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

the “Red Arrow,” the 32nd Division first distinguished itself in World War I. Because of its exploits, the French gave the 32nd the sobriquet “Les Terribles.” Its symbol, which it wore proudly as a shoulder patch, was a red arrow piercing a line. It was said that there was not a line the tenacious 32nd could not penetrate—it was the first division to pierce the German army’s Hindenburg Line, for example.
    By 1940, though, the 32nd Divison’s glory was a distant memory. On October 15 that year, when the Fighting Thirty-Second was “called to colors” in the first peacetime conscription act in American history, it was a largely untrained, loosely organized National Guard unit, comprised mostly of men from Wisconsin and Michigan.
    In the lean years at the end of the Depression, many jobless young men saw the National Guard as an alternative to poverty—most felt no special calling or patriotic duty or military ambition. Stanley Jastrzembski of Company G, 2nd Battalion, 126th U.S. Infantry, was one of those men. Born and raised in Muskegon, Michigan, he joined the National Guard to help support his family. Jastrzembski had the longest name in the company—“Jas Trz Emb Ski,” the men of Company G used to chant jokingly—and at only sixteen he was its youngest member.
    When Germany invaded Poland, Jastrzembski considered going to Poland and enlisting in the Polish army. He stayed home, however, and to help support his family, he joined the National Guard instead. His immigrant parents were dead, and there were six kids living at home. The Jastrzembski children tended a garden and traded vegetables with neighbors for chickens and rabbits. There was no money, though, and the family needed the paycheck the Guard offered.
    For Jastrzembski, the Guard offered just enough money to live on. For others, it provided a small beer and entertainment fund. A guy’s local Guard unit met one night a week—for that he received a paycheck of $12.00 every three months, enough for him to keep food in the house and to take a gal he was sweet on to the picture show. For weekend maneuvers and three weeks of summer training, the Guard paid extra.
    Upon having their service extended beyond one year, many guardsmen threatened to go AWOL. “OHIO” was the code word of their rebellion—“Over the Hill In October.” But October 15 came and went. The truth was that life in the army was not half bad. Call-up meant three meals a day, a roof overhead, a chance to shoot guns, and steady pay.

    When the 32nd was mobilized in October 1940, it was sent via troop trains to the Deep South, far from its midwestern roots. The send-off was festive. Units marched to train stations, bands played, and thousands of people lining the parade routes shouted their encouragement.
    Camp Beauregard, situated at the fringes of Alexandria, Louisiana, was the division’s new home. Beauregard, though, was not ready for the 32nd. Built as a National Guard summer camp and equipped to accommodate only one regiment, the camp’s infrastructure was overwhelmed by the division’s one hundred officers and thirty-two hundred enlisted men, who promptly dubbed Beauregard “Camp Dis-regard.” The tents in which they lived were heated with charcoal, which gave them terrible headaches. And when the cold late-fall rains began, the camp, trampled by the boots of thousands of men and the heavy tires of military vehicles, became a mudhole.
    Jastrzembski and the 32nd spent only four months at Camp Dis-regard, but it was a stay plagued by personnel turnover, equipment shortages, and an inadequate training regimen. One guardsman said bluntly, “We fired our rifles, screamed, and ran at straw dummies. That was the extent of our training.” Carl Stenberg, a heavy weapons squad leader in Jastrzembski’s Company G, recalls that the training area at Dis-regard lay four miles from camp. Company G marched out in the morning and back to camp at night. He remembers the sound of