The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [2]
On New Guinea, as at Guadalcanal, topography determined everything. Tanks and artillery, which won the day in Europe, were rendered useless. In the matted jungles, men were forced to fight battles at point-blank range. Soldiers used anything that worked—grenades, fixed bayonets, and, sometimes, their hands. Eric Bergerud described the struggle as “a knife fight out of the Stone Age.” George Johnston, an Australian war correspondent, called it one of the “most merciless and most primeval battles.”
As fierce as the fighting was, the terrain and climate were just as dangerous. General Hugh Casey, MacArthur’s chief engineer, called New Guinea the “ultimate nightmare country.” Support units, he said, would face challenges “without precedent in American military history.” Before his first inspection of the island, he assumed that nothing could compare with Bataan and Samar. But New Guinea was in a class of its own. War, Casey told MacArthur, would be almost impossible to wage on the island. His warnings proved prescient.
For the troops of the 32nd Division, New Guinea became “the ultimate nightmare country” indeed. Lenord Sill would later say, “All who were alive, were so near death…. Our briefing, before we began near Port Moresby, did not prepare us for what we were about to encounter. In the beginning, we were all young, healthy GIs, eager to conquer the world…. In a matter of weeks, long before we met the enemy force, all of us had been transformed into ghosts of our former selves.”
Bob Hartman of Grand Rapids, Michigan, minces no words. “If I owned New Guinea and I owned hell, I would live in hell and rent out New Guinea.” The first time Carl Smestad saw the Sanananda battlefront he was convinced that it would be his graveyard. “God help us,” he thought. “We’re never going to get out of here alive.”
One would think that the 32nd must have been a division of elite fighters, or that it contained units of crack troops. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Although Field Service regulations specified “all troops must be thoroughly acclimated before initiating operations,” the men of the 32nd were not ready for the jungle. When it came time to send the division to New Guinea, a commanding general judged it soft and just barely fit for combat.
New to jungle warfare, the division lacked even the basics for survival, prompting one military historian to label the soldiers of the 32nd the “guinea pigs” of the South Pacific. Men were not issued any of the specialized clothing that later became de rigueur for the war in the South Pacific. For camouflage, their combat fatigues were hastily dyed before they left Australia. In the rain and extreme humidity, the dye ran and clogged the cloth, causing men to develop horrible skin ulcers. Soldiers were forced to wade through vines, creepers, brush, dense stands of razor-sharp kunai grass, and elephant grass as high as a basketball rim without the aid of machetes. They did not even have insect repellent—astonishing when one considers that they were fighting in a bug-ridden place. They were not equipped with waterproof containers either. Matches were often unusable. Quinine and vitamin pills, salt and chlorination tablets got wet and crumbled in their pants pockets. Never, perhaps, have American troops been more poorly equipped. Yet, in New Guinea, the 32nd Division was asked to do the extraordinary.
PROLOGUE
Dearest Lover:
Is it ever grand out—you know, honey, you’ve read in stories about the tropical evenings, a warm, sultry night with a slight breeze…and a moon peaking thru the clouds. Well, that’s the way it was to-night. I stood there for a long time, watching and most of