The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [123]
For the Australians, the cost of victory at Gona was huge. One brigade lost over 40 percent of its troops. The victory must have given General Vasey pause. Perhaps he should have resisted the urge to “annihilate” the Japanese. By cutting off their supply and troop pipeline, he could have watched and waited while they starved.
There was a lesson to be learned at Gona. MacArthur, though, failed to recognize it.
The day after the Australians stormed Gona, another ration party made it to the roadblock. Upon returning to the command post, the leader of the ration party delivered another worrisome report. The men at the roadblock continued to deteriorate. If they hoped to survive, they needed to be supplied at least once every two days.
Medendorp had nothing but admiration for the men supplying Huggins. “These patrols,” he wrote later, “marched the flesh right off their feet, leaving in many cases sores that were so deep that they showed red meat.”
On December 12, Lieutenant Horton waited not far from the trail, hoping that someone might find him. Weak and able to dig for only seconds at a time, it had taken him four days to reach water. Even though it was “polluted by the rotting bodies” that lay around him, he slurped at the muddy puddle. A day later, he heard a rescue party traipsing through the jungle. They were looking for him, but a blinding rainstorm and Japanese snipers drove them away. Horton dared not call out. “The Japanese are living within 15 yards of me,” Horton wrote. “I see them every day.”
Horton tried to make a splint for his leg. He rose to his feet unsteadily, but his strength gave out. When he sat down and leaned against a tree, a Japanese sniper, who had seen him moving, shot him in the neck and shoulder. Horton lay at the base of the tree, waiting for the next bullet. “Why has God forsaken me?” he wrote in his diary. “Why is he making me suffer this terrible end?” Later, he continued, “I have imagined several other rescue parties…. My right hip is broken and my right leg, both compound fractures; else I could have been out of here in those first couple of days, wounds or no wounds. My life has been good, but I am so young and have so many things undone that a man of 29 should do…. I shall continue to pray for a miracle of rescue…. God bless you my loved ones…. I shall see you all again some day. I prepare to meet my Maker. Love, Hershel.”
Horton died that day, lying fifty feet from his friend Roger Keast.
Chapter 17
CAGED BIRDS
The caged bird, in his dreams
Returns to his homeland
Forgetting my own self, every day and night,
I think of my father and mother in the homeland
And wonder how they are
I look upon the river
And it is like the one
I knew so well in childhood
far from here.
IN MID-DECEMBER, Cannon Company and Company K moved from their position southwest of the trail to the rear. In a letter to his youngest sister, Alice, Alfred Medendorp wrote that his teeth were falling out because of a vitamin deficiency. But even the rear offered little relief. Company K’s journal keeper wrote, “The men are getting sicker. Their nerves are cracking. They are praying for relief. [They] must have it soon.”
The soldiers had all seen enough. A GI was brought in with the entire top of his head blown off. Another’s face was missing. Another had been shot between the shoulder blades. Medendorp witnessed the man’s agony: “The spinal cord lay exposed. The muscles could be seen and their contractions watched; the lungs were torn open in spots and with every exhalation of the breath several fine sprays of blood shot up.” Worse yet was the smell of the dead. “It is with us always,” wrote Medendorp, “and flies by the millions.”
East of the Girua River, General Eichelberger relieved the 2nd Battalion. He replaced it with the 127th, which had arrived at Dobodura, preparing to end what the Ghost Mountain boys had begun.
For MacArthur, the 127th could not attack