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By Root 709 0

alert her that there would be a lull in his letters, he had no idea what was in store for him. He had walked over the mountains shouldering his own pack, a smaller bag of medical supplies, and occasionally the pack of another doctor. Once they reached Bofu, the men collapsed, but Warmenhoven’s work had just begun. He had managed to keep the men of the 126th healthy while they were training in Australia. He treated venereal diseases, and on a small scale, malaria, dengue fever, and an assortment of skin ailments. That was comparatively easy. Now, it seemed, everyone had some kind of ailment. Soldiers were burning up with fevers, and some had dysentery so bad he worried about dehydration. Everyone had feet torn up with blisters, sore knees and shoulders, and backs scorched by the sun, and he had not even gotten around to visiting Stutterin’ Smith’s Ghost Mountain boys. What would happen once the fighting started? How could he treat all the sick and wounded? How would the newly created portable hospital units (forerunners to MASH, mobile army surgical hospitals) function? Knowing how long it would take to evacuate soldiers to a field hospital and knowing the dangers of infection in a climate like New Guinea’s, the idea behind the portable hospital was to treat the wounded as far forward as possible, and to be mobile. Units would include twenty-five beds, moving as the battle shifted. On paper, the concept seemed workable, even brilliant. But Warmenhoven needed qualified medical personnel to man the hospitals. And like the other regimental surgeons, he was up against a shortage of doctors and corpsmen.

For Warmenhoven, battle was not a hypothetical. Back in Port Moresby, Japanese Zeros, intent on taking out the airfield, came at dusk one evening, dropping bombs across the area. Portions of the 126th were camped near the end of the runway. Men dove into foxholes or dashed into the jungle. One unlucky soldier was hit by shrapnel while lying in his cot. He was sobbing when his friend, Sergeant Jack Hill of the 126th’s 3rd Battalion, ran to him. Turning on his flashlight, Hill realized that the hot metal had torn off his buddy’s kneecap, and the smell of burning flesh made him retch. Hill yelled for a medic, and Warmenhoven appeared, instructing him to shine the flashlight on the wound with one hand and with the other to press a tourniquet to his friend’s leg. Then Warmenhoven calmly amputated the leg while bombs exploded nearby. At one point a soldier shouted, “Put that goddamned light out or I’ll shoot it out!” Warmenhoven looked at Hill. “Keep the light steady,” he said. “Keep it steady.”

As the division prepared for battle, Harding was also worried about the condition of his men, especially since he had no reserve troops. As a keen student of history, he knew what disease had done to General George Washington’s colonial forces, especially at the Battle of Quebec, where Washington’s army, under the command of Colonel Benedict Arnold, was crippled by smallpox.

Despite the poor health of his troops, and the fact that MacArthur had consistently denied him the 127th Infantry Regiment, which was still back at Camp Tamborine, Harding was upbeat about his army’s chances. Both ground and air reconnaissance indicated that the Japanese strongholds each held only two hundred to three hundred Japanese. His intelligence officers speculated further that the Japanese had already decided to relinquish Buna.

These reports had clearly made their way to the officers. Quinn’s message to Jim Boice about having tea in Buna on his birthday testifies to the prevailing belief that the Japanese invasion force had been reduced to a ragtag bunch of tired and sick soldiers. One Ground Forces observer ventured “Buna could be had by walking in and taking over.”

It was General Willoughby who challenged these optimistic appraisals of Japanese troop levels. On November 10, he estimated that about four thousand troops were holding the beachhead. He also thought it unlikely that the Japanese would abandon their position on the north coast. But four days later,