The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea--The Forgotten War of the South Pacific (10 page)

By the early twentieth century much of the work of exploration was being done by prospectors and missionaries, many of the latter of whom were fueled both by an explorer’s sense of adventure and a desire to spread God’s message. Initially, however, most of the missionaries confined their proselytizing to the coast. Those who dared to set foot in New Guinea’s interior never made it out.

The terrifying stories did not discourage the Reverends James Chamlers and Oliver Tomkins of the London Missionary Society, two ardent men of God. Although they knew the reputation of the Fly River people—who they had been told were practicing cannibals and did not greet outsiders kindly—they set off in 1901 from Daru to bring God’s word to the benighted people. Only two weeks into their trip, they were captured by a river tribe and beheaded. They were then cut into pieces, and cooked with sago and yams.

Thirty-four years later, over half a century after much of the Amazon basin had been mapped, Australian gold prospectors stumbled across a previously undiscovered society numbering seven hundred fifty thousand people in what was thought to be an uninhabited area of the island (today’s Western Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea). Using stone tools, these people had been practicing a sophisticated form of agriculture for almost ten thousand years, making theirs one of the oldest agrarian societies in the world.

In 1942, when the 32nd Division arrived in New Guinea, the island was still terra incognita. Its interior was largely unmapped, its coastline a puzzle of coral reefs, its swamps and grasslands a breeding ground for disease, its climate as pernicious as any ever encountered by an army. In New Guinea, MacArthur neglected warfare’s most important lesson: The island was his enemy, yet he remained only vaguely aware of the hardships his troops would confront there.

B
OOK
T
WO

And over the hill the guns bang like a door

And planes repeat their mission in the heights.

The jungle outmaneuvers creeping war

And crawls within the circle of our sacred rites.

I long for our disheveled Sundays home,
Breakfast, the comics, news of latest crimes,
Talk without reference, and palindromes,
Sleep and the Philharmonic and the ponderous
Times.

I long for lounging in the afternoons
Of clean intelligent warmth, my brother’s mind,
Books and thin plates and flowers and shining spoons,
And your love’s presence, snowy, beautiful, and kind.

K
ARL
S
HAPIRO
, “
S
UNDAY
: N
EW
G
UINEA
”

Chapter 6

F
ORLORN
H
OPE

O
N
S
EPTEMBER
15, two days before the Japanese climbed onto Ioribaiwa Ridge, Company E, 2nd Battalion, 126th U.S. Infantry broke camp at 4:00 a.m. and assembled at Brisbane’s Amberley Airfield. The men were issued ammunition. The men’s newly dyed fatigues, sporting a mottled green jungle design, clung damply to their skin. Green burlap hung from their steel helmets.

Even at that early hour, the men were edgy with anticipation. Sergeant Paul Lutjens had written that “it was quite a shock walking up that gangplank” when the division loaded onto the ships leaving California. But now the adrenaline really pumped through their young bodies. This was it, what they had come ten thousand miles for. No one uttered a word until somebody with a timely sense of humor—it might have been Sergeant John Fredericks, another Big Rapids man—started whistling an old cavalry bugle call, and the men were still chuckling when Captain Melvin Schultz appeared. Schultz would not say much about where they were going, not that Lutjens or any of the others expected him to, but it did not take a genius to figure out that they were being airlifted to New Guinea. For many of them, the flight to New Guinea would be the first of their lives.

Though Melvin Schultz was Company E’s commander, he was raised in Muskegon, Michigan, and was regarded as something of an outsider. It was First Sergeant Paul Lutjens of Big Rapids, Michigan, who often ran the show. Lutjens was an affable but physically imposing man. He was also devoted to Company E. Twice during training in Louisiana he refused a commission because he did not want to leave his friends.

Like Lutjens, nearly 50 percent of Company E’s men were from the Big Rapids National Guard unit. In fact, many of the guys had joined together, continuing ties of friendship that went back to childhood. Mostly it was a reason to drink and play poker and avoid the realities of life at the tail end of the Depression. Lutjens was one of the few who was employed, but work in a factory was not exactly the kind of thing a guy dreamed of doing. In other words, few of the men seemed destined for greatness. If someone had asked the people of Big Rapids if Lutjens and his crowd were going to amount to anything, they might have shaken their heads—“They’re not bad boys, really, but no more than a few of them will do anything with their lives.”

For the men of Big Rapids, mostly beer-swilling party boys by their own admission, joining the National Guard during peacetime was just something you did. Lutjens simply liked the look of the uniform. “When I got my first uniform…” he said, “I was just in my second year at high school and I thought I was pretty big stuff. I wore out the mirror in the hall downstairs admiring myself…” According to Lutjens, Big Rapids had a “swell” armory, too, and large dances were frequently held there. Lutjens confessed, “…We used to worry a lot more about the dances than the drill.”

A lot of the new guardsmen, like Lutjens, were underage. Rules said that inductees had to be at least eighteen. The National Guard, though, did not care who you were, or how old you were, “as long as you had a pulse,” joked one former guardsman. “Its philosophy was, ‘If the body is warm, we’ll take it.’” Anybody could be a weekend warrior—postmasters, bankers, teachers, mechanics, cooks, factory workers, the unemployed.

On the afternoon of September 15, the men of Company E, a platoon of engineers, a medical officer, and four aid men, divided into groups, a dozen to a plane.

“We were pretty tense and mighty afraid,” Lutjens remembered. “Some of the men sort of sat in their seats and just gulped like Li’l Abner. But most of them got into a colossal crap game, right on the floor of the plane.”

The men of Company E imagined that they were going straight into combat, jumping off the plane and storming the Japanese amidst a barrage of bullets. It would be dramatic stuff, something to make the folks back home in Big Rapids proud. After an uneventful flight across the Coral Sea, the Douglas and Lockheed transport planes neared Port Moresby, and Lutjens took a moment to look out the window. “There were big fresh-looking craters on the landing strip down on the edge of the jungle. Over on one side were the smoking ruins of two planes that had evidently just been hit by Japanese bombers,” he wrote. But when the planes reached Seven Mile Drome outside of Port Moresby, the men disembarked with their bayonets sheathed. There were no Japanese to be found.

A blast of hot air nearly brought Lutjens to his knees. In the back of the transport truck, he was already writing in his diary. “September 15, 1942, 5:30 P.M. Temperature 115 degrees. Japs twenty miles away. New Guinea weather is hotter than the lower story of hell.” Even Fredericks, a former farmer accustomed to toiling in the hot sun, was barely able to stand the heat.

Fredericks, like the others, must have wondered how he had ended up in New Guinea. He and his buddies did not know anything about the jungle. What he knew was that it was full of things that could kill a man: Japs; blood-sucking bats; rats as large as collies; wild boars; snakes; crocodiles; moniter lizards over six feet long; diseases that could make a man’s scrotum swell up to the size of a pumpkin; and hungry cannibals who enjoyed the practice of eating living meat. They would tie a live captive to a tree and cut off chunks of flesh, as they needed it. And the heat, God, the heat—would they ever get used to it?

For a moment, Lutjens and the others were able to forget about the temperature. When their truck passed a group of Australian soldiers and a small group of American pilots, they were cheered heartily. Lutjens and the boys from Big Rapids were enjoying their new role. Back home, nobody had expected much of them, and now they were being treated like avenging heroes.

The following day, Captain Schultz woke the men at 5:30 a.m. and ordered Lutjens and Staff Sergeant Henry Brissette to assemble the troops. Lutjens smelled the sea and felt the sticky salt air on his skin. Even in the morning, the heat hung over the land like a blight. To the north, the Owen Stanleys rose menacingly out of bulky, dark gray rain clouds. Their steep, forested slopes were visible for a moment. Then they were gone, obscured by fog.

The entire company was loaded onto trucks. The men were probably looking to Lutjens for an explanation, as if to say, “Hey, what’s up now, Lootch? Are we finally gonna get into it?” If Private Swede Nelson was anything like people described him, it would not have mattered to him where they were going as long as there was a fight in the offing.

The trucks took the men southeast along the coast until a few miles later the dusty road dead-ended at a patch of gum trees with drooping leaves. Captain Schultz bellowed at the men to get out on the double. Schultz looked up and down the road, making a mental picture of the land. Then he cleared his throat and spoke. The men listened, hanging on his every word, still trying to picture their first brush with combat. What Schultz had to say, though, was a huge disappointment. Company E’s mission was to build a jeep road from Tupeselei, a few miles southeast of Port Moresby, to Gabagaba on the southeast coast. After Schultz delivered the news, the men groaned and complained. This was bullshit! Anything but beating the Japs into submission would have been an anticlimax. But building a road? They were fighting men, not engineers.

Real engineers of the 91st U.S. Engineers, an all-black unit that had been formed at Camp Shelby in Mississippi, joined the men of Company E that day. Although the 91st was a legitimate engineering unit, it was no better equipped than the men of Company E. Using picks, shovels, axes, saws, machetes, and their hands to hack a road for forty miles along the coast, the engineers and Lutjens’ men worked shirtless in mosquito-infested coastal jungles, sago swamps, and broad, sun-soaked savannas.

It was the job of Lieutenant James Hunt to drive a truck rigged with a winch and to locate usable sections of the trail. Hunt was a communications specialist who had flown over with Company E. Upon arriving in Port Moresby, however, Captain Schultz informed him that his services would not be needed. He was to act as a rifle platoon leader, which meant for the time being that he was nothing more than a road builder.

While the rest of the men of Company E worked on the road—largely an upgrade of a native trail, known as the “Tavai track” that linked the southeast coastal communities to Port Moresby—Lutjens and Privates Barney Baxter and Arthur Edson reconnoitered the territory between Tupeselei and Gabagaba. Undoubtedly, some of the guys griped that Lutjens, Baxter, and Edson had received the plum assignment, but the truth was that few of them would have traded places with Lutjens or the others. New Guinea was a dangerous country, and no one knew whether the reconnaissance patrol would encounter Japanese, or headhunters, or man-eating crocodiles. Although the three patrolmen were probably relieved that they would not have to build a road, it is equally certain that none of them felt particularly lucky about the assignment. Writing in his diary, Lutjens admitted to being scared.

Baxter, like Lutjens, was from Big Rapids, Michigan, a typical Midwest town in the middle of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, surrounded by farms and woodlots. Edson was the woodsman of the bunch. He had left Saranac, Michigan, at the age of fourteen to work as a lumberjack in Michigan’s wild Upper Peninsula, and later settled down in the U.P. to run a 120-acre beef farm. All three of the men were acquainted with the outdoors; none of them, though, had spent a single day in the jungle.

“Started through the jungle today,” Lutjens wrote. “It is ten times worse than you can imagine…. Wearing green head-nets to keep off mosq…. They damn near smother you.”

That night Lutjens, Edson, and Baxter camped somewhere along a coastal trail, perhaps outside of a small fishing village called Barakau. Their first tropical sunset must have struck them as spectacular—the blazing sun falling swiftly below the horizon, searing the blue sky with streaks of orange and red.

Later that night they were awakened by the sound of a dog’s frantic barking. Were Japanese soldiers creeping through the dark sago swamp that bordered the beach? It was what every soldier would come to dread most—the night maneuvers of the Japanese soldiers. Lutjens might have clutched his hunting knife. The army did not issue decent knives, so Lutjens had brought his all the way from Big Rapids. If a Jap was going to jump him, he would be in for the fight of his life. If Lutjens could, he would cut him from his lower abdomen right up to his throat. He would cut him like a big buck, snapping his sternum with a swift stroke.

When the Japanese troops did not rush them, Lutjens, Edson, and Baxter grabbed their M-1s, pressed their bodies into the soft sand, and searched the dark, ready to send a burst of bullets into the night. While they scanned the jungle, they heard something: It sounded like the snapping and crushing of bones. A yelp followed, and then silence. That now familiar adrenaline was slamming through their veins.

Lutjens woke with a start the following morning and searched for a sign that a Japanese patrol had been in the area that night. Just ten feet from where Baxter and Edson were lying, Lutjens saw something that chilled him—the tracks of a very large crocodile. Then Lutjens and the others pieced together the details of the previous night. The crocodile had caught a dog and had chosen to eat it not far from where they were sleeping. Better to take a Jap bullet than die a slow death in the jaws of a crocodile.

As Lutjens reconnoitered the coast, the news that General Horii had captured Ioribaiwa Ridge shook General Headquarters in Brisbane like the impact of an artillery shell. The Japanese army was now only thirty miles from Port Moresby.

MacArthur immediately called Prime Minister Curtin. The Australians, he said, did not have enough fight in them. They had forfeited every major position along the Kokoda track and had forced the Allies “into such a defensive concentration as would duplicate the conditions of Malaya.” MacArthur did not mention Bataan, but the implications were clear—Bataan had fallen and now he was in danger of losing New Guinea, too. Only six months before in Bataan, MacArthur’s army had been pushed up against the South China Sea. Now the Australian army’s back was up against the Gulf of Papua. With the specter of Bataan still haunting him, and his career hanging in the balance, MacArthur informed Curtin that he would send American troops by air and sea to prevent New Guinea from being “stitched into the Japanese pattern of quick conquest.” By the end of September he hoped to have forty thousand men in New Guinea. “If they fought,” MacArthur continued, “they should have no trouble in meeting the situation. If they would not fight, 100,000 would be no good.” MacArthur then requested that General Blamey be sent to New Guinea to take command and “energize the situation.” Curtin was in full agreement.