The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [109]
Major General Tsuyuo Yamagata, who had just landed with five hundred troops north of Basabua at the mouth of the Kumusi River, warned his men of the situation at the front. The battlefield, he said, was a “continuous swampland…devoid of supplies.” The health situation was also extremely bad. “Until now,” he continued, “conditions as severe as these have been unheard of during the China and Greater East Asia conflict.” Then he urged the men on, adding, “I have not the slightest doubt that you will conquer hardships and privation and that with one blow you will annihilate the blue-eyed enemy and their black slaves which will be the key to the completion of the Southern operations.”
Veteran troops who had made the long retreat from Ioribaiwa confirmed Yamagata’s appraisal. Although they had fought in the Singapore, Malay, and Bataan campaigns, they had never seen a worse battlefield. Reaching the coast, they discovered that Japanese doctors were ill equipped to care for them. Hospital conditions were deplorable. Sick and wounded soldiers were forced to lie on straw mats outside the overcrowded hospital. Reeking swamp water had seeped into the wards, causing clothes, bedding, and medical supplies to mold, rot, or rust. Those doctors who had not been forced into infantry duty had almost no medicine to treat patients. They performed operations without anaesthetic. The very ill were simply left to die.
For those suffering from malnutrition, there was little food to nurse them back to health. The detachment supply officer gave orders to slaughter the remaining horses. For many of the sickest soldiers, though, the meat was of no help. For the past month they had eaten anything they could—leaves, grass, roots, dirt, even their leather rifle straps. Now their digestive systems were incapable of processing regular food. According to one Japanese journalist, many of them “vomited blood and died.”
General Horii’s section leader, who penned agonized diary entries from Ioribaiwa Ridge, now turned his attention to the Imperial army’s disintegration. “Thinking reinforcements will come,” he wrote in late November, “we have waited every night…. As the battle stretches from day to day the number of men killed and wounded increases. The patients are all collapsing. We don’t know how great our losses are…but we are holding out, hoping for a miracle. In the meantime…we find that our Bn Comdrs and Coy Comdrs have all been hiding in trenches under trees and not one has come out.”
On the evening of December 3 he wrote, “Parents! Wife! Brother and Sister! I have fought with all my strength. I believe by all means that the violent efforts of BASA (Basabua) Garrison will be handed down to posterity…. But now my fighting strength is weakened and I am about to expose my dead body on the seashore of BASA. My comrades have already died, though my heart is filled with joy because I can become the guardian spirit of my country. I will fight and crush the enemy. I will protect the seashore of BASA forever.”
First Lieutenant Jitsutaro Kamio expressed many of the same sentiments. On November 30, he wrote in his diary, “Even though there is little to eat a warrior must bear it.” A day later he wrote, “Human beings must die once. I only ask for a good place to die.”
West of the Girua River at the oval-shaped clearing that had already become known as the “roadblock,” Captains Keast and Shirley were barely hanging on. The American position on the track was a precarious one. Two hundred fifty yards long by 150 yards wide, and only 300 yards south of a Japanese position on the track, the roadblock represented the only high, open ground for what might have been miles. Though the Americans were dug in, Japanese snipers tucked into the tops of trees had clear shots, and the dense undergrowth made them vulnerable to surprise attacks. Isolated nearly a mile behind