The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [154]
In “The Fight Against Malaria in the Papua and New Guinea Campaigns,” John T. Greenwood writes, “The establishment in March 1942 of the Southwest Pacific Area as an Allied theater command under General Douglas MacArthur meant that one of the most primitive, remote, and disease-infested tropical areas in the world would become the scene of major military operations.” He adds that the medical department’s experience with the “huge amount of damages inflicted on American forces in Bataan, should have alerted American military and medical leaders to the impending danger…. Theater officers devoted little attention to developing an antimalaria program during 1942, however, because of their focus on more immediate operational requirements.”
The army’s decision to let the soldiers rest in villages along the trail’s route seemed practical at the time, but it backfired. The soldiers were already suffering from dysentery, trenchfoot, and jungle ulcers when malaria hit them like a time bomb. Exposed to mosquitoes on the coast and in the long-grass savanna that bordered the hill country, many soldiers were wracked with chills and high fevers by the time they reached the mountains. Malaria devastated the 2nd Battalion, and eventually the entire 32nd Division. Eventually nearly 70 percent of the division would contract the disease.
Bergerud also discusses at length the problems that malaria and other diseases caused for the American army in New Guinea.
Malaria means “bad air” in Italian, a reference to the long-held notion that people contracted malaria by smelling the “bad air” of a swamp. The culprit, though, is a tiny parasite transmitted through the bite of the female anopheles mosquito, which teemed in the tidal swamps, open grasslands, and thick, dank jungles along the trail.
Once in the blood, the parasites traveled to the soldiers’ livers and reproduced, burst, and released more parasites back into the soldiers’ bloodstreams. When other female anopheles fed on the infected blood, they, too, were infected. Worst of all, the parasites were hard to get rid of. In some cases, the men’s livers and red blood cells played host to the disease for years.
Malaria is New Guinea’s scourge. Fort Coronation, the island’s first European settlement, a British colony established in 1793, was decimated by fever in less than a year. The next colony, a Dutch experiment called Merkusoord, lost seventy-five soldiers and nearly a hundred women and children in a seven-year period between 1828 and 1835. A French sailing vessel sighted the settlement in 1840, but discovered nothing more than a “citrus grove, coconut trees, a brick oven, ruined stone dwellings, and an overgrown road.”
Near the middle of the century Dutch Protestants affiliated with a society called “The Christian Workman” attempted to establish a number of missions in northwestern New Guinea. After twenty-five years, an earthquake and a tidal wave, epidemics of smallpox and dysentery, and rampant malaria, the number of people to die from disease exceeded the number of natives baptized into Christ.
Around the time of the missions’ collapse, a Russian biologist by the name of Nikolai Mikluho Maclay was making forays into New Guinea’s northeastern interior. After befriending the initially hostile natives, Maclay had to contend with an even more dangerous foe—malaria. One night while in his hut, Maclay described the symptoms. “He [the victim of malaria],” he wrote, “does not feel her [malaria’s] presence, but before long he feels his legs as filled with lead, his thoughts are interrupted by giddiness, a cold shiver passes through the limbs, his eyes become very sensitive to light and his eyelids droop in a powerless way. Images, some enormous monsters,