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By Root 1172 0

shipped seven miles along the north coast in landing craft, to a beach in the midst of Carigara Bay. There, they offloaded without opposition, and began marching into the hills. Three days later they took up position on Kilay Ridge, a nine-hundred-foot elevation which commanded much of the surrounding countryside, and provided vital flanking support for American operations on Breakneck Ridge. The battalion remained on Kilay until 4 December, in almost continuous contact with the Japanese. Clifford’s men were isolated, dependent for supply on Filipino porters and spasmodic airdrops. They suffered much, but held their ground. During one firefight, Clifford himself was visiting a company headquarters where he found a man wounded in the thigh, unable to walk. The colonel carried the casualty a mile on his own back over a mountain trail to his command post. On leave in the U.S. shortly before, Clifford was detained by military police without his dogtags, and accused of impersonating an officer. Now he received a Distinguished Service Cross for outstanding leadership.

Conditions on Kilay Ridge were never less than dreadful. “Rained all night and still raining hard,” medical officer George Morrissey wrote on 20 November “…The ground is a deep gooey churned mixture of mud, urine, faecal matter, garbage. The floor of our aid station is three inches deep with caked mud.” He described the terror of his helpless patients when shooting came close. It became especially hard to treat men when mud-stained fragments of clothing were blown into their wounds. So tenuous were the battalion’s communications that it took three days to move each casualty to a first-surgery facility. Some did not make it, despite the devotion of their Filipino carriers. Morrissey noted bleakly that the yearning to go home, common to every man in the Pacific theatre, was replaced in those days by a much more modest ambition—to get off Kilay. On 26 November, he wrote: “No loud talking or laughing352 around here these days. People converse in low voices, as at the bedside of a sick patient…Platoons have twelve to fifteen men at most…The mortality among our good non-coms has been very high…These are jittery days.”

They drank from potholes of milky water, and in the deep darkness of the nights cursed the bats which flew in thousands around their heads. There was no mail, and often they felt abandoned by their higher formation. Clifford explained by radio his difficulties with sick and hungry men, the Japanese crowding them. Corps headquarters shrugged: “You are in a tough spot.” The colonel was finally reduced to threatening: “Either you give us artillery or I’m going to pull my men off the ridge and leave the Japs looking down your throat.” The battalion got its gunfire support. Each morning, Morrissey viewed with disgust the heap of soaked, slashed, stinking clothing and dirty bandages lying outside the aid station to be burned. A sick call produced a queue of a hundred men, most suffering inflamed feet or fever. The doctor grew wearily accustomed to the cry: “Will you look at my feet? Will you look at my feet?” The 1/34th was relieved on 4 December, and made its weary way down to the coast. Clifford had lost 28 killed and 101 wounded, but his battalion could boast one of the most impressive performances of the campaign.

Other units suffered almost as badly in the November actions. “These bearded, mud-caked soldiers came out of the mountains exhausted and hungry,” said a 24th Division report on the experience of the 2/19th Infantry. “Their feet were heavy, cheeks hollow, bodies emaciated and eyes glazed.” When they left the line 241 officers and men—about a third of the battalion—were immediately hospitalised with skin disorders, foot ulcers, battle fatigue and exhaustion. “The men looked ten or fifteen353 years older than their ages,” wrote Kansan Captain Philip Hostetter, medical officer of the 1/19th Infantry. “They spoke little and moved slowly. There was no joking or horseplay.” Hostetter consigned three exhausted company commanders to hospital.

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