With their men, both officers are learning to kill Japs in the Japanese way.
“See that thing,” says Baetcke, pointing to a shapeless, dark green cloth mass. He lifts it up, still stinking wet.
“I wore that fifteen days continuously. It belonged to another officer; we don't have any valets in this colonial war. When we reach a river we wash. Until then we just fight.”
MIRACLE PILOTS CARRY A WAR OVER
THE GUINEA MOUNTAINS
With the American Forces in Papua—December 12, 1942
Now that you're here and your conversation pauses to guess which gun is firing and who has cleaned out what machine-gun nest, you are liable to forget how you got here. But you'd better not because that's how your food and your ammunition get here, too.
Just now you're down in this little clearing flanked by high jungle trees. Brown “boongs,” native carriers, with long, three-pronged pitchfork combs thrust in their chocolate-colored hair, walk loose-jointedly past. Few typewriters have crossed the range and some pause to listen and wonder at this strange new thing.
What you must try not to forget is the fellows responsible for you being here—you and all the hundreds who have flown across one of the world's most terrible ranges and been set down on the muddy landing crevice (it cannot be called either a landing field or strip) amid these great trees.
Seeing another transport coming in, looking again for that crevice in a green sea of danger, you remember things that a Japanese shell landing nearby caused you to forget. Who is bringing her in this morning? How will he ever slip her down? How many razor blades could you throw free-hand through the crack in her deck?
Looking out the left-hand window in the big flying corridor of a transport plane, seeing the rim of trees rising five feet from the wing, then looking out the right-hand window and seeing branches practically poking in, makes you feel you are participating in a new form of aerial acrobatics. As an assistant radioman says: “Where there is land, we can put this big baby down.”
The far side of New Guinea's backbone, the Owen Stanley Range, was first crossed by gold-eager Australians shortly after the area was obtained from Germany through peace treaties. They flew everything: German Junkers, American tri-motor “tin goose” Fords and British Puss Moths.
Today great American transports cross this range—whose castellated, cloudy crests are even more dangerous than its swirling precipitous currents—more times on some days than the gold service did in six months. They carry the entire war by air across these cloud-walled peaks in the face of attacks by Zeros.
En route you unroll again all the bloody places over which the Australians pursued the Japs after the failure of their double-edge coup to grab Milne Bay and China Strait while attacking Port Moresby by land. The course is a secret, but here is Wairopi Bridge, which our P-39 Airacobras used to strafe and dive-bomb as fast as the Japs repaired it. Ahead you set the whole panorama—Cape Endaiadere, where Japs and Americans are struggling for airstrips, and Sanananda Point, where Australians and Americans are fighting together.
A radioman brings you a letter of commendation these crews just received from the American general. This compensates for the daily risk of losing themselves amid the woolly walls that build up within a minute over these passes. The crew chief does not want any misunderstandings; indicating his plane's window, he says: “I don't want you to think we're too lazy to wash them. We keep the windows dirty because it stops them from glinting and attracting the attention of the Zeros.”
And when they finally slip her into that crevice—she who was made for airdromes measured in thousands of yards—and you jump from the loading platform, you see scores of muddy-booted Aussies and Americans with shirts plastered to their bodies. There is a jeep, the only powered creature in sight. Bushy-headed carriers eye you. It is hot. It is wet. Ahead lies the passage through the jungle, dark as a cathedral aisle. Men with tommy guns are splashing through mud up to their ankles, dim in the wet darkness, and cursing.
“That way, buddy,” they say, pointing across the lagoons, and grin muddily as you start.
GONA FALLS THE HARD WAY, BECOMES
A BEACH OF DEATH
With the American Forces in Papua—December 14, 1942
Gona fell because the Japs could not stand two hundred and fifty 25-pound shells thrown into a position about three hundred yards by fifty. They attempted to escape both east and went along the black sand strip on which they were trapped. They were hemmed in by four big, low trees, something like American river willows, ranged along the beach at intervals of fifty yards. Their enormous trunk roots turn the beach sand to black turf. The trunks are at least twelve feet in diameter and the roots and lowest branches can be formed into a wall with rice bags.
Among these thick, squatty trees the thick squatty Japs made their last stand. They had plenty of ammunition, food and water and also possessed shells for a 75-mm gun—but no gun. Their uniforms were clean and new.
Meanwhile, Australians—tall, mud-drenched, bearded and tatterdemalion—closed in on them, crawling from one flooded foxhole to the next while their own 25-pounders threw shells over their heads at almost point-blank range.
After the bombardment the stench of dead bodies was so powerful that the Japs donned gas masks. By night the enemy pushed east along the beach, possibly intending to join the force fighting the Americans and Australians about five miles away inside Sanananda Point. Ninety-five Japs were killed.
Another small party went west. How many Japs were killed there is still not known but the official total of buried dead at this unfinished stage is between 500 and 600. A number of Australians gave their lives for this seabound position.
Gona has now become a beach of death. The great palms are bitten and chewed with fire from everything in modern war that explodes and kills. Some palms are headless torsos, their torsos nicked and frayed.
The water is as still as a pond; there is no surf. The grass walls of the tiny mission whose entrance path runs down through an aisle of smashed palms to a torn-up rowboat pier—the only landing facility—are in ruins. An enemy barge is stranded like a turtle under one of the heavily armed trees overlooking the beach. A mile offshore, a big Jap freighter lies on its side. Fugitives from the beach are still there. You can see them with binoculars.
It is a Japanese Dunkirk, but there was no evacuation. Bandages, pot-shaped helmets, rifles, unopened bottles of vitamin pills, undischarged grenades and bullet clips lie in the mud. This is one end of the road that began outside Port Moresby.
Beside an Australian officer's tent stands a Jap officer's curved sword in leather field case, sharper than an officer's razor.
The bodies of enemy soldiers who made their final stand here are in various stages of decomposition, and make breathing objectionable.
The sea, impassively calm, touches the black and even clouds that lie quiet upon the promontory toward Lae and Salamaua.
Although the Americans are nearby, the country where they are fighting—in deep shadows and flooded jungle, with little low paths made by crawling men—belongs on another continent. Here at Gona, it is relatively open country with the intervening meadows of green kunai grass six feet high and rapier-sharp.
Arising this morning after a night on the ground in a thunderstorm, during which firing continued, the writer, going to the beach, found a group of Australians standing in an open patch of kunai. A Jap had been stealing across the road a few minutes before; the sentry got him.
“He's planted right there,” said one, pointing at a mound. Another man was scraping wet earth from a short shovel, another fitting a new clip to his gun.
Six American fighters moaned faintly against the woolly wet clouds.
The heat in Papua is oppression itself. When the sun comes out you feel your body is an anvil being hammered. When it disappears behind low monsoon clouds your whole torso bursts out with a thick black film of perspiration. Stinging sweat seeps into your eyes. Your nose and naked should
ers are streaking. You wipe your body with the plane mechanic's baseball cap and replace it on your head to dry.
On the beach is a starling-yellow blob of canvas—the new life raft for an airplane, half-deflated and misshapen. Its trademark says it was made in Clifton, N.J. And this beach was Japanese.
Your kinky-headed native carrier, with sweatband, grass armlets, frayed girdle and bushknife, is hunting around the beach. Amid this baggage of warfare worth thousands of dollars all he wants is a blackened saucepan. And coconuts. Smashed trees have been razed by the filter of fire and everywhere in gunpits lie tawny coconuts. Coconuts, and heads of the dead.
The Gona Mission, which is all there was to the beach of death before war came, consists of two small buildings upon stilts about a hundred yards from the body-littered beach, with tall roofs of brown grass. Shells went through both grassy arches, leaving a hole big enough for pterodactyls to nest in the entrance. Before both buildings are round craters the size of swimming pools, filled with water. Water is everywhere and turns any cavity more than a foot deep into a basin.
These craters, which are Flying Fortress bombprints, lie among the topless palms like some macabre effort at landscaping. Any platoon of soldiers could swim in them. But none does for the reason unnecessary to explain.
For these now nauseating dead who, hours ago, were quick with life, there was a single means of nourishment—big, woven raffia bags of rice scattered along the black sand and dragged in under fire. Neither rain, sun nor shells spoil Jap army rice, a mixture of nourishing whole grains and our kind of polished grains. They ate from bags that Australian bullets and American bombers split and shattered. The Japs fought alongside the bodies of their dead; some were nearly skeletonized.
“See how they lay right down among their first corpses,” said one tommy-gunner puzzledly, pointing with his muzzle. “The Japs are different from us.”
Burial may mean little to them, but form means much. Little bags of hair cuttings and nail parings were found in several places, which the soldiers took from the fallen to send to relatives in Japan.
“They're opposite to us in every way. They save what we throw away.”
Now grenades are bursting on the left, up the beach farther off. American guns to the right are silent. Several American-built trucks lie nearby, blown in on the sides by the concussion of bombs. One rusty officer's car, probably brought from Java, is down to the hubs in muck and as full of holes as a colander.
The strip of black sand is pocked with machine-gun and mortar holes. Lifting slowly upon the tide, the body of a mustached Jap infantryman drifts idly. Between the rended, wispy palms winds a burial party led by an English chaplain of a unit from the remotest quarter of Australia. The freckled chaplain, straw-colored hair exposed—everyone else is wearing a helmet with camouflage net—is fingering a sodden bunch of letters.
Gona is the westernmost salient of the Allied three-prong drive to the sea. Sanananda, where both Americans and Australians are fighting, is the central salient and Buna, with its pair of prized airdromes, is the American.
For several minutes the only sound is the squelch of passing boots sucking up mud as a helmeted Australian goes by, tommy gun in the crook of his arm, peering into slit trenches for snipers who are known to be still about.
Then, suddenly, down the beach toward Sanananda and Buna there are several bursts of machine-gun fire, followed by a mortar's deep, hollow boom. Somewhere back there the Americans and Australians are thrusting their way through one machine-gun nest after another, sometimes taking three days to clear up a single post and living meanwhile on half-flooded islands in a morass of hip-deep, fever-infested mud.
“Don't miss any hole merely because it contains a body,” says a sergeant major. “Use your muzzle to look underneath. Round potholes are Jap. Rectangular ones are ours.”
ALLIED TROOPS RISE FROM SHELL HOLES TO SWEEP FULL LENGTH OF CAPE ENDAIADERE
With the American-Australian Troops in New Guinea-December 21, 1942
Breaking the deadlock amid swamps and machine-gunned coconut groves east of Buna, Allied forces have sent a sweep of troops along the outer length of this strategic cape. Jap possession of Buna's pair of fighter strips was threatened, but not yet shaken.
By a circuitous route involving travel by aircraft, bumping jeep, and on foot, this correspondent arrived at the best-known of Buna's three fronts. The atmosphere is one of chastened resolve—chastened because the American infantry is learning how stern is the task ahead.
While the Jap trenches overrun yesterday were simpler than those elsewhere—which this correspondent saw after dawn from his treetop observation post—the trenches, at right angles to the beach and protecting both airdromes to the rear, had already resisted the efforts of Australian artillery and American dive-bombing.
In this stiff battle probably 300 or 400 Japs lost their lives. Many who fled through the underbrush to heavier pillboxes ranged along the two airdromes were presumably wounded. Some even tried to swim away from the palm-fringed beach, where the impassive sea flanked their bloody engagement.
While the Allied step toward hemming the Japs from the sea was a tactical success, the brunt of losses was borne by Australians. (The Americans, who have fought doggedly in this sector under heavy Jap mortar and artillery fire, this time were sent in to follow.)
Going up with the American troops into trenches still occupied by occasional enemy shamming death, this correspondent, with the others, had an ugly half-hour when a Jap fifteen yards away opened up with grenades while his mate, hidden high in the coconut palms, began trying to pick off individuals crouched in holes. His rifle's whipcrack reports sent bullets singing near.
The biting chatter of tommy guns was almost continuous; fighting went on long after the forward troops made their sweep. The Japs used one flamethrower and this was captured. Not until the entire ground had been gone over three or four times and every interlaced trench emptied—several had bays enabling fire to any point of the compass, and loopholes hung over with dissembling grass—was it possible to move except by dashing from shellhole to shellhole.
Frank Hewlett of the UP and Merlin Spencer of the AP occupied adjacent shellholes to me when the Japs crawled from hiding to resume their fire after the forward troops had passed, but two photographers had the narrowest shaves. George Strock of Life magazine photographed a dead Jap who came to life when Strock's back was turned.
“He sat up and blinked, he did,” said the Aussie who shot him.
Another Jap came toward George Wilk, the Australian photographer, with his hands above his head as though in surrender. Abruptly he rapped his head with his left hand, which infantrymen near Wilk fortunately observed was holding a grenade. The Jap was disposed of before the grenade could be cast.
For at least an hour before the battle, American Mitchells and Australian Beaufighters swept low over enemy positions, bombing them from little more than treetop-level. The Japs who raided our rear heavily on Saturday night had withheld all anti-aircraft fire Saturday, concealing their positions even in the face of bombing. But yesterday they cut loose with everything.
Promptly at seven in the evening, following their artillery barrage, a prisoner was taken alive. Getting him was difficult because as soon as his surrender was perceived by others in nearby trenches, their fire was directed against that spot and the Jap, with whom I rode partway into our lines, was hit in the head. Like others, this Jap seemed well fed and in good spirits.
Sergeant Robert Almonds of Wisconsin, who was near me when firing broke out, led his men in ferreting for Japs. “I never saw them dug in so deep. I threw one grenade in that hole, then had to come back and put down two more,” he said.
When the scene seemed peaceful—disturbed only by the chopping of tommy guns and the occasional boom of grenades a hundred fifty yards away as trenches were cleaned up—a walloping crash sent this correspondent first flat, then crawling. The Japs opened with a mountain gun concealed somewhere in the
jungle. Three Chicagoans beckoned the writer to cover just as another shell hit. Two others took refuge nearby. Their corporal was farther back.
The Japs' peculiar airburst shell sometimes goes off instantly, sometimes in three bursts. One shell landed in the sea near shore; another short, in the bush.
“We've made seven attempts to get this position before,” said a lieutenant, “and now we're going to keep it.” His well-armed eight-man patrol appeared adequate to the task. I shared a shellhole with a railway mail clerk for the Chicago-Carbondale train run.
At the most advanced hospital, I saw a transfusion given to the first victim of this shelling.
Americans yesterday marked one month's anniversary of their efforts to drive the Japs into the sea on the north coast and to annihilate them where they stand. The Australians cinched their belts tighter, too, as they returned after the lull that has followed the fall of Gona and Buna Village to watchful probing of the enemy's deeply dug-in positions.
Here is the same bumping jolt of artillery; the shock of mortars can be heard sharply above the chatter of these typewriter keys. Here are the same begrimed, sweaty men. The only discernible difference between the fighters at Buna and those at Sanananda is the latter's thicker beards.
The fight for the two airdromes has pushed slightly farther, but it is the same everywhere. Japs are literally picked from their positions with bayonets. Fliers and seamen, meeting the enemy, can decide an issue in seconds; for the infantry it is a long, dirty, costly, wearisome and little-gloried task in this vine-entangled, choking jungle. It has already run one month and could run another. Anything done fast here is done badly and usually dangerously. It is dangerous however you do it.
Weller's War Page 43