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| Source: Amazon.com |
From the book’s cover (this synopsis was taken from the book’s website, GhostMountainBoys.com):
Lying due north of Australia, New Guinea is among the world’s largest islands. In 1942, when World War II exploded onto its shores, it was an inhospitable, cursorily mapped, disease-ridden land of dense jungle, towering mountain peaks, deep valleys, and fetid swamps. Coveted by the Japanese for its strategic position, New Guinea became the site of one of the South Pacific’s most savage campaigns. Despite their lack of jungle training, the 32nd Division’s Ghost Mountain Boys were assigned the most grueling mission of the entire Pacific campaign: to march 130 miles over the rugged Owen Stanley Mountains and to protect the right flank of the Australian army as they fought to push the Japanese back to the village of Buna on New Guinea’s north coast.
Comprised of National Guardsmen from Michigan and Wisconsin, reserve officers, and draftees from across the country, the 32nd Division lacked more than training—they were without even the basics necessary for survival. The men were not issued the specialized clothing that later became standard issue for soldiers fighting in the South Pacific; they fought in hastily dyed combat fatigues that bled in the intense humidity and left them with festering sores. They waded through brush and vines without the aid of machetes. They did not have insect repellent. Without waterproof containers, their matches were useless and the quinine and vitamin pills they carried, as well as salt and chlorination tablets, crumbled in their pockets.
Exhausted and pushed to the brink of human endurance, the Ghost Mountain Boys fell victim to malnutrition and disease. Forty-two days after they set out, they arrived two miles south of Buna, nearly shattered by the experience.
Arrival in Buna provided no respite. The 32nd Division was ordered to launch an immediate assault on the Japanese position. After two months of furious—sometimes hand-to-hand—combat, the decimated division finally achieved victory. The ferocity of the struggle for Buna was summed up in Time magazine on December 28, 1942, three weeks before the Japanese army was defeated: “Nowhere in the world today are American soldiers engaged in fighting so desperate, so merciless, so bitter, or so bloody.”
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| I couldn't find a picture of the author, James Campbell, so I went with this one of General Douglas MacArthur. / Source: Wikipedia.com |
Synopsis:
In a nutshell, this book tells the story of the United States Army’s battle for Papua New Guinea, a large and decidedly inhospitable island off the northern coast of Australia that was among the first contested regions in the South Pacific that U.S troops fought to retake following Pearl Harbor. The Japanese military drove U.S. and British forces (as well as the Australian army, which was subordinated to the Brits at the time) from the South Pacific along the path of their proposed Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which would have given the Japanese mastery of the vital trade routes of the Pacific Ocean and would have allowed them to hold hegemony over the region. They might have even exercised the option to invade Australia, which was a great concern to Allied war planners at the time.
The book tells the story of the American forces of the 32nd Division, a group of American Army soldiers who were thrust into the hell that was New Guinea with little preparation. The unit was known to have been one of the most successful and brave to have fought in World War I in Europe, but at the last minute General Douglas MacArthur (who is not seen with sympathetic eyes in the text, and if you may forgive my personal interpretation, doesn’t deserve any better) decided that U.S. forces should support the under-manned and beleaguered Aussies in driving the Japanese from the island. MacArthur was holding a grudge after having to abandon his men in the Philippines, but his conduct of operations in New Guinea is inexcusable.
As for what actually happened when the U.S. troops went to work on New Guinea, the website’s synopsis is much clearer than I could do, and so I would refer you back to it for the basic premise we are dealing with in Ghost Mountain Boys, by James Campbell.
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| American troops in New Guinea during World War II / Source: Blogs.State.Gov |
What I liked about it:
The
book tells the story of the battle to retake New Guinea from a variety
of points of view, including the leaders of the troops, and some of the
individual soldiers themselves. The author used personal documents to
reconstruct what happened in explicit detail. I appreciated that the
Japanese point of view was also given to some extent, as it helps to
keep the book from feeling jingoistic, and also lends credibility to the
idea that many U.S. soldiers held that “the only good Jap is a dead
Jap.” This is a cruel way to think and is unconscionable nowadays, but
at the time, and based on the brainwashing that the Japanese (and the
Japanese armed forces in particular) had received that led them to feel
both ethically superior to all other races and also that they must be
callous and brutal, since their opponents would do no less, helps the
reader to understand why such barbarity was perpetrated during this very
sad period in twentieth century history.
What I didn’t like about it:
At times it was difficult to keep track of all the people that Campbell has included in the book. This may be a downside of the nature of my reading medium (audiobook), or it may also be due to the fact that the place I do most of my reading - namely my job - has been exceptionally busy lately and so it is hard to keep track of both what I am hearing and what I am doing. Just the same, there are a lot of things going on, and at times I was almost tuning out since the personnel roster could dull the narrative a bit. That was my perspective on things.
What I learned, if anything:
The book really helped me to appreciate the situation faced by the soldiers who fought the Japanese in the South Seas. It also made the situation the United States faced in World War II more appreciable (the fact that the U.S. committed lower numbers of troops to the Pacific Theater of the War since Roosevelt and Churchill came to the conclusion early on that the United States should pursue a Germany-First policy, for one), and also more poignant. This book held an particular attraction to me, due to the fact that my own grandfather served in the Army Air Corps in New Guinea during World War II. Grandpa didn’t talk much about his experiences, but from information the family collected, we know that he had some bad experiences there.
As a boy, I recall getting hit by a softball while in PE class and needing stitches. My grandpa was the only one available to take me to the clinic, and while the doctor was putting the stitches in my lip, Grandpa told us both the story of how he had seen a fellow GI troll for sharks off the back of a troop ship off the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, and how the man’s hand had almost been amputated when a shark took the bait he was dragging behind the ship with a piece of metal cable. The stories from The Ghost Mountain Boys made me remember this and some of the other tales Grandpa would tell of his time in the war, and made me sad that I was too young to appreciate just what he was telling me back then.
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| I'm not sure if it is accurate, but this appears to be a political cartoon from the period, which represents the problems soldiers experienced during the Buna campaign. Relating to this image is something I learned from the book that is of significance: not only did U.S. soldiers not have waterproof containers to keep their anti-malarial tablets and other medications that might have helped stave off disease in, but the prevailing medicine of the time for curing Malaria, called Atebrine, had nasty side-effects including ringing in the ears (similar to Quinine) and could cause psychosis if used for a prolonged period. / Image Source: Zazzle.com |
Recommendation:
The book is gruesome and detailed, and is not recommended for the faint-of-heart. It doesn’t pull any punches that I could perceive. However, the story it tells is one that many Americans probably do not appreciate, as the Second World War is often seen through the lens of battles that were much more highly publicized, or much less controversial. If you are interested in getting to know more of what the United States military underwent at the beginning of the Pacific Campaign, The Ghost Mountain Boys is a good place to find out.
Find out more about The Ghost Mountain Boys on Amazon.com
The parting comment:
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| Source: ShitHappens on Facebook.com |
I stole this one from one of my wife's recent Facebook posts. I appreciated it that much and decided that I would pass it on as well. Thanks Hunie.
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