The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [139]
Illness represented the vast majority of those casualties. Of the 9,688 casualties, 7,125 of them were due to illness. On the battlefields of Buna and Sanananda, malaria, dysentery, dengue fever, scrub typhus, and hookworm were as debilitating as enemy bullets.
When the entire division assembled at Camp Cable in April 1943, Simon Warmenhoven was shocked by the condition of the soldiers and their inability to recover. Physicals revealed that men had lost a quarter to a third of their body weight. Sam DiMaggio was down to 135 pounds and had blackwater fever. His liver and spleen were enlarged and his urine was the color of a Buna swamp. Others were suffering from exhaustion, malnutrition, and anemias related to vitamin deficiencies.
Those with hookworm, dysentery, and anemias eventually responded to treatment. The majority of the malaria cases, however, did not. Men with malaria got worse instead of better, suffering relapse after relapse.
Bill Sikkel’s personal malaria report is illustrative of what Stenberg and many of the Red Arrow men experienced. Sikkel had led patrols on the Sanananda Front since the third week in November. Stricken with high fevers, he was taken off the Sanananda track and evacuated to Port Moresby on Christmas Eve, 1942. Treatment in Port Moresby consisted of three days of quinine, then three days of atabrine, then three days of plasmochin. Following that, he took one atabrine tablet per day. Upon reaching Australia, before going to Coolangatta, he, like many other soldiers, was quarantined and given a seventeen-day malarial treatment. Australian officials were worried that malaria could spread in epidemic proportions throughout the continent; returning troops were banned from Australian territory north of 19 degrees south latitude, an area known for its large mosquito populations. On March 11, Sikkel suffered another malaria attack and was hospitalized at the 155th Station Hospital at Camp Cable. After a positive smear, he received nineteen days of quinine, atabrine, and plasmochin in addition to adrenaline shots. That treatment was followed by six weeks in a malaria rest camp at which he received one atabrine tablet per day. Three months later, Sikkel suffered a third attack. It was the worst of the three. He was admitted to a U.S. Navy hospital at Nelsons Bay, New South Wales, and then transferred to the 47th Station Hospital in Sydney, where he was diagnosed with malaria, bronchitis, and hookworm, and was hospitalized for forty-three days.
By September 1943 when the 32nd was preparing to return to New Guinea, 2,334 men, judged “unfit for combat,” were dropped from the division roster.
The decimation of the 32nd Division by disease was not an isolated incident. By the end of 1942, the Australians had 15,575 cases of infectious disease: 9,249 cases of malaria, 3,643 cases of dysentery, 1,186 cases of dengue fever, and 186 cases of scrub typhus.
And as badly off as the Americans and the Australians were, the Japanese suffered more. One Japanese official called New Guinea “a magnificent tragedy.” Of the sixteen to seventeen thousand troops committed to the campaign, they lost roughly twelve thousand, many to dengue fever, malaria, dysentery, and even beriberi, a disease directly related to starvation.
One thing is clear: MacArthur came away from New Guinea with a profound respect for the destructive power of malaria. In future campaigns he made sure that troops were supplied with malaria tablets, mosquito netting, protective clothing, and training in antimalaria procedures. By October