The Ghost Mountain Boys

by James Campbell

  When Company E finally reached Laruni, the rain came down in waves. Lutjens was huddled under a shelter half with his best friend, Staff Sergeant Peeper, and Sergeant John Fredericks. All were wet and caked with mud. Their bodies ached, but they were too hungry and exhausted to sleep. What they did was to talk about food. Back home on the farm in Michigan, Fredericks had been a great eater, so Lutjens and Peeper deferred to him.

  Fredericks did not disappoint them. He talked about sprawling farm breakfasts and heaping suppers, and about canning apples. When Lutjens and Peeper joined in they discussed Christmas dinners and swore that if they made it out of New Guinea and back home alive that they would devote their lives to the joyous pursuit of food and eating. In other shelter halves, men were discussing the same thing. The subject of women never came up, at least not in a sexual way. When they talked about women, they fondly remembered the smells of their mothers’ kitchens, the comforting odor of cookies and apple pies baking in the oven.

  What they might have craved more than anything else was salt. Lutjens later wrote, “The sweat in that drippy, oozy place took all the salt out of our bodies.” He dreamed of “good salty bacon or a dill pickle.”

  Up until Laruni, food consisted of Australian bully beef and half a canteen cup of rice, which the soldiers stored in a sock that they knotted at the top. Even the hungriest of men considered the bully beef too vile to eat. Some, like Lutjens, could stomach it only when mixed with rice in what Lutjens called a “hobo’s stew.” If Lutjens ate it plain, he got “sick as a dog.” But at Laruni, Company E got lucky. One morning, a pilot making a drop dove dangerously low, skimming over the tops of the trees. Men rushed to recover the boxes, dreaming of the possibility of finding a chocolate bar. According to Lutjens, a guy “would sell” his “soul for a chocolate bar.” They thought they were fantasizing, when instead of chocolate, they found another treat—hard candy! Lutjens wrote that the candy dropped “from the jungle vines overhead like a hail storm,” and was scattered across the rain forest from “hell to breakfast.”

  The soldiers’ joy at discovering the candy was short-lived. Beyond Laruni, wrote Lutjens, the march became “one green hell.” Still, Company E kept moving, motivated by a curious sense of pride. “No one,” according to Lutjens, “wanted to get passed by another unit.”

  As bad as Company E had it, the men of Companies F, G, and H had it worse. The boots of nearly two hundred soldiers—those of Company E—had turned every square foot of trail into something resembling a pig wallow.

  It was man against jungle, and it was obvious to Don Stout, a platoon sergeant from Muskegon, Michigan, that the jungle was winning. Stout had joined the Michigan National Guard in 1939 at the age of fifteen. He had never liked school anyway and if the recruiter sensed that Stout was too young, he chose to ignore the Guard’s eighteen-year-old requirement. Stout was proud of his new uniform, though he had to contend with people who called him a freeloader living off the federal government.

  When Stout joined the Guard, he never envisioned himself slogging through the jungles of New Guinea.

  “You should have seen ’em,” Stout says. “Guys were straggled out so far along the trail. When they were too sick or tired to move, they would set up a pup tent—if they hadn’t tossed it already—and pray that they would get better before the last company came past.”

  At twenty-five, Don Ritter, a staff sergeant also from Muskegon, was something of an old-timer, especially compared to Stout. But he certainly did not lack for strength. “One hundred and seventy-five pounds and not an ounce of fat,” he says. “That’s how much I weighed when I started.” When the malarial fevers hit, though, they laid waste to his body. The first full-blown attack struck one day out of Nepeana. Ritter could not understand it. The jungle was a humid 100 degrees, but his body shook as if he were back in Muskegon walking shirtless on a chilly October morning. By the time the medic was able to check him out two days later, Ritter’s chill had turned into a 103-degree fever. On the trail he walked like a zombie. His buddy Russell Buys helped him out, but Buys was himself exhausted. Ritter’s legs were buckling on him, and his teeth rattled like a train going over the tracks. He drifted in and out of delirium. Thousands of parasites were reproducing at will inside his liver and exploding into his bloodstream.

  “I don’t know if I can make it,” Ritter told Buys. “I’m sicker than a dog. Just leave me here.”

  Buys, though, insisted that his friend keep moving. “And somehow,” Ritter says, “I did. I didn’t have a choice. It was walk or die. They couldn’t get you out. Evacuation just wasn’t a possibility.”

  Stanley Jastrzembski says, “Everybody had malaria, and everybody was throwing stuff out of their packs. The guys with quinine pills were popping them like gumballs. Things got really bad when guys started getting dysentery, too. Then we all damn near died. I had ‘jungle guts’ so bad, I could scrape the crap off my legs with a tin ration can. Some guys had to go thirty times a day and all that came out was blood.”

  The food and water did not help the situation. If there was not a nearby stream or river, men drank from muddy jungle puddles. And often when they reached camp, they were so tired they did not bother to cook their rice. “We just soaked it in water to soften it and then ground it up in our mouths like animals. It was hell on our bellies,” says Jastrzembski.

  A stench followed Company G through the jungle. Jastrzembski’s body soured with the smell of encrusted sweat, excrement, and oozing sores. The worst dysentery cases dropped their pants and voided their bowels where they stood, or, like toddlers, fouled themselves as they walked, too tired to take down their pants. Some resorted to cutting the backs out of their pants and relieved themselves whenever nature “called.”

  DISEASE HAS ALWAYS been the enemy of armies. MacArthur witnessed this firsthand in the Philippines and, before that, as a divisional commander in World War I, when trench foot and the flu ravaged battalions. In the Philippines, dysentery, ringworm, hookworm, dhobi itch, and especially malaria disabled countless men. By March 1942, the combat efficiency of MacArthur’s troops had fallen by more than 75 percent due to disease and malnutrition. But MacArthur had never encountered anyplace like New Guinea. It was the perfect incubator for a host of debilitating tropical diseases. The bodies of the men—of Stout, Ritter, Jastrzembski, and countless others—who made the march across the Papuan Peninsula coursed with pathogens. Although the dysentery outbreaks might have been avoided through better hygiene, the men were largely defenseless against insect-borne diseases like malaria.

  The 32nd Division suffered several types of malaria, especially vivax and falciparum. Vivax debilitated its victims, making them susceptible to potentially lethal secondary infections. Falciparum, vivax’s wicked cousin, sometimes caused men to go mad, and occasionally, if left untreated, caused death. Despite the prevalence of malaria, however, army physicians knew very little about treatment of the disease.

  Traditionally, soldiers fighting in malarial regions of the world relied on quinine as a malaria suppressant. An alkaloid extracted from the bark of the cinchona tree, quinine was discovered by Spanish missionaries in the seventeenth century in Peru and Bolivia. Though quinine masks the effects of malaria, it does nothing to cure it, as some of the men of the 2nd Battalion discovered. Quinine was unreliable in more than one way. It had become a sole-source commodity, grown only on the island of Java, which fell to the Japanese in January 1942. Quinine shortages proved disastrous in New Guinea. Eventually, soldiers fighting there would have an alternative—atabrine (quinacrine hydrochloride), which, ironically, had been developed as a synthetic substitute for quinine by the Germans in the early 1930s. In 1939, realizing atabrine’s potential, the United States began a crash program to become independent of foreign sources. But atabrine had its drawbacks. It was so new that medical officers, experimenting with dosage, feared its toxicity and worried about potential “atabrine psychosis.” More basically, soldiers loathed the taste of it. Company com
manders trying to enforce a daily regimen were also up against a rumor that atabrine caused impotency and sterility. When their skin took on the yellow hue of an “atabrine tan,” soldiers did not need any more convincing. They were young men who hoped to return to wives and girlfriends. They would take their chances with malaria.

  But in October 1942, all that was available to soldiers like Ritter and Jastrzembski was quinine. Without the aid of waterproof containers, though, the quinine was almost impossible to preserve. In the heat and humidity, the pills dissolved in their pockets before they could use them. Some men did not care. The quinine made their ears ring so badly they refused to take it. If a guy could not trust his ears, he was as good as dead.

  In addition to malaria, New Guinea served as a breeding ground for a variety of other nasty diseases: dengue or breakbone fever, which was carried by the aedes mosquito (the same breed that causes yellow fever) and was accompanied by terrific headaches and throbbing body pains; and the dreaded scrub typhus, which brought on high fevers, hallucinations, and severe, sometimes fatal hemorrhaging. The culprit, in the case of scrub typhus, was not the mosquito, but a tiny chigger. Just as dangerous for the men of the 2nd Battalion were jungle rot and leishmaniasis (caused by the bite of sandflies), both of which were characterized by open sores. Because they could lead to serious complications, and because most soliders tended to ignore the sores, jungle rot and leishmaniasis scared the hell out of the medics. Then there was beriberi, directly linked to the soldiers’ diet of polished white rice. Caused by a thiamine deficiency, beriberi presented a whole assortment of debilitating symptoms, including vomiting, confusion, loss of sensation in the hands and feet, edema, and rapid heart rate.

  The U.S. Army in New Guinea forfeited huge numbers of men to disease. This raises the question: How could MacArthur have failed to give sufficient consideration to the effects of fatigue, climate, landscape, and the ravages of jungle-borne pathogens on a physically depleted army? In September 1942 he told the head surgeon in the G-4 Section at his General Headquarters that malaria had played such an important part in his defeat in the Philippines that he wanted to keep it under control in New Guinea. Despite this, General Headquarters never implemented a determined plan to deal with disease in New Guinea. This omission would prove to be ruinous for the entire 32nd Division.

  The medics of the 19th Portable Hospital, who accompanied the 2nd Battalion across the mountains, bore the brunt of this oversight. After the dysentery epidemic struck, they divided into four teams, established way stations along the trail, and treated the men as best they could given their limited resources. All the while they were cursing General Headquarters because even when medical supplies did make it to Australia, they often did not make it north to New Guinea.

  Although the medics were seemingly working miracles, they could do nothing for Lieutenant Colonel Henry Geerds, the 2nd Battalion’s commander, who suffered a heart attack outside of Strinimu. Geerds was an “old-timer,” a veteran of World War I. The march across the Papuan Peninsula was simply too much for him.

  Stutterin’ Smith, who was running a radio detail at the trailhead at the time, received the news of the battalion commander’s heart attack that evening. Using the landline, Smith notified regimental headquarters. The following day, Colonel Quinn ordered him to catch up with and take command of the battalion. Smith had not been pleased about being left behind at the trailhead in some rear echelon job while the men that he had helped to train trudged off to fight the Japanese. But now he must have wondered: Could he lead a battalion across New Guinea?

  Smith may have experienced a moment of doubt, but Colonel Quinn had no such reservations. Smith had no airs about him. He was a rough, likable straight shooter, an “enlisted man’s officer.”

  Late on the second day, Smith and his small team, which included Captain John Boet, an accomplished doctor whom Warmenhoven had instructed to accompany Smith, reached Strinimu. Smith and Boet were “lame and tired,” and if initially Smith underestimated the difficulty of the hike, he did not anymore. The following morning, he recruited a local guide. Romee was a slender, athletic-looking native man, who soon rendered himself indispensable to Smith. Romee could speak and read and write English, and became the group’s chief cook, translator, and fire builder, too. Romee’s greatest gift, though, was as a trader. At villages along the trail, Romee often used the small group’s supply of salt tablets and safety matches to barter for precious fruits and vegetables.

  AS SMITH AND HIS PARTY of men hustled to overtake the rest of the battalion, Lutjens and Company E entered the high mountains north of Laruni. According to Captain Schultz, the trail became so narrow, with sheer cliffs on either side, that “even a jack rabbit couldn’t leave it.” The men kept plodding forward, oblivious to almost everything but the trail itself.

  “One day, I swear, I saw gold nuggets in the bottom of a stream,” Lutjens would later recount. “There’s gold nuggets, but what the hell’s gold, you can’t eat it. It must have been a beautiful country, but all you could see was mud and the guy’s feet ahead of you…. The only time anybody really commented on anything would be when he fell down, and then he would cuss because it was so hard to drag yourself back up.”

  In all likelihood, Lutjens was not imagining it when he thought he spotted gold. Adventurous prospectors had discovered gold in the mountains of the Papuan Peninsula in the early 1900s. Wau-Bulolo, northwest of the Kapa Kapa (in what is today Papua New Guinea’s Eastern Highlands Province), was the scene of a two-decade gold rush that began to taper off by the start of World War II. The gold rush drew young men from all over the world, including Errol Flynn, who arrived in New Guinea in 1928. In addition to working as a patrol officer, a tobacco farmer, and a slave trader, Flynn managed a small claim in the mountains before landing in Hollywood and embarking on his movie career.

  By late afternoon on October 23, Company E confronted Ghost Mountain. It was a day they had dreaded, and one that they would never forget. The native carriers, who had been such a great help on the jungle trail, now balked. Lutjens understood their fear. Ghost Mountain, he recalled, “was the eeriest place” he had ever seen.

  The trees were covered with green moss half a foot thick. We would walk along a hog’s back, straddling the trail, with a sheer drop of thousands of feet two feet on either side of us. We kept hearing water running somewhere, but we couldn’t find any. We could thrust a stick six feet down through the spongy stuff…without hitting anything real solid. It was ungodly cold. There wasn’t a sign of life. Not a bird. Not a fly. Not a sound. It was the strangest feeling I ever had. If we stopped, we froze. If we moved, we sweated.

  You can hardly realize how wild and ghostlike this mountain country is. Almost perpetual rain and steam…. We have been traveling over an almost impassable trail. Our strength is gone. Most of us have dysentery. Boys are falling out and dropping back with fever. Continuous downpour of rain. It’s hard to cook our rice and tea. Bully beef makes us sick. We seem to climb straight up for hours, then down again. God, will it never end?

  When Company E finally dragged itself into Jaure late in the day on October 25, Lutjens regarded it as a small miracle. For the previous two days, they had not been able to march for more than fifteen minutes at a stretch without lying down to catch their breath. Their hearts felt like they would burst from the exertion. It took them seven hours to ascend Ghost Mountain’s final two thousand feet. Men were crawling on their hands and knees. According to Lutjens, by the time Company E reached Jaure, “We were down to a shadow. Our eyes were sunk deep in our heads. We were gaunt as wolves and just as hungry.”

  By the time Company E reached Jaure, Company G was already in Laruni. At the dropping ground operated by the Wairopi Patrol’s Captain Roger Keast, whose knee was still mending, Company G picked up sweaters and replenished its rations. “God, what a gift the sweaters were” says Stanley Jastrzembski. “The jungle got so cold at night.”

  The rations—soup, biscuits, and
even chocolate D-bars—were a godsend, too. “We were hungrier than we’d ever been in our lives, but still we couldn’t eat the bully beef,” says Russell Buys. “Guys tried to choke it down, but they couldn’t; they’d just retch.” Worse yet, the beef was often contaminated. It came in four-or five-pound tins. After opening the tins, the beef spoiled quickly, especially in the hot jungle.

  Laruni revived the men, but they had no time to linger; they needed to be back on the trail, moving as fast as they could in the direction of Jaure.

  A day out of Laruni, Sam DiMaggio was disconcerted by the change of weather. In the lowland jungles he had been as hot as he was when he stoked the stoves at the Malleable Iron Company. Now, he was hiking in his sweater to cut the cold.

  Two days out, somber gray clouds slid down from the mountains, and it began to rain—a cold, lashing rain that must have reminded Corporal Carl Stenberg of an early spring day on Lake Michigan.

  Stenberg had worked on and off with his cousins on the big lake as a commercial fisherman. It was a tough, cold, dangerous way to make a living, especially in early spring and late fall, twenty miles out, with a set of thirty nets. But it was the Depression, too, and people did what they could to get by. If a storm blew in, especially out of the north where the fetch had over a hundred miles to build, they would have to make a run for dry land. Stenberg had seen his share of storms, more times than he cared to count. Still, he never got used to them.

  Stenberg had joined the Guard to escape a hard, uncertain life on Lake Michigan and because he did not want to be drafted. He feared he would be one of the first guys chosen and the Selective Service Act contained a sentence about serving six months after the end of the conflict. Stenberg did not like that clause. “When it’s over it’s over,” he thought.