Shadows In the Jungle

by Larry Alexander

  Sumner recalled Krueger’s inspection of the lines of the 158th Regimental Combat Team, which, he said, got “a little hairy.” Just five hundred yards from the front line, artillery shells zooming overhead, mortars exploding in the nearby jungle, and machine-gun fire clipping the leaves and branches of trees, Krueger walked the infantry line, stopping to talk to individual soldiers.

  “When did you last eat, son?” he’d ask. “When did you change clothes last? Have you had any mail lately? Show me your weapon.”

  The whole time, a wary Sumner envisioned himself being court-martialed if his commanding general was shot dead.

  There were also perks to guarding Krueger. Wilbur Littlefield recalled his team escorting the general on Leyte in late November 1944, when Krueger made a point of stopping at a division headquarters at mealtime so his Scouts could enjoy Thanksgiving dinner.

  * * *

  Throughout the first half of 1944, MacArthur’s forces pushed the Japanese relentlessly westward, clearing the northern coast of New Guinea mile by bloody mile. By May, half of the world’s second largest island was under Allied control, and MacArthur next set his sights on Wakde, a small island off the New Guinea coast, which boasted an excellent airfield. His final goal was the bird’s-head-like shape of the Vogelkop Peninsula, New Guinea’s westernmost land area. But between there and Hollandia, which fell at the end of April, were six hundred miles of coast, defended by the well-fed, well-armed men of the Japanese 2nd Army. Unless the Vogelkop was seized, MacArthur knew its air bases posed a serious threat to his rear as he continued toward the Philippines.

  On May 17, MacArthur made his move on Wakde and Sarmi. Ten days later, American troops stormed ashore at Biak, the northernmost and largest of the Schouten Islands at the mouth of Geelvink Bay, New Guinea’s largest anchorage. The Biak operation would last until August 20 and cost the Americans about four hundred dead and five missing, along with two thousand wounded and another seventy-two hundred laid low with jungle ailments, such as dengue fever and scrub typhus. The Japanese would lose at least forty-seven hundred killed or missing and two hundred captured.

  During all these moves, the Alamo Scouts were ready, but they would be going into action without Colonel Bradshaw at their head. In May, Krueger, satisfied with the job Bradshaw had done in getting the Scouts up and running, promoted him to executive officer of 6th Army Intelligence. Homer Williams, Bradshaw’s XO, was promoted to major and took over the Alamo Scouts’ day-to-day operations. As his executive officer, Williams chose Maj. Gibson Niles, a New Yorker from Albany who, in April 1944, took part in a deception mission behind Japanese lines. Prior to the Allied landings at Hollandia and Aitape on April 22, Niles had planted an aviator’s notebook in an empty rubber boat for the enemy to find. The notebook contained false information on American invasion plans, confirming Japanese suspicions that Hansa Bay, at the mouth of the Sepik River and well east of the real invasion zone, was the target. He also arranged for “supply drops.” The ruse worked.

  On June 22, the ASTC at Mange Point graduated its third class, four teams led by Lts. Robert S. Sumner, Wilbur F. Littlefield, William B. Lutz, and Arpad Farkas. This addition gave Williams ten teams and sixty-eight highly skilled officers and men under his charge. Four days after the graduation, the ASTC was moved to Cape Kassoe near Humboldt Bay, in order to stay close to the 6th Army HQ.

  By the end of June, the ever-restless MacArthur was ready for his next move, this time on Noemfoor Island, the westernmost of the Schoutens, which, like Biak seventy-five miles to the east, lay at the entrance to Geelvink Bay.

  Code-named Tabletennis, the oval-shaped Noemfoor, fourteen miles long and eleven wide, contained three enemy airfields: the four-thousand-foot-long Namber Airdrome at Roemboi Bay, the five-thousand-foot Kamiri air base on the western coast, and the unfinished five-thousand-foot Kornasoren Airdrome just a short distance to the north.

  Much of the island’s coastline, especially on the western side, is choked by mangrove swamps. These thick morasses also cover the several small islands that all but block access to Noemfoor’s largest inland body of water, Broe Bay, on the northeast coast. The islands’ five thousand wartime inhabitants lived mostly along the southern and northern coasts.

  The island was headquarters for the Noemfoor Defense Detachment of the 219th Infantry Regiment, 35th Division, along with assorted support troops and construction personnel. These latter included six hundred Formosan laborers and two thousand Javanese slave workers. The troops under Col. Shimizu Suesada numbered about two thousand, although MacArthur’s G2 guessed them at thirty-two hundred.

  The landing was set for July 2 on Yellow Beach, a strip about eight hundred yards wide just west of the Kamiri airfield. Two teams of Alamo Scouts under John McGowen and Woodrow Hobbs were sent in advance of the strike force, the Cyclone Task Force, which was to depart from Wakde-Sarmi on the night of June 29-30.

  The two Texans—McGowen was from Amarillo and Hobbs from Fort Worth—and their men spent June 21-23 onshore, counting Japanese noses, checking defenses, and gauging morale, which, based on the disheveled appearance of the enemy and the fact that many of them were unarmed, they determined was low. They also spotted three tanks, possibly Type 1 models, toting a 47mm gun and two 7.7mm machine guns apiece.

  The mission included an examination of Yellow Beach, which they found to be a gradual sandy slope leading up to a wood line forty to sixty feet from the water’s edge. During one dark night, the Scouts spent two hours wading offshore in neck-deep water, feeling with their feet for a channel through the coral reef.

  Their presence was eventually discovered by the Japanese, but the Scouts remained one step ahead of the enemy and managed to get back aboard their PT boat without a fight. At least not on land. At sea, the PT boat crew had to fend off strafing runs by a fighter plane from Kamiri airfield. The boat managed to elude the plane with minor damage but no injuries.

  The information the team brought back was vital to the coming invasion, although they seriously overjudged the Japanese troop strength, guessing it at close to five thousand men.

  * * *

  Three days after the invasion, on July 5, Hobbs and two of his men left Woendi Island by PT boat bound for the tiny island of Japen, off the Noemfoor coast. Landing at the village of Ansoes, they quickly located and took custody of the captain of an interisland schooner who had been using his vessel to supply information to the Japanese. The man’s schooner had been shot up by American planes and natives had been holding him. Hobbs picked up his prisoner, but as he and his team rowed the rubber boat back to the PT boat, the PT’s radar picked up what was thought to be an enemy barge. After a few tense moments, it was discovered that the “barge” was actually a small land mass.

  Shortly after returning, Hobbs, along with Staff Sgt. Leonard Scott, Lt. Raymond Watson, an Australian officer attached to the ASTC, Dutch officer Lt. Louis Rapmund, and a native guide, were dispatched on a mission with multiple goals. The first objective was to monitor Japanese barge traffic at Seroei, off the southern coast of Noemfoor. Rowing into the harbor on a rubber boat, they discovered just one heavily damaged barge abandoned on the beach.

  Moving next to nearby Naoe Island, they captured a native who had been accused of spying for the enemy. Their mission ended the next day on Koeroedoe Island between Japen and western New Guinea, where they pinpointed Japanese coastal and mountain guns, and mapped out enemy beach and harbor defenses at Manokwari Harbor.

  Despite the American advances, Japanese troops, both those in front of the Americans and those bypassed by MacArthur’s leapfrogging up the New Guinea coast, continued to receive supplies and reinforcements, mostly brought in by shallow-draft barges. Because of U.S. air superiority, barges could only move at night, and lay hidden by day.

  To ferret out these hiding places, commanders turned to the Alamo Scouts.

  CHAPTER 6

  “. . . The Entire Shoreline Was Ablaze.”

  Sumner Team: Geelvink Bay,
Dutch New Guinea, July 21-22, 1944

  Lt. Robert “Red” Sumner’s team had not had an assignment since graduating from the ASTC at Mange Point near Finschhafen on June 22. So he was elated when, on July 10, he was put on alert for deployment to the PT base at Mios Woendi Island. PT boats meant action.

  Sumner sent Staff Sgt. Lawrence E. Coleman to draw equipment for the team, then took the men through two days of refreshment drills, including handling of the rubber boat, radio use, jungle survival, and scouting skills, followed by a trip to the shooting range, where weapons were sighted-in.

  While most of the team used carbines or Thompsons, Coleman drew for himself one of the newly issued M3 “grease guns,” the .45-caliber, stamped metal submachine gun with a folding wire stock. Coleman also requisitioned a 60mm mortar and a BAR, although these, as it turned out, would be left in camp.

  Before dawn on July 18, the men hoisted themselves aboard a deuce-and-a-half truck for a quick ride to the airfield at nearby Sentani. There a C-47 transport, its engines thrumming, awaited them. They had no sooner plopped down on the jump seats that lined each side of the plane than it taxied to the runway and was airborne, banking northeast, over Vitiaz Strait to the open ocean, for the nearly six-hundred-mile flight to Biak Island at the mouth to Geelvink Bay. Around ten thirty a.m., the C-47’s wheels touched down at Borokore Airfield, one of three airstrips on Biak’s southern coast, along the Japen Strait. Upon debarking from the plane, the team was assigned a squad tent and told to sit tight. A short distance away, a battery of 105mm guns sent harassing rounds at the enemy positions, a few thousand yards inland.

  “They shootin’ at Japs?” Pfc. Edward Renhols asked, startled at the first salvo.

  “They aren’t duck hunting,” Cpl. William F. Blaise replied.

  “Parts of this island are still hot,” Sumner explained. “Wander too far into that jungle and you’ll end up with your fool head mounted on some Jap officer’s trophy wall.”

  The harassing fire kept up all through the day and into the night, to the discomfort of the Japanese and the Alamo Scouts alike, both of whom were deprived of sleep.

  On July 20, Sumner and his men boarded a PT boat for the three-hour trip to the 6th Army HQ and the main PT base on Woendi Island, southwest of Biak. John McGowen, already a legend since he and his men had conducted the first Alamo Scout mission back in February, met the team as their boat tied up to one of the several long piers that jutted out from the sandy beach.

  “Hi, Red,” McGowen greeted Sumner. “Welcome to Woendi. Looks like I’ll be your contact for this mission. I’ll help you get your team situated, then we have a briefing with the Ops officer for PT Ron Twenty-one.”

  Slinging their weapons and gear over their shoulders, the men followed McGowen to their temporary billet. En route, Sumner learned he would be transported by Squadron 21, one of many PT boat units operating out of Woendi Island. Ron 21, led by Lt. Cmdr. Selman S. Bowling, consisted of five boats, PT-128, -131, -132, -320, and -321, all eighty-footers manufactured by the Elco Naval Division of the Electric Boat Company.

  As evening came on, the team and three PT skippers were assembled in the briefing shack, seated before Bowling and an officer who served as the PT squadron’s operations officer. A map of New Guinea, specifically the eastern shore of the Vogelkop Peninsula, was tacked to a corkboard at the front of the room.

  “Smoking lamp is lit,” the officer said, intoning the old navy term from the days of sail that denoted when it was safe to smoke because the kegs of gunpowder had been stowed away. Some men fired up cigarettes, some did not.

  “We’ve seen a lot of Jap barge traffic operating here in Cape Oransbari, south of the village of Manokwari,” the officer said. “We think there’s a staging area near the village, maybe a refueling site and a place from which to transport supplies, rations, and ammo from western New Guinea to enemy garrisons still operating along the coast farther east. Because of the heavy foliage, our recon planes can’t see a damned thing, and our boats aren’t able to get in close enough to take a look-see either. That’s where you Scouts come in. Tonight is dark of the moon. We will drop you just offshore at twenty-three thirty hours. You will recon the area and try to spot the Jap supply base, if indeed there is one. If you find the base, you will pinpoint it so our guys can get at them. Exfiltration will be twenty-four hours later. If for any reason you don’t make it back by then, the boats will attempt another pickup at twenty-three thirty for the next two nights if needed. Communication will be by SCR-300 radios. Lieutenant McGowen will be your contact.”

  “We’ll be using three PT boats, the 128, 131, and 132,” Bowling injected. “You men will be aboard the 132 boat with Ensign Jones, here.” He pointed to a young officer. “The other two boats will stand by beyond the horizon, to provide covering fire if needed.”

  “Are there any questions?” McGowen asked. Hearing none, he said, “Grab some chow and check your gear. We leave in two hours.”

  The trip across the stretch of water where Geelvink Bay meets the Pacific Ocean was a lonely one. The dark, moonless sky and the inky black ocean made it almost impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.

  The three boats roared through the night. The 132 boat, Sea Bat to her crew, was at the point with the 128 boat, Tug Boat Annie, and 131, Tarfu, following to port and starboard.

  For most of the trip, Sumner and his team—Coleman, Renhols, Blaise, Pfc. Paul B. Jones (no relation to the PT skipper despite the similarity in their names), Cpl. Robert T. Schermerhorn, and Pfc. Harry D. Weiland—along with Lt. Henry Swart of the Dutch East Indies Army, serving as interpreter, remained belowdecks. There they tried to get some rest despite the bouncing plywood boat’s best efforts to prevent that.

  Robert Sumner was a natural leader, and he had the well-earned respect of his colleagues. He took stock of a situation quickly and always seemed to make the right decisions. Joining the army right out of college, Sumner took to the strict military discipline and hard physical regimen like a fish to water. He felt he was made for the army to the point that he began to believe that he had always been a soldier since as far back as Julius Caesar.

  At about ten thirty that night, five miles off the Vogelkop coast, the Sea Bat’s skipper, Ens. Paul H. Jones, who was in command of the three-boat flotilla, engaged his underwater mufflers, funneling the exhaust into the water and thus silencing, as much as possible, the three Packard engines. While Tug Boat Annie and Tarfu dropped back, Jones closed on the coastline, guided by his radar and what visual landmarks he could discern in the night. Sumner’s team, their faces blackened and gear ready, were on deck, rubber boat inflated and set to launch.

  Half an hour later, the 132 boat idled a thousand yards offshore. The rubber boat was dropped overboard on Sea Bat ’s seaward side, held tightly against the hull by two crewmen hanging on to ropes, as the Scouts climbed in. Sumner, from his position in the back of the rubber boat, took a compass bearing and the team shoved off.

  In the gentle one-foot swells, the trip was smooth and uneventful, even though a nervous Ensign Jones, lingering offshore, kept picking up strange blips on his radar that he feared might be Japanese destroyers, but were more likely ghost echoes.

  Reaching the shore, the men hopped out and dragged the rubber boat across the thirty-yard stretch of beach, into the tree line, then hit the ground and silently waited for any sign that they might have been spotted. For fifteen minutes, none of them moved. Sumner next gently rapped the folding metal stock of his M1A1 carbine against the wooden upper hand guard—his all-clear signal—and the team quickly deflated the rubber boat. The escaping CO2 hissed loud enough to be heard in Hollandia, several hundred miles to the east, Sumner thought.

  As that was done, Renhols flipped on the radio, and after it warmed up, whispered into it, “Red One.” This was the code phrase announcing the team had arrived and was proceeding. Had he said, “Red One, recover,” it would have meant trouble and stand by to pick them up. McGowen replied
with “Mac One,” and Renhols switched the radio off.

  Out on the water, the 132 boat quietly withdrew to rejoin the other two, out of sight, but ready. The SCR-300 had a fifty-mile range over water, so calling the boats back would not be a problem. McGowen’s radio would be switched on for the entire mission.

  That done, both the rubber boat and the radio were buried in the soft sandy earth among the eight-to-ten-foot-high scrub, while Sumner and Swart kept a watchful eye for intruders.

  Indicating with his hand to “follow me,” Sumner led the team inland. After picking their way through fifty yards of sparse jungle, they came to a well-used coastal track. Advancing beyond the trail, they entered a small clearing and Sumner signaled “halt.”

  “It’s oh one hundred,” he whispered to the men who gathered around him. “We’ll rest here. Coleman, two guards, hourly relief.”

  At first sleep was difficult. The men were jarred awake by the slightest jungle sound, the rustle of the foliage, the call of a bird or an animal moving through the brush. Eventually, they settled in.

  Just before five a.m. Sumner woke the team and, as they had drilled so many times, formed them into a circle about ten yards in diameter. He remained in the middle of the circle to control the movements of the men. They remained there, hunched down in the jungle, eyes and ears tuned to any noise or movement. At the end of fifteen minutes, Sumner gave one tap of the metal folding stock of his carbine, and pointed to his left. At the signal, the entire circle shifted about twenty-five yards and halted again. Fifteen more minutes, and the action was repeated. This last move put the team on the seaward side of the jungle trail.

  Sumner consulted his map. He noted a river that flowed into the ocean, about sixty yards north of where he and his team now waited. Even as he studied the map, his mind registered a motor sound coming from the waterway.