duty American and Australian servicemen in the cities. Contrary to the myths that developed in the years after the war, they did not like one another.”
Gailey goes on to tell the story of a brawl that erupted in Brisbane between U.S. military police and Australian soldiers. One Australian soldier was killed and nine were wounded.
Messages between Colonel Quinn and and Captain Boice are in the National Archives.
Chapter 10. To Swallow One’s Tears
The details and quotes were taken from Japanese diaries translated by ATIS. At first, Allied translators were shocked by revelations of cannibalism that appeared in Japanese diaries, and asked for confirmation of their translations. It was indeed ironic that on an island legendary for its cannibals, it was the Japanese who were eating human flesh. In Papua, in the years before the war, the Australian colonial government had imposed on the people a western economic structure and the British system of law (Pax Australiana), and doled out harsh punishment for anyone suspected of cannibalism.
Ham writes that when the Australians searched the Japanese camp at Templeton’s Crossing, they found “the flesh of Australian soldiers still cooking over the smoking embers of a campfire. More carved corpses,” Ham writes, “lay on the track nearby.”
By the end of the war, human flesh had become a staple of the Japanese diet. Ham quotes one Australian soldier who said that when they entered the village of Sanananda, they saw “little billy tins of human flesh.”
Of Allen’s firing, Horner writes, “Clearly Blamey felt he had to relieve Allen to placate MacArthur. Had Blamey stood up to MacArthur, he would have won the respect of the Australian army. As it was, he did MacArthur’s bidding and won the opprobrium of the troops.”
Ham paints a wonderful portrait of General “Bloody George” Vasey: “His quick wit and independent character had happily survived his promotion up the ranks. He seemed free of…pomposity and self-importance.” He was a man of “rigid self-discipline and unyielding spirit,” and “swaggering indifference to danger,” but he had a “genuine concern for, and mingled with, his men.” Quoting Raymond Paull, Ham writes, “He never lost the common touch.”
In War History of the Force which was Sent to the South Seas, Nakahashi presents another scenario for Horii’s death. Lida Mayo suggests that he drowned in the Kumusi.
Smith includes a description of Natunga (alternately spelled Natanga on some maps).
Professor Bill McKellin, who lived among the people of Central Papua, provided descriptions of what the people of Natunga probably looked like.
I discovered the messages between Quinn and Smith and Quinn and Boice in the National Archives. The description of the crash is from soldiers, native interviews, and Smith. Boice comments on Quinn’s death in his diary.
Hawkins, Harding’s G-2, wrote of Quinn’s death, “It’s always the people who put out, who go out of their way to do more than their share—that seem to get their necks out. I only hope they don’t foist off one of these homeless colonels on us…floating around in superfluous base jobs.”
In his diary Odell also writes of the crash scene and of the minute or two where men were more concerned with scrounging food than the colonel and crew’s death.
Harding, of course, had the unenviable task of informing Quinn’s widow. To his wife Eleanor, he wrote, “It will be a tough job. I wish I didn’t have to do it.”
The details of the Memorial Service are from the National Archives file on the 126th.
Chapter 11. Fever Ridge
Descriptions of MacArthur’s Port Moresby Headquarters are found in a variety of different books including Manchester, Groom, and Willoughby.
Conditions at Pongani are found in Lawrence Thayer’s “My War” and other diaries of 128th soldiers, and in collections of newspaper articles housed in the Wisconsin Veterans Museum.
Robert J. Doyle, the staff war correspondent for the Milwaukee Journal who was assigned to accompany the 128th, wrote a series of excellent pieces on it, including a story about the 128th becoming mired in the extensive swamps of the Musa River delta, and the slow, tedious process of moving troops north by small boat.
On a boat trip from Oro Bay to Tufi, I saw the vast delta of the Musa River.
Lawrence Thayer relates an interesting side story. Once the 128th made it to Pongani, he was asked by a lieutenant heading up the I&R (intelligence and reconnaissance) platoon to take a squad through the swamps and into the inland hill country in an attempt to find the Kokoda track. Thayer writes that he “didn’t even have a map because the only one available described the interior as unexplored.” It was his job to fill in the map. He continues, “At first I wrote down an azimuth reading of our direction and an estimate of distance for each leg, but soon it became apparent that this was not going to work. There were too many short legs and steep climbs interspersed with stretches of soggy swamp. About all I could do was to keep track of the general direction and time involved.”
Thayer continues: “That afternoon we came upon a river…. We held our packs and rifles about our heads and started moving slowly across…. At one point I was submerged up to my neck…. It wasonly by a miracle that we weren’t pulled downstream. If the river had been an inch deeper or faster we couldn’t have made it. On our second night we slept on a huge pile of driftwood in the middle of a wide shallow river. It was very uncomfortable, but the current was strong enough to provide sufficient air to keep us from being devoured by the king-sized mosquitoes.
“As we continued toward the mountains the next day, the trail became quite steep in spots and very tiring. During one of our rest stops, to catch my breath I lay flat on my back staring into the branches of a small tree above me. To my horror I realized the leaves were covered with a squirming mass of leeches…. Some of the trees were nearly 10 feet in diameter and reached high in the sky…”
Eventually, Thayer and his team turned back and returned to Pongani because one of the soldiers developed a “nasty jungle infection.”
Milner’s book and Doyle’s articles provide great information on the 128th at Pongani. I also collected lots of information in interviews with soldiers of the 128th.
Before he committed large numbers of troops to the coast, MacArthur wanted to make sure there was an escape route and wanted assurances that he could supply his troops. Regarding supply, MacArthur was dealing with a very difficult situation. The line of communication and supply from the United States to the scene of operations was one of the longest in military history. According to G-2 reports: “The entire route was by water at a time when the Japanese Navy was undefeated and roaming the Pacific almost at will.” And once supplies reached Australia, the problems had just begun. It was fifteen hundred miles from South Australia to New Guinea. There was a shortage of ships and the quirky Australian system of transportation—all the railroad track gauges were different—made the transportation of supplies troublesome. MacArthur understood that Allied success in New Guinea would be determined, in part, by the dependability of its supply line. Aware of the fact that most of America’s resources would go to Europe, MacArthur wisely initiated a supply source using Australian producers and resources. It was a stroke of genius, almost certainly colored by the tragedy of Bataan.
By this time, Harding realized that it would be impossible to move troops overland to the north coast.
After the naval battle of Guadalcanal (November 12-15), the Japanese stopped trying to reinforce their Guadalcanal garrison. In other words, the marines reinforced by army troops were tightening the noose on the Japanese at Guadalcanal just as MacArthur was beginning his advance on Buna.
Most historians refer incorrectly to Buna Mission instead of Buna Government Station. The government station was at Buna, but the mission was up the coast at Gona.
I learned much of the history of Buna, and the correct spellings of place names, from Wellington Jojoba, a professor at the University of Papua New Guinea in Port Moresby, who was raised in Buna.
Details of William Hirashima’s life are from the transcript of Dr. David Swift, University of Hawaii.
The story of Simon Warmenhoven’s heroism on the trail is from a letter that Herb Steenstra wrote to Warmenhoven’s daughters. In an interview with Jack Hill, I learned of Warmenhoven’s heroism during the bombing of the airstrip in Port Moresby.
Milner discusses the paucity of accurate intelligence. There was a commonly held belief that the Allies might be able to take Buna “without firing a shot.” Eichelberger comments on this in Our Jungle Road to Tokyo; and in his article, “War Is Like This,” E. J. Kahn does, too.
Chapter 12. The Kill Zone
I found the translation of the poem “Umi Yukaba” in Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore Cook’s book, Japan at War: An Oral History. Details of the advance and first day’s battle are from Lawrence Thayer’s account, a series of articles that Robert Doyle wrote for the Milwaukee Journal,interviews with soldiers of the 128th, writer-historian Tom Doherty’s account in the Wisconsin Magazine of History titled “Buna: The Red Arrow Division’s Heart of Darkness,” and Bergerud’s interview with Ernest Gerber.
In the early days of the battle, according to Doherty, “Murphy’s Law ran amok.”
Accounts of the bombing of the flotilla of boats that included General Harding are from Lida Mayo, Harding’s Buna Diary, Anders’ biography of Harding, a report of the incident that Harding wrote on January 6, 1943, a colonel’s account of the disaster (written on December 8, 1942), Lieutenant Colonel Stanley Hollenbeck’s diary, which can be found at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum, an article by Murlin Spencer called “2 Allied Generals Swim Half Mile” that appeared in the St. Paul Dispatch, and Pat Robinson’s book The Fight for New Guinea.
Harding mourned the loss of McKenny. “The Division,” he wrote, “lost a good man.”
The 128th urgently radioed General Ennis Whitehead, General Kenney’s deputy commander, requesting airdrops to replace the supplies that were lost.
According to author Thomas Carmichael (The Ninety Days), despite Kenney’s boast about his pilots supplying the artillery, it was a role that he showed a “total inability to fulfill.”
Descriptions of the Japanese positions are taken from Milner, The Papuan Campaign, and Bergerud’s Touched with Fire. Geoffrey Perret writes in There’s a War to Be Won that the Japanese position was so formidable that “Two men and a machine gun could hold off a battalion.”
Groom writes, “The Japanese were fighting from beind the most formidable bunkers seen since the Western Front of World War I.”
Doyle wrote of the attack: “The Yanks are advancing—crawling on their bellies through the rain soaked jungle so thick they can’t see more than 10 yards ahead of them…” Doyle also writes of the medics’ outstanding work.
Details of that first night are from my interviews with Ray Bailey. Stutterin’ Smith writes of being put under Australian command.
Chapter 13. A Poor Man’s War
Eric Bergerud called the battle for the north coast “a poor man’s war.”
Harding comments at length in his Buna Diary on MacArthur’s orders to take Buna. According to Kenney, “Harding was getting the blame, as he had not weeded out incompetent subordinate commanders who didn’t know what to do. The troops were shot full of dysentery and malaria was starting to show up…. The troops were green and the officers were not controlling them…. They threw away their steel helmets and then wouldn’t go forward because they didn’t have them. They were scared to death of snipers.”
Smith writes of his battalion’s return to the east side of the river.
Soldiers would eventually come to call the Triangle the “Bloody Triangle.”
Details of Hirashima’s heroism are from the transcript of Dr. David Swift, University of Hawaii.
Details of the early days on the Sananada Front are from Lieutenant Colonel Bill Sikkel, Carl Smestad, Martin Bolt, Wellington Homminga, other 3rd Battalion veterans, Medendorp’s report and his memoirs (he called them his “Reminiscence”), and the Major Boerem Force Journal in the National Archives.
Details of the establishment of the roadblock, including the savage attack led by Shirley and Keast, are from Milner, Carl Smestad, and a series of articles that George Weller wrote for the Detroit News and the Chicago Daily News.
Details of 2nd battalion’s move back east across the Girua River are from Lieutenant Robert Odell’s diary.
The story of Colonel Smith’s early efforts at the Triangle were told to me by Irving Hall. I filled out the story with details from Milner.
Early in the afternoon on November 21, Sergeant Irving W. Hall of Company F, 128th, was out in front, leading the company, when he noticed an enemy machine gunner ahead. It was a lucky catch. The machine gunner was preparing to mow down Hall’s men. Hall pretended that he had not spotted the machine gunner. He turned around to face his men and calmly instructed them to leave the track. Then he spun around, firing his tommy gun and splattering the enemy with bullets. It was a heroic move that allowed the company to avert disaster.
Smith immediately called for flanking movements. Company F went left, G moved right, H was sent right down the center, and E was held in reserve. On the right, Company G was soon mired in neck-deep swamps. The company, under 1st Lieutenant Theodore Florey, pushed on in hopes of finding better terrain. Hours later, it was still surrounded by nasty swamp. At 2100 hours, Florey halted his troops; it was senseless to push on in the dark. Florey must have been cursing his map. Despite the swamp’s vastness, on the map there was no indication that it even existed. How could the G-2 guys have missed the swamp?
Early the following morning, Florey and his men moved out. By noon they found dry land on a kunai flat. After consulting his compass, Florey realized that only a relatively small sago swamp separated Company G from its destination. In other words, Company G was in position to attack. But Colonel Smith balked. He was convinced that the company’s position was unsupportable.
Company F had only slightly more success. The terrain west of the Triangle was not as swampy, so initially it made better progress. But then it bumped into Entrance Creek, which was impossible to cross. At high tide, the creek was deep enough to be unfordable. It was also teeming with well-positioned enemy machine gunners.
Colonel Smith was prepared to pull Company G when he received news from headquarters forbidding him to do so. It had planned an attack for the following morning. It would begin with an airstrike on the Triangle and was to be followed up by a ground offensive.
Colonel Smith asked for a postponement of the attack, during which time he hoped to reconnoiter the area. His request was denied. He was heartened, however, by the arrival of Major Smith’s 2nd Battalion.
The story of the friendly fire was told to me by Erwin Veneklase and soldiers of Company G. I also relied on Milner’s and Mayo’s accounts of the incident.
Lutjens’ story is from his diary and a series of lectures he delivered on the Papuan Campaign after returning to the United States. Other details are from Odell’s diary.
Details on the Japanese counterattack come from Milner, Mayo, Gailey, and Herbert Smith.
Chapter 14. If They Don’t Stink, Stick ’Em
Just a week before, six Japanese warships had landed a thousand men, including three hundred replacements from the 144th Infantry and the 229 Infantry’s 3rd battalion—a unit of crack troops. Along with Colonel Hiroshi Yamamoto, they were sent east of the Girua River.
Gailey, quoting John Hetherington’s Blamey biography, writes that Blamey wrote Curtin, saying, “My faith in the militia is growing, but my faith in the Americans has sunk to zero…. American troops cannot be classified as attack troops. They definitely are not equal to the Australian militia, and from the moment they met opposition sat down and hardly have gone forwards.”
Harding, as Anders says in Gentle Knight, was critical of the staff officers sent to observe conditions at the front.
Mott, though caustic, had a master’s from Harvard and a quarter century in uniform. Harding had made a mistake, however, in relying on Mott. Gailey relates a confrontation that Mott had with one of the staff officer observers, arguing over who had the right to use one of only two jeeps at the front.
As Gailey points out, the staff officer (Larr) did not leave a written report of what he witnessed at the front, and he was killed in a plane crash. Whatever Larr said, though, represented a nail in Harding’s coffin.
Smith relates the details of this meeting in his books.
The details of Harding’s walk to Dobodura are taken from Anders’ biography and from Harding’s Buna Diary.
The history of Doboduru, or what the army called Doboduru, was explained to me by Wellington and Willie Jojoba on a tour of Doboduru. Seeing Doboduru, it is obvious why the U.S. Army chose it as an airfield. Doboduru’s grasslands are vast. The runways that the army built, though surrounded by tall grass, are still visible.
Details on the mental and physical condition of the men on the eve of battle are derived from personal interviews with the veterans.
Smith writes of his affection for his men, especially Bailey. Jerry Smith (Smith’s son) also spoke of his father’s affection for his men.
Jastrzembski says that even guys who did not smoke or swear learned to do both once they got in the army.
Stateside conditions are from Perret’s book. I also mined Robert Frankenstein’s book, WWII: Rendezvous With History, for details. An exhibit set up by Frankenstein at the Dodge County Historical Society in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, was also very helpful.
In his interview with E. J. Kahn, Lutjens relates the story of Fredericks sneaking up on a Japanese position.
Lutjens’ love letter is from his diary.
Japanese diary entries are from the ATIS collection at the National Archives.
Odell’s observations are taken from his diary. Other historians have also used excerpts from Odell’s diary.
The scene with Captain Erwin Nummer is taken from E. J. Kahn’s article, “The Terrible Days of Company E.”
Historical accounts of what the soldiers discovered when they overran the Japanese hut vary. Milner, Mayo, Lutjens, Odell, and Smith all have slightly different stories.
Mary Ellen Condon-Rall quotes Warmenhoven about the performance of the medical corps. All the men that I interviewed spoke highly of Warmenhoven and his staff. Some details are also from George Moorad’s newspaper stories, and a variety of articles that appeared in the Grand Rapids Press. I also used an article in the Junior Review titled “Report from the Medical Front.”
The Bottcher incident is described by George Moorad in his article for Liberty Magazine called “Fire and Blood in the Jungle.”
Chapter 15. The Butcher’s Bill
Milner, Gailey, Mayo, and Anders provide details on Harding’s meeting.
Harding had written earlier that Sutherland seemed to be the kind of man with whom he could be “perfectly frank.” “I was,” Harding later wrote, “but he wasn’t.” Prior to the incident, Harding rated Sutherland a good friend—“until we tangled at the Dobodura airstrip on November 30…since then my personal and official regard for him has steadily deteriorated.”
Harding seemed to be the last man to grasp Sutherland’s true character. Others regarded Sutherland as prickly, aloof, and power hungry.
Harding thought it unwise to relieve subordinates in the middle of battle. While he was at the Infantry Journal, it published an article “The Economics of Canning” that clearly reflected Harding’s ideas on the subject. “In WWI,” the article read, “some commanders thought that GHQ’s measure of an officer’s ability was the number of subordinates he canned…. ‘Put the fear of God in them was the watch-word.’ One strike and out was the procedure…it gives them [the officers] the jitters. And jitters don’t make for the highest combat efficiency. Moreover, the practice lends itself to grave abuses; weak superiors are prone to cover their own shortcomings by throwing off their subordinates.” The article then goes on to extol the virtues of team play. “All passably good officers should be kept with their units. Commanding officers cannot expect run-of-the-mill subordinates to posssess the military virtues of Napoleon’s marshals. They must know how to get results with average material as well as superior…. Indeed, the chances are that the replacement will be worse than the officer relieved.”
In Our Jungle Road to Tokyo Eichelberger writes of his meeting in Port Moresby with MacArthur. General Kenney has a slightly different version, but the essence of the encounter is largely the same. Geoffrey Perret also details this meeting.
E. J. Kahn wrote, “The men at the front in New Guinea were perhaps among the most wretched-looking soldiers ever to wear the American uniform.”
In 1942, Groom, too, writes of the men’s suffering.
Eichelberger’s account of their meeting differs slightly from Jastrzembski’s.
Accounts of the meeting with the “brass” can be found in Smith’s books. Other historians describe the scene, too.
Harding defended Mott. The situation at Buna favored the Japanese. It was hard on the troops. In 1936 Harding wrote in Infantry Journal, “Flesh-and-blood troops don’t conform to Leavenworth and Benning ground rules.”
In a letter he wrote to MacArthur on December 7, 1942 (after he was relieved), which Tom Doherty quotes in his article “Buna: The Red Arrow’s Heart of Darkness,” Harding stated, “I cannot agree with General Eichelberger’s conclusion that the ‘men were licked.’ The impression I got was that the men still had plenty of fight left but had no stomach for another go at a position which had beaten off four attacks. They felt, and with good reason, that the bunkers and the strong fixed defenses that had held them up should be blasted out before they went at it again.”
Eichelberger writes of the flood in Our Jungle Road To Tokyo: “Various personal items floated around like chips in a millstream. I waded knee-deep to get my shaving mirror…. In Buna that year, it rained about a hundred and seventy inches.”
The incident with the soldier in the hospital is taken from Anders’ Gentle Knight.
Phil Ishio wrote an article for the American Intelligence Journal in 1995 on the Japanese-American contribution to the Allied victory in the Pacific.
Kahn writes of Swede Nelson and Ned Meyers in “The Terrible Days…”
In The Fight for New Guinea, Patrick Robinson details the enemy’s tactics. So do a number of other authors, including John Vader in New Guinea: The Tide Is Stemmed and John Ellis in The Sharp End. In Burma, according to Ellis, British soldiers referred to Japanese infiltration attacks as “jitter raids.” The intention was to draw fire and cause soldiers to give away their positions.
Lutjens decribes the incident and Schultz’s calm in shooting the sniper out of the tree.
The details of Colonel Yokoyama’s order to soldiers without weapons to defend the garrison with anything they could find are from ATIS documents and Ham. Hospital conditions are also described by Ham and by various Japanese soldiers in translated documents.
Yamagata’s speech is from ATIS documents.
Details of the conditions at the roadblock are from Milner, George Weller’s articles, the Detroit News, Medendorp’s memoirs, and veterans of the Sananda Front whom I interviewed.
The details of Roger Keast’s time in Marquette, Michigan, are derived from Harry Keast’s collection of biographical information on his father.
Captain Peter Dal Ponte said of Roger Keast, “He excelled in every mission that confronted him…. His heroic actions and gallantry instilled confidence in and maintained the high morale of his men constantly.”
Details of Keast’s and Shirley’s deaths are from Medendorp and a series of articles in the Grand Rapids Herald and the Detroit News.
Chapter 16. Breaking the Stalemate
Smith includes a description of Grose’s imperiousness in his books.
E. J. Kahn described this attack and Lutjens’ injury in detail.
Odell mentions this incident in his diary. In his correspondences with Milner, Grose relates the details, too. In a letter to one of the historians working with Milner (Colonel Kemper), Odell writes bitterly, “We unanimously condemned higher headquarters for wholly inadequate recognition of the Buna situation, particularly with regard to intelligence…higher commanders constantly ordered attacks without any conception of the situation.”
Details on Sergeant George Pravda, including the articles he filed for the Daily Tribune, are from George Pravda Jr.’s collection. Details of specific attacks are from interviews with George Jr.
Details on Bottcher’s Corner are from interviews with DiMaggio and Jastrzembski, Moorad’s article “Fire and Blood in the Jungle,” and Sufrin’s story for Historical Times.
Eichelberger writes of his emotions in Our Jungle Road. He also recalls Captain Edwards’ wound. The bullet entered his belly and blew a “gaping hole near his spine.” A doctor told Eichelberger that Edwards would never make it, that there were no “facilities that far forward to take care of a man so severely wounded.” The situation was hopeless, he said. If moved, Edwards would die. “Right then and there,” Eichelberger wrote, “I decided to take Edwards back to the field hospital. If he was going to die, he might as well die on the hood of my jeep. We carted him out like a sack of meal, lashed him to the hood, and started down the trail. Much of it was corduroy road…Edwards took a terrific and painful jolting but he offered only one protest…the operation saved his life.”
Smith writes of his injury in his books.
Milner and Mayo write of Odell reaching Bottcher’s Corner. Odell describes it in his diary.
ATIS documents reveal the extent of Japanese suffering.
Scenes of the roadblock are from interviews with Bill Sikkel and Carl Smestad and a variety of 3rd Battalion members.
Medendorp writes of Horton’s wounds.
George Weller wrote a story—“Bravery and Guile Keep Phone Line Open”—about the heroic American signalmen. Weller writes of Dal Ponte in his article titled “Scene of Gallant Stand Named for Hero.” Milner and Medendorp also write of Dal Ponte’s heroism.
In Medendorp’s memoirs he writes of Father Dzienis.
Details of the fall of Gona are from Paul Ham.
Medendorp includes Horton’s diary in his memoirs. Two articles in the Detroit News also tell Horton’s story—“Hero Writes Letter as He Awaits Death in Jungles of New Guinea,” and “Out of the Jungle a Dying Soldier’s Testament of Faith.”
Chapter 17. Caged Birds
The poem “Caged Birds” is from ATIS documents.
Medendorp writes grimly of what he’s witnessed.
Eichelberger writes of MacArthur’s letter in Our Jungle Road to Tokyo.
Milner and Mayo, among others, describe the horrible scene. The dead bodies and excrement explain the stench the Americans had to contend with. Groom writes that the American soldiers were “repelled to the point of nausea by odors from these positions, blown directly at them by a prevailing onshore ocean breeze.”
Blakeley, Milner, and Anders explain the problems that plagued the American advance.
In Our Jungle Road to Tokyo, Eichelberger includes the letter that he wrote to MacArthur. Could hundreds of men have been saved if GHQ had agreed to send in tanks earlier? In his Buna Diary, Harding writes of a letter that he and E. J. Kahn composed on their way back to Australia in early December and sent to MacArthur. It said: “I shall still not have it on my mind that I let you or the division down. I didn’t succeed in taking Buna with the means at my disposal but I don’t feel that any other commander could have done more.” Anders includes a letter from Colonel Geerds, who toured the Australian hospitals with Harding. “I could have cried,” Geerds wrote, “when they told him that most had been wounded after his relief.”
The details of Boice and Bailey’s advance are from Milner’s and Smith’s books, interviews with veterans, interviews with Katherine Matthews, Sam DiMaggio’s recollections, and from my two trips to Buna, during which I visited the bridge where Boice was killed, and interviewed Buna villagers about the details of Boice’s death.
Insight into Boice’s state of mind comes from interviews with William Boice Jr. and the collection of letters and newspaper articles that Zelma Boice kept.
The story of Chet Sokoloski was told to me by Stan Jastrzembski.
Bob Hartman told me the story of leading his platoon into the Triangle.
Phil Ishio told me about interrogating exhausted, disease-ridden Japanese POWs.
This story is from “Fire and Blood in the Jungle” by George Moorad.
During an interview, Stanley Jastrzembski told me the amusing anecdote about eating the cake with his buddy Chet Sokoloski.
Eichelberger describes the contents of MacArthur’s letters. Back in his Ivory Tower in Port Moresby, MacArthur could not have been more distanced from the reality of what Eichelberger was up against at Buna.
The following day, Eichelberger woke with a renewed sense of optimism. “Daylight,” he later wrote, “is good medicine for the fears of darkness.”
Grose, writes Mayo, was stunned by the orders. Eichelberger wanted to take Buna in front of MacArthur’s “eyes and ears”—in other words, he wanted Sutherland to witness it.
In his correspondence with Milner, Grose wrote of the general’s rage.
Wada and other Japanese soldiers’ diary entries are from ATIS documents.
Milner and Mayo comment on Eichelberger losing the 163rd.
The scene of the Japanese soldiers taking to the water to flee north up the coast is included in Milner, Mayo, and Blakeley. Many of the veterans that I interviewed remembered it. Those who did not witness it firsthand had heard the stories.
Mayo relates the story of Yasuda’s and Yamamoto’s deaths.
Seppuku, or hara-kiri (literally “cutting the belly”) is a form of Japanese ritual suicide by disembowelment. It was used by warriors to avoid falling into enemy hands. World War II Japanese officers, steeped in bushido, would have used the word seppuku.
In his book The Samurai Way of Death, Stephen Turnbull writes:
Seppuku…could take place with preparation and ritual in the privacy of one’s home, or speedily in a quiet corner of a battlefield. In the world of the warrior, seppuku was a deed of bravery that was admirable in a samurai who knew he was defeated, disgraced, or mortally wounded. It meant that he could end his days with his transgressions wiped away and with his reputation not merely intact but actually enhanced. The cutting of the abdomen released the samurai’s spirit in the most dramatic fashion, but it was an extremely painful and unpleasant way to die, and sometimes the samurai who was performing the act asked a loyal comrade to cut off his head at the moment of agony.
James Clavell writes in the novel Shogun that seppuku may have originated not as a positive good, but as the lesser of two evils. The code of bushido, unlike the European codes of chivalry, didn’t forbid mistreatment of prisoners. For this reason, a Japanese soldier had every reason to suspect that he would be tortured. Therefore, he would often choose seppuku instead.
Eichelberger’s letter to MacArthur is from Our Jungle Road to Tokyo.
Details of Buna’s fall and the various correspondences are taken from Milner, Mayo, and Our Jungle Road.
Medendorp writes of those remaining on the Sanananda Front.
Wada’s diary entires are from ATIS translations, Ham, and Raymond Paull.
Milner’s version of Oda’s death differs from Ham’s and Mayo’s, both of whom write that Oda committed suicide.
Winston Groom writes, “Two types of cannibalism were practiced by the Japanese. The first, and most common, was simply to stay alive when Imperial troops were abandoned by their supervisors on far away islands with no food to speak of. The second, and more disgusting, was the custom of ranking Japanese officers who, in the spirit of Bushido…deliberately ate the livers and organs of fallen enemies in the belief that it made them strong and brave.”
Paul Ham claims that Wada was not killed but was rediscovered floating on a raft and handed over to Allied forces. According to Ham, Wada went on to write something called “Painting over my shame,” which is contained in a document called The Signals Company Records: 144th Infantry Regiment. In all my research, Ham is the only historian I discovered who says that Wada survived.
Simon Warmenhoven’s daughters generously (and courageously) gave me access to all their father’s letters. Details of Warmenhoven’s death are from interviews with Jack Hill, Edward Doyle, and Bill Sikkel. Hill held Warmenhoven in his arms after the colonel shot himself. The official army version of his death (the report from the commanding general) stated that his death was the result of a gunshot wound received while in the Southwest Pacific Area. Over a decade later, Mrs. Henerietta Warmenhoven received the “Official Statement of the Military Service and Death” of her husband. It stated that “death occurred in the line of duty.”
Because atabrine was new and because doctors had not yet determined the proper dosage for malaria treatment, temporary atabrine psychosis was a danger. However, according to Major Lewis Barger, a military medical historian in the Office of the Army Surgeon General, “atabrine psychosis” was not statistically significant. “Military Psychiatry: Preparing in Peace for War” (Bordeu Institute website) gives a 12 percent rate for malaria cases treated with atabrine. There is also the possibility that Lieutenant Colonel Simon Warmenhoven was suffering from what we now know as “posttraumatic stress disorder.” During the Civil War, it was called “soldier’s heart.” The British military psychiatrist C. S. Myers introduced the term “shellshock” in 1915. Still, it was largely misunderstood. Therapies were designed to increase a soldier’s willpower. In 1941, a pupil of Sigmund Freud’s, Abram Kardiner, wrote The Traumatic Neuroses of War, with detailed clinical descriptions of psychoneurotic and physio-neurotic symptoms. Shortly after World War II, psychiatrists noticed what they called “gross stress reactions” among war veterans. In 1945, Commander Leon Saul, a doctor in the U.S. Navy Reserve, coined the term “combat fatigue” to describe a myriad of post-battle symptoms. It wasn’t until the mid-1970s that the American Psychiatric Association came up with the phrase “post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Epilogue
Bill Sikkel told me this story about returning to Australia during an interview in October 2006.
Quotes regarding the nature of the Buna war are from Our Jungle Road.
According to Gailey, Bergerud, and Anders, the war could have been shortened by weeks had the 32nd Division been properly supplied.
Major Koiwai’s quote is from Milner.
With the exceptions of Bataan and Corregidor, William Manchester would call Buna MacArthur’s “darkest hour.”
Manchester quotes MacArthur about keeping casualities to a minimum at Buna. Eichelberger would later write that Buna was “siege warfare…the bitterest and most punishing kind.”
Eichelberger’s comments about MacArthur are cited in Jay Luvaas’ book, Dear Miss Em: General Eichelberger’s War in the Pacific, 1942–1945.
Casualty statistics are from Milner.
Milner and Mary Ellen Condon-Rall quote Warmenhoven.
John T. Greenwood wrote, “The 32nd Infantry Division was basically noneffective on account of malaria for four to six months after its return from Papua.”
Stanley Falk comments that “Luzon was a magnificent victory but hardly a cheap one.”
Stanley Falk in his essay “Douglas MacArthur and the War Against Japan” is very critical of MacArthur. Contrary to popular myth (one, in fact, perpetuated by MacArthur), MacArthur did not advocate “bypassing” Rabaul. As Falk points out, he commented to his chief of staff that it “would go down in history as one of the time’s greatest military mistakes.”
Condon-Rall writes at length about what MacArthur learned at Buna.
John T. Greenwood points out that MacArthur told Colonel Paul F. Russell, chief of the Tropical Disease and Malaria Control Branch of the Preventive Medicine Division at the Office of the Surgeon General, and an army expert on malaria, “Doctor, this will be a long war if for every division I have facing the enemy I must count on a second division in hospital with malaria and a third division convalescing from this debilitating disease.”
Eichelberger pays tribute to the 32nd in his book.
In their essay “MacArthur’s Fireman,” Jay Luvaas and John Shortal discuss what Eichelberger learned at Buna.
At Hollandia in late April 1944, Eichelberger and his men had a chance to put much of what they’d learned into action. The landings went off without a hitch and the Americans pushed forward, seizing the Japanese airfields in five days. General Marshall described the operation as a “model of strategical and tactical importance.” Eichelberger enjoyed the same success at Biak a month later. Using the lessons he learned at Buna, he eschewed a frontal asault on Japanese positions. Instead he sent troops in behind, a maneuver that probably spared hundreds of American lives.
Notes on New Guinea’s natives are from Powell’s The Third Force, John Waiko’s A History of Our Time, and numerous interviews with Buna villagers. The Keith McCarthy quote is also from The Third Force. Like Australia, the U.S. government has not compensated the carriers or their families.
Sam DiMaggio’s post-Buna history is from “I Never Had It So Good.” Details in the Gus Bailey profile are from interviews with Katherine Matthews and from Wendell Trogdon’s book. Paulette Lutjens provided me with the information on her father, Paul Lutjens. Herbert Smith discusses his later life in his three books. The details of Alfred Medendorp’s life were provided by his son, Alfred Jr. Herman Bottcher’s story is from interviews with soldiers who fought with him in the Philippines and from Mark Sufrin’s article, “Take Buna or Don’t Come Back Alive.”
Leslie Anders writes at length of General Harding’s life after Buna.