The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [24]
They completed the Buna-Soputa passage in just three days. It was an incredible achievement, though it received little recognition. The Japanese soldier was expected to endure misery, fatigue, hunger, and disease.
The Japanese had beaten MacArthur to the punch, but even as they stormed ashore, MacArthur and his advisors dismissed the invasion as a minor threat. Brigadier General Charles Willoughby, MacArthur’s head of intelligence, clung to the notion that the Japanese would penetrate inland only as far as they needed to build airfields. The airfields, Willoughby argued, would allow Japanese pilots to attack Port Moresby and the Cape York Peninsula of Australia, and could support a possible seaborne invasion of Port Moresby and Milne Bay. But a major land assault on Port Moresby was inconceivable.
Ten days after Yokoyama landed at Basabua, General Marshall contacted MacArthur. Keeping Port Moresby in Allied hands and reestablishing Allied control over Papua’s north coast, he insisted, was of paramount importance. MacArthur reassured Marshall that he was doing everything in his power to secure New Guinea.
MacArthur had just ordered two Australian Infantry Division (AIF) brigades to Port Moresby. Comprised of seasoned soldiers, the brigades had returned from the Middle East in late March 1942. Upon arriving in Australia, however, most of the soldiers were sent to Queensland to perform menial labor, finishing airfields and fortifying the coastline, thus forfeiting valuable training time, so when they arrived in Port Moresby in mid-August, they lacked the skills for jungle fighting. They had the wrong equipment, too. For example, instead of jungle green, they wore bright khaki-colored battle gear; instead of pants to keep away the mosquitoes, leeches, and chiggers, they had knee-length shorts similar to the ones they wore in the deserts of North Africa. And in a land where every additional pound was a burden, they carried too much weight in their fieldpacks.
MacArthur was not ready to send in the 32nd yet. As Colonels Yokoyama and Tsukamoto marched inland, the American division was thousands of miles from New Guinea, traveling by train from South Australia to a tent encampment called Camp Tamborine. Situated in semi-tropical country thirty miles south of Brisbane, Camp Tamborine was fifteen hundred miles north of Adelaide. Rather than launching into jungle training exercises the moment they arrived at Tamborine, the troops had to build the camp from scratch. Soldiers who should have been learning to patrol and to maneuver at night were forced to cut down and clear trees and dig latrines.
It was weeks before the division was able to drill again. Watching the Red Arrow men, Harding remembered that General Marshall had counseled him against taking over the division. The 32nd, Marshall said, was poorly trained and rife with Midwestern small-town politics, enmities, and allegiances. At the time, Harding thanked his old friend for the advice and accepted the division anyway. The chance at his first field command was too attractive to resist.
As soon as he was able, Harding implemented a live-fire infiltration course called the Sergeant York and set up commando, sniper, and tommy gun schools. One of his most capable instructors was a man named Herman Bottcher.
Bottcher was not new to Australia. Though German-born, Bottcher left his native country at the age of 20, bound for Sydney, Australia, in May 1929. As he roamed the city looking for employment, he studied a German-English dictionary. Eventually he found a job as a carpenter on a sheep station in New South Wales. While there he saved his money and nursed a dream of coming to America. In November 1931, when he landed in San Francisco, that dream became a reality.
With sixty dollars in his pocket, he took a room at a hotel on Third Street and searched for work. Jobs were few, so he traveled south to San Diego. Nine months later he had saved enough money to get back to San Francisco, where he took a job in San Francisco’s Crystal Palace markets and attended