The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [135]
The Americans who had arrived on the Sanananda Front late in November would not be part of the final offensive. Of the fourteen hundred men who had gone into battle, only 165 remained. In no condition to fight, they were pulled off the front before the final Allied assault on Sanananda.
Alfred Medendorp was not one of the 165. In late December, incapacitated by malaria and fifty-five pounds lighter than when he had left Nepeana in early October to cross the mountains, he was shipped to the evacuation hospital at Dobodura. The next day he and a group he described as “battered, filthy, long haired, gaunt, festering, stinking wretches” boarded a plane for Port Moresby.
Lieutenant Lester Segal was not one of them either. After a month on the Sanananda Front, he was transferred to Buna to attend to the men wounded in the siege of the Government Station. Because of a shortage of medics, he stayed on in the aftermath of the battle. Eventually, he, too, was evacuated to Port Moresby. Seriously ill—perhaps with scrub typhus—it was a “miracle,” according to Medendorp, that Segal was still alive.
Of the 165 men, only ninety-five were able to march to the bivouac site at Siremi east of the Girua River. Father Dzienis was one of them. “Only then,” Medendorp later learned, “did he surrender his festering, fever-ridden body to a hospital to begin a long fight for recovery.”
At Siremi, Dzienis and the others washed and shaved for the first time in months, and were issued shelter halves and mosquito nets. Two days later, Eichelberger held a ceremony for them. “I received the troops,” he wrote, “with band music. It was a melancholy homecoming. Sickness, death, and wounds,” he wrote, “had taken an appalling toll. [The men] were so ragged and so pitiful that when I greeted them my eyes were wet.”
On January 16, the 127th and the 163rd Infantry Regiments were ordered to attack the Japanese garrison at Sanananda. The 127th was to advance on the coastal track from Buna Village, blocking any attempt by the Japanese to flee east. Meanwhile, one battalion of the 163rd was to move up the Sanananda track to the coast while another battalion sealed off the escape route west of Huggins Roadblock. After clearing out the Japanese positions south of the roadblock, the men of the 163rd were to join Australia’s 18th Brigade and advance north along the track.
On January 17, as the Allies converged on Sanananda, General Yamagata determined that the evacuation plan could not wait. The wounded and sick were to leave by landing barge. The rest of the troops were to escape any way they could—on foot, or by swimming up the coast. Upon reaching the mouth of the Kumusi or the Mambare River, they would be shipped even farther up the coast to Lae and Salamaua.
Kiyoshi Wada wondered if he would make it out alive. “I am left to take charge in this place,” he wrote. “We think that tonight will be the last night for Girua and we talk about swimming together to Lae. Wonder if we can get away? Wakaichi will not leave us behind.”
Late the following night, Wada, who had also read the Allied leaflets, continued, “We looked forward to getting on the boat tonight but because the wounded were put on first, we could not get on…. Reinforcements haven’t come. There are no provisions. Things are happening just as the enemy says…. I don’t think Wakaichi will leave us behind.”
The next day, Yamagata delivered the evacuation orders to General Oda and sent an aide to carry them to Colonel Yazawa. That night Yamagata and his staff and over a hundred sick and wounded soldiers left Girua in two large motor launches. Later, a prisoner of war stated that the general made “room for himself by taking off the patients and men already loaded on the barge.”
Oda was indignant: Yamagata,