You may wonder why, with these explicit warnings, I tackled the 41st Division story. It is because we have by far the most complete account of the campaign and I wanted to keep the record. But the doctors say I have very seriously overextended myself, and I must heed them.
He did not, however, and in June 1943 he was allowed by MacArthur to train as a paratrooper, to better understand the kind of warfare he was not allowed to write about. (These dispatches appeared in late November and early December, as he was finally leaving the southwest Pacific for the United States.)
There were other stories he was not permitted to touch, of course. In April 1964, on MacArthur's death, his remembrance of the general began:
In the prickly heat of the New Guinea jungle a lieutenant general stood up in the stifling mess tent, pushed aside his coffee cup and rapped it with a spoon. “I have received a message from the general,” he said. The sweating officers loosened the open throats of their shirts and looked sideways at each other.
“The general” could mean only MacArthur, 1000 miles to the south in his office in downtown Brisbane. It was almost Christmas, 1942. MacArthur had announced that his troops had captured Buna, a gift for Roosevelt to offer the American people. The trouble was that the Americans hadn't taken Buna. They were still trying to solve the tangle of swamps, snipers and crossfire. What would be MacArthur's Christmas message?
Lt. General Robert Eichelberger, a tall, balding man who like MacArthur had been superintendent of West Point, held up a handwritten flimsy under the hissing lantern. “The general says,” he paused and his hand seemed to tremble, “he says, ‘I want to hear that you have captured Buna or I want to hear that you are dead.’”
The tent was so still that only the razor strop sound of giant bats in the palms could be heard. Every infantry officer there knew that the message didn't mean death for Eichelberger. But it meant that Eichelberger was ordered to push forward regardless of cost to the Wisconsin-Michigan 32nd Division and the Northwest's 41st Division. MacArthur's message meant death first for young lieutenants and sergeants whose jungle tactics had never been revised. MacArthur did not get Buna for Christmas, but he got it later—through a starving deserter stumbling into an American camp and giving away a path through the hip-deep swamps, the barbed wire and trip mines and the tree snipers.
MacArthur perceived that publicity was the lever of American power and he used it openly. His censors, by suppressing almost everything political and meaningful from the Southwest Pacific, reduced the war to a series of banal hero stories costing the American people a generation of political education in Southeast Asia. To MacArthur ruthless censorship was a means not to deceive the Japanese enemy but to keep his material supplies increasing in an uncritical atmosphere. When I tried to cost-analyze the sending of 25 bombers to destroy a single Japanese Zero parked on a field, the story was instantly killed. To MacArthur this was the way to keep the public happy and tractable.
Late in life, he characterized MacArthur even more bluntly: “He cowed the entire American press into suppressing the fact that his battle of malaria-ridden New Guinea was directed from
the hotel apartment in Brisbane where he lived with his wife and son. Bataan it wasn't.”
This chapter also contains a short story, “By the Light of a Mushroom,” published in the Autumn 1945 Yale Review, which describes the special fellowship in New Guinea of enlisted men, correspondents, and officers.
In July 1943, Weller wrote again to his editor, Carroll Binder:
My health is improving as I get fresh milk and sleep. Some people have very severe malaria recurrences; I wanted to get fresh food in me and my corpuscles back, and to get my affairs together before leaving. The jungle breaks everything down, typewriter, camera, papers. I lived for months in one set of jungle greens with a notebook in the pocket. My glasses gave way this morning; it takes days to get things done that take hours under ordinary circumstances. And my conscience is troubled by letters from parents of men who are dead, whose outfits are scattered, but who must (I feel) be answered. My pile of them is three months old.
To preserve his health, Weller had to leave New Guinea a year before the campaign for Papua ended. He was replaced there for the CDN by Hal O'Flaherty, who near the end of the war would take over as foreign editor back in Chicago from Carroll Binder. Binder, a veteran correspondent himself, had lost his eldest son over France, and never recovered from it.
MOSQUITOES, JUNGLE TOUGHER THAN JAPS IN NEW GUINEA
At an Advanced Allied Base in the Southwest Pacific—August 5, 1942
Until you have been bitten by your first New Guinea mosquito and seen your first raid against Port Moresby you cannot say you belong on the island that blocks Nippon's progress southward. (With the Japanese pressing toward the Owen Stanley Range and their plan undisclosed, little can be written outside the communiqués.)
Up in the mountains, where the monsoon deposits its burden of rain-heavy clouds, everything is green, thick and tangled. Troops, as one officer said, are “fighting the country ninety per cent of the time and the Japs ten per cent.” But Port Moresby is not part of that steaming hell tied together with vines and creepers and infested by hundreds of wild animals and savages. The town stands on a small promontory jutting into the Coral Sea. The thirty-mile semicircle has been dried by the South Pacific autumn until the hilly countryside is withered and brown.
Across this relatively open country, MacArthur's Australians and Americans have disposed themselves in a manner calculated to puzzle Japanese bombardiers, who are still trying to find out what is significant upon this parched panorama.
It might be the Sudan or Libya, as far as personal appearance is concerned—shorts, shirt, boots and socks. One sees even dispatch riders on motorcycles wearing only shorts, their faces creased into lines of dust.
The climate now is clear and healthy with the southeast monsoon blowing in from the Coral Sea. But there are mosquitoes. Malaria must be consistently fought and quinine taken for six weeks after leaving to prevent hot and cold chills.
HUSH-HUSH BASE READY FOR JAPS MILNE BAY STAB
Soldier-Workers Spend Long Days Preparing Surprise for Foe
Somewhere in Australia—September 1 & 4, 1942
“What are you doing here? We never expected a war correspondent in this neck of the woods. Who told you we had a base at Milne Bay?”
With those words this correspondent was greeted several days ago when he succeeded in reaching the secluded, secret base at the extreme end of southeastern New Guinea, the scene of the crushing Allied victory over invasion forces and now the center of a jungle hunt for Japanese who escaped the Allied trap.
The Americans' surprise was understandable. Although dozens of correspondents have been able, during the last nine months, to reach Port Moresby and describe the Allied situation there, none—either American, English or Australian—had been able to get from there to the hush-hush base at Milne Bay.
How well the secret was kept may be judged by the fact that many troops in Port Moresby never knew of the base.
Even high officers who had visited could be counted on one hand. This correspondent's trip, made with a general of engineers, naturally could not be the subject of dispatches. However, the direct attack by the Japanese upon the base itself makes possible some relaxation of the double secrecy, though naturally many facts useful to the enemy must be withheld.
This correspondent reached Milne Bay aboard an aircraft with guns ready against patrolling Zeros. Australian gunners, naked to the waist and wearing only shorts and half-length boots, sat vigilantly at their positions. Every person aboard, including the American general, scanned the skies unceasingly. Zeros have been seen repeatedly over this lonely tongue of land.
Going to Milne Bay was mighty different from going to Port Moresby, which seemed a haven by comparison. In other words, this correspondent—as many other times in the war—was just plain scared. You cajole and plead to get a peek at places like Milne Bay w
ithout any hope of being able to write about them for months. Then, en route, straining your eyes at the lookout windows, with phones strapped over your head, you listen to an inner voice saying: “Well, you asked for this, didn't you?” It must be nice to be a Japanese correspondent and be able to take a short snifter of bushido whenever it is needed.
Milne Bay is a horseshoe twenty miles long and two to four miles wide. Its prongs point at the reefs and coral islets that form a natural barrier against Japanese naval incursions southward. Strategically this means that if the Japs take Milne Bay, they have still not penetrated the barrier by sea, but can easily do so overland.
The Japanese calculatedly avoided taking any particular notice of Milne Bay before their attack. When this correspondent walked ashore, his first question was when the last red-balled reconnaissance plane had flown overhead. An American officer's reply was that it had been nearly three weeks since humming, heard through the overhanging palms and coconuts, had betrayed Japanese interest.
Prior to the attack the base had never been bombed or even strafed. It seemed as though the Japs were prepared to ignore the work going on there.
In Milne Bay, Americans and Australians shared something between rough plantation life and the muddier existence of Australian Commando troops. Men from all parts of the States were there, mostly living in the plain, square plantation houses characteristic of this coconut-growing area. Some privates, white and Negro, lived in tents. Both officers and men slept under long mosquito nets.
What happened when it first became known that a Jap force, despite attacks of Australian bomber-fighters, was actually landing can only be conjectured. But certainly it was not a case of being wholly taken by surprise. Submachine guns, loaded and oiled, were ready. Guards against Jap parachutists were maintained. Two American sergeants echoed the general sentiment when they said: “If the Japs strike here they'll know, even though we may only be pencil pushers, that now we're able to fight if necessary.”
Milne Bay is covered by two canopies, one permanent. The semipermanent is a thick layer of wet mist which fills the enclosure between the horseshoe's sides sometimes down to the level of the palm tops. This layer effectively concealed the base's preparations from enemy eyes, but played the Allies false by making it difficult for our fighter-bombers to hit enemy landing forces. Once the invader knew what was going on under the clouds, the weather was with him.
The other canopy is that of green, feather-duster palms planted systematically close, so only half-light falls into the glades beneath. Both large coconut plantations are controlled by Lever Brothers' soap interests, but not a single company employee—only officers—occupy the square bungalows with bare colonial furniture. While Kittyhawks snarled overhead on patrols, Milne Bay prepared for the Jap onslaughts which the men believed were certain.
This correspondent spent a 21-hour day, from 5 a.m. until 2 a.m. the next night, with an Army captain who had been his friend as a businessman in Singapore. These Americans were unquestionably working harder at the job of creating this New Guinea base than any other officers or men elsewhere in the Far East.
Where the Japs landed, before the Allies annihilated them in a trap, was “a tiny narrow strip of black-sanded beach, with palms dipping over the waves.” Here the Allies built a short primitive road. All day and night, sighing trucks bumped along. Far from being a soggy swamp, it was nearly as deep in dust by day as Port Moresby. But when night mists fell, all turned to mud.
It was characteristic that when the Allies, in the mosquito-infested night, discovered a truck with a broken axle lying across the road, the officers, the men, and also this correspondent fell to and somehow hefted the big fellow over to one side on the beach so that more important caravans might pass.
These men were proud that in many cases their jobs of uploading had been accomplished faster under the rawest tropical conditions, with hearty, spirited labor, than by professional stevedores working in safety thousands of miles away. They made the boast that every ship was unloaded with their crude means faster than they had been loaded by modern means elsewhere.
Nowhere so much as at Milne Bay has this correspondent wanted honor for the unknown soldier-worker who sweats alone unrecognized. Among the perspiring officers were three doctors, from New York, Cleveland, and Chicago. Dawn would find them already at work. They were living on canned food, with occasional banana leaves and papayas. They taught this correspondent how to select the best coconut for drinking, shave off the end to a point and clip it off. They are already jungle troops. They are fighting a war of roads, of concealment, of disposal and never without pistol in readiness. It was symbolic that they kept their screen doors shut by the weight of a spade suspended on a pulley by a heavy window cord. Continually wet with sweat, they never could bathe in the ocean, which sharks frequent. Instead, they used a small creek with signs: No swimming above this point. No washing above this point. No drinking water above this point.
“We need more newspapers at Milne,” said a sergeant who used to be a factory foreman in Michigan. “The natives make cigarettes by rolling tobacco in old American newspapers. They don't seem to mind the taste of newsprint.”
A private, another of those who defended Australia by defending Milne Bay, said: “One thing we watch for is spiders getting in our boots. Every morning I always shake out my shoes. In Papua it's the tiniest spiders that are the deadliest.”
Pointing through the dark glades of coconut palms, where his Kittyhawks were hidden, an Australian squadron leader picked out for this correspondent the names the pilots had painted upon their American-built fighters.
Instead of girls' names, which American pilots frequently use, one grinning shark-faced plane was sarcastically titled U-bite. At the runway's end was another bearing a title evidently adopted from James Joyce: Opityerbich.
Australian fliers are readers of comic strips imported from America, too. One toothy Kittyhawk is called Mandrake, after “Mandrake the Magician.”
Milne Bay has undergone German, American, and Australian influences during its period as a tiny coconut port. The Germans, left over from the days when New Guinea was their possession, put the mark of Adolf Hitler upon their bags of copra. (American officers uncovered a cache of bags with swastikas, but they were put to anti-swastika use.)
The Japs first tipped off the Allies that they knew what was going on at Milne Bay by sending over a small handful of Zeros, which shelled and machine-gunned the airdrome, smashing one Australian-piloted Kittyhawk and partly damaging two others. Thereafter they left Milne in peace for three weeks, only about half their forces returning from this raid.
Their plan of conquest at the entrance to the Coral Sea was delayed by the destruction of their fighters on the ground at Buna—then destroyed completely. While the Airacobra pilots operating over New Guinea have a lower record of downing bombers than their colleagues in Kittyhawks around Darwin, their strafing efforts have been murderous to parked aircraft. Whether the Japanese use dummies or the real thing, it doesn't matter; the Airacobras tear them apart.
Like Port Moresby and Darwin, Milne is a womanless Eden, for all the dark-skinned females, except for one pudgy creature in a grass skirt, have moved out to the hills. The dark-skinned men who remain wear light powder in their stiff hair. This makes their coiffure look like a dandelion gone to seed. With high-girted calicos bound around their waists by leather belts and legs tightly bound below the knees, they walk along, tasting that combination of betel nut rubbed in dust of lime which is their mild intoxicant.
“But don't make the mistake of thinking they're dumb or anything,” warned a captain. “Remember what happened to Lee when he first came to Milne Bay.”
Lee, a husky, square-built officer, was trying to get some biscuits made for a luncheon in honor of a captain-physician in charge of Milne Bay's hospital.
Addressing a puff-haired, tattooed native who had just applied for the job, he said in pidgin: “Rastus, blackfellow, you savvy, gettum f
lour, milk, mixum plenty good, makum crumpets?”
Rastus drew himself up and replied: “I'm deeply sorry, sir, but I don't believe I shall be able to secure sufficient baking powder.”
Rastus learned English from Miss Doris Passel of the London Missionary School, a young New York woman who taught the natives not only respect for God but also an American attitude toward native populations. Troops here owe her a debt of gratitude. These splay-footed brown men remember her. One named Kwato, about eleven, did arithmetic sums for me and printed his name perfectly. All wanted to know when Miss Doris Pas-sell was coming back from New York. Yes, they get their pound of rice daily and their two sticks of nearly black trade tobacco. And yes, American fighters whine overhead. But where is Miss Doris Pas-sell?
‘BATTLE OF LUNGS’ IN GUINEA MOUNTAINS
Somewhere in Australia—September 12, 1942
In lonely forests of perpetual rain, 6000 feet above the seas that flank New Guinea's eastern peninsula, Australian and Japanese troops carry on a deadly struggle for tactical position on several gully-rippled dorsal fins of the Owen Stanley Range. For the first time in this war the great equatorial rain forest which girdles the entire world's circumference, crossing Africa, South America, Borneo and Sumatra, is a sustained battleground. It is a strange region anywhere, but here it is lonely, wet and terrifying.
Great tree ferns, their leaves forever bright with mist, thrust their arms from the black walls of precipitous rock and the disordered pell-mell of enormous slate boulders. The atmosphere is clammy-cold, and hands upon a rifle grow damp with the chill. Animals are few because the sun is little seen.
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