The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [1]
Captain Roger Keast: Second-in-command Wairopi Patrol, and Commanding Officer Antitank Company
Captain John Shirley: Commanding Officer Company I 3rd Battalion 126th Infantry Regiment
Captain Meredith Huggins: Operations Officer (S-3) 3rd Battalion 126th Infantry Regiment
Lieutenant Peter Dal Ponte: Commanding Officer Service Company 3rd Battalion 126th Infantry Regiment
Lieutenant Hershel Horton: Platoon Commander Company I 3rd Battalion 126th Infantry Regiment
Father Stephen Dzienis: Chaplain 126th Infantry Regiment
Lieutenant Lester Segal: Physician assigned to Wairopi Patrol
Major Simon Warmenhoven: Regimental Surgeon, 126th Infantry Regiment. Served on both Sanananda and Buna Fronts
Author’s Note
IN 1884 THE ISLAND of New Guinea was partitioned by three Western powers. The Dutch claimed the western half (it was handed over to Indonesia in November 1969 and is now called the province of Papua, formerly Irian Jaya), and the Germans and British divided the eastern half. The southern section of the eastern half became a British protectorate (British New Guinea Territory) and passed to Australia in 1906 as the Territory of Papua. The northern section formed part of German New Guinea, or Kaiser-Wilhelmsland. During World War I, it was occupied by Australian forces and in 1920 was mandated to Australia by the League of Nations. It became known as the Territory of New Guinea.
Although the Battles of Buna and Sanananda took place in the Territory of Papua, because people generally refer to the island as New Guinea, I do, too, in order to avoid potentially confusing distinctions.
Introduction
NEW GUINEA WAS an unlikely place in which to wage a war for world domination. It was an inhospitable, only cursorily mapped, disease-ridden land. Almost no one—not the elite units of the Japanese forces that invaded New Guinea’s north coast in July 1942, not the Australian Imperial Forces or its militia, and maybe least of all the U.S. Army’s 32nd “Red Arrow” Division—was prepared for what military historian Eric Bergerud calls “some of the harshest terrain ever faced by land armies in the history of the war.”
In New Guinea, exhaustion and disease pushed armies to the breaking point. Losses to malaria alone were crippling. Sixty-seven percent of the 14,500 American troops involved in the battles for Buna and Sanananda contracted the disease. On the Sanananda Front, casualties due to malaria were over 80 percent.
The suffering was enormous on all sides. For the Americans, it could have been alleviated, at least initially, by better planning. But eventually the topography and climate would still have exacted a terrible toll.
By the time the Red Arrow men arrived in New Guinea in September 1942, U.S. Marine troops were already fighting a brutal, well-documented land battle at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. The marines had a superbly oiled publicity machine that kept them in the spotlight. The 32nd Division’s soldiers fighting in New Guinea felt forgotten. The American public, in particular, suffered from the misperception that except for Guadalcanal, the South Pacific was a naval war with a few insignificant ground operations thrown in for good measure. By October 1944, they knew that General Douglas MacArthur, who had fled the Philippines, had returned two and a half years later, keeping his promise. But they had little idea of what went on in the interim, which is to say that they had scant knowledge of the land war in New Guinea. Americans’ lack of interest revealed a geographical ignorance. The European front—and the exception of Guadalcanal—they could comprehend. The vast blue Pacific with its obscure island nations remained a mystery.
Yet the fighting on the island of New Guinea—especially the early confrontations at Buna and Sanananda—was every bit as fierce as that at Guadalcanal. General Robert Eichelberger, who would assume command of the 32nd, wrote that in New Guinea, “Everything favored the enemy.”
Casualties at Buna, in fact, were considerably higher than at