Day 15
By late morning, a deluge of rain turned the lowlands to quagmire within moments of its arrival. General Blamey’s advance slowed to a crawl; if the rain kept up at this pace, he had doubts the lead elements of his force would reach the outskirts of Port Moresby—still several miles away—by nightfall. And even if they did, he knew they wouldn’t be in any shape to do battle. Next to withering enemy fire, nothing disorganized a military unit like foul weather.
On Astrolabe, the pouring rain only added to their problems: all morning, a thick and constant mist had shrouded the long ridge of the mountain’s peak. At OP Charlie Able, Melvin Patchett tried to scan the lowlands with binoculars from beneath the shelter of a lean-to. “I believe we’re on the top side of a cloud,” he said. “Still can’t see much of anything down there.”
The walkie-talkie sputtered to life with the faint sound of Sergeant Hadley’s voice, awash in static. “I’m almost halfway down the slope,” he reported. “and the fog isn’t so thick. But I can’t make out much of anything on the lowlands through all this rain.”
“I’m afraid it’s going to be like this for the better part of the day,” Trevor Shaw replied.
“That ain’t good,” Patchett said. “We ain’t much of an OP if we can’t see shit.”
Lee Grossman had an idea. “You know, Top…The Notch isn’t as high as we are. Maybe they’ve got a better view down there.” He picked up the field telephone and gave it a few cranks. “Let’s get Corporal Boudreau on the line.”
It was PFC Teddy Mukasic who answered the call at OP Charlie Baker, his words barely audible through torrents of static. “Yes, sir, we’re up in the fog here, too,” he said, “but it ain’t raining yet. Bogater’s gone down the slope to see how far you gotta go for a clear view. Maybe it won’t be too far and we can run a phone down there. We ain’t got a lot of wire left, though.”
“Neither do we,” Grossman said. “Let us know what you find ASAP.”
Mukasic responded, “Will do, sir,” but Lee Grossman never heard it. Neither realized the line had gone dead.
No sooner had Mukasic rung off than Bogater Boudreau came scrambling back up the slope. Breathless, he said, “We got Japs on the move all over the damn place.”
Mukasic asked, “Are they in artillery range?”
“They won’t be if we don’t get some rounds on them right quick,” Boudreau replied. “We’re moving our OP. Grab that last reel of commo wire and follow me…on the fucking double.”
Zigzagging across the sky as they reconned behind enemy lines, Jock Miles and John Worth had an even better view of the Japanese troop movements than Bogater Boudreau. Several large units—each at least battalion size, Jock estimated—were disengaging along the battle line with the Americans. They were hurrying down the roads toward Port Moresby—and Blamey’s Australians.
And we figured the Japs wouldn’t do that, Jock told himself.
“Hurry up and get us a couple miles west of here,” Jock said to Worth. “The artillery I just called for…we’re right in its flight path. It’d be hell to get knocked down by our own guns.”
Worth stared glumly at the L4’s fuel gauge. It had been almost 90 minutes since they left Twenty Mile Airfield; it was time to go home again and refuel. What gas was left would barely get them there.
“Okay, but we can only stay around here another minute or two, sir,” Worth said. “Unless you want to walk back.”
“Crap…fucking gas,” Jock mumbled, switching frequencies like a madman as he alternately gave fire mission coordinates to both the American and Australian artillery. “Unable to adjust fire,” he told the gunners. “Leaving the area to refuel.” He made a special plea to the American fire support center: “Use Blind Eye Six for further adjustments. They should have eyes on target.”
Jock could barely see Astrolabe, nearly 10 miles to the north, mysterious behind a curtain of low clouds and driving rain. Yet, he hoped the men of Charlie Company—Blind Eye Six—could somehow track the Japanese from their mountain perch.
As Bogater Boudreau led his two men down the slope at The Notch, the humidity of the rainforest felt so thick he swore it parted like an invisible curtain as he moved through it. They hadn’t gotten below the fog still clinging to the mountain top, but they could hear the first volleys of artillery rounds impacting on the Japanese pulling back across the lowlands.
“Hot damn!” Boudreau said. “Somebody’s already giving them Japs hell.”
PFC Fanning was playing out the communications wire from their only reel. “We ain’t got much left,” he called to Boudreau, scrambling downhill far ahead. “Maybe another hundred yards.”
“Just keep moving, numbnuts,” Corporal Boudreau replied.
They heard the rain coming seconds before it engulfed them, shimmering like the hiss of surf rolling in their direction. The first drops stained their fatigues and web gear like giant polka dots for just an instant. Then their clothing turned dark and sodden from head to toe as if they were standing beneath a giant faucet. Water streamed off the lip of their helmets and down their shirt collars, soaking the three GIs to the bone.
The spinning of the wire reel snapped to a halt as the last turn on the spool played out. “That’s it,” Fanning said. “This is as far as it goes.”
Bogater Boudreau wiped the dripping water from his face and scanned the murky vista below, stopping every few seconds to wipe the rain from his binocular lenses. He couldn’t see much of the Japanese, but he could see enough.
“Well, they ain’t walking anymore, that’s for damn sure,” Boudreau said, “and they ain’t stupid, neither. They’re running like sons of bitches to get out from under that artillery.” He turned his impatient glare on Mukasic and Fanning and asked, “You got that fucking phone hooked up yet?”
“It ain’t working, Corporal,” Teddy Mukasic replied, holding out the handset like an offering of proof. “It’s fucking dead.”
Boudreau snatched the handset away from Mukasic. But Bogater’s turns of the crank brought no more response than Mukasic’s.
“I told you, Corporal…it’s dead,” Mukasic said, sounding oddly satisfied with the sad state of affairs.
“It’s the fucking rain,” Boudreau said, sending mud flying in all directions as he stamped his feet in fury. “All them splices we had to make in the Jap wire…the rain’s shorting them out. They’re probably all sitting in puddles now. We shoulda hung them up in the trees from the git-go.”
Mukasic and Fanning gave a collective shrug, which infuriated Boudreau all the more.
“We can’t do nothing about that,” Fanning said.
“The hell we can’t,” Boudreau replied. “For starters, you two take the spare phone and start policing that commo line…on the damn double…and get every damn splice high and dry.” Seeing the reluctant expressions on the privates’ faces, he added, “I don’t give a crap if you gotta trace it all the way back to OP Charlie Able. Get moving…NOW!”
Mukasic and Fanning hovered for another few moments—straining their exhausted minds to discover some drier option requiring less effort—and then gave in to the order. They turned and started following the wire back up the mountain, just like they had been told.
“Don’t get no bright ideas about hiding out under a ground sheet until the rain stops, neither,” Boudreau called after them. “If I don’t have communications with OP Charlie Able in about one-zero minutes or less, it’ll be your asses.”
With each passing minute, John Worth grew more certain the L4 would run out of gas before reaching Twenty Mile Airfield. Even if they did make the field, they might never know it: the rain was cutting the visibility down to almost nothing. The view through the windshield was a watery blur. The side windows were somewhat clear, but even from their low altitude, wide swaths of the ground were still indistinct in the mist.
Worth said, “If I don’t hit the field dead on…” He didn’t bother finishing the sentence. There was no need; he and Jock were both well aware wh
at would happen if they couldn’t find it.
“That would be a real raw deal, too,” Worth added, “seeing as how we’ve been flying over enemy territory all morning and nobody even shot at us, near as I can tell.”
“Oh, I’m sure somebody tried, John. He just didn’t aim good enough.”
Jock was trying to navigate from the map, but there were no usable landmarks. Every feature of the terrain below seemed dissolved in the storm’s gray mist. Suddenly—out the left window—there was a landmark he wasn’t expecting at all. There was the unmistakable shape of aircraft—American P-39 fighters, from what he could tell—scattered on a patch of open ground below. “I think I found it, John,” he said. “Check left.”
“Holy shit,” Worth said, truly surprised. “Those fighter jocks really did show up. Let’s go join the party…before we make another silent entrance.”
He banked the L4 into a tight, descending half-circle. No sooner had Worth leveled her out, her tires began to slosh along the sodden runway. As she rolled to a quick, mud-assisted stop, Jock counted the parked P-39s: there were seven parked against the trees at the field’s periphery. They taxied past an eighth fighter mired at the end of the runway, its nose and one wingtip rumpled and plowed deep into the soft, wet earth.
“Gear collapse,” Worth explained. “Like I said, that type doesn’t do soggy fields real well. How many did you say you counted, sir?”
“Eight, counting the wreck over there.”
“That’s only two flights’ worth. There was supposed to be three. Wonder what happened to them?”
She rolled to her parking spot and Worth shut the engine down. Once outside the airplane and sheltered beneath the high wing from the rain, he looked up at the low, opaque sky and said “I think we’re done for a while, sir.”
A resigned smile on his face, Jock replied, “You wouldn’t kid me, would you, Lieutenant?”
After what he had been through this morning, the studied inactivity that greeted Jock at Division HQ was too much to take. Senior officers—in dry uniforms untouched by the morning rain—huddled over maps and spoke in sweeping generalities of troop maneuvers more imagined than real.
To someone who had been looking down on the battlefield little more than an hour ago, the HQ’s big situation map was hopelessly inaccurate. “The Aussies are a good two miles closer to Port Moresby,” Jock said, sketching a more accurate line on the map with his finger, “and I estimate several battalions—perhaps as much as a regiment—of Japanese have pulled back from contact with us”—his hand made a big sweep across the map—“to about here. I called for fire on them from the plane. The artillery—ours and the Aussies—ought to be shelling the shit out of them right now.”
But the sound of big guns firing—a low rumble even heavy rainfall couldn’t mask—was completely absent.
The G3 began his reply with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Once you had to fly away, we had no observers tracking the target. We ceased fire so as not to waste rounds.”
“What about Astrolabe? There are two OPs up there.”
“They can’t see a damned thing, Major.” the G3 replied. “Weather, you know.”
Yeah…tell me about the weather.
The situation map told another surprising story: it showed no American unit had moved forward to exploit the weakening Japanese line they now faced.
“We tried,” the G3 said, annoyed at having to explain, “but we ran into very stiff resistance once again…and even if we could advance, we couldn’t go very far until this rain stops. The artillery vehicles will bog down if they try to move…and then nobody will have fire support.”
Jock leveled his glare at the Air Force liaison officer. “When can we expect some support from those P-39s that finally showed up?”
“Can’t fly,” the Air Force officer snapped. “The weather’s below minimums. And the squadron isn’t ready to go fully operational, anyway.”
Jock asked, “What does that mean?”
“It means, Major, that none of their ground support personnel have arrived yet. Those planes require a lot of maintenance. It’s not safe for them to fly without it.”
“Really?” Jock replied, feigning shock. “What about the crew of mechanics who are doing a hell of a job keeping our L4 in the air?”
“They’re not trained on the P-39.”
“Maybe it’s time they learned,” Jock said. “And by the way, I only counted eight planes…and one of them is already badly damaged. Where’s the other four?”
“They didn’t make it.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m not sure. We know that flight left Australia…but they never got here. We don’t know where they are.”
“In other words, one third of our Air Force direct support is missing before it even gets here,” Jock said, and then poured on the sarcasm as he added, “Ain’t that great?”
The G3 had had enough of Jock’s pointed questions. Adding his own dose of sarcasm, he said, “Speaking of missing, Major Miles, I see your Japanese Headquarters at Port Moresby seems to have vanished into thin air.” The colonel was taking great pleasure in erasing the red flag that symbolized that headquarters from the situation map. “Perhaps it was just your imagination, Major,” he added.
“Negative, sir,” Jock replied. “I know what I saw. The Japanese aren’t fools. They know they were spotted, so they moved. We just don’t know where yet.”
The G3 went back to shuffling the papers on his desk; Jock had no doubt he was being dismissed in every sense of the word. Without looking up, the colonel said, “Very well, Major. Just be sure to let us know if that phantom headquarters of yours pops up again.”
Jock stepped outside the HQ tent and let the rain cleanse his spirit. He needed to be back in the air again, where he could at least do some good. The weather forecast wasn’t optimistic, though: there would be no flying for the rest of this day.
It was nearly an hour before Bogater Boudreau’s field telephone rang. It was Teddy Mukasic on the line.
“Honest, Corporal,” Mukasic pleaded, “we ain’t been goldbricking. This line is really fucked up. We’re about a mile down the trail, and we’ve been hanging the splices up in the trees to keep them dry. There’s still more trouble farther down the line, though…I can’t raise OP Charlie Able at all.”
Boudreau kicked the ground and sent a plume of mud high in the air. “Shit,” he said, “ain’t no big rush now. I can’t see any fucking Japs no more anyway.” He sighed and then told Mukasic, “Keep at it, even if you gotta fix that line all the way back to Charlie Able. One more thing…if you do get all the way there, make fucking sure you bring me back a couple of ration boxes. I’m starving out here.”
Chapter Forty-Four
Day 15
By suppertime, the rain had stopped. There were a few hours of daylight left; every officer in 32nd Division knew their excuses for not advancing were drying up as fast as the Papuan mud. Visibility was no longer an issue, either. Even the sun descending in the evening sky cast plenty of light for military operations—but not enough for another recon flight. His pilot was game, but by the time Jock got to Twenty Mile Airfield and they got airborne, the long shadows of day’s end would already be casting much of the ground in the cover of darkness.
Still, Jock told himself, I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit around this HQ tent with my thumb up my ass like the rest of this staff, pretending to be doing work of monumental importance.
The G3’s order came like a gift from heaven: “Major Miles, we think tomorrow’s big push will be spearheaded by Eighty-Second Regiment. I want you to go down there and liaise with them…Make sure they’re getting all the support they need from Division.”
Jock was packed up and in his jeep in less than two minutes. He didn’t even bother waiting for his driver. Funny thing is, Jock thought, the colonel thinks he’s screwing me over with this little liaison assignment, like it’s some shit detail. Fat lot he knows.
; Astrolabe no longer had its head in the clouds. Bogater Boudreau reeled his phone line back up to the peak at The Notch. Despite the clear view he once again had of the terrain below, he couldn’t see anything other than the occasional vehicle. All the troops—American, Japanese, and Australian—seemed to be lying low.
He wasn’t at the peak five minutes when his field telephone sounded its muted ring; it was Teddy Mukasic, calling from OP Charlie Able. It had taken all afternoon—and over six miles of walking and working in the rain—but he and Fanning had finally gotten the phone line to the Notch operational again.
“Ain’t that hot shit,” Boudreau said with a laugh. “Good job…Now you two better hurry up and get your asses back here before dark. I’m getting lonely out here. And don’t y’all dare forget my food, y’hear?”
Lieutenant Grossman came on the line, asking if he could see any troop dispositions from his location.
“No, sir,” Boudreau replied, “it looks about as quiet as church down there.”
All in all, It hadn’t been a bad first day for Blamey’s Australians. The general stood on high ground overlooking the town of Port Moresby, little more than a mile to the east. In the fading light of dusk, it looked like a ghost town to him. His troops had gone far enough for one day. Tomorrow, they’d begin taking back the town.
One question still bothered him, though: Just where the hell are all the Japanese? After the near disaster at the passes exiting the beach, the Aussie advance had been uncontested. They had only encountered a handful of Japanese—scouts, probably—and those had been easily dispatched. But he knew the night could bring a whole different equation:
I can’t just sit back and wait for the little bastards to sneak up on us in the dark. All those troops that Yank spotter plane said were coming our way…they’ve got to be out there somewhere. The only way to be prepared is to patrol aggressively tonight.
Operation Long Jump (Jock Miles WW2 Adventure Series Book 2) Page 29