The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea--The Forgotten War of the South Pacific (4 page)

The day after Pearl Harbor, Curtin allied Australia with the Americans, declaring that Australia was “at war with Japan.” On December 23, 1941, he wrote to Roosevelt and to Churchill: “Our resources here are very limited. It is in your power to meet the situation. Should the government of the United States desire, we would gladly accept an American Commander in the Pacific Area.”

At the same time, Curtin demanded three divisions from Australia’s Imperial Forces sent home at once. When Churchill told him that his request was impossible to fulfill, Curtin persisted, and eventually won the return of two out of the three. Churchill argued that to remove the 9th Division from the Middle East would jeopardize the British line. He then suggested to Roosevelt that if the Prime Minister agreed to leave the 9th Division in place, the United States should send to Australia another U.S. Army Infantry division. Marshall chose the 32nd.

A full seven months later, as the Japanese Imperial army ascended a high ridge overlooking Port Moresby, MacArthur dispatched two of the 32nd Division’s three regimental combat teams to New Guinea.

Although MacArthur came to Australia in defeat, no one would have known it from his reception. One of the most decorated generals of his time, a man who during World War I was called by America’s secretary of war “the finest front line American general of the war,” had arrived to defend Australia in her hour of need.

In fact, MacArthur’s arrival overshadowed the return of one of Australia’s own heroes. Curtin had ordered General Sir Thomas Blamey to return home from the Middle East “as speedily as possible,” appointing him Allied Commander, Australian Military Forces.

The March 18 announcement that MacArthur would be the Supreme Commander of the Southwest Pacific Area upstaged Blamey’s appointment. Blamey was unhappy about the news, which he got while traveling by train east from Perth. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff had already worked out the organization of the Pacific, dividing the theater into two distinct areas: The Pacific Ocean, which included North, Central, and South, went to the navy, and the Southwest Pacific, including Australia, the Philippines, New Guinea, the Solomons, the Bismarck Archipelago, and a portion of the Dutch East Indies, would go to MacArthur.

Conceding to General George Marshall, who argued that an Australian should command Allied troops, MacArthur reluctantly appointed Blamey as his Commander Allied Land Forces. In an uncharacteristic moment of modesty, MacArthur named himself the Commander in Chief Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA) rather than Supreme Commander.

Despite MacArthur’s choice of Blamey, Australian officers were still unhappy. The staff of MacArthur’s General Headquarters was entirely American, composed of trusted advisors who had served on his staff in the Philippines. Not appointing an Australian as a senior member of his staff—which was known as the “Bataan Gang”—was a move by MacArthur that generated bad blood between the Commander in Chief and the Australians, though it was one he defended gruffly. “There was no prospect,” he said, “of obtaining qualified senior staff officers from the Australians.”

From the beginning, MacArthur regarded Blamey ambivalently: In his words, Blamey was “…sensual, slothful and of doubtful moral character…[but] a tough commander likely to shine like a power light in an emergency. The best of the local bunch.” Blamey’s opinion of MacArthur was not much different. “The best and the worst of the things you hear about him are both true,” Blamey said.

On a bright, sunny morning in March, a train pulling MacArthur’s private railroad car came to a stop at Spencer Street Station in Melbourne. Six thousand people, including the Prime Minister and other dignitaries, greeted MacArthur with an outburst of adoration. A correspondent for an Australian newspaper said that he had never seen any man receive such acclaim. MacArthur stepped from the car and, though weary, he was an impressive-looking man. He sported a “flourishable cane” and wore his signature gold-embroidered cap dashingly at an angle.

After a brief but dramatic speech in which he took a jab at Roosevelt for consigning him to Australia to command an insufficient army, MacArthur and Sutherland stepped into a limousine and made for the Menzies Hotel. For the next few weeks, MacArthur went into hiding, guarded closely by his devoted chief of staff, General Sutherland, trying to come to terms with the reality of his situation.

A part of the 32nd Division’s fate was sealed when Churchill persuaded Roosevelt to break England’s stalemate with Australia by sending Australia another U.S. Army Infantry division. The division’s ultimate fate, though, hung in the balance for months after MacArthur arrived Down Under.

The defensive strategy devised by the Australian Chiefs of Staff was to hold the “Brisbane Line,” a thousand miles of coastline between Brisbane and Melbourne, the heart of the country’s industrial power and its population center. Barbed wire was strung along the beaches in Sydney and Melbourne and a blackout was imposed on the southeast coastal cities.

Initially, MacArthur accepted, or was forced to accept, the Australian strategy. Later, though, he wrote that he never had any intention of abiding by what he considered a defeatist approach. He asserted that from the moment he set foot in Australia, he planned to take the war against Japan’s Imperial army to New Guinea.

MacArthur considered New Guinea a backwater theater. His decision to engage the Japanese Imperial army there was a strategic necessity. Japan, on the other hand, coveted New Guinea, one of the last essential pieces in its colossal Asia-Pacific land grab. Once it controlled the island, it could isolate, and perhaps invade, Australia. More important, possession of New Guinea would allow the Japanese to cut off the eight thousand-mile Allied supply line (one of the longest in military history) that ran from the West Coast of the United States to Australia via Hawaii and Fiji, thereby ending Allied influence in the South Pacific.

MacArthur’s decision to fight for New Guinea, and Admiral Ernest King’s efforts to challenge Japanese expansion in the Solomons by invading Guadalcanal, upset Japanese plans for putting a quick end to the war and suing for a favorable peace that acknowledged its numerous conquests.

But even as MacArthur prepared to send troops to New Guinea, he bitterly resented its necessity, and remained obsessed with the Philippines, vowing to return even if he were “down to one canoe paddled by Douglas MacArthur and supported by one Taylor cub [plane].”

In New Guinea, that pledge would be put to the ultimate test. MacArthur would be up against a Japanese army whose determination to hold the island would initiate one of the South Pacific’s most savage campaigns.

Chapter 2

A T
RAIN
H
EADING
W
EST

T
HREE WEEKS AFTER
MacArthur arrived in Australia, his dream of a speedy return to the Philippines was shattered. Major General Edward King, ignoring MacArthur’s orders for a counterattack against the Japanese on Bataan, surrendered to them on April 9, 1942. The capitulation was the largest in U.S. military history.

Three days before the surrender, and ten thousand miles away, the 32nd Infantry Division was loaded onto a train. The decision to move the division puzzled battalion and company commanders who had been led to believe that they were headed for the European Theater of Operations (ETO). The rumor was that the division was now bound for the Southwest Pacific.

Although many of the 32nd Division’s men could not have pointed on a world map to the area defined as the Southwest Pacific, they were familiar with Europe’s historic battlefields. Called the “Red Arrow,” the 32nd Division first distinguished itself in World War I. Because of its exploits, the French gave the 32nd the sobriquet “Les Terribles.” Its symbol, which it wore proudly as a shoulder patch, was a red arrow piercing a line. It was said that there was not a line the tenacious 32nd could not penetrate—it was the first division to pierce the German army’s Hindenburg Line, for example.

By 1940, though, the 32nd Divison’s glory was a distant memory. On October 15 that year, when the Fighting Thirty-Second was “called to colors” in the first peacetime conscription act in American history, it was a largely untrained, loosely organized National Guard unit, comprised mostly of men from Wisconsin and Michigan.

In the lean years at the end of the Depression, many jobless young men saw the National Guard as an alternative to poverty—most felt no special calling or patriotic duty or military ambition. Stanley Jastrzembski of Company G, 2nd Battalion, 126th U.S. Infantry, was one of those men. Born and raised in Muskegon, Michigan, he joined the National Guard to help support his family. Jastrzembski had the longest name in the company—“Jas Trz Emb Ski,” the men of Company G used to chant jokingly—and at only sixteen he was its youngest member.

When Germany invaded Poland, Jastrzembski considered going to Poland and enlisting in the Polish army. He stayed home, however, and to help support his family, he joined the National Guard instead. His immigrant parents were dead, and there were six kids living at home. The Jastrzembski children tended a garden and traded vegetables with neighbors for chickens and rabbits. There was no money, though, and the family needed the paycheck the Guard offered.

For Jastrzembski, the Guard offered just enough money to live on. For others, it provided a small beer and entertainment fund. A guy’s local Guard unit met one night a week—for that he received a paycheck of $12.00 every three months, enough for him to keep food in the house and to take a gal he was sweet on to the picture show. For weekend maneuvers and three weeks of summer training, the Guard paid extra.

Upon having their service extended beyond one year, many guardsmen threatened to go AWOL. “OHIO” was the code word of their rebellion—“Over the Hill In October.” But October 15 came and went. The truth was that life in the army was not half bad. Call-up meant three meals a day, a roof overhead, a chance to shoot guns, and steady pay.

When the 32nd was mobilized in October 1940, it was sent via troop trains to the Deep South, far from its midwestern roots. The send-off was festive. Units marched to train stations, bands played, and thousands of people lining the parade routes shouted their encouragement.

Camp Beauregard, situated at the fringes of Alexandria, Louisiana, was the division’s new home. Beauregard, though, was not ready for the 32nd. Built as a National Guard summer camp and equipped to accommodate only one regiment, the camp’s infrastructure was overwhelmed by the division’s one hundred officers and thirty-two hundred enlisted men, who promptly dubbed Beauregard “Camp Dis-regard.” The tents in which they lived were heated with charcoal, which gave them terrible headaches. And when the cold late-fall rains began, the camp, trampled by the boots of thousands of men and the heavy tires of military vehicles, became a mudhole.

Jastrzembski and the 32nd spent only four months at Camp Dis-regard, but it was a stay plagued by personnel turnover, equipment shortages, and an inadequate training regimen. One guardsman said bluntly, “We fired our rifles, screamed, and ran at straw dummies. That was the extent of our training.” Carl Stenberg, a heavy weapons squad leader in Jastrzembski’s Company G, recalls that the training area at Dis-regard lay four miles from camp. Company G marched out in the morning and back to camp at night. He remembers the sound of metal on metal, of rifles clanking against helmets. “Put it this way,” Stenberg says, “we did a lot of marching.”

On weekends the men would head for New Orleans, Alexandria, or Natchez, Mississippi, attracted by the promise of music, booze, and women. Despite the occasional outbreak of gonorrhea and the lurid films designed to scare the men into abstinence, the buses from Camp Beauregard deposited them every weekend at the front door of a brothel in Alexandria that they called Ma Belle’s. One guardsman, who spent his share of time at Ma Belle’s, said that the line of eager young men often ran around the block.

In February 1941, the 32nd moved to the newly built Camp Livingston, Louisiana, ten miles northeast of Alexandria. At Livingston, the division began its transformation, losing its old-time Guard officers to “overage” (being declared too old to serve with combat troops) and bringing on board recent Selective Service draftees and junior officers from the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) and Officer Candidate School (OCS).

With the infusion of troops, Captain Simon Warmenhoven, formerly the senior resident in Surgery at St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and now one of the doctors in the 126th Infantry Regiment’s medical detachment, stayed busy. Warmenhoven was no stranger to hard work. Growing up, he had put in long hours on his father’s farm. On summer breaks during college he ran a four-horse grain binder and traveled all over cutting wheat for local farmers. His younger brother Cornelius, who helped him by drumming up business, remembers how Simon would make it back to the house well after dark and practically fall asleep at the supper table. Once he got back to college, he shoveled coal into campus furnaces for spending money.

The new soldiers needed physicals and vaccinations. After days of marching they needed help tending to sore feet. Perhaps what they required most was sound medical advice about the dangers of cavorting with the kind of women who made their living at Ma Belle’s. Doc Warmenhoven could only do so much, though. These were young men in the prime of their lives, and he was not given to preaching. Regardless of his warnings, the soldiers sowed their wild oats on Friday and Saturday nights and then, as the saying went, attended church on Sundays “to pray for crop failure.”

Warmenhoven, who in his early thirties was practically as old as some of the soldiers’ fathers, stayed behind in camp writing letters to his wife Henrietta, whom he called Mandy (she called him Sam). Warmenhoven was a devoted husband and father, and the son of staunchly religious parents. When his parents emigrated to the United States from the Netherlands in 1921 (Simon was eleven years old), they chose the community of Sunnyside, Washington. Sunnyside was founded in 1898 as a Christian cooperative colony by members of the German Baptist Progressive Brethren, who selected the beautiful Yakima Valley as the site for their experiment in Christian living. In every land deed it sold, Sunnyside included a morality code: no drinking, dancing, gambling, or horseracing. By the time Warmenhoven was of high school age, his parents sent him off to Hull Academy, a Christian school in Hull, Iowa, where he boarded with the minister’s family. Later, with a student loan from the Christian Reformed Church, he attended Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was preparing to enter the seminary, fulfilling his parents’ dream, when he signed up for dance lessons, and realized that thanks to the church’s austere code of conduct, he had been missing out on one of life’s great joys. He switched his major to biology, got a Bachelor of Science degree, and later attended medical school at Marquette, a Jesuit university in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

On Sunday, March 9, 1941, while most of the men were dragging themselves back to camp after boozy weekend jaunts to Alexandria or Natchez or New Orleans, Warmenhoven was listening to the Blue Danube Waltz on the radio and penning a letter to Mandy. Mandy was pregnant with their second child, and as he wrote, Warmenhoven was trying out names. How he hoped to be home for the birth.

Livingston was a melting pot of men from all over the Midwest. They came from small towns and farms and industrial cities, from immigrant families, separated by only a generation from Poland, Germany, Holland, Italy, Ireland. At first, the guardsmen and the draftees regarded each other skeptically. The draftees, according to the guardsmen, were not real soldiers. The draftees, on the other hand, considered themselves intellectually superior to the guardsmen. Most of the draftees had graduated from high school; some had even been to college. When they wanted to insult a fellow soldier, they accused him of “acting like a guardsman.” But gradually, as they lived and trained together, the barriers broke down.

One of those new draftees was Samuel DiMaggio. DiMaggio was a first-generation American. His father, Giuseppi, came over from Sicily in 1902, using money that someone had agreed to loan him for the voyage. Having worked for two years to pay back his sponsor, Giuseppi traveled back to Sicily to fetch his bride, and after returning began his career as a railroad man in Albion, Michigan, roughly ninety miles west of Detroit. After a few years, he took a job with the largest local employer, Malleable Iron Company, which made parts for automotive manufacturers. Sam Dimaggio was born in 1916 in Albion on a table in a house owned by the company.

Like the Jastrzembskis, the DiMaggios cultivated a large garden in their backyard, growing most of the food they ate. By fourteen, Sam was working at the Malleable Iron Company in order to pay for school supplies and books. On the night shift, he stoked fifty potbellied stoves with coal; it was hard, grimy work. In 1935 he graduated from high schoool, fulfilling a dream. But the dream ended there, and shortly after, he returned to his old job.

In 1941 his life changed forever in the form of a draft notice. He viewed it as the break he had been waiting for. He would put in his year and, in the interim, figure out what he wanted to do with his life. When the gates of the Malleable closed behind him for the last time, DiMaggio glanced back and said, “I’m never coming back here, you son of a bitch!”

On April 11, Good Friday, DiMaggio reported to Fort Custer in Battle Creek, Michigan. A few days after Easter, he was on a southbound train without the vaguest idea where that train was headed. Two days later, he arrived at Camp Livingston, Louisiana. He had never been farther than ten miles from home.

Physically, Camp Livingston was a far cry from Dis-regard. It was a spacious, thoroughly up-to-date camp with gas heaters in all the tents, heated latrines, bathrooms with an unlimited supply of hot water, washing machines, and raised walkways made of crushed stone or oyster shells. Livingston was a veritable military city with over fourteen thousand tents, fifteen hundred buildings, laundries, bakeries, post offices, fire stations, and hospitals.

At Livingston the 32nd’s training lacked a sense of urgency. DiMaggio was surprised by how “casual” it was. First Sergeant Paul Lutjens of the 2nd Battalion’s E Company admitted, “No matter how much our officers and non-coms talked about combat, we couldn’t help but think they were talking about somebody else.”

In late summer 1941, the army initiated the Louisiana Maneuvers, the largest peacetime war games in U.S. history. Four hundred thousand men trained in the unrelenting heat and humidity of the hills, valleys, and pine forests of Louisiana and east Texas. The experience was intended to toughen the men, and to develop their skills in the field. With an eye toward the European Theater of Operations rather than the SWPA, the men were trained in modern, mechanized, mobile warfare that emphasized World War I tactics based on big guns preparing the way for infantry.