The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea--The Forgotten War of the South Pacific by James Campbell Read Free Book Online Page A

Dorothy to return to Wisconsin, Jerry, according to his father, was “heartbroken.”
    Smith himself felt a sense of relief when Jerry and his mother departed. He had to get back to his new regiment. The transition from the 128th to the 126th was not an easy one for him. After having spent his entire military career in the 128th since enlisting in the Wisconsin State Guard in 1919 at the age of sixteen, Smith was faced with having to try to win the loyalty and respect of a bunch of guys he did not know. Truth was, he was lucky to be in the army at all. Smith was a tall (six foot three), raw-boned man with black hair and hollow cheeks. While at Camp Beauregard, he flunked his physical because he did not meet the army’s weight requirement. The regimental surgeon granted him a six-month waiver, and Smith was literally told to eat to save his military career.
    The 126th, though, was his biggest challenge to date. It was a Michigan outfit, and Smith hailed from Wisconsin, on the other side of Lake Michigan. He was not averse to proving himself. Back home in Neillsville, Wisconsin, the Badger State Telephone and Telegraph was a family-owned business, and Smith was the boss’s kid. His father rode him hard, too. The elder Smith expected his son to earn the front office by digging postholes, setting poles, trimming trees, and stringing wire and cable with the line crew.
    Now he would have to prove himself again. The junior officers and the grunts were watching closely to see if he was up to the task.
    Two things they did know was that Smith was a stutterer, and he had a volatile temper. The guys mocked him behind his back.
    “Look out for St-St-St-St-Stutterin’ Smith. He’ll ch-ch-ch-chew your ass right out.”
    According to Erwin Veneklase, “when Smith was really mad, the stutter completely disappeared.” The guys of the 126th learned to listen for the stutter as a kind of barometer of Smith’s mood. Nobody wanted to be dressed down by “Stutterin’” Smith.

    On April 7, Colonel Lawrence Quinn, the popular commanding officer of the 126th Infantry, tried to impress upon his men the importance of their mission.
    “Our path will not be smooth,” he said. “We have much to do in the way of training to attain the goal we have set for ourselves—a rugged, powerful, hard-hitting, fast-maneuvering infantry team…But what we lack in perfection we more than make up for in espirit de corps…Our destination is secret; and, except for curiosity, is unimportant. What
is
important, however, is the fact that we are on our way to meet the enemy. War is a grim business. It is a killer business…Should you experience difficulty developing this desire to kill, you have but to recall what we are fighting for—our homes, our loved ones, our freedom, the right to live as we please.”
    On April 8 at 5:40 a.m., thirteen freight trains and twenty-five passenger trains departed Fort Devens. The railroad yard, according to one of General Edwin Forrest Harding’s staff officers, was a “madhouse.” Harding, the 32nd Division’s new commander, and most of his staff had left for San Francisco almost two weeks earlier. They would be waiting when the men arrived.
    Despite Colonel Quinn’s stirring speech, when the train rolled west, few of the men felt the impending doom of battle. The bombing of Pearl Harbor was four months old, and the Japanese had not followed up with other attacks on the American mainland. The men were being shipped off to war—they knew that—but how that war would manifest itself was impossible for them to imagine. As they boarded the train, they shot the bull and joked as if the train ride were just another chance to play cards, pull practical jokes, and see the sights.
    Outside of a small cadre of officers, no one knew where the trains were headed. They traveled west via Albany and Buffalo and reached Chicago twenty-four hours later. In Chicago, they stopped so repairs could be made to one of the locomotives.