The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [111]
The following day, December 2, a party under the command of Captain Meredith Huggins left the battalion command post a mile back on the track. Five hours later, after dodging enemy snipers, Huggins reached the roadblock’s southern perimeter. In need of ammunition and rations, Shirley was overjoyed to see Huggins, but he had bad news for him: Roger Keast was probably dead.
Huggins had no time to mourn his friend. Just minutes after he arrived, a large Japanese force attacked. According to Johnson, who had seen Keast go down the day before, Shirley was “everywhere,” shouting orders and beating back the enemy. Not long after noon, though, Shirley’s luck ran out. A medic saw him go down, ran to him and dragged him into a trench. Shirley wanted to know how bad his wound was. “You’ll be okay,” the medic lied. According to Johnson, Shirley “just slipped off into death.”
As the highest-ranking officer, Huggins was suddenly in charge of the roadblock. In a matter of seven hours he had gone from a supply man to a battlefield commander. Now, battalion headquarters wanted to know: Could he hold the garrison?
Huggins replied, “I’ll hold that place until hell freezes over.”
Chapter 16
BREAKING THE STALEMATE
BACK AT THE Buna Front, Eichelberger was gearing up for the December 4 attack. After consulting with Colonel John Grose, though, he agreed to postpone the attack, but only by a single day.
Grose had been I Corps inspector general, but now that I Corps was taking over, Eichelberger was replacing Harding’s officers with his own. Grose was an odd choice for a battlefield commander. In a matter of a few days, the colonel went from shuffling papers to leading men.
Grose immediately rubbed the troops the wrong way. According to Stutterin’ Smith, he “arrived like a potentate.”
Grose was taken aback by the condition of the troops, especially Stutterin’ Smith’s men. Some of them, Grose wrote, were on the brink of “nervous exhaustion,” and most of them had fevers, too. Malaria did not keep men off the front lines, either. A soldier’s temperature had to reach 103 degrees before Smith could send him back to an aid station. Smith hated to see sick men going into battle, but he was so shorthanded that he took anyone he could get, fever or not. Searching for troops, he had already stripped the regiment’s Headquarters and Service Companies. Cooks, too, were fighting as riflemen.
At 10:00 on Saturday, December 5, Eichelberger’s attack began with nine B-25 bombers swooping in on Buna Government Station. Artillery and mortars pounded Buna Village. Some of them landed short of the village and burst in the trees just above the heads of Lutjens and his men. Had the shells landed twenty feet shorter, Company E would have been wiped out by friendly fire. Half an hour later, the barrage ended. Then, according to Lutjens, “it was deathly still.”
The troops waded into the jungle. The Japanese were flinging mortars, and Lutjens took cover in an artillery shell hole as rounds crashed through the trees and burst. Shrapnel flew and splinters of wood cut the air. Everywhere around him men lay plastered to the ground in rain puddles.
After waiting out the mortar bombardment, Lutjens and his men were back on their feet. They had advanced only twenty yards when Japanese machine gunners opened up on them. Bullets struck flesh, and six men fell. Blood clouds floated in the air. Then everyone dove for cover, except Sergeant Harold Graber. With his machine gun at his hip, Graber stormed the Japanese. Inspired by Graber