Weller's War

by George Weller

  Declaration of the individual graves is not allowed, for reasons you will be quick to understand. I therefore took only the liberty of saying a short prayer on behalf of you and your family, as I felt perhaps you might have wished me to do.

  Sincerely yours,

  George Weller

  Correspondent: Chicago Daily News.

  CHICAGO BOYS TRAMPLE JAPS IN JUNGLE MUD

  With the American Troops Before Sanananda—January 22, 1943 (Delayed)

  As shells from our artillery whined their keening chant overhead and mortars bumped the earth underfoot, a green-clad man, wet to the armpits and dripping from the knees down, stepped from the swamp beside the Sanananda road where this correspondent stood. His face, sunk deep in his mired helmet, was sweaty, dirty and bearded. Two of the four grenade pouches slung sideways across his chest were empty. His fingers still were locked around his tommy gun, his left hand forward and his right hand back on the trigger. His expression was hard and challenging.

  “The road is clear,” I said. “They just started running from that last pillbox on the right.”

  A sniper hinged toward us. A fusillade of tommy guns overwhelmed him and only then did the American soldier's expression—duplicated by dozens of men ahead and behind who were soaking wet and caked with several days' layers of mud, and stepping similarly from the swamp to the only road—relax slightly.

  This is the new American soldier. He is a killer. He has seen friends shot beside him. He has buried his friends. He has learned what it is to be hunted by Japs without mercy and to hunt them back and kill them coldly and absolutely—twice and three times over if necessary.

  Before the war Bernard Zidrich, 22, of Chicago, was employed in a canned soup factory. Now he is a killer and sleeps beside the dead. From the pot-shaped helmet in which he carries water and sometimes washes himself, to his feet, swollen inside mud-impregnated shoes, he is a jungle fighter. Every day I talk with scores of these men who live under fire.

  Today was the last day's hard fighting to the accompaniment of artillery and mortars. Zidrich said: “We had been in there four days and made three attacks without much progress. Today they cracked. Anyone we saw, up or down, we shot full of holes. My company passed the last forty minutes sweeping through pillboxes. I caught one Jap trying to fake dead, but I saw his chest rise and finished him off.”

  Toward evening, while I was investigating Jap regimental headquarters—filled with bodies agape as though yawning and hands thrown carelessly in stiffened attitudes of death—a spurt of shots broke out fifteen yards away. A man who had been checking inside the dugout on the opposite side of the road toppled over, shot through the throat.

  My day at the front began at the hospital, with patients being hastily dragged from their grass huts as snipers opened fire. Where the patients lay a moment before, riflemen crouched, peering into the tops of mighty trees against the sky. It is hardly necessary to get any more instruction in the tremendous difficulties hidden in that phrase “mopping up.” Thirty-five more Japs escaped from the perimeter and slipped through the jungle, headed south. As darkness fell and the moon rose tonight, they were being engaged by our patrols.

  There is nothing more disagreeable than a long hot day of being shot at, unless it is sleeping in a leaky broken-down hut where the preceding night's rainfall exceeded ten inches and everything you own including your body is partly broken, rusty, moss-covered, insect-infected, diarrhetic, fevered, dirty, diseased, wet and muddy, or smells of putrefying Japs. Some idea of much of this country is conveyed by an official description: “Small islands in a flowing inland sea.”

  The Sanananda road, opened by the Americans' taking pillboxes some 2½ miles from the coast, was marked with sagging skeletons flattened in their uniforms. The dugouts were dotted with newly dead, some still in blue navy trousers and undershirts, others in the Japanese Army's peaked, starred cap. The first mine left behind by the enemy, which I passed, was cleverly hidden. Someone had scrawled the word “mine” in the mud and I surrounded the place with palm leaves and branches to make it conspicuous for coming troops.

  Tonight the commander of the Australian forces in Sanananda, Major General G. A. Vassey, told correspondents that American troops had held up well and been “several hundred percent improved” by their first experience in battle. He said that our pleasure with the campaign's being ended six months after the Japs landed in Buna should be moderated by the knowledge that the enemy in the final stages possessed neither aircraft, artillery, nor mortars.

  The tommy guns continue stammering in the moonlit jungle nearby as this is written. Cannons are thumping energetically and Jap bombers cross overhead. Of approximately a hundred Japs killed today, thirty-three blundered about 5:30 this morning into an encampment of forty Americans commanded by Captain Edward Reams, a young farmer from Montana. We spoke shortly afterward deep in the jungle. “Our sentries woke those not already on their feet but two men had close calls. Frank Navoli was awakened by getting a bayonet poked in his stomach but managed to kick the Jap in the jaw, grab his gun and shoot him. Bill Huff got pricked in the shoulder but grabbed his tommy gun and got his man.”

  Another party from this same company gave the details of storming the Jap regimental headquarters, surrounded by dugouts and a dozen camouflaged trucks stacked with supplies. As I listened to the narrative, our men cleaned their mottled feet in mudholes in the shadow of trees, with bullet-riddled trucks all around. Two dead Japs sprawled within touching distance.

  “We not only have dishwater hands but dishwater feet,” said Sergeant Dean Poole. A tall, boyish tommy-gunner, Lawrence Burton, said: “Last night before this attack, I said nothing when Japs walked past me. But when one tried to climb down into my slit trench in the dark, it was too much.” Burton shot four Japs today.

  Brothers Joe and Clifton Deason, who have been fighting side by side, said: “We pulled around the Jap left until we could see their fire. One came up to Naryka, looked at him and walked away. He was wearing one of our helmets and full G.I. equipment. You could tell in the moonlight he was a Jap by the square pack on his back. After we shot at three only one crawled away. Then their fire wounded one of our best men. He lay there hollering for someone to come get him. We told him to crawl toward our voices. He crawled to the creek and we dragged him back.”

  YANKS BLAZE AWAY, ADVANCE IN GUINEA

  With the American Forces on Sanananda—January 25, 1943 (Delayed)

  Here, deep in the Sanananda swamp, men are taking off their mud-clogged boots, hanging up their wet socks in the shafts of sunlight that penetrate the brush, and breaking down their tommy guns for the first thorough oiling in ten days.

  Christmas mail is getting through to the outlying posts in the green-hung quagmire. The bearded barefoot men pick their way across, between mudholes, and extend their dirty hands for their first news from the outer world. As the mud-bedaubed runner reads the names he sometimes pauses, waits and gets no answer. Without a word he puts these letters, which will never be claimed, back in his haversack.

  Yesterday there were several bursts of fire at odd places nearby. Today there were only two and nobody pays any attention. A captain and his bespectacled aide are working under a shelter half-open to the sun, dictating citations for bravery.

  Two Australian war correspondents in a jeep were blown up by a mine a few feet from another mine this correspondent had marked two days ago, and one was wounded, making two killed and two wounded since the Buna campaign began.

  It is quiet except for the occasional lone bombers on moonlit nuisance raids. Our own fighters drone with a comforting monotony. That fellow shot by a sniper across the road from me died today. But in general, it is tranquil. Clean-khakied men are beginning to arrive from over the Owen Stanleys on official errands. They want to hear what happened and would not refuse a Jap officer's sword if you could suggest where it could be obtained. The clock on this campaign has run down.

  GUNNERS DRIVE JAPS OFF; WANT TO SHO
OT AGAIN

  With the American Troops in New Guinea—February 23, 1943

  Having driven off a bevy of Zeros that tried a hit-and-run raid by daylight against American positions in northern Papua, a force of anti-aircraft gunners with whetted appetites are awaiting Tojo's return.

  “It was a pity our guests stayed such a short time,” said Major Earl Marsha, a former insurance agent. At the moment of this hospitable statement, Marsha was sitting on a stool under a palm, having his hair cut. As the major told his story, a Zero with his landing gear down as a sign that he was friendly came in low and dropped bombs in the area. Two others that followed met a fusillade from a gun tucked away in a well-prepared position. Although none of the Jap planes was hit grievously enough to fall, after the run by the leading Zero caused no damage, the others sheered off. Six bombs were dropped, but ineffectively.

  As these three Jap planes took their departure another three came over the trees, making their circuitous approach by land in order to avoid American-held beaches like Sanananda and Buna. Met by guns, the Zeros took one look at this upraised wall of fire and with what is variously interpreted as a sneering or terrified note in their engine throbs, turned to sea and dropped their bombs offshore.

  Other things happen around this tropical outpost that call for emergency action. During two visits by this writer at a fortnight's interval, dirt piles fell in on a backed-up truck. The second time the Australian driver was pinned inside the cab, his left temple split open, his head forced completely through the wheel.

  The first to reach the still conscious and bleeding Digger was Captain Joseph Gross of Brooklyn, whose medical aide station was nearby. Leaning through the shattered window, Gross—an energetic, chunky doctor—gave the Aussie an injection. Afterward sixty Americans worked an hour before the now-unconscious man could be released. (This correspondent plied a shovel atop the truck.)

  Gross has an intuitive eye for malaria symptoms and twice has knocked this writer's malaria back far enough to permit him to keep going a while longer.

  When a raid comes, everyone anywhere near the Japs tries to help with the guns. In the last low-level raid John Staron, unable to get any weapon, lost his temper and began throwing rocks. His unit is proud of his zeal but claims no hits.

  As everywhere in New Guinea, the Americans' relations with the natives are excellent, although some anti-aircraftsmen underestimate the intelligence of the boongs. An armorer, for example, marshaling his best pidgin, addressed one: “You, boy, climb plenty high bit tree, catchum one coconut, savvy?”

  “I beg your pardon but just exactly what do you want?” responded the native.

  When the armorer explained that he was offering a cigarette for coconut service, the native retorted: “I don't have to climb trees for cigarettes. I am in the native constabulary and get mine on issue.”

  Newcomers are often bewildered by the tastes of the more primitive tribes coming down from the hills. Some wear the shredded papers in which perishables are shipped from the States, plaited in their hair and wound around their ears. This style is said to be irresistible to the Kikinis' girls, who remain hidden in the forest.

  The style that really breaks dusky hearts, according to the local American dentist, is bridge paint. It seems that Americans, erecting permanent structures while building roads in undeveloped parts of Papua, are using lead paint as a metal preservative. The natives find that this red paint smeared on foreheads and even in bushy hair adds just the right je ne sais quoi to a warrior's appearance.

  This is also a lovely outpost of the tyranny of paperwork. Gross still treasures one document which just arrived from the United States.

  “Are you doing your duty?” the circular demands. “Are you serving as one of these: air raid warden, block salvage captain, fire warden, blood donor, police messenger, plane spotter?”

  “If I'd been a plane spotter,” said Gross, “I could have stayed in Brooklyn.”

  Gross is sitting tight among ack-ack guns manned by former insurance men, and waiting for breaks.

  BY THE LIGHT OF A MUSHROOM

  A Short Story

  In the coconut grove at Senemi, which had a floor as hard and level as a ballroom, we used to gather, around eight o'clock, outside the barber shop. Even when there was a moon shining down through the aisles of palms, whose poles were straight and round as the pillars of a temple, you had to be careful where you walked because there were slit trenches everywhere. We gathered outside the barber shop because the barber had a portable radio. It was not a tropical radio, but a cream-colored picnic portable with Mickey Mouse's figure done on it in red and black.

  Though the Sydney-made “tropical” radios distributed by the Red Cross to some outfits after the fighting ended all broke down after three days in the kunai grass, this little job in picnic ivory kept right on giving out the news.

  Every evening the barber, a corporal from East Chicago, put his radio out on the narrow, shelf-like verandah of his native hut, which was so raised above the ground that he entered it by a ladder. We stood around or squatted on the hard ground of the palm grove. The barber in his stained, green jungle dress lay out at full length on his verandah at the level of the eyes of standees, and then began to work the dials. The air smelled of sweat, crushed insects, mosquito lotion, blossoms, rotting coconuts, and smoke of cookfires. Because of the blackout, no cigarettes were allowed.

  In this colonnaded grove the only sounds beside the nasal voice of the radio, frequently half-intelligible between bursts of static, were the sounds of things flying. There were mosquitoes beside one's ear, or working on one's wrists and ankles. There was the synchronized grinding of the nightly nuisance raider from Rabaul, which patrolled the coast two miles away dropping an occasional small bomb like a man playing a long line of gambling machines with a pocketful of nickels. And there was the sound of the big fruit bats overhead. Disturbed by the radio's penetrating stridency, the bats would take off with claps of their wings, making a squeaky flapping, as they paddled back and forth among the palms, exactly like the stropping of a razor. One night Roy Hodgkinson, the Australian army's official painter, pointed his finger up into the darkness as a pair of dark wings went plopping creakily by and roared: “God, would you mind having that big 'un oiled?”

  Although the radio program was Australian in origin, the station had an American announcer for American news. One had the illusion that one was hearing the United States. This illusion was strengthened by the fact that, after the program was over, there were often re-broadcasts of old American comedy programs made from records. A Bob Hope show, full of cracks about turkeys and stuffing and Pilgrims and Indians, was heard around St. Patrick's Day. But this tardiness and remoteness were in key with the way we felt. Men who had walked by twos and threes to the grove stood alone and apart from each other when the radio was on, listening singly because they were listening to home. While movies, when shown on the Moresby side of the Hump, always drew wisecracks and ironical cheering, not a sound was made on the fighting side of the Owen Stanleys as long as the little ivory box was on. At the last syllable of the sign-off the barber would extinguish the tiny light, saying, “That's all, gang. Only battery we've got.” Then we would all drift away, back to our mosquito nets, our cots, and our lean-tos.

  One evening I was walking away with two war correspondents, Bill Terriss and Frank Hallett, when Bill stopped abruptly and said, “What's that?” He was looking off the side of the path toward the underbrush slashed by the machetes of the engineers, from which a sour, rotting smell still came. What we saw was a pair of green eyes.

  We glanced back to make sure that the M.P.s enforcing the blackout had already gone, and then gave the thing a quick dart with the beam of a flashlight. It did not move. We went closer. The creature's green eyes shone right at us without fright, unperturbed. We came up ten feet from it, listening for an animal sound. None came. Perhaps it's scared, or blinded by the flashlight, we thought. We held off until we were all but over
it then let it have full flash and held it in the beam.

  It was not an animal. It was two mushrooms. They were growing on the rotted stuff cut down by the engineers. One was about an inch in diameter, the other, which looked like its mate, a little less. Illumined in the beam the two growths appeared white, vegetable, and static. In the darkness, however, they were a bright milky green, a green that seemed alive.

  With some hesitation we picked them up, careful not to separate them from the putrefying slabs of bark on which they lived. They shone persistently and cheerfully at us. Quite unsinister, they had a kind of gay green vivacity about them. Frank held one a couple of inches under his hand. “That light is strong,” said Bill. “I can see every finger you have.”

  The mushrooms, we observed, were not simply coated with phosphorescent fungus; they were luminous through and through. The underside of each little umbrella was as bright as the top; the tiny green parasol illumined the bark on which it stood. Even the sturdy little stem was a column of cool, crisp green. Unlike artificial tools of light-making, the mushrooms had no blind spots or handles. They were completely effulgent, gently luminous all over.

  We stood there a while, passing the chips of bark like candleholders from hand to hand. “Let's take them back to the intelligence tent and see if they'll put them in the communiqué,” said Frank.

  “No,” said Bill, “let's put them back where we found them. They're better off there.” So the mushroom couple went back where they had been. Until we reached the head of the path we could see the two of them gleaming greenly at us, the way you can still see the riding lights of a plane long after a night take-off.