The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [136]
As the last evacuation boats pulled anchor, Kyoshi Wada was left standing on the beach, longing for home. He returned to the hospital and was killed by mortar fire early the following morning.
A day later, on January 22, 1943, the Buna-Gona-Sanananda campaign officially ended. Advancing Allied troops caught starved and weary enemy soldiers in their shelters or trying to escape and mowed them down. By day’s end more than five hundred Japanese lay dead. It was the largest single-day slaughter since Gorari nearly three months earlier.
Carl Stenberg, like most of the men of Ghost Mountain battalion and the 128th Infantry Regiment, was already in Port Moresby, waiting to be transported south to Australia. Days before the fall of Sanananda, he had left Dobodura and was flown over the Owen Stanley mountains. The entire trip took forty-five minutes.
Stenberg had been marching or fighting for over three months. His ear throbbed and bled and he was woozy with malaria. His lower legs were a patchwork of jungle sores. And when he slept the nightmares came: He was stranded in a swamp, stuck up to his hips in mud that gripped like quicksand. The tide was in and the water crept to his chest. He held his head high to breathe as rats glided by, making their way through the black scum.
Stanley Jastrzembski was lying in a hospital bed not far from Stenberg. Early in January, after a nine-day regimen of quinine, atabrine, and plasmochin, Jastrzembski’s fever broke; but now it was soaring again. Wrapped in towels and ice, he lay on a cot, unable to escape the smell. He was back in the jungle, waiting and watching. Bodies bloated by the heat floated past. They were smiling. He could see their gold fillings.
In late December 1942, Simon Warmenhoven was appointed division surgeon at the request of General Eichelberger and received a rare battlefield promotion to lieutenant colonel. In mid-January, as the Allied attack on the Sanananda and Girua garrisons was about to begin, Warmenhoven turned thirty-three and was still performing surgeries in a poorly lit tent. On January 20, he learned that he was being sent back to Port Moresby. He arrived in Australia not long afterward and went directly to a hospital for treatment of hookworm. In late February he returned to Camp Cable, where he took up residence in a small wooden house. The first thing he did was to put pictures of his family on his dresser. Warmenhoven was now a celebrated doctor. Articles in newspapers across the U.S. were praising his bravery in New Guinea and his medical achievements just behind the front lines. In early March, his picture was on the front page of the New York Times.
Back in Australia, Warmenhoven did not feel like a celebrity. He worked around the clock seven days a week nursing the Red Arrow men back to health while neglecting his own needs. In early April, exhausted, he suffered a malaria attack and was hospitalized for three weeks. At the time, doctors little understood the possible toxic effects of large doses of atabrine and quinine. The term “atabrine psychosis,” characterized by drug-induced manic depression and schizophrenic episodes, had only recently been coined. Nevertheless, Warmenhoven was treated aggressively. Upon returning to Camp Cable three and a half weeks later, he learned that MacArthur was preparing to send the 32nd back into combat. As division surgeon, he was asked to sign a medical release