The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [94]
One of them arrived at the Warren Front, east of Buna Government Station, the day after Thanksgiving. Everyone knew by looking at his purposeful way of walking and his pressed uniform right off the quartermaster’s shelf that he was from HQ, “a typical, theoretical staff officer” devoid of “practical knowledge” of combat operations. The men did not bother to put on a show for him either. They were sick and tired, and their morale was low. According to E. J. Kahn, a member of Harding’s staff and a former staff writer for The New Yorker, they were “gaunt and thin, with deep black circles under their sunken eyes. They were covered with tropical sores and their jackets and pants…tattered and stained. Few wore socks or underwear. Often their soles had been sucked off their shoes by the tenacious, stinking mud.” To make matters worse, after a full week of fighting, they had nothing to show for their efforts.
After consulting with War Department observers, the HQ man was convinced that there was not only a lack of leadership on the Warren Front, but that the men had no fight left in them. The observers told him of soldiers who refused to advance, relying instead on aircraft, mortars, and artillery. He heard stories about men who in the heat of battle abandoned their weapons and fled into the jungle. Two days after arriving at the Warren Front, he was back at Government House, where MacArthur was awaiting his report.
The officer’s assessment was damning, and exactly what General Headquarters wanted to hear. GHQ wanted to make changes and now it had the evidence it needed to justify them.
What the observer had omitted from his report was that without more troops, heavy artillery (especially 105 mm howitzers, which were ideal for destroying pillboxes and bunkers), tanks, flamethrowers (which marines at Guadalcanal were using with great success), grenade launchers, and bangalore torpedoes, the Japanese bunker system was virtually unassailable.
General Harding’s head was on the chopping block, and he knew it. He had already dispatched Colonel John W. Mott, his chief of staff, to the Urbana Front. Mott’s orders were clear: Do what he needed to do to invigorate the attack. Mott wasted no time asserting his authority, or according to some, his ego. He relieved two of the 128th’s company commanders.
Mott also held a conference with the two Smiths. Earlier Colonel White Smith had convinced General Harding that redirecting the efforts of the two battalions toward Buna Government Station instead of Buna Village might energize the stalled advance and drive a wedge between the Japanese positions. However, when Mott asked Colonel Smith if he had a plan for doing just that, Smith confessed that he had not.
Mott then turned to Stutterin’ Smith. Did Major Smith have a plan? Smith said he had been thinking about it since Colonel Smith had proposed the idea. Though there was nothing ingenious about it, in his opinion throwing troops at the Triangle was a recipe for disaster. Japanese defenses were too strong. The key was to move troops into position on the far west side of the Triangle and stage an attack from there, behind the main Japanese position, while simultaneously striking at the head of the Triangle. They might catch the Japs by surprise. Mott was impressed enough to adopt the plan, and he and Smith hashed out the details. He also told Smith that he would soon get a chance to put it into action: General Harding had scheduled an attack on both fronts for the last night of the month, November 29–30.
Meanwhile, Harding was in the process of moving his headquarters and staff from Embogo on the coast to the inland Allied airfield at Dobodura. Fifteen miles from the coast, with a trail running on the left to the Urbana Front and on the right to the Warren Front, Dobodura was the logical choice for the new headquarters.
Dobodura was an area of broad grasslands that a tribe of coastal natives had inhabited to avoid the attacks of a neighboring coastal tribe. “Dobo-duru,”