Shadows In the Jungle (13 page)

On March 3 Barnes and his team, Sgt. Louis J. Belson, Pfc. Warren J. Boes, Pfc. Aubrey L. “Lee” Hall, Pvt. John O. Pitcairn, and Pfc. Robert W. Teeples, along with their contact team, Lt. Michael J. “Iron Mike” Sombar, and three of his five Scouts, were on board a PT boat bound for the landing beach, fifty yards west of the mouth of the river. Jammed into the cramped wardroom of the boat, seasickness became a memorable malady.

“God,” Teeples still recalled sixty-four years later. “I figured landing on a Jap island couldn't be worse than that.”

Around four a.m. the PT glided to a halt one hundred yards from shore and both teams loaded into rubber boats. The sea was choppy, and as they closed on the beach, a wave tipped Barnes's boat, dumping its contents. Teeples's finger was broken in the fall. It would cause him considerable pain for the entire four-day mission. The two Scout teams set up a defensive perimeter for the remainder of the night in case the landing had been detected. Just before dawn, Sombar and his men rowed both dinghies to the PT boat while the Barnes Team headed inland.

Everything went smoothly at first. But on March 6, the mission's third day, while moving through a field of tall kunai grass, Boes, the point man, was suddenly face-to-face with a Japanese patrol. The enemy, with only two rifles among them, had been walking along casually, obviously pulling back. Americans were the last thing they expected to encounter. Jolted by the confrontation, Boes opened fire. Two of the Japanese fell and the rest fled into the tall grass.

In the confusion, Boes and Barnes became separated from the rest of the team. Fearing the skirmish had tipped off their location, the two continued on alone, hoping to link up with the others later. They passed through the villages of Kumisanger and Bibi, spotting several Japanese bivouac areas, but no enemy troops.

The rest of the team, now led by Hall, moved west to the Bau Plantation, which was found to be unoccupied. There they rested and chowed down on their standard peanut-raisin mix. While they were leisurely eating, the high-pitched engine scream of diving airplanes shattered the calm day. Several Australian fighters were swooping down out of the sky right at them, machine guns blazing and hundred-pound bombs dropping from the wing racks. Amid the deafening explosions and the dirt and debris kicked up by heavy machine-gun slugs, the team scrambled for cover. Emerging unscathed moments later, they cursed the receding planes.

Almost at the same time Hall and the others were ducking Australian planes, American fighters spotted Barnes and Boes. Coming down in steep dives, the .50-caliber machine guns chattered and bombs fell, one bursting fifty yards from the two hapless GIs. For the second time that day, men of the Barnes Team cursed Allied flyboys.

Barnes and Boes continued to move east to the rendezvous point, where they finally linked up with Hall and the others. The team was soon all back on the PT boat, much to the dismay of the sailors. After four days in the same clothes in the sweltering jungle heat, the men smelled so badly the crewmen held their noses as they came aboard.

The Male River mission of March 3-7 was the first and last for the Barnes Team. Since Alamo Scouts were technically on detached duty, their old units had the ability to recall them. Barnes would soon be ordered to return to the 32nd Division to become an aide to Maj. Gen. William H. Gill, and his men were absorbed by other teams. Teeples, who was shortly promoted to sergeant, would also be recalled by his former unit because of a shortage of experienced NCOs. He would eventually win a battlefield commission to second lieutenant.

* * *

On March 31, 1944, two new Scout teams were formed under Lts. Woodrow E. Hobbs and William G. Reynolds. A few days later, to keep up with 6th Army advances, the ASTC camp was moved from Fergusson Island to Mange Point near Finschhafen, an area of cleared land in a palm grove some five hundred yards across at its narrowest point and eight hundred yards deep. Scout Bob Sumner, who trained there, recalled it “afforded an excellent training area.” Natives of the nearby village of Kalo Kalo threw the Scouts a feast. As Bradshaw's adjutant and the Alamo Scouts' first historian, Lewis B. Hochstrasser later wrote, for over an hour drums were heard pounding in the darkness.

“We had heard them before, but never like this,” he recalled.

The natives gathered by torchlight and boys ages six to twelve performed a combination dance and song, as the local missionary's wife, named Priscilla, and her two daughters sat cross-legged and sang “The Old Rugged Cross” and “God Bless America.”

Concluding, they said, “Good luck and God bless you, brave soldiers.”

It was a most touching ceremony.

* * *

Then it was back to work, this time for the Thompson and Reynolds teams. Taking the field for the first time, their job was to perform reconnaissance missions for the 158th Regiment, nicknamed the “Bushmasters,” the same unit to which a number of the Alamo Scouts had once belonged.

Born in Bevier, Missouri, Thompson attended a small school called Central College, where he enrolled in the ROTC program. With the attack on Pearl Harbor, his unit was activated and, amid the national hysteria that followed the Japanese attack on Hawaii, Thompson found himself on the West Coast, attached to a unit patrolling California's Monterey Peninsula against enemy invaders.

Once calmer heads prevailed and a Japanese invasion of the West Coast was deemed unlikely, Thompson was sent overseas and attached to the Bushmasters of the 6th Army. That was where he heard about the need for volunteers for a special unit. Being a strong and proficient swimmer, the idea appealed to him and he applied. Accepted, he graduated in the Alamo Scouts' first class.

George Thompson's team, with Sgts. Theodore “Tiny” Largo and Jack E. Benson, and Pvts. Joshua Sunn, Anthony Ortiz, and Joseph A. Johnson, landed at Tanahmerah Bay, and began patrolling the Tablasoefa area.

Interestingly, Thompson's team included four of the nine Native Americans who graduated from the first class at the ASTC. Private Johnson, nicknamed “the Ghost,” was of the Eagle Clan of the White Mountain Apaches in Cibecue, Arizona. Sergeant Largo was a Pima Indian from Phoenix, while Private 1st Class Ortiz of Chamitam, New Mexico, was a San Juan Pueblo Indian and Private Sunn of Laveen, Arizona, was of the Maricopa tribe.

Thompson thought highly of his Native American team members, calling them all “exceptional Scouts.” He was particularly fond of Johnson.

“I never went anywhere without him beside me or in front of me,” Thompson later wrote. “His eyesight was exceptional, the best I had ever seen on a human. He could distinguish the enemy in dense jungle from several feet and he was absolutely silent. In New Guinea he used to track the natives. He showed them a thing or two about scouting.”

On this particular mission, however, the eyesight was not needed. The only soldiers the team spotted were other Americans.

Reynolds's team had a much grimmer experience.

Coming ashore near the village of Demta by Humboldt Bay, the team—Reynolds, Staff Sgt. Leonard J. Scott, Cpls. Winfred E. McAdoo and William R. Watson, and Pvts. William C. Gerstenberger and Lucian A. Jamison—had a rough landing. A high surf tossed them against a thirty-foot cliff, destroying their rubber boat. Saving what gear they could, the team managed to scale the cliff to the top, where, exhausted, they collapsed for the night. Moving into the Dutch coastal village of Moeris Besar, a mile south of Demta, the next day, they came across the bodies of three men, two Dutch and one native. The Dutchmen had each been shot in the stomach and head, while the native had his face beaten to a pulp by a bloody club that lay nearby. Under a hut they discovered a fourth body, that of a naked man. Although the corpse had been half eaten by wild dogs, it was easy to see the man, another native, had been castrated and his left hand cut off. For a long moment, the Scouts gazed at the bodies, the only sound breaking the silence the buzzing of the many insects that were feasting on the gore.

Despite these brutal signs of a Japanese presence, the team saw no enemy soldiers before they turned and headed for home.

* * *

While Reynolds and Thompson were returning to camp, Iron Mike Sombar and three members of his team were slogging through six miles of jungle and knee-deep swamp toward the village of Goya. Word had been passed to them that the Japanese were holding 107 hostages at the village, all foreign missionaries and nuns.

Moving cautiously through the undergrowth, the men came across two native huts, including one with a saddled horse tied up outside. Knowing no native would own a saddle, Sombar crept closer and saw a Japanese soldier inside, sitting on a bed, changing clothes. Not knowing if the man was alone, the Wyoming, Delaware, native slipped a grenade from his belt, yanked the pin, released the lever, or “spoon,” and lobbed it through the window. The explosion shook the hut and Sombar charged inside. Miraculously, he found the Japanese man dazed and on the floor, but otherwise unharmed. As the man tried to rise, Sombar punched him on the jaw, knocking him over. The Japanese soldier started to rise again, and Sombar leveled his carbine and squeezed off several quick rounds.

Continuing on toward the village, the team came across one of the missionaries, a man sitting on a log, utterly exhausted. He told Sombar the rest were just ahead, and that the Japanese had fled. Sombar, skeptical, assigned Pfc. David M. Milda to escort the missionary back to American lines, and pushed on. (Milda would perform four missions with the Sombar Team in New Guinea before returning to his original unit. He was killed in action on Luzon in 1945.)

Arriving at Goya, the team spotted the missionaries, but, as the first missionary had said, there was no sign of the Japanese.

“Spread out and make sure they're gone,” Sombar told his men.

They did, and soon flushed out and captured a Japanese naval officer who had been hiding.

“I won't run away,” the officer said in perfect English, a gun pointed at his head.

The missionaries, seventy Dutch, thirteen Americas, three Poles, one Czech, one Australian, and, oddly, nineteen Germans, were overjoyed at the sight of the Americans, and a nun embraced Sombar.

“Oh, it is so good to see a real man again,” she said.

Knowing the difficulty of evacuating so many people, some weak from hunger, over the rough terrain with just three Scouts, and convinced the Japanese were gone for good, Sombar decided to leave the freed hostages where they were and head back to Hollekang, where he could send back more help. Taking with them the three Polish missionaries and their prisoner, Sombar's party began trudging back toward American lines. The prisoner was put to the task of carrying the pack of an exhausted missionary. He refused.

“You cannot make me do this,” he said defiantly. “You are under the Geneva convention. You can shoot me if you want.”

“If you won't carry the pack, you're of no fucking use to me,” Sombar said. He nodded to a Scout, who waved two of the missionaries out of the way as he leveled his carbine at the man. “We'll just kill you and leave you here for the flies.”

The officer stared at the carbine, then slung the pack onto his back.

By noon Sombar had made contact with men of the 34th Division. That unit sent a detachment, including medics, to the village and brought out the rest of the missionaries. Escorted back to safety, all were set free except for the Germans, who, as enemy civilians, were turned over to U.S. authorities until the war's end.

* * *

Throughout April and May and on into June, the Scouts were dispatched on a host of missions, often lasting just one or two days. On April 24, Lt. Henry R. Chalko, an instructor at the ASTC, pulled together a scratch team of men from the Hobbs and now-defunct Barnes teams for a short excursion to Ali Island, a few miles north of Aitape. During the mission, they got into a firefight with a small Japanese force. The skirmish lasted six hours, until the GIs were reinforced by two platoons from the 127th Regiment. When the shooting stopped, there were twenty-three dead Japanese in the brush.

All the while, American forces continued to push westward across New Guinea. In May, Krueger's 6th Army was advancing toward the Wakde-Sarmi area, 140 miles west of Hollandia. Their job was to establish forward air bases in order to launch future attacks on the enemy on the Vogelkop Peninsula on New Guinea's westernmost tip.

On May 3, Sombar's team was sent on a one-day reconnaissance mission to tiny Vandoemoear Island in Sarmi Harbor. This was followed ten days later by a two-day mission to gather data on roads and beaches near Maraena, west of Sarmi.

The Thompson and Reynolds teams, meanwhile, were dispatched to Biak Island to look for suitable beaches for landing craft. They completed this task successfully, but not without coming under attack by a Japanese fighter plane. They escaped the strafing plane without casualties.

On June 17, about two weeks after his one-day excursion to Biak, Thompson and his team boarded the S-47, one of the navy's aging class of submarines, in Seeadler Harbor for a two-week mission to Sansapor, near the Sansapor coconut plantation on the western side of the Vogelkop. Accompanying him and his men was a special team consisting of Maj. Frank Rawolle of 6th Army G2, Lt. (j.g.) Donald Root, and Coxswain Calvin W. Byrd, both formerly with the Naval Amphibious Scouts, and Lt. Col. G. G. Atkinson and Maj. William M. Chance of the 836th Engineer Aviation Battalion. The group also included Sgt. Heinrick Lumingkewas and his brother, Cpl. Alexander Lumingkewas, of the Allied Intelligence Bureau.

Their mission, at least initially, was to pave the way for the invasion of the Vogelkop Peninsula, by landing on Waigeo Island. There they would locate three suitable sites for air and naval bases. However, while en route, the men were notified that aerial reconnaissance showed that Waigeo was unsuitable for either. They were rerouted to the Vogelkop itself, landing on the west coast near Cape Sansapor, to see if two enemy airstrips already in existence could be made to accommodate fighter and light-bomber groups.