The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [117]
“It hit the kidney,” Boet said to his friend. “It’s a bad deal.”
“Hell no,” Smith replied. “I’m alive.”
Boet then summoned four native litter bearers and instructed them to carry the major to the portable hospital.
Lacking the equipment to treat him, the doctors at the portable hospital sent him on to the Evacuation Hospital. At the Evac Hospital, doctors stripped Smith and threw his putrid clothes and shabby boots into a fire. When they put him on a scale Smith was astonished by the weight he had lost. He was down to 138 pounds. At six feet three inches that meant he was nothing but skin and bones. After they had picked the metal fragments out of his back, they confirmed Boet’s diagnosis: Smith’s kidney had been damaged. They would have to get him back to Port Moresby and on to Australia as soon as possible.
That evening, a dull pain settled into Smith’s side. The carriers lay him in a makeshift cot, which they had fashioned using poles lashed together with a webbing of bush vines. Smith felt self-conscious. Around him, badly injured soldiers lay in their cots groaning. His wound was much worse than he knew.
Word was sent forward to the companies of the 2nd Battalion that Smith had been seriously injured, but probably would recover. Gus Bailey must have been relieved to hear that. He liked Smith as much as Smith liked him. How often would you find a battalion commander out front leading his men into battle? It was the exact principle that Bailey had adhered to: Never ask a man to do something you won’t do yourself. Anyway, Bailey was glad that he would not have to mark Smith down in his journal in which each day he recorded the names of G Company men and battalion officers killed in battle.
Captain Jim Boice took over for Smith, and his first order was to direct a platoon under the command of Lieutenant Odell to try to creep or shoot its way to the beach. No attempt had been made to reinforce Bottcher and his troops, and they were struggling to hold on. Boice realized that to lose the beach would set the American effort back three weeks.
Odell’s task was to get to the beach and then to extend Bottcher’s line to the sea. In the process he would have to destroy two enemy outposts: one not far from Bottcher and his men, the other in the direction of the village. Odell and twelve men made it to Bottcher without a fight, then threw grenades at the nearest outpost. When no one fired back, they went to investigate, running part of the way and then dropping to their bellies and crawling. Odell led the way. When they reached the pillbox, they discovered a number of Japanese soldiers either dead or dying, and bayoneted them all.
Next, they moved on the second outpost. Not far down, they encountered fifteen Japanese soldiers huddled in a shallow trench. Using English, one of the Japanese soldiers shouted that he and his men were prepared to surrender. Odell suspected a hoax. Without responding to the Japanese soldier’s request, he and his men rushed the trench, shot and bayoneted the enemy soldiers, and then closed in on the village. From the village, machine guns answered. Odell had now lost the element of surprise. He and his men retreated to the first outpost near Bottcher’s Corner where they set up another machine gun.
They had just settled into foxholes when Japanese soldiers from Buna Government Station fired on them. The bullets were zipping over their heads. “It was quite a sensation,” according to Odell, “stretched out in a foxhole (8 inches deep in water…) watching the leaves of the trees and bushes above your head rapidly assuming the appearance of cheese cloth.”
Odell was plastered against the sand wall of his foxhole waiting for the firing to subside when fifty screaming enemy soldiers attacked firing rifle grenades. One of Odell’s men raked the beach with the machine gun and stopped the assault. For the next few hours, Japanese soldiers crawled around the perimeter. Just after sunset,