The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [163]
Insight into Boice’s state of mind comes from interviews with William Boice Jr. and the collection of letters and newspaper articles that Zelma Boice kept.
The story of Chet Sokoloski was told to me by Stan Jastrzembski.
Bob Hartman told me the story of leading his platoon into the Triangle.
Phil Ishio told me about interrogating exhausted, disease-ridden Japanese POWs.
This story is from “Fire and Blood in the Jungle” by George Moorad.
During an interview, Stanley Jastrzembski told me the amusing anecdote about eating the cake with his buddy Chet Sokoloski.
Eichelberger describes the contents of MacArthur’s letters. Back in his Ivory Tower in Port Moresby, MacArthur could not have been more distanced from the reality of what Eichelberger was up against at Buna.
The following day, Eichelberger woke with a renewed sense of optimism. “Daylight,” he later wrote, “is good medicine for the fears of darkness.”
Grose, writes Mayo, was stunned by the orders. Eichelberger wanted to take Buna in front of MacArthur’s “eyes and ears”—in other words, he wanted Sutherland to witness it.
In his correspondence with Milner, Grose wrote of the general’s rage.
Wada and other Japanese soldiers’ diary entries are from ATIS documents.
Milner and Mayo comment on Eichelberger losing the 163rd.
The scene of the Japanese soldiers taking to the water to flee north up the coast is included in Milner, Mayo, and Blakeley. Many of the veterans that I interviewed remembered it. Those who did not witness it firsthand had heard the stories.
Mayo relates the story of Yasuda’s and Yamamoto’s deaths.
Seppuku, or hara-kiri (literally “cutting the belly”) is a form of Japanese ritual suicide by disembowelment. It was used by warriors to avoid falling into enemy hands. World War II Japanese officers, steeped in bushido, would have used the word seppuku.
In his book The Samurai Way of Death, Stephen Turnbull writes:
Seppuku…could take place with preparation and ritual in the privacy of one’s home, or speedily in a quiet corner of a battlefield. In the world of the warrior, seppuku was a deed of bravery that was admirable in a samurai who knew he was defeated, disgraced, or mortally wounded. It meant that he could end his days with his transgressions wiped away and with his reputation not merely intact but actually enhanced. The cutting of the abdomen released the samurai’s spirit in the most dramatic fashion, but it was an extremely painful and unpleasant way to die, and sometimes the samurai who was performing the act asked a loyal comrade to cut off his head at the moment of agony.
James Clavell writes in the novel Shogun that seppuku may have originated not as a positive good, but as the lesser of two evils. The code of bushido, unlike the European codes of chivalry, didn’t forbid mistreatment of prisoners. For this reason, a Japanese soldier had every reason to suspect that he would be tortured. Therefore, he would often choose seppuku instead.
Eichelberger’s letter to MacArthur is from Our Jungle Road to Tokyo.
Details of Buna’s fall and the various correspondences are taken from Milner, Mayo, and Our Jungle Road.
Medendorp writes of those remaining on the Sanananda Front.
Wada’s diary entires are from ATIS translations, Ham, and Raymond Paull.
Milner’s version of Oda’s death differs from Ham’s and Mayo’s, both of whom write that Oda committed suicide.
Winston Groom writes, “Two types of cannibalism were practiced by the Japanese. The first, and most common, was simply to stay alive when Imperial troops were abandoned by their supervisors on far away islands with no food to speak of. The second, and more disgusting, was the custom of ranking Japanese officers who, in the spirit of Bushido…deliberately ate the livers and organs of fallen enemies in the belief that it made them strong and brave.”
Paul Ham claims that Wada was not killed but was rediscovered floating on a raft