By daylight, in a scene reminiscent of General Horii’s attempted escape two months earlier, Japanese soldiers by the hundreds, grabbing on to anything that would float, took to the sea. American and Australian machine gunners sprayed them with bullets. Then the artillery opened up. By 10 o’clock that morning, the air force was strafing the remaining swimmers. Those who had not already drowned were shot to death.
At the same time, American artillery pulverized Buna Government Station, and white phosphorous smoke shells set the entire area ablaze. Japanese soldiers ran from their bunkers, and American troops cut them down. Some of the Japanese were carrying M-1s and wearing American helmets and fatigues.
Stenberg’s patrol went from bunker to bunker and destroyed each one with grenades. Sometimes the Japanese burst out swinging swords or bayonets. A number of Japanese climbed trees and hid, or rushed into the swamps. Those who remained in their bunkers, refusing to surrender or run, were buried alive.
While the Americans stormed Buna Government Station and flushed out the last of its defenders, Australian tanks were destroying the remaining bunkers at Giropa Point. As the Australians approached what had been Colonel Yamamoto’s command post, two Japanese officers appeared. One was Yamamoto and the other Captain Yasuda, who earlier had left the Government Station to join Yamamoto.
“Surrender,” the Australian commander shouted to the two officers. “You must surrender.”
Yasuda and Yamamoto pretended not to hear the order. Yasuda drifted off into a grove of coconut trees, while Yamamoto appeared to be washing himself in the muddy waters of Siremi Creek. When he finished he rose and bowed three times in the direction of the morning sun. Then turning to the Australians, he stood saber straight.
“I’ll give you until I count ten to surrender,” the Australian commander shouted.
Again Yamamoto did not respond. He tied a Japanese flag to the blade of his sword. Then with one hand he raised the sword and with the other he stretched the flag across his breast.
“Nine,” yelled the Australian commander. A second later, the Australian riflemen shot Yamamoto dead. Later they found Yasuda. He had committed suicide by cutting open his belly in the fashion befitting a Japanese soldier.
That afternoon, Allied troops took control of Buna Government Station. The beach looked like a charnel house as the corpses of dead Japanese, some of which had been chewed on by sharks, rolled in on the waves. They swelled in the sun and in no time were filled with maggots.
The following day, January 3, as Allied patrols hunted down enemy stragglers, soldiers at “Maggot Beach” removed their boots and rolled up their pant legs and walked barefoot in the warm sand. Some men took the opportunity to wash their filthy clothes; some swam naked in the bay. Others lay sprawled under the scarred trunks of coconut palms or curled up in remnant foxholes.
Blamey and Herring sent messages congratulating Eichelberger. The general’s sense of accomplishment, however, was tempered by the realization that he had sent too many soldiers to their deaths. In a letter to Emmaline, Eichelberger confessed, “To see those boys with their bellies out of the mud and their eyes in the sun…. made me choke, and then I spent a moment looking over the American cemetery which my orders of necessity have filled from nothing.”
Curiously, no message came from MacArthur. When two days later there was still nothing from the commander in chief, Eichelberger penned a brief letter to Sutherland, “Is your secretary sick?” he asked.
Nearly a week after American forces took Buna Government Station, MacArthur finally wrote Eichelberger. If the general was hoping for gushing praise, MacArthur disappointed him.
Dear Bob,
I am returning to G.H.Q., Brisbane, Saturday morning the 9th so will not see you until some later time. I have been wanting to personally congratulate you on the success that has been achieved. As soon as Fuller [Major General Horace Fuller, commanding general of the 41st Division] takes hold, I want you to return to the mainland. There are many important things with reference to rehabilitation and training that will necessitate your immediate effort. The 32nd Division should be evacuated as soon as possible so that it can be rejuvenated.
I am so glad that you were not injured in the fighting. I always feared that your incessant exposure might result fatally.
With a hearty slap on the back,
Most cordially,
MacArthur
On that same day, MacArthur issued a communiqué stating that the campaign in New Guinea was “in its final closing phase.” “The Sanananda position has now been completely enveloped,” MacArthur told correspondents. “A remnant of the enemy’s forces is entrenched there and faces certain destruction…. This can now be regarded as accomplished.”
Although MacArthur and his staff had described Sanananda as a “mopping up operation,” Eichelberger and the Australians knew otherwise. Barely able to contain his disgust, Eichelberger would exclaim, “If there is another war, I recommend that the military…. and everyone else concerned, drop the phrase ‘mopping up’ from their vocabularies. It is not a good enough phrase to die for.” Eichelberger added, “The best plan” for Sanananda “would seem to be to surround the area and cut off all supplies, accompanied by plenty of mortar fire and constant harassing. This seems to me very slow work, but I realize that any other decision may result in a tremendous loss of personnel without commensurate gains.”
It was the exact approach that he and MacArthur had rejected at Buna.
Had the Allies known that Japanese Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo had issued orders via Rabaul calling for the withdrawal of forces up the coast, they might have been content to ambush the fleeing soldiers and cut off the supply lines to the beachhead, condemning the Japanese who remained at Sanananda to a slow but certain death. Instead, they moved in for the kill.
The Americans who had arrived on the Sanananda Front late in November would not be part of the final offensive. Of the fourteen hundred men who had gone into battle, only 165 remained. In no condition to fight, they were pulled off the front before the final Allied assault on Sanananda.
Alfred Medendorp was not one of the 165. In late December, incapacitated by malaria and fifty-five pounds lighter than when he had left Nepeana in early October to cross the mountains, he was shipped to the evacuation hospital at Dobodura. The next day he and a group he described as “battered, filthy, long haired, gaunt, festering, stinking wretches” boarded a plane for Port Moresby.
Lieutenant Lester Segal was not one of them either. After a month on the Sanananda Front, he was transferred to Buna to attend to the men wounded in the siege of the Government Station. Because of a shortage of medics, he stayed on in the aftermath of the battle. Eventually, he, too, was evacuated to Port Moresby. Seriously ill—perhaps with scrub typhus—it was a “miracle,” according to Medendorp, that Segal was still alive.
Of the 165 men, only ninety-five were able to march to the bivouac site at Siremi east of the Girua River. Father Dzienis was one of them. “Only then,” Medendorp later learned, “did he surrender his festering, fever-ridden body to a hospital to begin a long fight for recovery.”
At Siremi, Dzienis and the others washed and shaved for the first time in months, and were issued shelter halves and mosquito nets. Two days later, Eichelberger held a ceremony for them. “I received the troops,” he wrote, “with band music. It was a melancholy homecoming. Sickness, death, and wounds,” he wrote, “had taken an appalling toll. [The men] were so ragged and so pitiful that when I greeted them my eyes were wet.”
On January 16, the 127th and the 163rd Infantry Regiments were ordered to attack the Japanese garrison at Sanananda. The 127th was to advance on the coastal track from Buna Village, blocking any attempt by the Japanese to flee east. Meanwhile, one battalion of the 163rd was to move up the Sanananda track to the coast while another battalion sealed off the escape route west of Huggins Roadblock. After clearing out the Japanese positions south of the roadblock, the men of the 163rd were
to join Australia’s 18th Brigade and advance north along the track.
On January 17, as the Allies converged on Sanananda, General Yamagata determined that the evacuation plan could not wait. The wounded and sick were to leave by landing barge. The rest of the troops were to escape any way they could—on foot, or by swimming up the coast. Upon reaching the mouth of the Kumusi or the Mambare River, they would be shipped even farther up the coast to Lae and Salamaua.
Kiyoshi Wada wondered if he would make it out alive. “I am left to take charge in this place,” he wrote. “We think that tonight will be the last night for Girua and we talk about swimming together to Lae. Wonder if we can get away? Wakaichi will not leave us behind.”
Late the following night, Wada, who had also read the Allied leaflets, continued, “We looked forward to getting on the boat tonight but because the wounded were put on first, we could not get on…. Reinforcements haven’t come. There are no provisions. Things are happening just as the enemy says…. I don’t think Wakaichi will leave us behind.”
The next day, Yamagata delivered the evacuation orders to General Oda and sent an aide to carry them to Colonel Yazawa. That night Yamagata and his staff and over a hundred sick and wounded soldiers left Girua in two large motor launches. Later, a prisoner of war stated that the general made “room for himself by taking off the patients and men already loaded on the barge.”
Oda was indignant: Yamagata, he believed, had taken the coward’s way out. Early the next morning, Oda, Yazawa, and a large number of troops plunged into the swamp and ran smack into an Australian outpost. Yazawa, who had been in New Guinea since the overland assault on Port Moresby, was killed and, by some accounts, Oda was too. Other reports contend that Oda stayed behind. Realizing that his end was near, he told a soldier that he was going off “to smoke one cigarette at leisure.” Soon afterward, the soldier heard two pistol shots and ran back to assist Oda. There he found the general and his supply officer lying on a cloak on the ground where they had killed themselves.
As the last evacuation boats pulled anchor, Kyoshi Wada was left standing on the beach, longing for home. He returned to the hospital and was killed by mortar fire early the following morning.
A day later, on January 22, 1943, the Buna-Gona-Sanananda campaign officially ended. Advancing Allied troops caught starved and weary enemy soldiers in their shelters or trying to escape and mowed them down. By day’s end more than five hundred Japanese lay dead. It was the largest single-day slaughter since Gorari nearly three months earlier.
Carl Stenberg, like most of the men of Ghost Mountain battalion and the 128th Infantry Regiment, was already in Port Moresby, waiting to be transported south to Australia. Days before the fall of Sanananda, he had left Dobodura and was flown over the Owen Stanley mountains. The entire trip took forty-five minutes.
Stenberg had been marching or fighting for over three months. His ear throbbed and bled and he was woozy with malaria. His lower legs were a patchwork of jungle sores. And when he slept the nightmares came: He was stranded in a swamp, stuck up to his hips in mud that gripped like quicksand. The tide was in and the water crept to his chest. He held his head high to breathe as rats glided by, making their way through the black scum.
Stanley Jastrzembski was lying in a hospital bed not far from Stenberg. Early in January, after a nine-day regimen of quinine, atabrine, and plasmochin, Jastrzembski’s fever broke; but now it was soaring again. Wrapped in towels and ice, he lay on a cot, unable to escape the smell. He was back in the jungle, waiting and watching. Bodies bloated by the heat floated past. They were smiling. He could see their gold fillings.
In late December 1942, Simon Warmenhoven was appointed division surgeon at the request of General Eichelberger and received a rare battlefield promotion to lieutenant colonel. In mid-January, as the Allied attack on the Sanananda and Girua garrisons was about to begin, Warmenhoven turned thirty-three and was still performing surgeries in a poorly lit tent. On January 20, he learned that he was being sent back to Port Moresby. He arrived in Australia not long afterward and went directly to a hospital for treatment of hookworm. In late February he returned to Camp Cable, where he took up residence in a small wooden house. The first thing he did was to put pictures of his family on his dresser. Warmenhoven was now a celebrated doctor. Articles in newspapers across the U.S. were praising his bravery in New Guinea and his medical achievements just behind the front lines. In early March, his picture was on the front page of the New York Times.
Back in Australia, Warmenhoven did not feel like a celebrity. He worked around the clock seven days a week nursing the Red Arrow men back to health while neglecting his own needs. In early April, exhausted, he suffered a malaria attack and was hospitalized for three weeks. At the time, doctors little understood the possible toxic effects of large doses of atabrine and quinine. The term “atabrine psychosis,” characterized by drug-induced manic depression and schizophrenic episodes, had only recently been coined. Nevertheless, Warmenhoven was treated aggressively. Upon returning to Camp Cable three and a half weeks later, he learned that MacArthur was preparing to send the 32nd back into combat. As division surgeon, he was asked to sign a medical release stating that the division was healthy enough to return to active duty.
He refused.
On Monday night May 3, 1943, he wrote Mandy.
Dearest Lover:
Had a lovely letter from you yesterday, darling. Came at the right time too believe me. Sure had the “blues” here for a couple of days. That’s why I haven’t written you. I don’t often allow myself to get that way but after all, when one is away from his best friend in the world you my wife, and away from such grand children, you just can’t help it. I love the way you ended your letter, Sweetheart, about “not being so far apart because we’ll live forever in each other’s hearts.”
Lovingly Always, Sam
Two days later, Lieutenant Colonel Simon “Sam” Warmenhoven shot himself in the head.
EPILOGUE
I laid him down by the bend in the stream;
And erected a cross at his head.
His funeral song was a kockatoo’s scream,
As if they knew my buddy was dead…
I’ve evened the score, yes, a dozen times o’er,
But no matter the distance between,
My mind wanders yet and I’ll never forget,
His grave by the bend in the stream.
BOB HARTMAN,
BUNA VETERAN
It would take months for the 32nd Division to be transported to Australia, where upon arriving, the sick and wounded were sent to a variety of hospitals in the Brisbane area. Those in relatively good health went to Coolangatta on Australia’s Gold Coast for R&R. The men chased girls and got roaring drunk. They told stories, too. The stories were not sad or dark; in fact, according to Bill Sikkel, they were full of “GI humor.” The one that really busted up Sikkel and the guys who had been on the Sanananda Front was about Father Dzienis.
It was in late November and Father Dzienis excused himself from a conversation to visit the recently dug two-hole outhouse. When a Japanese navy ship shelled the track, Dzienis came running out with his pants down around his ankles, “mad as a hornet.”
“To hell with the Geneva Conventions,” he thundered (according to the Geneva Conventions, a chaplain was not allowed to be armed). “Give me a pistol!”
When victory at Sanananda was declared on January 22, 1943, the war on New Guinea’s Papuan Peninsula came to a close. For the first time in World War II the Allies had defeated the Japanese in a land operation. Two and a half weeks later, the fighting on Guadalcanal ended.
New Guinea was a flashback to earlier wars. General Eichelberger called it a “poor man’s war,” one largely unaffected by America’s industrial machine. For two months, the Allies beat at nearly impenetrable enemy defenses. One American destroyer, bombarding Japanese positions, could have shortened the campaign by weeks. Shallow-draft landing craft, commonplace when the Marines inv
aded Guadalcanal, could have brought the campaign to a quicker close by hauling in much-needed tanks and artillery. Even something as basic as transport ships reliably delivering supplies could have eased the suffering of the soldiers.
Eventually, the Allies succeeded in pounding the Japanese into submission, but at what cost? What would MacArthur have lost by letting the Japanese starve? Major Mitsuo Koiwai was the commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion, 41st Infantry. When captured at the end of the war, he said, “We lost at Buna because we could not retain air superiority, because we could not supply our troops…. We were in such a position…that we wondered whether the Americans would bypass us and let us starve.”
At the war’s end, MacArthur privately resolved to never again force a “head-on collision of the bloody, grinding type.” There would be “No more Bunas,” he said. On the other hand, he publicly congratulated himself during the war for his patient execution of the campaign. On January 28, he issued his final campaign communiqué, declaring that in the battle for New Guinea the “time element was…of little importance.” It added, “The utmost care was taken for the conservation of our forces, with the result that probably no campaign in history against a thoroughly prepared and trained army produced such complete and decisive results, with so low an expenditure of life.”
Correspondents who had witnessed firsthand the brutality of the campaign were outraged by MacArthur’s claim. It was a piece of fiction, a brazen lie. When some refused to wire the text to their editors, MacArthur’s headquarters threatened to expel them from the SWPA.
Eichelberger was flabbergasted by MacArthur’s claim. Was this the same MacArthur who had told General Harding to “Take Buna Today At All Costs”? Was this the same commander in chief who told him to “take Buna or don’t come back alive”? Eleven years later, in a letter to Samuel Milner, the army’s official historian, Eichelberger wrote, “The statement to the correspondents in Brisbane after Buna that ‘losses were small because there was no hurry’ was one of the great surprises of my life. As you know, our Allied losses were heavy and as a commander in the field, I had been told many times of the necessity for speed.”
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