The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [52]
Nothing about Captain Buckler’s story, though, unsettled them as much as the possibility of torture at the hands of the Japanese. The barbarism of the Japanese army was legendary. A Japanese soldier would put a gun to his head, or hold a live grenade in his hand, or perform seppuku, gutting himself before he allowed himself to be captured. If captured, he expected to be tortured because that is what he would do in turn. Though they had signed the Geneva Convention of 1929, which articulated a policy for the humane treatment of POWs, the Japanese never ratified it. At the onset of the war, Prime Minister Tojo boasted that “In Japan, we have our own ideology concerning prisoners of war…”
In late January 1942, Japan’s famed South Seas Detachment—the Nankai Shitai—ran their barges ashore and captured almost a thousand Australians at the Rabaul garrison. The Japanese soldiers tied 160 Australian prisoners to coconut palms at Tol Plantation. While the remaining Aussies looked on, Japanese trainees used the men for bayonet practice. Bayoneting was officially sanctioned by the Japanese military. It was said to “eradicate a sense of fear in raw soldiers.” The plantation was filled with the cries of dying men and the grunts of Japanese recruits digging their bayonets into the bellies of their Australian captives. Privately, some of the Japanese soldiers expressed their revulsion, but publicly they kept quiet for fear of being perceived as cowards.
Arapara to Imiduru.
Mendendorp was upset about the lack of trail discipline. It was not only unmilitary, it was dangerous. From Arapara on, Medendorp insisted that platoons and companies stick together. With each day, the column was getting closer to the possibility of a Japanese ambush.
The men hardly heard him. The Wairopi Patrol was not made up of superbly conditioned soldiers specially trained in jungle and mountain survival. Prior to the march, many had never even climbed a hill higher than a thousand feet.
The soldiers who made up the patrol were not even infantrymen. They were heavy weapons guys of the Cannon and Antitank Companies, new units formed in Australia as part the division’s streamlining. But with no antitank weapons or tanks to shoot at, they became foot soldiers, pressed into duty because the 126th Infantry Regiment’s commanding officer, Colonel Quinn, did not want to disrupt his own battalions by providing the patrol with riflemen.
Lieutenant Segal must have been completely perplexed by the assignment, too. He was a doctor, after all. He had not been trained to walk a mile, much less be part of a grueling hike across the Papuan Peninsula. Even Medendorp—especially Medendorp—was no infantryman. He was a supply specialist. He had been an assistant Service Company commander. Supply often attracted talented rascals, jokers, and iconoclasts who enjoyed “wheeling and dealing” and the challenge of breaking army rules and getting away with it. But it also appealed to meticulous, can-do soldiers who followed army regulations to a T. Medendorp was the latter. He liked a good pair of socks, a knife with a blade sharp enough to cut paper, and clean silverware. When the general in charge of supply for the entire Southwest Pacific area was looking for a conscientious supply professional to identify airdrop sites at four-day intervals along Boice’s route, he chose Medendorp. It was a daunting task under the best of circumstances. Nine hundred men of the 2nd Battalion were scheduled to follow Medendorp’s patrol. Although it would use hundreds of native carriers, it would still need to resupply along the trail.
What Medendorp did not know was that some of the men from his former company were happy to see him go. He was an able officer, but he could also be a vain, demanding man. “He was always talking about separating the men from the boys,” says a former Service Company soldier. “He rode the guys hard, but he was a physical man, and could back it up.”
After scaling Turner’s Bluff outside Arapara, the men knew they were in the mountains