The Ghost Mountain Boys by Campbell James E

Author:Campbell, James E. [Campbell, James E.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: NON-Fiction WWII
ISBN: 9780307407436
Publisher: Crown Publishers
Published: 2007-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Captain Medendorp’s Cannon and Antitank Companies, which were considered to be part of Tomlinson’s fourteen hundred men, were in the vicinity of Wairopi. Since crossing the mountains, they had spent the last month in the Kumusi River valley on what Medendorp called “hell raising” patrols, essentially guerilla activity that, according to Medendorp, consisted of “playing hide and seek with the Japs.” Medendorp was still suffering from a badly ulcerated leg and in the past few weeks he had been racked by malarial fevers. His men were no better off. The “sick,” he wrote, “were struggling along with their arms thrown over the shoulders of friends walking on each side of them.” There was no time for them to recuperate, though. Tomlinson was in need of men.

Before Medendorp began marching toward the Sanananda Front, he and Captain Keast paid off the native carriers and scouts who had so ably assisted them on their patrols. Medendorp wrote later, “The parting was very sad.”

Medendorp’s consolation was that he and Keast had been reunited. Medendorp later wrote, “It was a greater pleasure than I can tell you to see Roger again when I climbed up that last hill into the village. He was smiling from behind his beard.” Waiting for his knee to mend, Keast had been tending the dropsite at Laruni while Medendorp scouted the Kumusi River valley.

On November 25, Medendorp, Keast, and the Wairopi Patrol began marching, but as they neared the front, Medendorp was slowed by the ulcer on his leg, so Keast went ahead to establish contact with Tomlinson. Moving in the opposite direction, however, away from the battlefield, were groups of natives “carrying stretcher after stretcher” of wounded Americans. It was an unnerving sight for Medendorp’s troops. Among the wounded they recognized friends. The natives, straining and sweating under their loads, treated the casualties with great compassion. Medendorp would later write, “There was no jostling. It was a symphony of movement. If the wounded man was too far gone to hold a banana leaf to shade his eyes from the sun…then a native walked behind a stretcher holding a broad leaf over the man’s eyes…. Their [the natives’] shoulders were sore and bandaged, and fatigue showed on their blank faces, still they trudged on like a stream of ants.”

Soon, the Wairopi Patrol heard rifle and machine gun fire, the explosions of mortars and “high overhead the soft sigh of…shells on their way to blast the enemy.” It was “sweet music” to Medendorp. But the Japanese were returning fire, too. When that noise “developed a lower pitch and became harsh and severe, like a buzz saw going through a knot,” Medendorp knew it was time to dive for cover.

Medendorp finally reached Tomlinson’s command post. Keast informed him that after a series of setbacks—just two days before they had lost more than a hundred men killed or wounded—Colonel Tomlinson, a hard-nosed West Pointer, had scheduled his largest attack yet for the morning of November 30. Medendorp was relieved by the news of the delay.

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