Isolated rifle cracks speak across misty gullies as scouts try to pick off sentries. Through the gloomy clouds that hang overhead or scud across intervening ramparts of black rock, a shaft of light comes only occasionally. It is gone before the men, crouching behind rocks, can emerge to dry out their muggy clothing.
Even at 14,000 feet, the uttermost peaks rarely get sun and never snow. The trickle of water whispering among the rocks is the only constant sound.
Altitude itself is a bitter antagonist amid a 6000-foot network of interlacing ravines on the broad back of the mountain chain. Australian fighters now meeting Japs are, like their antagonists, undergoing a struggle for breath as well as mastery. The air is thin as well as wet. At such an altitude the necessity to leap and climb swiftly among boulders as big as a house, without exposing a single movement to well-camouflaged Jap scouts, is a test of endurance.
When one considers that heavy mortars, with their cumbersome base plates, must be tugged by hand or carried on sweating backs from one position to another, with changes being as often vertical as horizontal, the effort in merely keeping the breath or even the heart action unstrained is formidable. No human beings, native or Australian, have ever attempted tropical fighting at such an altitude or under these rigorous circumstances. Australians are by nature a people of dry plains and hot desert; their factories and cities and their tendency to move to the seacoast have made pioneers rare and mountaineers almost nonexistent.
Native Papuans, with their puffball black heads and loincloths, have always shunned the mountains because of the insupportable climate and the necessity to have clothes there which they do not possess—and because of the eerie, sunless, haunted atmosphere. Lowland carriers in the mountains suffer sometimes more from the altitude than white men, and frequently die. Two, for example, who bore cameras for newsreel photographers in a recent film being shown in Australia, died of pneumonia en route even though their aggregate period at high altitude was only three days. It was to avoid the black reaches of New Guinea's mountains that the famous gold-carrying air transport system was developed.
Australia, counting upon Singapore and the Dutch East Indies to hold, had no way of anticipating that Port Moresby would become her Singapore, and that a battle in the mountains would be necessary to defend Port Moresby from an attack by land. Australians, who consider themselves able to fight anywhere they have to—like Americans—have never developed a specialist corps resembling Germany's Jäger-truppen or her Italian ally's Alpinists.
Japanese troops feeling their way through the mountain mists some sixty miles from Port Moresby were trained for altitude fighting as part of a thorough plan for Far Eastern conquest. While American Marines were hewing their way through Nicaragua's lofty jungles, their Japanese prototypes were hardening themselves in Formosa for a battle that would one day be fought in the Owen Stanley Range. Had the American combat troops now in Australia ever foreseen a worldwide role, their training might have been similar. As it is, the New Guinea situation must be faced in terms of the axiom that only experience makes a soldier. The Japanese, by schooling, learned what the Australians rapidly are learning under fire and what Americans still have to learn.
It is not only a battle of lungs and hearts, but of bellies. The bigger, looser frames of Australians are used to nourishing food, and require more per man than the rice-and yam-eating Japanese. More food poundage brought up from Allied advance bases means less ammunition. Along the several days' journey through the slippery, clammy path, the carrier must also carry food for himself. Thus, in one of the world's most sparsely populated tropical regions, a labor problem is created.
One white man cannot serve as a food carrier for another, however willing he may be to sweat his way upward along the trail front by Mount Victoria. By the time he reached the “roof” he would have consumed the whole poundage on his back. It is wrong to think of Australian troops requiring a porter each, just as it is exaggerated to picture the Japanese as some miracle fighter living like an animal off his own fat. But how can General MacArthur's Australian commanders bring together sufficient Papuans to keep the mountain troops fed and nourished? This question is being answered with energy and thoroughness.
The Japs have bearers, too—many being natives pressed into service and brought over from New Britain and the Rabaul region—but their dependence is considerably less and most bearers carry war materiel. The Japanese Institute of Tropical Warfare has made a study of edible wild plants throughout their intended empire, and the Jap's little bags of rice and meat are savories rather than staples. Instructions are to live off the country as quickly as possible. Wherever the Rising Sun flag is planted, a vegetable garden follows soon afterward as part of the Jap soldier's regular 16-hour fighting day. Where rear troops grow their own food it means less transport devoted to their sustenance and hence more advancing forces engaged in the forward areas. Less food means more and bigger guns in the mountains, and more and bigger caliber munition. Or it means, as today in New Guinea, that the Japanese are able to sustain a bigger force in an inaccessible area and make outflanking movements.
Given the long record of air exploitation of New Guinea, the first inquiry of a visitor to Port Moresby is always whether our troops, like the gold miners, are being supplied from the air. But the difficulties among mountains forever hooded in clouds must be seen in order to be appreciated. It requires more than exceptional courage for a pilot to fly two miles a minute through narrow misty valleys walled with black slate while seeking a tiny ground signal. It also requires plenty of reserve transport aircraft, for there are losses.
Even by using air supply to the utmost, Allied generals are still leaving themselves a fundamental problem: Anglo-Saxon troops under tropical battle conditions simply require more than Japanese, and somehow that must reach them. Wherever the inured and imperial-minded Japanese make up their minds to hide in the jungle, the Allied capacity to seek them out and destroy them depends not alone on cutting off their slender and relatively unimportant line of supplies but on becoming troops capable of enduring greater hardship.
The Allies are feeling their way toward the development of a corps of elite jungle fighters who can endure any altitude and any heat and cold that a Jap can, without making greater demands upon bases for sustenance or support. That idea is likely to take root before long, as the Japs push toward Port Moresby in their surge to snatch an empire.
MORESBY DONS LONG PANTS, GROWS INTO MAJOR FORTRESS
Somewhere in New Guinea—December 5, 1942
Only when you return to Port Moresby after a few weeks' absence can you see what has been accomplished. In this scattered stronghold of closely woven hills and air fields, sweating under the grey clouds of the still-unbroken monsoon, you find how powerful Port Moresby has become: a fortress whose walls are mountains and the blue waters of the Coral Sea, and whose eyes are far-striking aircraft. What is here now is here to stay, come fever or air raid. Port Moresby will stand, for her invulnerability has been hewn by the sweating arms of her defenders, white, brown, and black, American, Australian and Papuan.
At first a visitor is lost in the developments. New roads send clouds of dust up over a jeep, encrusting your body in tan dust, caking it with perspiration. The new roads are named Pitts Street for Sydney, and Broadway or Michigan Boulevard. Mosquitoes still hover around a typewriter. There is the wracking noise of machine guns over one of many fields. New aircraft, new faces, new gossip are everywhere.
Somebody has taken away the worried Port Moresby. Here is this new one, where paths to showers and latrines are laid out in crushed stone with boulders for borders. Drinking fountains are still created by twisting brass faucets upside down.
When the Jap bombers come over, the anti-aircraft fire goes stabbing up but there is more of it, much more. (A helmet still hangs by each cot.) When it patters down on the grass roof, it sounds like hail. In the bad old days, it sounded like rain.
There is still the brown bottle of quinine
tablets and the blue bottle of salt tablets on the mess table. Butter still drips soupily yellow from the knife and all drinks are warm. But fighters now have vitamin tablets and there are wounded, too.
Here the Japs' wounded and our own wounded are in the hands of American nurses, the first women to return to Port Moresby. Already they have their own hospital. This touch of feminism is the hallmark of a new stability, but it imposes sacrifices, too. No more bathing of sweaty bodies in the open; baths have shoulder-high palisades of thick bamboo. Grass skirts hang from roofs, or are draped across tied-up mosquito nets. Their original wearers are on the other side of the Owen Stanley Range, upon the cloud-wrapped peaks undergoing almost continuous rain.
Across these hills, with their short green trees and dead brown grass, moves an endless crisscross procession of why Port Moresby is strong: Fortresses, Havocs, Liberators, Kittyhawks, Airacobras. Port Moresby had nothing six months ago, not even geographical advantage. The battle of Milne Bay saved it, to stand beside Guadalcanal as long as American wings are spread over its boomtown defenses.
When we came in aboard Major General George Kenney's big B-17 Fortress, there was a “quarrel of nature” over the hills: rainbow, sunlit clouds, bursts of rain falling on perspiring bodies. We manned our machine guns as our giant wings dipped and our pilot chose his airdrome. An alert was on and the runways suddenly deserted. But nothing happened. And then we knew that, in this new system of American defenses upon Australian soil, Port Moresby would become—until better bases took its place—a true Singapore, not too confident but self-reliant, sure that its labors would endure.
JAPS AT BUNA TESTING ALLIES ABILITY TO DIE
Somewhere in New Guinea—December 6, 1942 (Delayed)
Sitting in a thatched grass hut as the guest of an American fighter squadron, this correspondent is one of many observers awaiting Buna's fall, in MacArthur's first offensive in this war to capture Papua. Tomorrow I will cross the grey-veiled Owen Stanleys to join troops in the field, having at last found a seat aboard one of the transport planes that helped accomplish this great airborne invasion. Crossing the range and descending into the field with the troops will necessarily limit the writer's vision, for the three principal sectors are remote from each other.
The Japs lost the battle for Port Moresby last September when stiff air attacks drove them back across the range. Buna will be a baptism of fire for American soldiers fighting offensively against the Jap infantry.
Progress has at times appeared slow. Buna has seemed repeatedly upon the point of falling. But Japan is deliberately spinning out this battle. Her slow pusher planes, slipping in under tremendous clouds—piled 40,000 feet high each afternoon in swirling arabesques that are deadly to pursuit aircraft—have successfully dropped parachute supplies upon a small rectangle along Buna beach. Jap machine-gunners with their protected positions among the marshes and creeks, and with the grass before their posts cut down to afford a full sweep, still are being eliminated only a single gun at a time. And the price of this elimination is not cheap.
To some, it has seemed that the inability of Allied airmen to shake Japanese soldiers' positions on the ground—though causing heavy losses—was proof that until the ground was gained by our infantry, victory could not be considered won.
The Japanese are ingenious in devising means of undergoing Allied air attacks and at the same time holding positions that still can repel infantry. The best device they have developed is the natural pillbox created within the roots of trees along the marshes from Cape Endaiadere to Gona. This tree—not even old New Guinea hands have been able to furnish the writer its name—has thick roots that meet six to ten feet above the ground, forming a cone structure something like the poles of an American Indian tepee. The Japs mount machine guns within to sweep every direction. They can be taken only at the point of a bayonet. Sunk so low that they are almost undisturbed by aircraft attacks, difficult to see beneath the foliage, their woven form protects them from mortar fire.
A striking paradox of the Papuan campaign is that, after being fought so recently among the rain-drenched tree ferns of the “Roof of the World,” it is now entering its final phase in the marshy, foul and steaming flatland. What was supremely right in the mountains has become inapplicable.
The Japs, being attacked only by land, therefore have a ten-mile front on one side only. Although many rivers and creeks must be crossed with our supplies, and muddy marshes traversed in attacks, the Japs cannot counter-attack us this way because our destructive raids upon their supply barges have made it impossible.
Our air umbrella has been used offensively over land, and used defensively over the sea to prevent the Japs from landing any reinforcements or vacating those already there. Yet the primary idea of amphibious war—using water to skirt the enemy for a rear attack—remains unexploited at Buna and Gona.
The battle for Buna is plainly what faces us in the many months that lie ahead. Japan is betting on scores or hundreds of Bunas. She means to curdle the blood of her enemies by causing her peasant infantrymen to fight so suicidally—and inflict maximum losses—that the Christian nations will be repelled and negotiate a peace that will leave her part of what she so adroitly snatched. With Japan on the defensive, it is clear she never intended an equal relationship as one of many partners in the Pacific peace. What Japan wants is to be master, or die.
This, at least, is the aim of the military caste behind such doomed resistance as that of the Jap marines and army at Buna. To uphold that idea, the Japanese navy squandered destroyer after destroyer while knowing Buna was strategically only an anachronism of the misbegotten plan to take Port Moresby.
Their Milne Bay defeat lost them the China Strait. By spending blood lavishly to delay the Buna surrender she cannot prevent, Japan means to test the capacity of American and Australian troops to carry the battle to Tokyo. Her answer is coming slowly but with it the first light that the western nations are resolute may possibly touch Jap leaders, though it will never be permitted to reach their people.
That is what actually is being decided by our men under the hot suns and steaming rains of Buna's swamps and beaches.
CRAWLING THROUGH JUNGLE TO KILL, OR DIE, IN GUINEA
With the American Forces in Papua—December 11, 1942
Not a bird chirps, not a leaf stirs. A cricket somewhere in the high, green kunai grass begins a faint song, then, oppressed by the sun, fades away. It is silent again. Suddenly the earth seems to rise and a soft blow of air, like a hand pat, strikes your face. Every tree trembles with the shock of shells.
“Still looking,” says the corporal leading you to the advance post. “Landed about there. Those Jap 75s only have a fragmentation arc of thirty yards. They'll have to get better observation posts. Unless they see us, how can they hit us?”
He has hardly finished speaking when another blow and concussion make the earth rise, as though outraged, beneath your feet. There is no whistle of warning because you are right under the shells, aimed at our line of communication. In these leafy tunnels we are as safe as rabbits scurrying through tiny paths in deep grass.
Abruptly a tommy gun sounds its hard punch gruffly just ahead; again, then once again. That's ours. A single biting rifle crack. That's a Jap sniper trying to get our tommy-gunner. Whoever sees the other best, whoever waits the longest without being seen and fires the surest, will live. The other man will die. On both sides, there are plenty of quick and plenty of dead.
Now the humming of aircraft. Scanning the treetops, you try to see whose planes are coming. In this overhanging green you've as much chance as looking through a chimney; you can only tell by the engine sounds. Our plug-ugly infantry doesn't pretend to be sure of the difference between a Nakajima and an Airacobra.
The sniper snaps his whip again and a big leaf comes floating down. But the leaf is old and yellow, not fresh green. It was just a dead leaf, nothing hit it.
There is a singing whine. Almost simultaneously a shell crashes ahead and
behind. That is our artillery. Another snarl, then again wham-wham. You hear it and the fall of the shell nearly together, close overhead, because the range is short.
Off to the left two machine guns have begun to argue. One accuses, the other answers, then both talk at once.
Here on the front between our Gona and Buna drives—sometimes called our Sanananda push, midmost of our three drives to the sea—the Jap lines and ours are stretched across a ten-foot-wide road that bends east toward Buna. Two miles more and we'll see those blue waters again. But in those two miles lies an indeterminable number of Jap machine-gun posts not yet uprooted. There are grenade-throwing rifles. There are clip-haired, bearded Japs in two-foot foxholes, covered over with matted foliage so that only muzzles of machine guns protrude. There are others in huge protective roots of the peculiar giant eucalyptus which no one seems able to name. Its roots are interwebbed like ducks' feet, making separate polygonous chambers. The Jap gunner simply crawls from one chamber to the next, protected on three sides. Could we do the same thing? Of course we could—defensively. But this time we are advancing, not the Japs. And it is for us to dig them out.
War is never very clean or quick on the ground. But for slowness, heat and mud, this has most wars bettered. The Australian Imperials say that Papua is worse than anything Libya, Syria or Palestine ever offered.
Two majors sit before hip-high shelter tents scraping bullybeef (meatball style) and rice from their plates. Both their overall uniforms, like our own, were originally light green, but are now stained and mottled almost black by dirt and 24-hour sweating. Baetcke has a bead of sweat on the brow under his helmet. He is tall, sandy blond, spare. His junior, Boerem, is dark, plump and deadly earnest. Both are true infantrymen. Both have led attack after attack through this labyrinth and so have their lieutenants. Both know what it is to fight day and night, to lie in the lines for fourteen days straight, fighting for every gain by yards and paying for it in men as parsimoniously as possible.
Weller's War Page 42