The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [122]
That evening, having made it through the gauntlet of Tsukamoto’s troops, Huggins briefed Medendorp. At the roadblock, men were burning up with malaria fevers. They had ringworm and their feet were going bad. They lived in filthy holes, unable to dispose of their feces. Corpses festered in the hot sun and it rained every night. Of the 225 men holding the garrison, barely half of them were able to fight. Medical supplies, food, and ammunition were almost nonexistent. Perhaps worst of all, the troops were subjected to repeated attacks and did not dare sleep. Sometimes at night the Japanese crept so close that the Americans reached out and grabbed their ankles. Pulling them into their trenches, they slashed the Japanese soldiers’ throats with razor-sharp knives and bayonets.
Though Medendorp’s Cannon Company and the men of the 3rd Battalion’s Company K were not engaged in near-constant combat, the conditions they were enduring were hardly better than those Huggins described at the roadblock. A soldier wrote in K Company’s journal that “between mosquitoes, Japs, heat, bad water, and short rations, it has sure been hell…. What is left of the company is a pretty sickbunch of boys.” All the officers who had crossed the mountains with Medendorp were “gone, dead, wounded or sick.”
Sick or not, men were forced to go out on patrols and were often the targets of Japanese snipers and machine gunners, especially at dawn and dusk, when the Japanese liked to attack. Patrols often returned with wounded men. The dead, though, they left behind. It was especially painful to leave dead buddies lying in mud puddles. The Japanese picked them clean as a bone, grabbing anything of value—grenades, lighters, knives, rings—and mementos. Photographs, though, they discarded—often, soldiers would find wedding pictures and photographs of children alongside the trail. But the Americans had no choice but to leave their buddies behind. Carrying them through the swamp in order to bury them back at the command post was an impossible feat, so they gritted their teeth and turned their heads in shame.
Not even Father Dzienis, despite his efforts, was able to retrieve many of the bodies. When he succeeded, he and a volunteer or two would carry the corpse back to the little cemetery he had built just behind the front lines. Dzienis remained utterly devoted to his men. Even in the midst of battle he held services for them—Catholics, Lutherans, agnostics, it did not matter to him. Though his legs “were one mass of running sores,” when he was not at the aid station comforting wounded men, maintaining morale, delivering last rites, or inviting soldiers to worship with him, he crawled out to the front lines to “visit his flock.” The soldiers were always glad to see him. “Chaplain Dzienis is here!” Soldiers would pass along the news from slit trench to slit trench.
The day after Dal Ponte’s men pulled Huggins out of the roadblock, soldiers on all fronts learned that the Australians had taken Gona.
Prior to the Japanese invasion in July 1942, Gona had been one of the prettiest spots on the peninsula’s north coast, with a church built of woven sago leaves and a handsome mission building with a red tin roof that caught rainwater. On the grounds, shaded by elegant palms and tulip trees, sat a school and a green, groomed cricket field. The pathways were lined with red hibiscus. Just down from the mission, the blue waters of the Solomon Sea washed over an idyllic stretch of black sand.
When the Australians seized Gona four and a half months later, they were horrified by what they saw. The Japanese had reinforced their bunkers, which doubled as latrines, with their own dead. Inside, they had used corpses as firing steps. They had stacked them with their rice and ammunition. They slept beside them. The bunkers reeked so badly the Japanese soldiers had resorted to fighting in gas masks. Partially decayed bodies floated in nearby lagoons.
In two days, the