The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [38]
“Started through the jungle today,” Lutjens wrote. “It is ten times worse than you can imagine…. Wearing green head-nets to keep off mosq…. They damn near smother you.”
That night Lutjens, Edson, and Baxter camped somewhere along a coastal trail, perhaps outside of a small fishing village called Barakau. Their first tropical sunset must have struck them as spectacular—the blazing sun falling swiftly below the horizon, searing the blue sky with streaks of orange and red.
Later that night they were awakened by the sound of a dog’s frantic barking. Were Japanese soldiers creeping through the dark sago swamp that bordered the beach? It was what every soldier would come to dread most—the night maneuvers of the Japanese soldiers. Lutjens might have clutched his hunting knife. The army did not issue decent knives, so Lutjens had brought his all the way from Big Rapids. If a Jap was going to jump him, he would be in for the fight of his life. If Lutjens could, he would cut him from his lower abdomen right up to his throat. He would cut him like a big buck, snapping his sternum with a swift stroke.
When the Japanese troops did not rush them, Lutjens, Edson, and Baxter grabbed their M-1s, pressed their bodies into the soft sand, and searched the dark, ready to send a burst of bullets into the night. While they scanned the jungle, they heard something: It sounded like the snapping and crushing of bones. A yelp followed, and then silence. That now familiar adrenaline was slamming through their veins.
Lutjens woke with a start the following morning and searched for a sign that a Japanese patrol had been in the area that night. Just ten feet from where Baxter and Edson were lying, Lutjens saw something that chilled him—the tracks of a very large crocodile. Then Lutjens and the others pieced together the details of the previous night. The crocodile had caught a dog and had chosen to eat it not far from where they were sleeping. Better to take a Jap bullet than die a slow death in the jaws of a crocodile.
As Lutjens reconnoitered the coast, the news that General Horii had captured Ioribaiwa Ridge shook General Headquarters in Brisbane like the impact of an artillery shell. The Japanese army was now only thirty miles from Port Moresby.
MacArthur immediately called Prime Minister Curtin. The Australians, he said, did not have enough fight in them. They had forfeited every major position along the Kokoda track and had forced the Allies “into such a defensive concentration as would duplicate the conditions of Malaya.” MacArthur did not mention Bataan, but the implications were clear—Bataan had fallen and now he was in danger of losing New Guinea, too. Only six months before in Bataan, MacArthur’s army had been pushed up against the South China Sea. Now the Australian army’s back was up against the Gulf of Papua. With the specter of Bataan still haunting him, and his career hanging in the balance, MacArthur informed Curtin that he would send American troops by air and sea to prevent New Guinea from being “stitched into the Japanese pattern of quick conquest.” By the end of September he hoped to have forty thousand men in New Guinea. “If they fought,” MacArthur continued, “they should have no trouble in meeting the situation. If they would not fight, 100,000 would be no good.” MacArthur then requested that General Blamey be sent to New Guinea to take command and “energize the situation.” Curtin was in full agreement.
MacArthur ended the conversation on a note of self-pity—a quality that he had revealed on other occasions, and one that was as much a part of his enigmatic emotional make-up as his extravagant self-confidence. “Must I always lead