In mid-September, 1942, the Australian idyl came to a grim end. The Japanese tide was within thirty-two miles of Port Moresby. On four hours’ notice, elements of the 128th Infantry prepared to move by air to New Guinea. Light-colored fatigue uniforms were sprayed with green camouflage dye. The men who were to become the heroes of Buna were frankly scared as they flew north – the newly dyed uniforms wet on their backs. On the twenty-eighth of September, these elements of the 128th Infantry took up the left flank of the Allied positions along the Goldie River defending Port Moresby. The division lays proud claim to this commitment as being the first by a United States division in World War II, save for those units which fought against the original Japanese sneak attacks.
The grim business of death had actually begun. In mid-October the second battalion of the 126th Infantry started out to parallel the Kokoda trail across the Owen Stanley Mountains. The men who made that terrible march are still regarded as human curios – those that are left. For forty-two days they climbed and suffered, often cutting their own trail through some of the most awesome country in the world. They threw away everything they didn’t absolutely need – and a lot they did. It was bitter cold amid the 8000-foot peaks.
On the highest point of the trail there stands a simple monument, put there by Pfc Elvin W. Penn, of Muskogee, Oklahoma, to mark the grave of a doughboy who died on the trail to Buna. Penn was one of two medics left behind on the trail with seven sick men and a group of native litter bearers. One patient died. Penn hewed a headstone of solid rock for the grave. He made a cross from newly peeled white limbs of trees. He built a neat wall of stone around the plot. A buddy who passed the spot some weeks later said, “It was the most beautiful grave I ever saw anywhere.”
The second battalion moved down into the dank jungles of Papua, crossing and recrossing the roaring waters of unmapped rivers. Forty-two days after it left Port Moresby, the filthy battalion emerged from the green twilight of the rain forest of Soputa. The long green line snaked single file through the kunai grass. A Jap sniper’s rifle crackled. A man went down. A staff sergeant lifted his tommy gun and sprayed the treetop. The tommy gunner’s name was Herman Botcher. The soldiers looked at him admiringly and began to have confidence in him.
Thus began the hell of Buna. The 127th and 128th Infantry regiments moved by air to bases east of Buna, which is the reason the doughs today will tell you they were the first United States troops to be airborne into combat. Kids who one year before had been playing high-school football learned for the first time the terror of the night perimeter – a terror which was to be with them for a long, long time.
Uniforms, continually wet, rotted on their backs. New shoes rotted off the feet in ten days. The men were covered with festering sores – the jungle rot which has plagued the division ever since. Blankets became fly-blown, green with mold, leaden with rain, and were usually abandoned. Fever – malaria, dengue, typhus – felled men faster than Jap bullets. Dysentery took its toll.
These were the men who went up against 5000 veteran Jap jungle fighters entrenched in what the Army – not given to superlatives – called “superb defense positions.”
“We wrote the book on jungle fighting,” a Buna man said casually. “We learned as we went, and we were up against guys who were supposed to be the best in the world at the business.” The research was nasty. Units of the 126th Infantry went into action on the Sanananda front with 1119 officers and men, and came out with 165.
The Bottcher legend, which will be forever a part of the 32nd, was molded on the steaming morning of December 5, 1942. Staff Sergeant Bottcher led a thirty-one-man platoon forward when all other elements of the attacking force were pinned down by enemy fire. Wading across a creek under constant mortar fire, Bottcher led his men thorough to the beach. He drove a wedge between Buna and Buna village. Botttcher, one eardrum broken by mortar blast, his hand cut by shrapnel, held that wedge. The tide of the battle of Buna turned. Bottcher became a captain. They gave him the Distinguished Service Cross. Three men out of those thirty-one were still with the platoon when it came off the Villa Verde three years later.
By the time Buna was over, on January 22, 1943, a total of 5000 Japs had been killed. This was the entire Jap force in the area. The 32nd’s cost was brutal. The division sent 9825 men into combat and suffered 2620 battle casualties. However, disease took its toll as well; 6336 men were lost due to malaria, dengue, jungle rot and dysentery. The division received the Distinguished Unit Citation from President Roosevelt.
Sick remnants returned to Australia. Word got around that the 32nd was finished, that it would go home. Then Gill, the lean Virginian, came to take over. He told the 32nd in no uncertain terms that it would fight again.
They had had enough, they thought. But they found themselves in the midst of amphibious training, while malaria cases were nursed back to health in rest camps. Replacements arrived. [Including Homer's father, sometime between now and Feb. 4 - HJS.] The 32nd was rebuilt to fight.