The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [19]
The ships steamed by Alcatraz, and the men joked that they would gladly trade places with any of its prisoners. When they reached the Presidio they heckled the “soft” garrison soldiers who were staying behind to guard the coast and enjoy the niceties of civilization. With the Golden Gate Bridge in sight, Stanley Jastrzembski grew nostalgic. There was no turning back now. Secretly some of the guys hoped that the transports’ smokestacks would not clear the bridge. When they did, Jastrzembski watched the city disappear in the distance. Already he was dreaming of his return home.
No one seemed to have any definite answers about where they were going. Rumors swirled through the ships: Hawaii, some said; others were convinced it was Alaska, or the Far East, New Zealand, India, Fiji, or maybe Australia. Stutterin’ Smith, now the 2nd Battalion’s executive officer, had slipped a map into his duffel prior to leaving California. Using his compass, he plotted the ship’s course—Hawaii first, and then an abrupt turn to the southwest. Smith ventured an educated guess: Australia. Not long after, Division Headquarters confirmed his assumption.
They were at sea for three weeks. By the hundreds, men unaccustomed to the pitch and roll of a ship at sea fell ill and spent much of their time leaning over the ship’s rail.
“It’s mind over matter, boys,” Captain Medendorp asserted as he walked the deck.
It was not the thing to tell a bunch of seasick men. Days later when Medendorp’s stomach began to roil and he, too, was standing at the rail retching, many felt that he had received his just reward.
The ships were filled far beyond capacity, and the men had to endure long lines everywhere they went—to the dining room, the showers, the latrines. At night, they bedded down wherever they could. Most slept in “standees,” pipe frame bunks piled four or five high in converted staterooms, parlors, party rooms, and the ballroom. According to Carl Stenberg, the ballroom was dubbed “Stinking Sock Alley.” Those who had it worst, though, slept on sheets of plywood in the bowels of the ship. As the convoy approached the equator, men vied for space on the deck to avoid the stifling heat.
The officers, though, enjoyed a bit of pampering. They slept two men to a stateroom, dined at tables set with fine china and silverware, and were treated to sumptuous meals because the ship’s food locker was still full of fare that would normally be reserved for its paying civilians.
Although officers held mandatory orientation courses emphasizing Australia’s people and customs and staged battalion conferences, the men still had lots of time to fill. They spent their days doing calisthenics, walking around the ship’s crowded deck, writing letters home, singing, and watching the sea. The novelty of flying fish, ocean-wandering albatross, gliding hundreds of miles from land, and moonlit nights did not last, however. The “Abandon Ship” drills and fire drills and the “Order of Neptune” ceremony, performed when the division crossed the equator, provided some excitement. But it was the poker games—instigated in some cases by Gus Bailey—and the craps games that did the most for the men’s spirits.
For General Edwin Forrest Harding’s staff, it was get-acquainted time, and they liked what they saw. The division’s new commander had an agile mind. He could quote T. S. Eliot or Tennyson or Kipling, or discuss astronomy and history like an Ivy League professor. But he did not put on airs. He had sparkling eyes and a midwesterner’s common touch. And there was no one who understood the modern military better than he.
Harding had written the book on it. When George C. Marshall went to Fort Benning to become the school’s assistant commandant entrusted with updating the army, he brought his friend Forrest Harding with him as an instructor and put Harding in charge of Benning’s influential Infantry School publications. In 1934, Harding edited Infantry