The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [121]
On December 5, while Horton was waiting for his buddies to retrieve him, Lieutenant Pete Dal Ponte led a sixty-man ration and ammunition party through the jungle. Dal Ponte knew he had to reach Huggins. Dal Ponte’s party, though, was not made up of choice riflemen. His men were cooks, clerks, and mortarmen who had been pressed into duty. Each man carried forty pounds of supplies. Though only a mile separated them from the roadblock, Dal Ponte had to contend with hip-deep swamps and Tsukamoto’s troops, who lay dug in like badgers between the American command post and Huggins.
Dal Ponte and his men had not gone far when Tsukamoto’s troops sprung upon them. Despite the heavy loads and their lack of fighting experience, Dal Ponte’s men drove them back, and at one juncture almost penetrated their defense and pushed through close to the southern end of roadblock. But the Japanese rallied and surrounded them. Dal Ponte and his men were fighting for their lives.
Late in the day, Dal Ponte’s party managed to blast its way back to the American command post, limping in with half a dozen casualties and two dead soldiers.
For the next two days, supply parties tried to reach the roadblock, only to be turned away by Japanese fire.
The signalmen, struggling to keep the lines of communication open, had it just as hard—they had never strung wire across a tropical wilderness before. They could not run it along an established trail because as soon as the Japs saw it, they had cut it. So they had to hide it, wading into swamps, risking their lives in the sniper-infested jungle. The signalmen divided into two-man teams. Acting as a lookout, one soldier toted a rifle while the other carried a little reel of braided copper and metal combat wire.
While supply parties tried to push through to Huggins and the signalmen strung and repaired wire, the Australians tried to dislodge Tsukamoto’s forces. They met with no better luck than the Americans. Tsukamoto had positioned his men throughout the jungle, and they subjected the bewildered Australians to a fierce cross fire. After two days of fighting, the Australians counted 350 men dead or wounded. Unable to withstand those kind of casualties, the Australians would not mount another attack for almost two weeks.
Dal Ponte, though, was not to be denied by Tsukamoto’s firepower. He had friends at the roadblock and he knew the situation was desperate. Early in the morning on December 8, he and his party trudged into the jungle determined once again to reach Huggins. Sunlight flickered through branches, cockatoos screeched, and crowned pigeons darted through the trees. Three hundred yards south of the roadblock, the jungle erupted with gunfire. From both sides of the trail, machine gun fire bore down on the men.
Dal Ponte knew they would be mowed down if they could not locate the guns. His plan was a crazy one: He would expose himself to fire while his men got a bead on the machine gunners. His men must have wondered if he had a death wish. He would be cut down in seconds.
Before anyone could stop him, Dal Ponte dashed out from behind a copse of trees. Bullets slapped through the underbrush all around Dal Ponte, but miraculously he was untouched. And now his men knew where the shooting was coming from. Slipping into the forest with his band of cooks, clerks, and mortarmen, Dal Ponte stalked the snipers. When they reached the enemy positions, the Japanese were gone.
That afternoon, Dal Ponte made it to the roadblock (now called Huggins Roadblock) where Huggins had established a double perimeter, two men to a foxhole. The men were alive, but starving and nearly out of ammunition. The Japanese had since established another roadblock farther to the north and surrounded Huggins’ position with snipers.
When Dal Ponte arrived, he discovered that one of those snipers had put a bullet in Huggins’ head. Huggins, though, had the luck of the Irish, and was busy directing his men despite his wound. Dal Ponte could see that Huggins needed medical attention,