The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [81]
Bunker and trench systems protected all of the inland approaches to Buna Village and Buna Government Station. The approaches, in turn, were honeycombed with enemy emplacements.
Colonel Yokoyama, the commanding officer of the 15th Independent Engineers, took charge of all the Japanese forces west of the Girua River. Captain Yasuda, the senior naval officer, took command east of the river.
The Japanese line at Buna left the 32nd Division no room to maneuver, and forced the Americans into swamps, putrid with decay, or onto paths where the Japanese could concentrate their firepower. The situation clearly called for an amphibious assault using shallow-draft landing craft, but all available Higgins boats had been diverted to Guadalcanal.
As the men of the 128th closed in on the Japanese positions, the jungle, according to Robert Doyle, a Milwaukee Journal reporter assigned to the 128th, “was as quiet as a church.”
Another hundred yards down the trail, the 128th met a hailstorm of fire. Men were scythed by Japanese machine gunners, by snipers who used a smokeless powder and were tied into the tops of trees with enough water and food to last them days, and by riflemen hiding in their bunkers. The Japanese shells made a small flash, so the Americans could not tell where the shots were coming from. If a tribe of headhunters wielding spears had attacked, the Americans could not have been more shocked. They had stumbled directly into the enemy’s kill zone.
One scout took a bullet to the head. His killer was only four feet away, invisible in his camouflaged bunker. When the men saw the scout go down, they scattered. They dove from the trail and fired wildly. Bullets ripped through the jungle. Men cursed, “I can’t see the bastards!” It did not take long before wounded soldiers were sobbing, “I’m hit, I’m hit!” Then came the awful “Stretcher bearer!” It was the first time any of the men had ever heard the call. Those who survived the war would always remember it.
A medic was jumping from one man to another, opening his pouch to get at first aid supplies, and dusting gaping wounds with sulfa powder to fight infection. The jungle was full of injured soldiers, blood-spattered vines and ferns, shards of shattered bone, and strings of bloody intestines hanging from gaping holes in men’s bellies. The Japanese snipers were especially fond of the gut shot. A gut-shot soldier would act like a decoy—he would cry out for help, drawing in more soldiers.
Japanese troops continued to rain down lead on the bewildered Americans, who clutched trees, hid underneath sprawling mangrove roots, and dug down into the muck. But every movement, every muscle twitch drew more fire from the Japanese. Some men were on their bellies, heads down, crawling forward blindly, bumping into dead bodies strewn along the trail. In no time the bodies would swell in the tropical heat, and then the flies and the maggots would find them.
A soldier sprinted forward. When he finally stopped, he realized that he was standing on the roof of a Japanese bunker. Before he could mutter “Goddammit,” a bullet ripped into his arm. Instinctively, he hit the ground and rolled off the bunker and kept rolling. It must have seemed like a miracle. When he came to a stop, he was alive and there was a medic at his side.
An engineer observer watched it all.
The first opposition from the enemy was a surprise and a shock to our green troops. The enemy positions were amazingly well camouflaged, and seemed to have excellent fields of fire even in the close quarters of the jungle…. Snipers were every where…. The enemy habitually allowed our troops to advance to very close range—sometimes four or five feet from a machine gun post—before opening fire; often they allowed troops