Chapter 13

A POOR MAN’S WAR

WITH NO SHORTAGE OF bad news coming from the front, MacArthur’s publicity team in Port Moresby was busy creating a message that had almost no basis in reality. The same day the 126th arrived at Soputa, MacArthur’s communiqué read, “Our ground forces have rapidly closed in now and pinned the enemy down on the narrow coastal strip from Buna to Gona. We are fighting on the outskirts of both places.”

As if convinced by his own PR, MacArthur issued orders calling for a full-scale advance on the Buna-Sanananda-Gona Front early the following morning. “All columns,” he said, were to be “driven through to objectives regardless of losses.” The message that General Harding received from MacArthur read: “Take Buna Today At All Costs. MacArthur.”

Harding could not believe his eyes. His 128th was up against thousands of Japanese troops, blistering fire, log bunkers, and a huge swamp that limited his army’s mobility. His 126th had been stolen from him. He had no artillery and he was dealing with a supply crisis. His luggers and trawlers had been sunk off Hariko, and the Dobodura airstrip was not yet fully functional. He was operating on what he called a “hand-to-mouth, catch-as-catch-can basis.” It was not the way to run a war, much less win it.

As if the terrain was not tough enough, equipment failures made his problems worse. Radios used by mortar platoons to coordinate firing did not work. Because of their short fuses, the few 81 mm mortars that made it to the front had almost no effect on the Japanese bunkers because they blew up on impact. Harding was also to have received a number of tanks, but Murphy’s Law prevailed—when the tanks were loaded onto barges at Oro Bay, the barges sank. Harding had no options but to take the bunkers out “by hand.”

Harding was also deeply concerned about casualties. In just three days of fighting, he had lost sixty-three men, and in one day of fighting alone, a single battalion suffered forty-one killed and wounded. Now MacArthur wanted him to take Buna regardless of the costs. Harding knew that if he followed orders he would be sentencing hundreds of Red Arrow soldiers to a certain death. “I know as well as anybody that you can’t win battles without getting a lot of people hurt,” Harding wrote in his diary. “But I also know…that infantry can’t break through an automatic weapons defense without first knocking out the automatic weapons. Anyone who knows his World War stuff knows that.” What Harding did next was to tell his officers that they were to push the offensive only as long as the progress they made justified the losses. Progress in the jungle, though, was tough to calculate. Was it a hundred feet, two hundred? Harding let his officers be the judges. He would accept the responsibility for defying MacArthur’s orders.

After three days of disappointment, General Harding needed good news, and it came with a pick-me-up late in the day on November 21. After the loss of his 126th Regiment, Harding had been troubled about the state of his left flank, and practically begged Lieutenant General Edmund Herring to return a portion of his men. Having taken over for General Rowell, who had been dismissed by Blamey in late September, Herring was now commander of all Australian and American forces in New Guinea. Herring agreed to Harding’s request and instructed General Vasey to pick a battalion to turn over to Harding for action east of the Girua River. For Vasey it was an easy choice: He selected Major Smith’s 2nd Battalion, the Ghost Mountain boys, who everyone seemed to agree had been done in by their 130-mile march across the Papuan Peninsula.

Smith’s men were weary and filthy, and their dirty uniforms hung loosely on their gaunt frames. They looked more like haggard Depression-era hobos than fighting men. But at least Harding had another battalion with which to work.

Early on the morning of November 22, Colonel Tomlinson pulled Smith aside.

“Good luck, Herbie,” Tomlinson said, “and get the hell out of here before the bastards change their mind.”

Smith took Tomlinson’s warning to heart and he and his men double-timed it for the Girua River crossing.

By late morning the 2nd Battalion was at the riverbank. It had only been a few days since they last forded it, but during that interval, fed by recent rains, the river had risen dangerously. Someone volunteered to swim the hundred yards and run a cable across the river, but moving the battalion across the river even with the use of the cable was a risky proposition. If surprised by a Japanese patrol while attempting to cross, they would be defenseless.

The battalion’s luck held, however, and by evening Smith’s men crossed the Girua without a single mishap. But if any of them had convinced themselves that their fortunes had changed, they soon discovered otherwise. Smith’s orders were to join the 2nd Battalion of the 128th Infantry Regiment at the Triangle. Of all the Japanese strongholds, the Triangle may have been the most impenetrable. For a group of men that had already undergone a seeming lifetime of misery, this was the worst possible assignment.

Along with naval pioneer troops, Captain Yasuda had over eighteen hundred men defending the Triangle. Yasuda had a series of superbly hidden machine gun positions south and north of the Triangle on the Dobodura-Buna track, the only man-made route to the Buna coast. In the Triangle itself, Japanese engineers had built an elaborate system of bunkers. In the Coconut Grove and Government Gardens just to the north and northeast of the Triangle, the engineers had designed more bunkers. Everything else was covered in swamp.

Smith and his Ghost Mountain Battalion reached the Triangle on the morning of November 23, and learned that the two battalions would come under the heading of Urbana Force (named after I Corps commander General Robert Eichelberger’s Ohio hometown) to be commanded by another Smith—Colonel Herbert A. Smith.

Thirty-nine days after leaving Nepeana on the other side of the mountains, Stutterin’ Smith’s Ghost Mountain boys were about to be blooded.

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West of the Girua River on the Sanananda Front, Colonel Tomlinson was being asked to lead an attack despite the fact that he had just lost Stutterin’ Smith and the 2nd Battalion. He was now in command of only fourteen hundred troops, which included only one full battalion—the 3rd Battalion of the 126th Infantry Regiment.

Tomlinson’s troops spent the last week in November trying to get in position to establish a roadblock behind the main enemy position on the Sanananda track. His troops, their faces smeared with green camouflage paint, took to the swamps to the west and east of the track, but with little training in patrolling, inaccurate maps, and no lateral trails, they often lost their bearings. Colonel Tsukamoto and hundreds of fresh 144th Infantry replacements, relying on savage nighttime raids, caught Tomlinson’s tired, disoriented troops off guard. Casualties were heavy.

While Tomlinson’s troops tried to work in behind the Japanese, William Hirashima strove to make himself useful. He went out on patrols where he risked being shot by soldiers from both sides. Japanese snipers wanted to shoot him because he wore an American uniform and Americans would shoot him because he looked Japanese. Hirashima also negotiated with a wounded Japanese machine gunner who was stranded in a field. To do that, he had to walk out ahead of the frontline troops. He was completely exposed and only sixty yards separated him from the Japanese soldier. He could have been gunned down before he had a chance to utter his first word.

Hirashima shouted to the soldier. Was he willing to surrender? Just then a shot rang from the jungle. A Japanese sniper had spotted him. Hirashima dove into a nearby trench. He waited for a few minutes before crawling out. It had been a close call, but Colonel Tomlinson still wanted him to try to talk with the machine gunner. To take a prisoner so early in the battle would be a real stroke of luck; who knew what they might learn?

Hirashima agreed to try again. Seeing ahead of him a little rise, he decided to make for it. It would be dangerous, but the soldier needed to be able to hear him. Half expecting to hear a crack from the jungle and to feel a bullet tear into his belly, he stood on top of the rise and tried to coax the machine gunner out of hiding, saying he would be treated kindly. The soldier, though, was reluctant. Surrender was the ultimate disgrace.

Just then another shot ripped through the trees. Hirashima threw himself to the ground. He had been lucky; the sniper had missed again. No more pushing it though—the third bullet was bound to find its mark.

That day Hirashima thought he had proved his loyalty, but he still wondered if his fellow soldiers trusted him. Guys muttered under their breath: Whose side was he on? They better watch their backs. He looked like a goddamn Jap.

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Captain Medendorp’s Cannon and Antitank Companies, which were considered to be part of Tomlinson’s fourteen hundred men, were in the vicinity of Wairopi. Since crossing the mountains, they had spent the last month in the Kumusi River valley on what Medendorp called “hell raising” patrols, essentially guerilla activity that, according to Medendorp, consisted of “playing hide and seek with the Japs.” Medendorp was still suffering from a badly ulcerated leg and in the past few weeks he had been racked by malarial fevers. His men were no better off. The “sick,” he wrote, “were struggling along with their arms thrown over the shoulders of friends walking on each side of them.” There was no time for them to recuperate, though. Tomlinson was in need of men.

Before Medendorp began marching toward the Sanananda Front, he and Captain Keast paid off the native carriers and scouts who had so ably assisted them on their patrols. Medendorp wrote later, “The parting was very sad.”

Medendorp’s consolation was that he and Keast had been reunited. Medendorp later wrote, “It was a greater pleasure than I can tell you to see Roger again when I climbed up that last hill into the village. He was smiling from behind his beard.” Waiting for his knee to mend, Keast had been tending the dropsite at Laruni while Medendorp scouted the Kumusi River valley.

On November 25, Medendorp, Keast, and the Wairopi Patrol began marching, but as they neared the front, Medendorp was slowed by the ulcer on his leg, so Keast went ahead to establish contact with Tomlinson. Moving in the opposite direction, however, away from the battlefield, were groups of natives “carrying stretcher after stretcher” of wounded Americans. It was an unnerving sight for Medendorp’s troops. Among the wounded they recognized friends. The natives, straining and sweating under their loads, treated the casualties with great compassion. Medendorp would later write, “There was no jostling. It was a symphony of movement. If the wounded man was too far gone to hold a banana leaf to shade his eyes from the sun…then a native walked behind a stretcher holding a broad leaf over the man’s eyes…. Their [the natives’] shoulders were sore and bandaged, and fatigue showed on their blank faces, still they trudged on like a stream of ants.”

Soon, the Wairopi Patrol heard rifle and machine gun fire, the explosions of mortars and “high overhead the soft sigh of…shells on their way to blast the enemy.” It was “sweet music” to Medendorp. But the Japanese were returning fire, too. When that noise “developed a lower pitch and became harsh and severe, like a buzz saw going through a knot,” Medendorp knew it was time to dive for cover.

Medendorp finally reached Tomlinson’s command post. Keast informed him that after a series of setbacks—just two days before they had lost more than a hundred men killed or wounded—Colonel Tomlinson, a hard-nosed West Pointer, had scheduled his largest attack yet for the morning of November 30. Medendorp was relieved by the news of the delay. He and his men badly needed a day of rest.

The day before the attack, Colonel Tomlinson pulled aside Medendorp and Keast to discuss plans for the following day’s attack. Tomlinson’s shirt was streaked with sweat and salt. He had large rings under his armpits and a skunk-like band that ran from his neck to the small of his back.

“There’s only about half a dozen Japs out there,” Tomlinson roared. “Three of those have dysentery and the other three fever! They move one machine gun from place to place. Our men are green, and they think that every bullet has their name on it. We must teach them to keep on advancing as long as they are not exactly being fired at. After hitting the ground they must learn to get up and get along. Now get in there and do your part in cleaning them out, or I’ll just have to tell the Australian general in command on this front that our regiment cannot accomplish its mission.”

Neither Medendorp nor Keast knew what to make of Tomlinson or his speech. They had had almost no contact with the new colonel. Quinn had been their regimental commander, the leader they loved, but Quinn was now buried in a grave in the misty mountains. Who was Tomlinson kidding, trying to convince them that they were up against only a skeleton force? They had seen the wounded Allies being carried from the front.

“It won’t be any pushover tomorrow,” Keast said, when he and Medendorp left Tomlinson.

Medendorp’s account of Tomlinson’s speech was infused with sarcasm: “Properly impressed with the necessity of giving the enemy a killing, we started out on the half-day march to get into position.”

As the men were assembling, Father Stephen Dzienis paid the soldiers a visit. By now Dzienis had proved himself. He had earned Medendorp’s respect on the long, cold journey from Camp Livingston, Louisiana, to Fort Devens, Massachusetts, when instead of going by troop train he went with Medendorp in an unheated army-issue truck with a canvas top and side curtains. More recently, he had volunteered to march across the mountains with the 2nd Battalion. Never again would he be thought of as a pampered chaplain.

Dzienis had a great field of a beard. As always, he was filled with spirit and good cheer, though his legs, Medendorp noticed, were a “mass of running sores.” At one point, Dzienis pulled Medendorp aside. “Be sure,” he winked, “to use plenty of hand grenades, Skipper. They’re buried up to their eyebrows.”

Medendorp carried Tomlinson’s orders for the attack in his pocket. When he and Keast got to the front, Medendorp turned them over to the battalion’s executive officer, who scratched out a diagram of the plan in the soft, black jungle humus. The orders called for Medendorp and Keast to attack eastward from the left flank on November 30. Another group of men would attack head on, and one would advance from the right. The goal of the attack was to establish a roadblock north of the main Japanese position on the Soputa-Sanananda track.

“We’ll get those bastards,” Captain John D. Shirley assured the battalion XO after the meeting. “Tomorrow, we’ll get those bastards.”

Captain John D. Shirley was from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and he and Medendorp had been inducted together as second lieutenants in the National Guard. Shirley pointed to a position just down the track where a platoon commanded by Lieutenant Hershel Horton was set up, and volunteered to escort his old friend and Keast there. Medendorp gladly accepted.

“Shirley was a bundle of energy,” Medendorp would later write. “Every move he made was on the double. I couldn’t keep up with him, for I had already been in the jungle for two months. I could get where it was necessary to go, but couldn’t put out any spurts of energy. The trail to Horton’s position led through kunai grass. Shirley bent forward and ran along like a pheasant.”

It was not the first time Medendorp realized just how hard he had pushed himself in the last two months. But he and his men were in the same boat—they were all weary, even the youngest of the soldiers. Now, trying to keep up with a relatively fresh soldier, it was obvious that he was not up to it. Just what had the last two months done to him? Medendorp knew that he had lost weight, maybe forty pounds, since entering the jungle in early October; he could feel his ribs and his hipbones and the sharp corners of his shoulders. Now only 150 pounds, he tired easily. On the short hike to Lieutenant Horton’s position, he had to stop a number of times to catch his breath. Then there was the ulcer that looked like it might never heal.

Shirley dropped off Medendorp and Keast with Lieutenant Horton. Keast flashed Horton a smile. They had known and competed against each other since their college days when Horton was a track man at Notre Dame.

“Hello Horton. Glad to see you again,” Medendorp said.

“Quiet,” Horton snapped. “And get down.”

Medendorp, Keast, and Horton lay on their bellies like snakes in the sharp three-foot kunai grass. The hot sun beat down on them and the air was thick and wet. Except for the occasional shot, the front was largely silent. Even the birds grew quiet.

Horton, Keast, and Medendorp went over the plans for the following morning.

“This is how it’s gonna happen, boys,” Horton told them. “I’ll fire two shots with my pistol and that will be the signal to begin the attack.”

Keast said, nodding in agreement, “Two shots.”

That night Keast, like the other men, drifted in and out of sleep. He would doze off and then wake with a start, his heart pounding, his head cobwebbed with images. His son Harry moved in and out of his dreams as if he were real. Sometimes, it was as if Keast could reach out and hug him; he would pull Harry in close and hold him in his arms. Awake, his head cleared and his eyes adjusted. All he could see was darkness and the phantom shape of trees. Then the dank smell of the jungle would fill his nostrils, and he would remember where he was.

On the morning of November 30, the men were stretched tighter than piano wires, and smeared in mud with sweat dripping off their foreheads. The combination of salt and dirt clouded and stung their eyes—how in the hell were they supposed to kill Japs when they could hardly see?

In tense whispers, they passed the word down the line.

“Two shots. Listen for ’em. And then we go.”

As they waited, touching their triggers and trying not to hyperventilate, they imagined the various ways they might die. “Keep a tight asshole,” someone said. “Now is not the time to be shittin’ your pants!”

Squinting and adjusting his gaze, Keast tried to make sense of the shapeless jungle. Where was the enemy? All he could see was the morning haze cut by a dim sun, shimmering trees, and in some areas where the 3rd Battalion and the Australians had already clashed with the Japanese, bare patches where trees had been stripped of their leaves.

Lying in the kunai grass waiting for Horton to give the signal, Keast recalled the details of his photographs: Ruth sitting on the running board of the family car holding their baby son; Harry with his perfect doll face, smiling at the world. Where were they now? What were they doing? For a moment he might have dreamed of the future: chasing his sons in the back yard; watching them swing their arms in that exaggerated way kids did when they ran; throwing the football with Harry; seeing Roger Jr. heave a basketball up to a rim, all coiled up, launching the too-big ball with all his might.

Keast’s feet were burning and a dull ache had settled into his knee. The rest in Laruni had helped, but the knee was still weak.

Then, two shots. Gunfire exploded from the line. To pull the trigger after waiting for so long gave the men a giddy sense of release. Soldiers shot in the general direction of the enemy and hoped that their bullets struck flesh. Japanese troops returned fire. The volley was loud, theatrical, but brief. Medendorp heard the sound of empty clips popping out of rifles. He turned to Keast.

“Sure,” he said, “Only half a dozen sick Japs!”

After ten minutes of artillery, with Medendorp assisting Lieutenant Daniels, the Australian Artillery forward observer, in registering the shots, the telephone operator got on the phone. “Guns off,” he said.

Medendorp and Daniels stepped in front of the lines to assess the damage. Company I, under Captain Shirley, was ready now. Company I and the Antitank Company under Captain Keast moved forward supported by fusillade from Medendorp’s men.

“Follow the sun,” Shirley shouted. “Follow the sun.”

Medendorp watched as the “advancing men crawled over wounded and dead.” He was startled by the fury of the Japanese response. They “gave back every bit they received.” The .25 caliber Japanese Arisaka rifles had a peculiar, high-pitched sound—like the “crack of a bull whip.” Each of those cracks was answered by the coarse bark of American .30 caliber M-1 rifles.

While bullets ripped through the jungle and dense kunai grass, Medendorp leaned against a large, rotten tree stump, consulting his compass and trying to get bearings on the Japanese locations. Enemy bullets hit the tree stump, splattering wood chips all around him. Somewhere in the jungle a Japanese Juki machine gunner opened up. Medendorp could tell it was a Juki by its slow, heavy thud.

Just behind the front line, Lieutenant Segal worked, according to Medendorp, “as calmly as in a hospital at home.” His aid station was nothing more than a thatched hut with a mud floor and assistants with flashlights.

On the battlefield soldiers improvised stretchers of balsa wood or split bamboo, wrapped them with telephone wire or denim jackets, and went out to recover the wounded. They had to act fast; it did not take long for open wounds to become infected, even gangrenous. Once off the line, they carried their comrades into slit trenches to protect them from rifle fire and mortar fragments. There, the wounded lay wrapped in dirty, blood-soaked battle dressings until Segal could attend to them. Though Segal was sick himself—over the past two months, Medendorp had watched him grow thinner and paler—he worked mightily to stabilize the wounded before they were carried back to the regimental station. There were times, though, when even a talented medical doctor like Segal was powerless. That is when Father Dzienis took over. Dzienis had buried his first man—Colonel Quinn—at Natunga, surrounded by the mountains and the green solitude of the jungle. Here, he walked along the slit trench, holding his rosary, administering last rites to the dying while the battle raged around him.

Back at the front, Shirley and Keast’s assault was stalled after four hundred yards by withering enemy fire. Notified that the advance had bogged down, the battalion executive officer rushed to the front to rally his troops and led the way across a large kunai field. When the attack slammed up against a wide stretch of swamp through which the Japanese had cut lanes of fire, the jungle vibrated with the sound of machine guns, and the executive officer was killed. Realizing that the only way across the swamp was through the machine gun nests, one of Shirley’s sergeants assembled a patrol—ten men with two automatic rifles, a tommy gun, and a bunch of grenades between them.

As they crept and slithered through the swamp, bullets ripped through the trees and over their heads. The men knew that the Japanese were firing indiscriminately. If the machine gunners actually spotted them, however, it would be like a carnival shoot. The Japanese could wipe them out in a matter of seconds.

When the patrol got within thirty feet of the machine gun nests, the men decided not to push their luck. They rose and tossed their grenades. The barrage stopped.

Seeing their opening, Keast and Shirley drove their men through the Japanese line. When the Japanese retreated, the two captains agreed to rest the troops. They had gained another six hundred yards. In the jungle, where success was measured in double-digit increments, it was a tremendous accomplishment.

Late in the afternoon, as a gray mist settled over the jungle and fruit bats gathered in the darkening sky, Shirley’s scouts located an enemy bivouac off the main Soputa-Sanananda track. Shirley and Keast realized that if they hoped to make a move on the enemy stronghold, they would have to do it before nightfall.

“Fix your bayonets and let’s cut the guts out of them,” Shirley said.

If his men, who had been locked in battle for almost the entire day, were surprised by the order, they should not have been. Shirley’s ferocity was well known. Do or die, he was determined to get the bastards.

Shirley and Keast divided their companies into three platoons and then they led the charge through the jungle.

“Keep moving,” someone yelled out. Giant ferns and vines ripped at their legs. Branches gashed their faces. They did not know where the Japs were until they saw the muzzle flashes, then they hit a solid mass of enemy soldiers. Men fired at each other at point-blank range and slashed and lunged with their bayonets. Blood splattered everywhere. Shirley had hold of a man’s neck, and he could feel the Japanese soldier thrashing under his hands.

When the Japanese defenders scattered, Shirley and Keast wasted no time securing the track. They dug in and placed rifle squads in all directions around the new position. The men were wet with sweat and covered in muck. Their hands were sticky with blood. But they had succeeded, beating the Japanese at their own game. They had established a perimeter three hundred yards to the rear of the Japanese position on the track, and had isolated the enemy’s forward units. But as dusk fell, they realized the precariousness of their own position. Surrounded by Japanese snipers and machine gunners, they were cut off from the main body of the Americans by more than a mile of thick jungle.

Shirley knew he had to get word back to battalion headquarters. “Where the hell is the phone?” he wanted to know. When one of the signalmen confessed that he had left it a hundred yards back in a kunai patch, Shirley ordered him to get it.

News of Shirley’s and Keast’s attack electrified battalion headquarters. But the victory had come at a price. On the way back to the command post, Medendorp saw the graves of the men lost that day. “There were more,” he wrote, “but they were out there between the lines where they could not be gotten.” He heard wounded men crying out and saw corpses already bloated by the heat. That night, a breeze came in off the coast, cooling the jungle. Then, Medendorp said of the unrecovered bodies, “We could smell them.”

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East of the Girua River, as Colonel Smith began moving on the Triangle, he was heartened by the arrival of Major Stutterin’ Smith’s 2nd Battalion.

Smith, too, was happy to be back among familiar faces. The 128th had been his home for more than twenty years. One of the first people he saw was Lieutenant Mack Fradette, an old friend. Fradette was stunned by the condition of Smith and his men. Smith, who had always had problems keeping weight on, was as thin as a cornstalk. He had also just recovered from a bout of malaria. His men all wore long beards and in Fradette’s opinion looked like “walking skeletons.”

As the battalion got settled, Colonel Smith gave Stutterin’ Smith a quick tour of the area. However, the major would have very little time to familiarize himself with the lay of the land; the attack was scheduled for the following day. He must have hesitated for a moment when he saw the battlefield. “Buna,” Smith wrote, “was a nightmare…of jungle…kunai grass higher than a man’s head…and swamps…that rose and fell with the tides…. The Japs had built bunkers” with “excellent fields of fire covering approaches from inland routes…. These bunkers” were “practically invisible.”

That night, Stutterin’ Smith put Lieutenant Odell in charge of a platoon in Company F. Odell was forty pounds lighter than when he had come to New Guinea. Still, he realized that the “hardships thus far encountered were nothing compared with the hell that was to come.”

Just short of midnight on November 23, Colonel Smith and Stutterin’ Smith held a council of war at the colonel’s command post, which was situated along the Soputa-Buna track three-quarters of a mile short of the Triangle. They had already resolved the confusion that might arise from two battalions fighting side by side, each one commanded by a Herbert Smith. Stutterin’ Smith became Red Smith and Colonel Smith was White Smith. They also laid out the plans for the following day’s attack. It would come from three directions and would begin at 0800 with bombing and strafing by American pilots. Before the troops moved out, four 25-pounders, new to the front, would open up on the Triangle.

Despite the plans, both Smiths knew that they would be flying by the seat of their pants. They had no topographical maps of the area and their aerial photographs proved worthless; a large cloud covered the zone in which the attack was supposed to take place.

Dawn came in with a rush and at 0800 the planes appeared. Twelve P-40s strafed the Triangle, but for some reason the bombers never showed. Worse yet, the P-40 pilots completely missed their target. Both Smiths hesitated. They could not possibly send their men into the Triangle now; it would be a suicide mission. They called for more planes, which arrived five hours later—but only four of the twelve they had requested. Rather than firing on the Triangle, though, the four P-40s, unable to identify their targets in the thick foliage, turned their guns on Colonel Smith’s command post.

It was chaos. Men screamed at the top of their lungs and dove into the jungle. “We’re Americans, you stupid bastards! We’re goddamn Americans!”

The strafing stopped as quickly as it had begun. When Major Smith assessed the damage, he was relieved to discover that it had not been as disastrous as he feared. Only one man had been wounded. The Triangle, though, had been untouched.

But there was no turning back. Though fully conscious of the dangers of sending men into the maw of the Triangle, the decision had been made—the attack would go as planned. Both Smiths felt the pressure to push the offensive. According to headquarters in Port Moresby, they were to have taken Buna half a week earlier.

Before the men pushed off, 60 mm mortars fired on the Triangle. From Ango, the 25-pounders with ranges of nearly eight miles boomed. At 2:28 that afternoon the troops jumped off.

On the left, Captain Melvin Schultz and Sergeant Lutjens and the men of Company E swung wide around the Triangle. The night before, after the company received its orders, Lutjens had taken a moment to scribble a few lines in his diary. “God only knows what we are about to face,” he wrote. “If I said I am not afraid I would be a liar. Reread an old letter trying to place myself back in the states. To find something to fight for…I’m afraid of dying as much as anybody else. Maybe life wasn’t so pleasant for me, but God it seems good now. If I don’t come through this it will be God’s will.”

The plan called for Company E to cross Entrance Creek and sneak in behind the Japanese stronghold. Although the 128th’s Company F had made some progress on the left three days before, it took Company E eight hours to advance eight hundred yards across the dense swamp. The men could not see more than ten feet in any direction and they were under strict instructions to hold their fire even if fired at. Their mission was reconnaissance.

Men swore under their breath about how easy it would be for a bunch of Japs to ambush them in the swamp—they were goddamn sitting ducks. A Juki machine gun could wipe them out before they knew what had hit them.

When the first shot rang through the swamp, “everybody,” according to Lutjens, “flopped down and sank his face into the mud. I don’t know exactly how the rest of the guys felt, but it scared the hell out of me. Somebody whispered, ‘That’s a Jap.’”

One guy, who was out on the post, was trying to figure out where the shot had come from. When he reported that it had originated from behind a tree, Lutjens must have shaken his head. Talk about stating the obvious; the swamp was full of trees.

Though neither Lutjens nor Schultz knew it, Company E had stumbled smack into a Japanese outpost. The Japanese were guarding the bridge that spanned Entrance Creek, northwest of the Triangle. Lutjens’ men were scared, but they were not content to stay put. They crept forward. “We all wanted a peek at them [the Japanese],” Lutjens admitted. “After coming all that way, we wanted to see what they looked like.”

Despite their curiosity, Schultz and Lutjens eventually did the prudent thing—they halted the company. Men stood as still as mannequins. As dusk neared, a fog settled over the swamp. The men grew cold and uncomfortable. A few guys decided to light cigarettes to calm their nerves. It was a soldier’s prerogative—if he was going to be miserable, he might as well have a smoke. The Americans might have been short of 81 mm mortar ammunition, but they sure were not short of cigarettes.

According to Lutjens,

The Japs had automatic fire emplaced in coconut trees, and as soon as they saw the matches flare up, they let us have it—not from just in front, but from all sides. We’d walked right into the middle of them. We started to dig in, and I mean quick. Three of us dug a hole in five minutes flat, with our hands. We thought it was all over with. We couldn’t see a thing. The Japs were shooting all around us. They stopped for a while, and by the next morning we were all dug in. They couldn’t spot us too well through the jungle, but every time a man moved, they’d open up. One guy had the tip of his bayonet shot off. He didn’t move a muscle. Nobody fired. I sometimes think it took more guts not to than it would have to shoot back. Then it began to rain. It was a cold, cold rain. We had left our packs behind when we started, and all we had with us was a few rations in our pockets. Then the tide began to come up through our foxholes.

At this, soldiers left their foxholes and leaned against trees while the black water lapped at their waists. The lucky ones found high ground on the outstretched roots of mangroves, which spread over the area like giant spiderwebs. The Japanese, they knew, were fond of fighting at night, but in the belly of the swamp, it hardly mattered, day or night. The sun could not penetrate the ceiling of twisted branches.

Some of the men managed to nod off. Others, like Lutjens, waited hyper-alert, listening for the sucking sound of Japanese scouts slogging through the muck, watching the water for animals—giant long-haired rats, deadly snakes, crocodiles, and rabid, bloodthirsty bats—which they feared almost as much as the Japanese.

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While Company E was stranded in the swamp to the left, Company F, led by Captain Erwin Nummer, and Company H, White Smith’s heavy weapons company, attacked up the middle. It was a scary proposition. Some of the men had fathers who had fought in World War I. From them they had heard grisly stories about attacking a trench system and the carnage that followed. A head-on assault on the Triangle, they feared, would be no different.

They were right. Captain Yasuda was waiting, eager to unleash the full fury of his firepower on anyone who blundered down the trail. Yasuda was supremely confident. He knew that whatever his men could not accomplish, the surrounding swamps would.

After only three hundred yards, the Americans encountered barriers of barbed wire that the Japanese had laid across the track. As they walked up to it to assess their options, the Japanese opened fire. Some of the men were so close, they could taste the gunpowder. Lieutenant Odell hit the ground and rolled off the track into the swamp that flanked it. He and the others had just two options: to dig in or to retreat. Captain Nummer called for a retreat. If they had any hope at all of advancing, they would need engineers with explosives to clear the trail.

In the swamp to the right, White Smith’s men, like Lutjens and company, were trying to work their way behind the Triangle when a large enemy force attacked them. It was a classic Japanese attack—near dusk, the Japanese riflemen unleashed savage yells and bore down on the Americans. Though the Japanese could not have known just how raw and unseasoned the American soldiers were, the reality was that they were up against men who had never before experienced battle. Furthermore, they had caught them off guard. The Americans scrambled to defend themselves, only to have their weapons fail. According to the official report, “[M]ortars fell short because increments [the propelling charges in the mortar ammunition] were wet. Machine guns jammed because web belts were wet and dirty and had shrunk. Tommy guns and BARs were full of muck and dirt, and even the Mls fired well only for the first clip, and then jammed because clips taken from the belts were wet and full of muck from the swamp.”

When their weapons failed, the Americans panicked and fled into the swamp. The following day, White Smith’s company commanders met with him at his command post. Red Smith was on hand for the meeting, too. Outraged that American soldiers would so easily relinquish a position, he wrote later that “Smith should have kicked their fannies right back into the forward positions.”

White Smith, however, saw the situation differently—his men were hungry and exhausted. Besides, he had little faith in the possibility of success on the right. His decision, he wrote, was “to abandon for the time being any action on the right and concentrate on the left…” When he made General Harding aware of his decision, Harding agreed—“the left hand road to Buna” was best. That put the burden of the attack squarely on the shoulders of Stutterin’ Smith’s Ghost Mountain boys.

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