The Ghost Mountain Boys: America’s Forgotten War in New Guinea D

By the time they reached the coast, they didn’t look like soldiers anymore. Men who had shipped out of San Francisco fit and healthy had lost 50, 60, sometimes 65 lb off frames that had little to spare in the first place. Their uniforms hung off them. Many hadn’t had a dry pair of boots in over a month.

They had just spent 42 days walking 130 mi across some of the most brutal terrain on Earth. Swamps, jungle, and a 10,000 ft mountain range the locals said was haunted. And they had done it with almost no training, almost no proper equipment, and almost no idea what waited for them on the other side. What waited for them was one of the fiercest, costliest battles the US Army fought anywhere in the Pacific War.

This is the story of the 32nd Infantry Division, the men who came to be known as the Ghost Mountain Boys, and the Battle of Buna. A brutal campaign so costly, it permanently changed how the American military fought the remainder of the war in the Pacific. The 32nd was a National Guard division built out of Wisconsin and Michigan.

Men who, before Pearl Harbor, had mostly joined for the steady paycheck and the weekend drills, not expecting to fight anyone. They shipped out of San Francisco aboard the ocean liner SS Lurline in April 1942, landed in Adelaide, Australia in May, and trained at camps outside Brisbane through the middle of that year.

Training that was built for a European battlefield because that’s where most of them assumed they were eventually headed. Instead, by September 1942, they were in Port Moresby on the southern coast of New Guinea because the war had gone somewhere nobody in Washington had fully planned for. New Guinea in 1942 was one of the least hospitable pieces of ground either side fought over in the entire war.

Dense jungle, towering mountains, and disease-ridden swamps, most of it barely mapped by anyone before the war arrived. Japanese forces had landed on the northern coast and were pushing south across the Owen Stanley mountain range along a track called Kokoda, aiming for Port Moresby itself. If Port Moresby fell, Australia’s northern approaches would be wide open to further Japanese advance.

Australian troops were fighting the main Japanese thrust along the Kokoda track. American commanders decided to send part of the 32nd division to flank the Japanese from the south over a second, lesser-known route through the mountains, the Kapa Kapa trail, named after the coastal village of Gabagaba, which American soldiers consistently mispronounced.

Most of the 32nd division made the crossing to the northern side of the mountains by air, a 45-minute flight over some of the roughest terrain in the Pacific. The 2nd battalion of the 126th infantry regiment did not get that option. They were ordered to march on foot over mountains that included a peak so remote and eerie that American troops started calling it Ghost Mountain, a name that stuck partly because of local stories about the place and partly because of the moss-covered trees on its upper slopes that seemed to glow faintly at night. Its real name was Mount Obree, over 10,000 ft high. And the men who crossed it later described the summit as feeling like walking through a cave made of wet, spongy moss with no solid ground anywhere underfoot. None of the soldiers assigned to this track had any jungle

training. Most had barely fired their weapons before shipping out, let alone learned how to survive in terrain like this, or how to treat the tropical illnesses that would soon become their most persistent enemy. What they did have, and by nearly every account, what actually saved the mission from becoming a complete disaster, was help from Papua New Guinean carriers and guides, men who knew the trail, knew where water and food could be found, and carried supplies the exhausted Americans could no longer manage themselves. Without them, several survivors said afterward, the march would almost certainly have failed outright. What followed was, by any measure, one of the most physically punishing ordeals any American unit endured in the entire war, and it happened before they’d fired a single shot at the enemy. The trail crossed swamp after swamp, waist-deep in places, alive with leeches

and mosquitoes carrying malaria. Rain fell almost constantly, turning what passed for a path into ankle-deep mud that sucked the boots right off exhausted men’s feet. Supply drops from the air, the only realistic way to resupply a column moving through terrain with no roads at all, were unreliable at best.

Bundles missed their mark, landed in impassable terrain, or simply never came at all for stretches of days. Food supplies, difficult to carry and harder to resupply in terrain this remote, ran desperately short within the first couple of weeks. Men who had started the march with full rations were soon rationing single cans of stew between multiple soldiers, or going without food entirely for stretches at a time.

Malaria spread through the column relentlessly. So did dengue fever, dysentery, and jungle ulcers that festered in the constant wet heat. Soldiers later recalled cutting holes in the seats of their own trousers because there was no time, no privacy, and often no strength left to do anything else about the dysentery hollowing them out from the inside.

And then, there was Ghost Mountain itself. A final brutal climb that some survivors described as feeling less like hiking and more like pulling their own body weight up a slope made of sponge, soaked through, freezing at altitude after weeks of tropical heat below. 42 days after they set out, the survivors of the 2nd Battalion, 126th Infantry, stumbled out of the mountains roughly 2 miles from the village of Buna on New Guinea’s northern coast.

They were, in the words of one soldier who lived through it, nearly shattered by the experience. There was no rest waiting for them. On November 16th, 1942, alongside the rest of the 126th, elements of the 127th and 128th Infantry Regiments and Australian troops, they were ordered straight into an assault on the Japanese positions at Buna Village and Buna Mission, organized into what commanders called the Urbana Force on one flank and the Warren Force on the other.

What they found waiting for them at Buna was not what American intelligence had promised. Commanders, including General Douglas MacArthur himself, had assumed the Japanese garrison there was weak, poorly supplied, possibly even starving. It wasn’t. The Japanese defenders, reinforced by newly landed troops from the 229th Infantry Regiment and naval landing forces, had spent weeks building one of the most sophisticated jungle defensive positions American troops had encountered anywhere in the Pacific War.

Concealed bunkers connected by trenches, interlocking fields of fire, positioned along dry ground bordered by swamp on one side and the sea controlled by the Japanese navy on the other. There was no room to maneuver around it. Every yard had to be taken head-on. The results were disastrous. On the northern flank, a separate American force called Warren Force pushed against Japanese positions near an airstrip the troops called the new strip and a crossing point over Simemi Creek and made almost no progress at all. Attacks launched day after day in early December gained ground measured in yards when they gained any ground whatsoever. On November 16th, four coastal craft carrying the division’s commanding general, Major General Edwin Forrest Harding, and desperately needed supplies were caught in the open by 18 Japanese Zero fighters.

24 men were killed and most of the supplies destroyed before Harding himself had to swim to shore. Under mounting pressure from MacArthur to take Buna regardless of cost, Harding launched repeated assaults through late November. One push on November 23rd got a company within 300 yd of Buna Village, close enough to see it, not close enough to take it.

Another major push on November 30th was thrown back almost as easily as the ones before it. Harding, increasingly desperate, requested tanks, artillery, and his division’s full third infantry regiment to have any real chance of breaking through. Requests that, for reasons that remain debated among historians, went largely unanswered while he still held command.

Meanwhile, combat losses were only part of the story. Malaria, dysentery, and scrub typhus were tearing through the division’s ranks faster than Japanese bullets were, reducing entire battalions to half their fighting strength without a single additional casualty on the battlefield.

MacArthur, watching from his headquarters in Port Moresby, ran out of patience. On November 30th, 1942, he summoned newly promoted Lieutenant General Robert Eichelberger and gave him an order that has been quoted by military historians ever since. According to Eichelberger’s own account, MacArthur told him to relieve any officer who wouldn’t fight, down to putting sergeants in command of battalions if that’s what it took.

And closed with a line that left no room for misinterpretation. He wanted Eichelberger to take Buna or not come back alive. It was, by any standard, one of the starkest orders an American general gave another American general in the entire war. Eichelberger relieved Harding and took personal command at the front, not from a headquarters miles behind the lines, but close enough to the fighting that members of his own staff became casualties alongside the infantry.

What he found when he actually inspected the situation firsthand was sobering. Exhausted, malaria-ridden troops who had been fighting and marching for months without enough tanks, artillery, or fresh supplies to break a position this well-built. Rather than simply repeating Harding’s approach with more urgency, Eichelberger pushed for exactly the resources his predecessor had been requesting all along, tanks, artillery, and fresh troops from the 127th Infantry, and got them in a way Harding somehow never had. His own first attack, launched December 5th, initially fared no better than Harding’s had, but with better supply, better artillery support, and relentless grinding pressure, a platoon from the 126th Infantry finally reached the sea on December 5th, driving a wedge between Buna Village and the Japanese positions

further along the coast. Buna Village fell on December 14th. Australian troops captured the neighboring stronghold of Gona 5 days earlier on December 9th. Buna station itself was stormed on January 2nd, 1943. The last organized Japanese resistance in the area at a position called Sanananda held out until January 22nd, 1943.

More than 2 months after the 2 126th had first stumbled out of the mountains expecting perhaps a quick fight. The cost of the entire Papua campaign from the Kokoda fighting through the fall of Sanananda was staggering relative to its size. Japan lost nearly 12,000 men defending a stretch of coastline most Americans couldn’t have located on a map before the war.

Of roughly 11,000 Japanese troops who fought at Buna and Gona, only a few thousand survived. Cut off from resupply and reinforcement for weeks at a time, many of the defenders were reduced to near starvation themselves by the campaign’s final weeks, fighting on regardless. Australian forces suffered around 2,000 dead and wounded.

The 32nd Division alone lost close to 700 killed and around 1,700 wounded in combat, and that number is dwarfed by the toll disease took on top of it. Of roughly 10,700 combat troops the division’s three infantry regiments put into the field, over 8,000 were treated for malaria, dengue fever, dysentery, or scrub typhus over the course of the campaign.

A disease casualty rate that outnumbered combat losses by more than three to one. Some historians estimate the division suffered casualties, combat and disease combined, approaching 90% of its fighting strength by the time Buna fell. Eichelberger himself never described Buna as a triumph worth celebrating.

In his post-war memoir, Our Jungle Road to Tokyo, he wrote plainly that the victory had been bought at a brutal price in death, wounds, disease, and human suffering. And that even years later, looking back on it, Buna remained something close to a nightmare to him. He wasn’t alone in that assessment.

Even at the time, senior officers on the ground privately acknowledged that non-battle casualties, physical exhaustion, lack of shelter, spoiled or insufficient rations, and disease running unchecked through units already stretched thin, had done as much to stall the campaign as anything the Japanese did.

MacArthur, for his part, drew a hard lesson from what had happened. After the Papua campaign ended, he reportedly vowed there would be no more Buna’s, no more frontal assaults against entrenched Japanese positions without the tanks, artillery, and supply lines needed to support the infantry doing the actual fighting.

That lesson shaped the island-hopping strategy the US military would rely on for the rest of the Pacific War, bypassing heavily fortified Japanese strongholds wherever possible, instead of grinding straight through them, exactly the mistake Buna had been. None of that made the ordeal any less real for the men who lived through it.

The 32nd Division spent the better part of a year afterward refitting in Australia before it was fit to fight again. Its ranks rebuilt with replacements who had never heard of the Kokoda Trail or Ghost Mountain and would never fully understand what the survivors around them had actually been through.

Many of the men who survived the trail and the fighting at Buna carried the physical and psychological weight of it for the rest of their lives largely out of the public eye. Overshadowed then and now by Guadalcanal, which was unfolding at almost exactly the same time and captured far more of the wartime headlines, in part because the Marines fighting there had war correspondents embedded with them in a way the isolated jungle-bound 32nd Division largely didn’t.

The Ghost Mountain boys earned their nickname crossing a haunted-looking peak most Americans have never heard of, then fought one of the most brutal battles of the entire Pacific War immediately afterward with almost nothing left in reserve. It remains, even among Pacific War historians, one of the least remembered major American campaigns of 1942.

Not because it mattered less, but because it happened in a place and in a way that never made it into the popular memory of the war the way Guadalcanal or Iwo Jima did. If you want to hear how the lessons learned at Buna reshaped the island-hopping strategy that won the rest of the Pacific War, that’s a story for another video.

Let us know in the comments which forgotten battle we should cover next.