The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea--The Forgotten War of the South Pacific (5 page)

The maneuvers were considered a great success, though they would have no practical application for the 32nd Division once it arrived in New Guinea, where jeeps, tanks, and trucks were neutralized by a terrain that reduced war to its most primitive. It was not that the opportunities for mimicking New Guinea’s conditions did not exist. “The swamps of Louisiana were so available,” Major Herbert C. Smith, then the 128th Infantry Regiment’s supply officer, wrote with the clarity of hindsight, “…but we did not train in them…. Had we only known.”

During the Depression, fathers earned money any way they could, and Alfred Medendorp was no exception. He had gone to chiropractic school, but after getting his diploma discovered that he did not enjoy practicing. Then he took a sales job with a biological supply company, peddling test tubes and beakers to universities and high schools around the country. Afterward, he opened up his own business and caught and killed stray cats, embalmed them, and sold them to researchers at the University of Chicago. After joining the National Guard in 1931 for the extra money it offered, he had another commitment—and with federalization nine years later, the army became his first responsibility.

In winter 1941, Captain Alfred Medendorp had just arrived home from Camp Livingston on leave to Grand Rapids, Michigan. He had not seen his wife and three sons in nearly a year. On Sunday morning, December 7, he and his boys were traipsing around the hills near the house with bows and arrows, creeping through fields and ducking in and out of woodlots, shooting trees and launching arrows high into the air.

Alfred Jr. crept along with his dad, picking his way over dry leaves and sticks. There was no snow but the ground was frozen. The leaves crumbled like wax paper under their feet.

Dot Medendorp was in the kitchen, tidying up. On the radio The Glenn Miller Band was playing “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anybody Else But Me,” when a newsman’s urgent voice interrupted. Dot rushed to the radio to turn up the volume. The Japanese, the newsman reported, had just bombed Pearl Harbor.

Dot hurried to the back door and called out, “Al, Come quick! Something’s happened.”

Alfred Medendorp rushed toward the house, followed by his sons. Dot was standing at the back door, holding it half-open.

“Japan just bombed,” she said, choking on the words.

Medendorp brushed past his wife and sat down at the kitchen table. The voice on the radio repeated: “The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor.” Medendorp tried to absorb the impact of the news. Then he looked up to see Al Junior standing at the door, holding his little bow.

Later that day Medendorp received a telegram ordering him back to Camp Livingston; the following day he left, but not before Dot took a family photograph. In the photo, Medendorp is standing behind his three sons. The low dun-colored hills that they had wandered the previous morning form the photo’s backdrop. His arms encircle the boys. He is in full dress uniform and smiles slightly. The boys, too, are dressed up—hats, Sunday coats. Al Junior wears stockings and tucks his hands into the pockets of his checkered black and red peacoat.

When Corporal Carl Stenberg heard about Pearl Harbor, he and a bunch of buddies had just come back from Alexandria, Louisiana. It was a weekend ritual for Stenberg. While other soldiers went to Alexandria for the women, the recently married Stenberg made the trip to go to the theater.

When Stenberg and his friends returned on Sunday afternoon, the camp was buzzing with activity.

Trucks waited, their engines idling, and men rushed from building to building. Even before hearing the news, Stenberg knew that something big was up. It was in the mess hall that he learned what had happened.

“The Nips just bombed Pearl Harbor!” exclaimed a cook.

The following day, fearing the Japanese might follow up Pearl Harbor with attacks on other strategic sites, the entire camp mobilized. The division sent soldiers to guard dry docks, factories, shipyards, bridges, chemical refineries, utilities, and sulfur mines across the south, from Mississippi to Louisiana to east Texas. Some officers, including Major Herbert Smith, went to the Infantry School at Fort Benning to learn combat tactics.

Pearl Harbor abruptly ended Stenberg’s dream of “putting in a year” and returning home to resume his life. On December 31, 1941, the army informed all one-year soldiers that they were now obligated to serve for the duration of the conflict plus six months. Few soldiers were pleased, but now instead of griping, they spoke of “exacting revenge” on the “yellow bastards” and making “quick work” of the war. “Remember Pearl Harbor” became their battle cry.

Japan’s December 7 assault on Pearl Harbor decimated the Pacific Fleet, killed or wounded over 3,500 men, and sent shock waves through America. In Japan, the excited voices of newsmen crackled over radios: “The war with America has begun!” Throughout the day stations across Japan played military songs, including the inspirational “Battleship March.” At dawn on the same day, the Imperial army landed at Kota Bharu on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula, beginning its takeover of Southeast Asia.

The day after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on Japan. Winston Churchill, for one, was relieved. He exclaimed that he was “well content” with the news; the U.S. had been forced to enter a war it had long resisted.

America geared up at a furious pace. Across the country, men by the thousands no longer waited to be drafted. Many did not even know where Pearl Harbor was. They knew, though, that the Japanese had just bombed American soil. The Selective Service cracked down on conscientious objectors, and the attorney general rounded up alleged Axis sympathizers. Meanwhile, President Roosevelt issued his infamous Executive Order 9066: By August anyone who was one-sixteenth Japanese, possessing at least one Japanese grandparent, a total of one hundred twenty thousand people, was interned.

By January 1, 1942, the United States would surpass Germany as the world’s largest producer of planes. Thousands of defense plants were being built; shipyards were running around the clock. “America Firsters” who, advocating isolationism, had opposed entry into the war no longer had an ideological leg to stand on. The American public supported strict rationing programs, which included limits on paper, shoes, silk, butter, milk, canned goods, meat, and fuel oil. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without” was a slogan indicative of the kinds of sacrifices that Americans were willing to make. People cultivated “victory gardens,” drove at a “victory speed” of 35 miles per hour to conserve gas, and organized scrap drives with slogans like “Slap the Jap with the Scrap!” “Hit Hitler with the Junk!” Bing Crosby sang a song called “Junk Will Win the War.” When the War Production Board (WPB) asked for four million tons of scrap metal to be gathered in two months, people responded with five million tons in three weeks. The WPB organized rubber drives and paper drives. The Farm Security Administration began a program called “An Acre for a Soldier.” The profit on that acre was used to buy canteens and other essentials for servicemen. Overnight, apathy had turned into fervent patriotism.

By mid-February 1942, concerns about a Japanese follow-up attack had quieted. The men of the 32nd were back at Camp Livingston preparing to go north to Fort Devens, Massachusetts by special troop train. At this point Churchill, Roosevelt, Curtin, and Marshall had not yet struck their deal to send the 32nd to Australia. The plan was to ship the division to Northern Ireland. In fact, its 107th Engineer Battalion was already on its way. But only six weeks after arriving at Fort Devens, the 32nd was getting ready to move again. Few of the men knew what was in the works. What they did know was that they were no longer headed for Europe.

Katherine Hobson Bailey, wife of Lieutenant Cladie Bailey, had driven to Fort Devens to see her husband off. Bailey, who had been the executive officer of Jastrzembski, Stenberg, and DiMaggio’s G Company, was now its commander.

Earning the respect of the men of Company G had not been easy for Bailey when he reported to Camp Livingston in April 1941. The first strike against him was that he was an ROTC officer. National Guard units were insular groups, made up of men whose friendships often dated back to high school, even grade school; national guardsmen were not very accepting of outsiders, especially new officers. The second strike was that Bailey, an Indianan, was an interloper among the tightly knit Muskegon, Michigan, men. But Bailey quickly earned the admiration of the men of Company G with a unique combination of charisma, humor, and toughness. As an ROTC second lieutenant, he had done a two-year stint in the Civilian Conservation Corps, and it was in the CCC that Bailey learned how to motivate men. The key was to be right there with them, struggling under a heavy pack, doing the work that they did. When other officers enjoyed the privilege of riding in jeeps to training areas, Bailey chose to walk with his men. When the occasion called for it, he could be decidedly un-military. One member of G Company recalls, “he ran a light ship, making weekend camp fun…no inspections, no reveille, just fun and card games.”

It did not take long for everyone to realize that the company’s new lieutenant was a natural. And it did not take them long to give Bailey a nickname. The men of G Company simply called their lieutenant “Gus.”

Gus Bailey was a man from humble roots who made the most of his considerable abilities. A farm boy, he was no stranger to the kind of backbreaking labor that characterized rural life during the Depression. The house he grew up in had no electricity or indoor plumbing.

His father, Jim Bailey, was a carpenter who built houses and barns all over the county; his mother, Mamie Bailey, sold eggs and cream, and canned with Cladie’s help, but mostly the farm provided just enough for the family, including a once-a-week Sunday chicken supper.

A standout athlete by the time he reached high school, Cladie swapped the hardcourt for the baseball diamond and became a star pitcher on the Indiana University baseball team that won the Big Ten Championship in 1934. Bailey was no ordinary jock, though. While at IU, he developed a love of Robert Service’s North Woods ballads.

Poetry wasn’t something he tried to hide in the army, either. Later, the guys of G Company learned to look forward to his recitations of Service poems, which Bailey performed with flourish. Bailey was a poker player, too. Once he got to G Company, it was Bailey who instigated the all-night games, which invariably meant late nights and tables decorated with empty beer bottles.

It was during the fall of 1940, while Bailey was still teaching and coaching at Heltonville High School, that he and Katherine Hobson began dating. She was a beautiful redhead and recent graduate of Bedford High School, twelve years Bailey’s junior. Given that she was the age of the senior girls strolling the halls of Heltonville High, there might have been some who considered the budding romance improper. If so, Bailey would not have cared a whit. He was as taken with Katherine as she was with him.

What had first caught her eye was Cladie Bailey’s (Katherine always called him Clade) looks. Bailey was a handsome, square-jawed man with a field of brownish-blond hair. He was a fashionable dresser who wore white starched shirts and pinstriped suits and liked his shoes well polished. But what Katherine had come to love most about him was not his good looks, which he never let go to his head, but his honesty and kindness. “He was the same,” she said. “He never varied in his kindness to people.”