The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [164]
Simon Warmenhoven’s daughters generously (and courageously) gave me access to all their father’s letters. Details of Warmenhoven’s death are from interviews with Jack Hill, Edward Doyle, and Bill Sikkel. Hill held Warmenhoven in his arms after the colonel shot himself. The official army version of his death (the report from the commanding general) stated that his death was the result of a gunshot wound received while in the Southwest Pacific Area. Over a decade later, Mrs. Henerietta Warmenhoven received the “Official Statement of the Military Service and Death” of her husband. It stated that “death occurred in the line of duty.”
Because atabrine was new and because doctors had not yet determined the proper dosage for malaria treatment, temporary atabrine psychosis was a danger. However, according to Major Lewis Barger, a military medical historian in the Office of the Army Surgeon General, “atabrine psychosis” was not statistically significant. “Military Psychiatry: Preparing in Peace for War” (Bordeu Institute website) gives a 12 percent rate for malaria cases treated with atabrine. There is also the possibility that Lieutenant Colonel Simon Warmenhoven was suffering from what we now know as “posttraumatic stress disorder.” During the Civil War, it was called “soldier’s heart.” The British military psychiatrist C. S. Myers introduced the term “shellshock” in 1915. Still, it was largely misunderstood. Therapies were designed to increase a soldier’s willpower. In 1941, a pupil of Sigmund Freud’s, Abram Kardiner, wrote The Traumatic Neuroses of War, with detailed clinical descriptions of psychoneurotic and physio-neurotic symptoms. Shortly after World War II, psychiatrists noticed what they called “gross stress reactions” among war veterans. In 1945, Commander Leon Saul, a doctor in the U.S. Navy Reserve, coined the term “combat fatigue” to describe a myriad of post-battle symptoms. It wasn’t until the mid-1970s that the American Psychiatric Association came up with the phrase “post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Epilogue
Bill Sikkel told me this story about returning to Australia during an interview in October 2006.
Quotes regarding the nature of the Buna war are from Our Jungle Road.
According to Gailey, Bergerud, and Anders, the war could have been shortened by weeks had the 32nd Division been properly supplied.
Major Koiwai’s quote is from Milner.
With the exceptions of Bataan and Corregidor, William Manchester would call Buna MacArthur’s “darkest hour.”
Manchester quotes MacArthur about keeping casualities to a minimum at Buna. Eichelberger would later write that Buna was “siege warfare…the bitterest and most punishing kind.”
Eichelberger’s comments about MacArthur are cited in Jay Luvaas’ book, Dear Miss Em: General Eichelberger’s War in the Pacific, 1942–1945.
Casualty statistics are from Milner.
Milner and Mary Ellen Condon-Rall quote Warmenhoven.
John T. Greenwood wrote, “The 32nd Infantry Division was basically noneffective on account of malaria for four to six months after its return from Papua.”
Stanley Falk comments that “Luzon was a magnificent victory but hardly a cheap one.”
Stanley Falk in his essay “Douglas MacArthur and the War Against Japan” is very critical of MacArthur. Contrary to popular myth (one, in fact, perpetuated by MacArthur), MacArthur did not advocate “bypassing” Rabaul. As Falk points out, he commented to his chief of staff that it “would go down in history as one of the time’s greatest military mistakes.”
Condon-Rall writes at length about what MacArthur learned at Buna.
John T. Greenwood points out that MacArthur told Colonel Paul F. Russell, chief of the Tropical Disease and Malaria Control Branch of the Preventive Medicine Division at the Office of the Surgeon General, and an