Our wounded have had treatment from surgeons better, as one doctor said, “than if hit by a car in Fifth Avenue and carried by ambulance to a hospital.”
The Allied soldier, knowing the tommy gun is his best friend, has learned, although city-bred and pavement-raised, to give meaning to every tremble of a leaf and to resist premature fire. The hardest decision in the jungle is when a trigger should be pressed.
GET OUT THAT SQUIRREL GUN; NEED DAN'l BOONES IN GUINEA
With the Advanced American Forces near Sanananda—
January 8, 1943
Sons of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, where are you? You Tom Sawyers and Huck Finns of America, you squirrel hunters and turkey shooters, stand by us! We need minutemen like Lexington's. We need crack shots. We need woodsmen.
Such is the refrain, less lyrically expressed, that goes up from campfires on the steaming, swampy Sanananda front.
Tanks, the 13-ton General Stuarts, broke Japan's network of marsh-flanked coconut groves at Buna. But for the most unusual phenomenon of this campaign, one must look to the Jap fighting defensively against the American Army for the first time in history. And the enemy's strongest threat is her jungle sniper.
The great lesson of the campaign, when we have still not fully countered the enemy landing on July 21 [1942], is that a Jap woodsman cannot be beaten by the fact that our Garand is a superior rifle to their .25 caliber. Only when our infantryman is more cunning in jungle guile can the sniper menace be eradicated.
This calls for a new kind of soldier similar to the frontiersman. Clay-pigeon champions and professional marksmen, with their stances and quantitative records, are about as useful here as a racing driver bringing wounded on a peep through seas of mud. Sniping and counter-sniping are arts which go back to the last Indian wars, but America's rural tradition has been pushed to the rear by industrialization. Here in Papua, it is a couple of shoeless boys from Kentucky, Tennessee, or the Arkansas hills who feel at home stalking the Japs. Only reluctantly are city-bred boys coming to realize that their deficiency—“if we could only see where the little so-and-sos are”—is one they alone can correct, by acquiring woodsmen's eyes.
Pleasant though it is to imagine that Japan can be beaten by sinking aircraft carriers and massacring by the thousands, it is clear to all who grapple the enemy here that cleaning up the vast tropical wilderness through the Indies, Malaya, Indo-China and the Philippines will not be accomplished easily. Some army is going to have to walk in on the Japs' fortifications, which resist both artillery fire and bombing because they are underground, dig every Jap out at bayonet point and kill him. To do that, someone must deal with that ornery creature, the sniper. Every position has a complement commanding a view in several directions. Most are lashed in trees.
In Jap warfare, the idea is always to divide the enemy's attention. In an offensive, the effort is to get him to look over his shoulder and imagine himself surrounded. In defensive war the effort is to pin down the attackers with a machine gun, then pick them off with fire from the trees. If the attackers advance, automatic fire gets them; if they flatten, the snipers go to work. The key to every Jap position is not the position itself, but the snipers concealed against the sky all around.
The trouble about cleaning out snipers is the same old thing: where are they? Their small bodies, like those of Filipinos, lend themselves to concealment. Their powder is smokeless and some rifles have silencers. This means that a bullet's whisper is often the first intimation a patrol gets that it is under observation.
Japs on the defensive often withhold fire in order to encourage advance by a larger force. Or only one sniper will fire when four or five are in the trees.
The American forces with fewest sniper casualties achieve this by systematic “hosing” of treetops—heavier firepower rather than superior woodsmanship. It requires great expenditure of tommy gun ammunition and slows up a main attack against palmetto bunkers. Besides spoiling any surprise by chewing up the foliage with fire, it lets some snipers remain concealed behind these sometimes 100-foot trees. Using vine slings, the Japs swing themselves around, keeping the trunk as a protection, squirrel-wise. Therefore it is never certain that mere volume of fire, as a substitute for hitting the sniper with a single aimed bullet, is the answer.
The Japs also use straw-filled dummies on cords which, when shot down, invite an advance, offering prey for live snipers who act as lookouts and carry signal whistles. When hit they rarely fall, and are replaced. Snipers work in teams, climb with splay-toed tabitabi sandals, and hoist ammunition and food with vines.
Primitive war reverses the industrial order. In the jungle, a city boy is a hick. Army rifle training calls for targets on a painted background, and combat firing teaches shooting while advancing. But nobody can hit what he cannot see.
Can our infantrymen make their eyes as sharp as the pioneers'? Can our scouts conceal their bodies better than Japs? Can they move more silently, climb more surely, wait more patiently? Corps of man-hunters, trained in woodland wisdom, would today be more valuable in the western Pacific than millions of marksmen who need stalking rather than killing practice. This is history's first true jungle war with modern weapons. More surprises are coming.
HYMIE EPSTEIN WOULDN'T QUIT, HERO IN GUINEA
With the American Troops near Sanananda—January 18, 1943
“He was one swell little guy, that Hymie.”
That's all his company will say about Hyman Epstein. They are still living in drowned mudholes amid sniping, fighting off fever. But when they mention his name among those who have gone, there is a special tightening around the mouth and a vagueness of the eyes as they look away.
“In war I guess the best go first,” says Major Bert Zeeff of Grand Rapids, who has fought in two wars. “That kid was the best.”
This is the last twelve hours of Hymie Epstein's life as Zeeff tells it.
“We were sent out to carry rations to a unit cut off in the forest. They had several dead and a number of wounded. Epstein was a medical aide. Medical aides are forbidden by the Geneva Convention to bear arms. Casualties among their ranks have been as high or higher than among fighting troops because when the Japs wound a man with sniping, they do not finish him off but wait for the company aide, and get both. This is accepted practice in this jungle game where the Japs' one aim is take a maximum number of American lives before being wiped out.
“The Japs must have heard us creeping along because they moved a machine gun across our line of crawl. They got another gun and had two converging lanes of fire directed upon our mudholes. Then they sent snipers around the sides so they could pick us where we were if we stopped moving. We had to stop because it was getting dark and we could not see where we were going. Then they opened fire.”
Epstein, a small, slight youngster from Omaha, was lying at the major's side about three feet away to the right. Suddenly, a man about eight feet ahead was hit in the neck by a machine-gun bullet.
“Both Epstein and myself saw him get it. But the Japs knew we were there and kept their fire right in that spot. You could see bullets hitting all around. I would not order anyone to go out into that fire to get that man. I could not. It was just throwing one life after another. But this little kid, he crawls right from the mud to the wounded man who lies on his back. Epstein gets out his sulfanilamide powder and bandages and, lying on his back, binds the wounded man's neck. Then he crawls back with bullets all around him.
“Just before darkness came down—with Jap snipers firing from the sides and working around behind, while the machine guns continued in front trying to probe out the Americans in the mudholes—another man was hit in the head. Without any hesitation out crawls that kid again with his packet, gets to the man, rolls over and, lying on his back, binds up his head and gives the man sulfanilamide. I could not understand how he ever got back that time. They simply poured fire around him. But he did get back.”
Through the night the men hugged the mud as low as possible
while Japanese machine-gunners and snipers systematically worked over the muddy layers of fallen foliage where they lay. Then dawn began to lighten the sky toward Buna.
“You could hear the men talking all night. ‘Did you see what little Epstein did?’ they would say. Word had gone the whole length of the line in whispers. At dawn the Japs began to get more accurate with their fire. A man over on the left was hit and word came a medic was needed. Epstein crawled down the line. Five minutes later, word passed up the line that he was dead. How they finally got him was this: a badly wounded guy was out there with fire all around. Epstein went out and just got him fixed. Then the Japs put in everything they had. Epstein could have crawled back, but he chose to stick until he finished the job. He stayed a little too long.
“What I will always remember was that wounded man when he dragged himself in. It's not often you hear a soldier crying and he was a tough baby himself, but he was crying, crying like anything as he reached us. He kept saying between sobs, ‘Somebody's gotta go out there and take care of Epstein. Epstein's bleeding to death. Somebody's quick gotta go out and get Epstein.’ Of course he was delirious. We could see Epstein was already dead. But even in delirium and with his severe wound, that guy felt worse about Epstein than himself.
“I've seen a lot of men do things out there in the swamp that never would be believed. We buried the man he tried to save by moonlight the next night, and we buried Epstein by day as we pulled back through the forest. You never know who is going to be a good soldier and who isn't. But when they are handing honors around, you can give mine to that little Hymie Epstein. And that goes for all of us.”
THE SAGA OF THE LOST COMPANY
(Attention has been drawn to the Sanananda front only since the fall of the Buna area permitted an Allied concentration of forces. Fighting was continuous at Sanananda for seven weeks before that, with American troops of the 32d Division and Australians. The present situation makes possible the release of the story of the “Lost Company” of the 32d Division which held out for three weeks in a roadblock on the Sanananda road, entirely surrounded. The story is told by George Weller, whose dispatches five weeks ago from Sanananda were the only American accounts from that front prior to Buna's fall.)
With Advanced American Troops at Sanananda—January 21-24, 1943 (Delayed)
Japan's most prized weapon is a stab in the back. But the thrust from the rear has even a more honored place in the Nipponese lexicon of military tactics than in diplomacy. Army commanders will do anything possible to get a harassing force in their enemy's rear. If they cannot give the fatal stab, the Japs try to cause the enemy to yield that “look over the shoulder,” which can begin the disintegration of forces.
The story of Sanananda's “Lost Company” is that of the American use of this weapon of trickery. A small but sternly resolved American force, entirely encircled by Jap troops whose entrenchments were superior, was able to cut the Sanananda road and hold a dagger at the back of the Japanese front line troops. These men, who fought and died to maintain that “island” amid Jap forces until Buna's fall, released the main American and Australian troops for Sanananda.
The plan to strike the Japs' rear and cut off their forward lines from using the Sanananda road, which was 3½ miles from their beachhead to our front lines, was led by Major George Bond. Two companies of American infantry, plus another equipped with machine guns and rifles, comprised the force selected for the daring operation. I and K Companies were under Bond's direct leadership, while their support—where combined American and Australian forces already faced the Japs across the ten-foot wide muddy road—was in the hands of Major Bernt Baetcke.
Company K set forth on November 23 to establish a command post deep in the jungle on the left of the road between Soputa and Sanananda. The mud varied from ankle to waist depth. Often they tripped on giant buried roots and fell. Finally they discovered a place behind enemy lines, parallel with Jap artillery positions a theoretical mile distant across the jungle, but three hours' floundering from the road.
In bypassing enemy lines in this sweeping curve westward, Company K felt only desultory sniper fire. But that showed the Japs knew something was coming.
Company I—leaving a third of the company and K to protect the thin rampart of earth around the new command post—started out to cut the road, accompanied by a force with machine guns. The party's 367 men were commanded by Bond.
“Follow the sun,” were the orders. The only maps were inaccurate but it was certain that by heading east they would cross the road somewhere. From 7:30 to 11:30 they crept through the swamp. The sniping had fallen off in a deadly lull.
They reached a dry patch of kunai grass; in the middle was a huge fallen log, five feet thick. When the point men, creeping low, rounded this log, terrific fire opened up from a machine gun on the left and snipers in the trees. There was mortar fire, too—not of a “Charlie McCarthy” mortar, with a saddle so a Jap infantryman can place it on his knee like a ventriloquist's dummy—but heavy mortars.
The Americans had crossed the Jap trail through which the enemy front lines were supplied. It was an ambush.
During the terrible days to follow, the Japs stubbornly held this bottleneck on the American line of communications. It came to be known simply as “the log.” Where the Japs would lay ambushes for food and ammunition columns was never certain. But whenever the Americans passed this log they were fired upon.
“As we lost men we filled columns with new ones,” said one officer. “We came to know it was necessary to crawl the full length of the log, go around the end, then double back. The Jap fire went straight along the log's top. But always there would be some wise guy who would hear voices of our point men on the other side and decide to take a short cut by crawling over. Almost invariably they got him.”
Why, during the weeks that the Lost Company was supplied along this slender swamp path, was nothing done to eliminate the pillbox? The reason was that because the men were looping around enemy supply lines, it was inevitable that Jap and American paths should intersect. The log furnished protection against machine guns, whereas any new crossroads might have proved even hotter.
The Americans, having established a supply dump and advanced battalion headquarters, continued following the sun, seeking the narrow jungle road in an effort to cut the Japs' motorized supply from Sanananda. They knew by pressing east they must strike the road somewhere. The Japs evidently phoned back word that a large American party was fighting its way through.
When the Americans, mudded to the hips, laden with ammunition and food, and sweating streams in the humid, breathless shadows of the swamp, reached a point afterward determined as 200 yards from the road, machine-gun fire bit the open green quagmire ahead. As the Yanks flattened, Jap snipers in the trees opened fire. It was the regular Jap sequence of pinning down with a machine-gun barrage, then picking off with snipers.
The party took cover behind giant-roofed mangroves while bullets hissed among them.
The sun was low and soon darkness would overtake them. Isolated deep within the Jap lines, they would be easy prey for raiding snipers. Ignorant of their own whereabouts, they were uncertain whether they could find the road before night. The officers decided to send out patrols. The patrols paddled through the encircling muck awhile without drawing Jap fire, but they had hardly gone 75 yards through the swamp when machine guns challenged them again. They felt they must be getting near the road. Captain John Shirley of Grand Rapids decided the issue. “Let's get these so-and so's,” he said. “Put your bayonets on your rifles.”
Shirley led the charge himself. It was not a charge such as history books describe, at full run. It was half-wading, half-swimming, with enemy fire flickering all around. Knee-deep mud made the charge at once gallant and clumsy. Hidden roots threw the men on their faces; they struggled up and went on. Finally Shirley and some men reached the jagged line of trenches where the Japs kept swinging their machine guns to bear, then half-dived, half-flound
ered, upon the enemy.
The trenches were cleared.
Within minutes the Americans burst from the swamp onto the road. They had no choice and did not dare push forward or back to a better location. They had to take whatever strip of road they happened to blunder on first.
Today, standing where mud-blinded tommy-gunners, followed by sweating carriers with the wounded on litters behind, saw a deserted, muddy road amid the hostile jungle, the writer could appreciate how lucky they had been.
Frequently flooded, the road was sand mixed with mud. The men dug holes for shelter immediately, and cut shallow trenches for machine guns as well as heavier guns pointing both ways.
The Japs apparently knew they had been outmaneuvered. Where the Americans hit the road was a small enemy supply dump and repair shops. What the men began to call “our 5 o'clock rush” had yielded modest prizes. There were two big supply trucks fitted with maintenance equipment, lathes, dies, and clutch disks. There were two shacks full of motor supplies. Best of all were several tin cracker boxes and bags of fresh onions, an unbelievable treasure in can-fed Papua.
This find—symbolic of the difference between being supplied by sea, as the Japs were, and by transport plane and parachute, like the Americans—delighted Lieutenant John Filarski, supply officer of the Lost Company. As he told the writer, “Those onions were swell, but the beginning was also the end of that kind of food.”
As dusk fell the officers marked out an area running 350 yards along the road and extending 125 yards into the jungle as the “perimeter.”
Weller's War Page 45