The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [68]
Chapter 10
TO SWALLOW ONE’S TEARS
(namida o nomu)
IN LATE OCTOBER 1942, the Australians pressed their counterattack on the Kokoda track. By the time Horii reached the village of Myola, his men were manifesting symptoms of beriberi, typhus, dysentery, colitis, and malaria, for which many didn’t even have quinine. Others were slowed to a virtual crawl by jungle rot.
Lieutenant Sakamoto wrote angrily, “It is damp and dark here in the thick woods. We have no more than a handful of rice left. If we are to remain until the end, we will all die from beriberi. What is the Army doing?”
As they grew sicker, soldiers watched, with a growing bitterness, their officers “endeavoring to evade hardships.” Some rode horses and hoarded food while ordinary soldiers walked and starved, eating grass, roots, leaves, a few grains of rice they found in the dirt and mud, the flesh of dead horses, and anything else they could scrounge along the way.
Days later, Sakamoto was diagnosed with beriberi and feared that he would not be able to go on. “Cruel nature,” he wrote, “God take us to Paradise. Each day, we are nearing our death.”
By the time Horii’s troops reached Templeton’s Crossing, they were doing anything they could to stay alive. Lieutenant Sakamoto’s dispassionate diary entry of October 19 read, “Because of the food shortage, some companies have been eating human flesh (Australian soldiers).” After weeks of consuming grass and roots and putrid horseflesh, Sakamoto added, “The taste was said to be good.”
Advancing Australian soldiers discovered evidence of cannibalism. The Japanese had tied Australian soldiers to trees, cut strips of flesh from the bodies, and wrapped the strips in large leaves in order to preserve the meat. Now the Australians, despite suffering from malaria, dysentery, and fatigue, pushed forward, bent on revenge.
Watching from afar, MacArthur grew frustrated with what he considered the Australians’ cautious advance. When Arthur “Tubby” Allen, the Australians’ commanding general, reached Myola on October 17, a message awaited him. In it, MacArthur made it clear that he was unhappy with the pace of the counterattack. The casualties, he said, were “extremely light.” Allen refused to let his men rush blindly into an ambush. What he knew, and MacArthur did not, was that at some strategic point, the Japanese would turn and fight.
That place was Eora Creek. Once they reached the ridge that towered over the gorge, they stopped running and dug in. They erected log bunkers in which they placed their machine gunners. While the healthy and semi-healthy were ordered to stand and fight, carriers behind the lines lugged the diseased and wounded back to the field hospital in Kokoda, and in some cases, all the way back to the north coast, a ten-day journey.
When the oncoming Australians reached the Eora Creek gorge on October 22, Brigadier Lloyd smelled a trap and divided his brigade. He wanted a portion of his men to attack head-on while the others took to higher ground, outflanking the enemy army. But the units charged with sneaking in above and behind the Japanese lost their way in the dense forest, and a mere platoon made it to a spur above the Japanese position. Hoping to catch Horii’s army off guard, it attacked. But the Japanese, old pros at encirclement, cut off the platoon’s escape route, and the killing commenced. Thirteen of the platoon’s seventeen men were lost.
The other group was met by Japanese machine gunners who, swinging the barrels of their guns, strafed the oncoming Australians as they fought to cross the rushing creek. Eventually, though, a group of a hundred men bored straight ahead and stopped to grub out trenches within shouting distance of the Japanese position.
Concealed behind log bunkers, Horii and his officers celebrated with cups of sake. “How tasteful it was!” wrote Lieutenant Sakamoto, the