The Ghost Mountain Boys

by James Campbell

  MacArthur insisted on a plan for the swift withdrawal of Allied troops, and General Blamey assured him that he had one. Blamey had already endorsed General Harding’s plan to fly the remaining portions of the 126th Infantry Regiment into Pongani, where a usable airfield had been discovered and improved. Aware of MacArthur’s reservations, Blamey added his own wrinkle: After landing, they would hike inland and temporarily join Major Smith’s 2nd Battalion at the village of Bofu, north of Natunga, and wait for orders to attack. The entire route, Blamey assured MacArthur, would be protected by the Hydrographer’s Range, a sprawling series of mountains that butted up against the coastal plain. At worst, if the Japanese invaded en masse, the 128th Infantry Regiment could use the same route to evacuate the coast. On the other hand, if all went well and the Japanese were preoccupied with Guadalcanal, the Allies could launch a three-pronged advance on Buna, beginning sometime in mid-to late-November after the Australians had crossed the Kumusi River.

  MacArthur was satisfied with Blamey’s blueprint, and the transfer by air of regimental headquarters, and the 1st and 3rd Battalions of the 126th Infantry Regiment began on November 8, two days after MacArthur arrived in Port Moresby.

  Major Simon Warmenhoven, preparing to be airlifted to New Guinea’s north coast, wrote his wife a hurried letter:

  Somewhere in New Guinea

  Sunday Nite 10:45 PM.

  November 8, 1942

  My Lover:

  Hello Mandy darling. I’m going to sit down here and dash off a letter…Things are moving fast right now and am taking time out to let you know that my thoughts are with you, the grandest and most wonderful person in my life…Don’t be surprised hun if there’ll be a little lull in my letters.

  I’m ever so much in love with you…Until next time…

  Lovingly Always, Sam

  As the Allies were assembling their forces, MacArthur received news from Guadalcanal: Admiral Halsey’s fleet had destroyed an eleven-ship Japanese convoy carrying most of Japan’s reserve troops. It was now safe for Marine Corps troops, reinforced by the army, to begin their raid on the Japanese-held garrison. Admiral Halsey’s victory was a turning point in the war, one to which MacArthur, weighing the impact of the report from his secluded veranda, must have responded ambivalently. Though he no longer had to worry about a massive Japanese assault on New Guinea, he desperately wanted to beat the Marines to the punch and claim for himself the first American land victory in the South Pacific.

  A few days later, General Harding issued the divisional plan of attack. The bulk of the 128th Infantry Regiment would advance on Buna from the east and southeast. One battalion would approach Cape Endaiadere, two and a half miles east of Buna Government Station (which the American army incorrectly called Buna Mission) via a coastal route. A second battalion would advance on Buna by way of Siremi (mistakenly called Simemi in military history accounts of the battle), a village located about three miles inland of Cape Endaiadere, while the 128th’s 2nd battalion would be held in reserve.

  Though Major Smith’s Ghost Mountain boys were still a ways out, the plan was for them to advance on Buna by way of Bofu, at the headwaters of the Girua River, roughly twenty miles from the coast. West of the Girua River, the Australians would begin to move toward the coast.

  Although they would soon be entering battle, none of the men were physically ready. The men of Major Smith’s Ghost Mountain Battalion were in Natunga, trying to recover their strength. The 128th did not have to endure the march over the mountains, but they were no better off. Then there were the Australians, who had pursued the Japanese from Ioribaiwa Ridge across the Owen Stanleys to the Kumusi River crossing. They were in no shape to fight either.

  The men of regimental headquarters, the 126th’s 3rd Battalion and elements of its 1st Battalion, halfway through a twelve-day march from Pongani to Bofu, were suffering, too. William Hirashima, the regiment’s only second-generation Japanese-American (Nisei) soldier, remembers how rugged the trail was. Hirashima had been assigned to regimental headquarters as an S-2, specializing in intelligence work—captured documents and prisoner interrogation. “We were very disorganized,” he says.

  Each of us started out with a minimum full pack, but by the time we got half-way there…our arms were down to a minimum. We had thrown our steel helmets away and spare ammunition…. By the time I was on the trail for three or four days most of my original equipment was gone. I had thrown it away. I kept a quarter of a pup tent, one blanket. My mess kit was down to just the pan…. I just had one big spoon…. It wasn’t just me; everybody was doing it…. Some of the people had thrown away most of their ammunition, down to perhaps two clips. So we were not really a battle prepared unit…. I was carrying a rifle, an M1. Then I was given a carbine because I had these weighty dictionaries to carry, too.

  William Hirashima was born and raised in Santa Barbara County, California. His father emigrated to the United States during Japan’s rice crisis of the 1890s. Reaching Hawaii, he had worked as a cutter in the pineapple orchards. Later he left Hawaii and moved to the Santa Barbara area to work on the railroad. It was backbreaking labor even for a man accustomed to toiling in farm fields from sunup to sundown. After getting a job as a janitor at the Seaside Oil Company, he felt he was finally settled, and sent back to Japan for a bride. His son William was born in March 1920, the second of three brothers.

  Hirashima grew up like any other kid in America. In fact, he was treated better than the Oklahomans who flooded California during the Depression. The Hirashimas tried their hardest to be a typical American family. Like many Japanese-Americans, they eschewed any association with Japan and Japanese culture. They attended July 4 parades and on Memorial Day went down to the town flagpole and set out flowers to commemorate the service of World War I veterans. In school, William recited the Pledge of Allegiance with conviction; America was his country. By the time he was a teenager, he was playing football and baseball, earning varsity letters in both sports.

  It was not until he attended the University of California at Berkeley that he experienced any sort of racism. There, Japanese-Americans lived in segregated boarding houses and he and his friends were shunned by their “hakujin” (Caucasian) classmates.

  Hirashima studied chemistry at Berkeley, but became disillusioned with the program when he realized there were few job opportunities for a Japanese-American. He was resigned to spending his life in the farm fields like the Issei—first generation Japanese-Americans—and Nisei he knew, and after dropping out, he started at the Salinas Vegetable Exchange as a lowly lettuce trimmer. He probably would have ended up working there for much of his life if not for the draft. In February 1941, much to his surprise, he received his notice. The general population of Japanese-Americans were considered 4-C, enemy aliens, and were not usually eligible for the draft.

  A few weeks later he was on his way to Fort Lewis, Washington, where he was placed in the army, 15th Infantry, 3rd Division. Just over six months later he was sent to the Language School at the Presidio in San Francisco. The army needed translators. Though Hirashima’s knowledge of Japanese was basic at best, he was chosen to attend. At the Presidio, Nisei students drilled in Japanese night and day.

  In the spring of 1942, Hirashima boarded a Liberty ship with eight other Nisei and a Marine unit. Like the soldiers of the 32nd Division, he did not even know where he was going.

  The ship stopped in Auckland, New Zealand, and then continued on to Melbourne. By August, 1942, while the 32nd Division was training at Camp Tamborine, Hirashima was at Camp Indooroopilly, a short train ride from Brisbane, where he was refining his translation and prisoner interrogation skills.

  Back in the United States, though, the tolerance that Hirashima had grown up with was a thing of the past. Thanks to President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, Hirashima’s parents and older brother were living in a horse stable in an internment camp (Tulare) between Sacramento and Fresno.

  The country that his parents had come to love and
worship had betrayed them. Japanese-Americans had their homes, farms, and businesses seized. They were herded up and forced to live like animals.

  Although Hirashima felt a great resentment, that experience did not turn him against the country he loved. It made him more determined than ever to prove his patriotism.

  As the Americans negotiated the treacherous trail, Hirashima prayed they would not run into the Japanese. The men could barely walk, much less fight. For Hirashima, the thought of being killed in battle was frightening, but being taken prisoner would be the worst possible fate. For a Japanese-American soldier, the Japanese would reserve a special brand of cruelty.

  They did not encounter any Japanese on the march, which was a good thing because they were in no condition for battle. When they finally arrived in Bofu, they were tired, hungry, and nursing a variety of ailments.

  Simon Warmenhoven was grateful to have made it over the mountains. When on November 8 he wrote his wife Mandy to express his love and alert her that there would be a lull in his letters, he had no idea what was in store for him. He had walked over the mountains shouldering his own pack, a smaller bag of medical supplies, and occasionally the pack of another doctor. Once they reached Bofu, the men collapsed, but Warmenhoven’s work had just begun. He had managed to keep the men of the 126th healthy while they were training in Australia. He treated venereal diseases, and on a small scale, malaria, dengue fever, and an assortment of skin ailments. That was comparatively easy. Now, it seemed, everyone had some kind of ailment. Soldiers were burning up with fevers, and some had dysentery so bad he worried about dehydration. Everyone had feet torn up with blisters, sore knees and shoulders, and backs scorched by the sun, and he had not even gotten around to visiting Stutterin’ Smith’s Ghost Mountain boys. What would happen once the fighting started? How could he treat all the sick and wounded? How would the newly created portable hospital units (forerunners to MASH, mobile army surgical hospitals) function? Knowing how long it would take to evacuate soldiers to a field hospital and knowing the dangers of infection in a climate like New Guinea’s, the idea behind the portable hospital was to treat the wounded as far forward as possible, and to be mobile. Units would include twenty-five beds, moving as the battle shifted. On paper, the concept seemed workable, even brilliant. But Warmenhoven needed qualified medical personnel to man the hospitals. And like the other regimental surgeons, he was up against a shortage of doctors and corpsmen.

  For Warmenhoven, battle was not a hypothetical. Back in Port Moresby, Japanese Zeros, intent on taking out the airfield, came at dusk one evening, dropping bombs across the area. Portions of the 126th were camped near the end of the runway. Men dove into foxholes or dashed into the jungle. One unlucky soldier was hit by shrapnel while lying in his cot. He was sobbing when his friend, Sergeant Jack Hill of the 126th’s 3rd Battalion, ran to him. Turning on his flashlight, Hill realized that the hot metal had torn off his buddy’s kneecap, and the smell of burning flesh made him retch. Hill yelled for a medic, and Warmenhoven appeared, instructing him to shine the flashlight on the wound with one hand and with the other to press a tourniquet to his friend’s leg. Then Warmenhoven calmly amputated the leg while bombs exploded nearby. At one point a soldier shouted, “Put that goddamned light out or I’ll shoot it out!” Warmenhoven looked at Hill. “Keep the light steady,” he said. “Keep it steady.”

  As the division prepared for battle, Harding was also worried about the condition of his men, especially since he had no reserve troops. As a keen student of history, he knew what disease had done to General George Washington’s colonial forces, especially at the Battle of Quebec, where Washington’s army, under the command of Colonel Benedict Arnold, was crippled by smallpox.

  Despite the poor health of his troops, and the fact that MacArthur had consistently denied him the 127th Infantry Regiment, which was still back at Camp Tamborine, Harding was upbeat about his army’s chances. Both ground and air reconnaissance indicated that the Japanese strongholds each held only two hundred to three hundred Japanese. His intelligence officers speculated further that the Japanese had already decided to relinquish Buna.

  These reports had clearly made their way to the officers. Quinn’s message to Jim Boice about having tea in Buna on his birthday testifies to the prevailing belief that the Japanese invasion force had been reduced to a ragtag bunch of tired and sick soldiers. One Ground Forces observer ventured “Buna could be had by walking in and taking over.”

  It was General Willoughby who challenged these optimistic appraisals of Japanese troop levels. On November 10, he estimated that about four thousand troops were holding the beachhead. He also thought it unlikely that the Japanese would abandon their position on the north coast. But four days later, after assessing Japanese losses on the Kokoda track, Willoughby revised his estimate downward and ventured a guess that the Japanese were capable only of fighting a delaying action at Buna. “The seizure of the Buna area,” he said, “is practically assured.”

  BOOK THREE

  Train the arm and school the eye.

  Steel the heart to ice-lipped death.

  They are God’s who learn to die

  Having learned life’s shibboleth.

  C.T. “BUCK” LANHAM, “INTERIM”

  Umi yukaba, mizuku kabane,

  Yama yukaba, kusamusu kabane,

  Okimi no he ni koso shiname.

  Kaerimi wa seji.

  (Across the sea, corpses soaking in the water,

  Across the mountains, corpses heaped upon the grass,

  We shall die by the side of the Lord.

  We shall never look back.)

  OTOMO YAKAMOCHI, “UMI YUKABA”

  Chapter 12

  THE KILL ZONE

  ON NOVEMBER 16, the Australians had just completed their crossing of the Kumusi River at Wairopi and began marching on Gona and Sanananda, northwest of Buna village via the Buna-Kokoda track. On the coast, the 128th moved out, too, in the hazy light of a tropical morning. The men lined their dog tags with rubber tubing so the clang of metal on metal would not give them away in battle. In addition to their packs, they carried canteens, knives, first aid kits hooked to their belts, cigarettes, Zippo lighters, two extra bandoliers of ammo per man, and hand grenades.

  After weeks of idleness, they were happy to be on the move at last. One officer remembered the mood as “like the eve of a celebration to come. We were to go in to ‘raise the flag’ and there was to be a great victory for the American forces with very little effort on our part.”

  For the first time since landing on the north coast the men appreciated the island’s luxuriant beauty—the picturesque coastline with its regal coconut palms, waves lapping at the sandy beach, a blue sky stripped of clouds, the first bands of sunshine filtering through the trees.

  It was a puzzling thing to see—soldiers moving into battle without a touch of gravity, hardly conscious of their own mortality. Gangly young men, soaked to the bone, chuckled and gibed with each other and told jokes, the raunchier the better, raising their voices not to overcome rampaging fear, but to deliver punch lines. Though they were tired from having walked twenty miles through knotted jungle with bad feet, fevers, and oozing sores, and though they were hungry after the previous night’s meager dinner of rice and boiled, under-ripe papayas, they believed what they had been told: The beachhead was lightly defended, they would mop up, they would kill a few starving, near-sighted Japs, take a few scalps maybe, knock out some gold fillings, and push on up the island’s north coast toward bigger battles and then get back to civilization as quickly as they could. Once home, they would drink, race fast cars, date every pretty gal they could, take baths every day, eat until they could not stand, and sit on their front porches and wave to passersby.

  Despite their initial cockiness, by the afternoon the men were beat, and they, too, rid themselves of everything they considered nonessential. But even after lightening their loads, they struggled in the 100-degree heat. By nightfall it was all they could
do to wade a waist-deep creek. After crossing, they made camp at the creek’s mouth, near the village of Boreo, just north of coastal headquarters at Hariko.

  Just behind the encampment, soldiers were assembling two Australian 3.7-inch mountain howitzers, which would provide long-range artillery for the attack. Using a captured Japanese barge, General Albert Waldron, Harding’s artillery officer, had brought in Australian mountain guns and two hundred rounds of ammunition early that morning. It was a daring move. He and his crew put ashore in an area that had not yet been scouted by Allied troops, unloaded, and then headed back down the coast to Oro Bay to pick up General Harding and his party, the members of a portable hospital unit, two 25-pounder field pieces, 81 mm long-range mortars, .50 caliber machine guns, rations, radio supplies, and ammunition. Harding and Waldron and his party were expected to arrive later that night.

  By the time Waldron made Oro Bay, the supplies had been divided among three ships: the Alacrity, the Minnemura, and the Bonwin. Waldron’s barge was loaded and then all four ships departed for the front. The cruise north was a pleasant one. It had been over a month since a Japanese plane had been sighted along the north coast, and the crews of the various ships were relaxing for perhaps the last time before going into battle.

  Just off Cape Sudest, General Harding, who was aboard the Minnemura, was enjoying dinner with the captain and its crew. It was nearly dusk, and the sky throbbed with the rich shades of a tropical sunset. A slender native boy stood at the bow of the ship, throwing out a plumb line and shouting out the depths. Angelfish gathered around the line, and the sea was radiant with color. Off the starboard bow, the black fin of a shark broke the surface of the water. In the distance, the Alacrity, the largest ship in the convoy, was already dropping anchor off Hariko. The Alacrity towed a barge and carried most of the ordnance, forty native carriers, and the twenty-nine-man hospital team.