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 B

It would be a while before they were moving again, so the men were allowed to disembark to stretch their legs.
    They were all curious—just where in the hell were they headed? That’s when a sergeant recognized a relative in the train yard. He slipped by the guards at the depot platform who had been posted there to stop the soldiers, for security reasons, from talking to anyone and said, “C’mon, give me the skinny.”
    As the train headed for Kansas City, the word circulated among the troops.
    “Oakland,” Jastrzembski heard one of the guys say. “We’re headed for goddamn Oakland. I wonder what that means? One thing’s for sure, we ain’t going to Europe to fight the Krauts.”
    In Oklahoma, the train stopped and the men took a half-mile run. By noon, it was bound for Clovis in the flat grasslands of eastern New Mexico. En route, Captain Medendorp gave a lecture on Japanese weapons.
    Afterward the guys got together in small groups. “That’s it. Now it’s for sure. It’s the Nips; we’re going to fight the Nips. Those sons-a-bitches.”
    If the men were headed to “fight the Nips,” no one was in a hurry to get them there. The route to Oakland via the desert Southwest was a puzzling one to say the least. In Winslow and Seligman, Arizona, they disembarked and were ordered to run again. Then there was the train itself; the farther west it got, the slower it traveled. Inexplicably, it was given low-priority status and lost “rail rights” to trains hauling freight.
    As far as Simon Warmenhoven was concerned, the train could crawl to the coast. The farther he got from Michigan, the farther he was from Mandy and his daughters. Besides, he loved the West’s wild country, the canyons, and the Painted Desert. At one of the Arizona stops, he bought his two daughters each an Indian doll and his wife a Navajo purse. Like some of the other officers, Warmenhoven was lucky enough to be on one of the passenger trains, traveling in style. He ate well, was assigned a sleeping car, and even had stewards to turn down his bed. It sure beat the way he used to get cross-country. In college, he made his way from Sunnyside, Washington, to Grand Rapids, Michigan, on filthy sheep trains. For a free ride, he watered the sheep at stops and herded them back onto the cars.
    Gus Bailey also enjoyed the trip. It allowed him and the guys of Company G ample time to do what Bailey loved best—play cards. It also gave him a chance to see the sights. Like many of the Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana men of the division, Bailey had never been west. He was awed by the wide-open expanses of the high plains, by the snow-packed mountain passes of New Mexico, and eventually by the ocean. When the train arrived at the Oakland, California, pier on April 13, Bailey took time out from his duties to write Katherine a letter.
    “I’ve made up my mind, “he wrote, “that when I get back we will spend two or three months in this part of the country. You and I and the little one. I hope to God this is over soon so that we may be able to start where we left off, and with a little more to make life happier for us. I am now looking forward to the day when I get off that boat for home and, wherever it is, I want you to be there to meet me.”

Chapter 3
    A RRIVAL D OWN U NDER
    W HILE WAITING TO be deployed, a portion of the division stayed at Fort Ord and the Dog Track Pavilion while the rest of the men were put up at a large convention center and rodeo venue called the Cow Palace in San Francisco. According to Stutterin’ Smith, the Cow Palace was a miserable, concrete “monolith” as cold and “drafty as the North Pole,” and the men hated it. They were forced to sleep draped over stadium chairs and in horse stalls that reeked of manure. But the stopover was essential. Before shipping the division overseas, the army needed to take care of some last-minute business, including issuing extra uniforms, M-1 rifles, new helmets, and modern howitzers to