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

metal on metal, of rifles clanking against helmets. “Put it this way,” Stenberg says, “we did a lot of marching.”
    On weekends the men would head for New Orleans, Alexandria, or Natchez, Mississippi, attracted by the promise of music, booze, and women. Despite the occasional outbreak of gonorrhea and the lurid films designed to scare the men into abstinence, the buses from Camp Beauregard deposited them every weekend at the front door of a brothel in Alexandria that they called Ma Belle’s. One guardsman, who spent his share of time at Ma Belle’s, said that the line of eager young men often ran around the block.
    In February 1941, the 32nd moved to the newly built Camp Livingston, Louisiana, ten miles northeast of Alexandria. At Livingston, the division began its transformation, losing its old-time Guard officers to “overage” (being declared too old to serve with combat troops) and bringing on board recent Selective Service draftees and junior officers from the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) and Officer Candidate School (OCS).
    With the infusion of troops, Captain Simon Warmenhoven, formerly the senior resident in Surgery at St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and now one of the doctors in the 126th Infantry Regiment’s medical detachment, stayed busy. Warmenhoven was no stranger to hard work. Growing up, he had put in long hours on his father’s farm. On summer breaks during college he ran a four-horse grain binder and traveled all over cutting wheat for local farmers. His younger brother Cornelius, who helped him by drumming up business, remembers how Simon would make it back to the house well after dark and practically fall asleep at the supper table. Once he got back to college, he shoveled coal into campus furnaces for spending money.
    The new soldiers needed physicals and vaccinations. After days of marching they needed help tending to sore feet. Perhaps what they required most was sound medical advice about the dangers of cavorting with the kind of women who made their living at Ma Belle’s. Doc Warmenhoven could only do so much, though. These were young men in the prime of their lives, and he was not given to preaching. Regardless of his warnings, the soldiers sowed their wild oats on Friday and Saturday nights and then, as the saying went, attended church on Sundays “to pray for crop failure.”
    Warmenhoven, who in his early thirties was practically as old as some of the soldiers’ fathers, stayed behind in camp writing letters to his wife Henrietta, whom he called Mandy (she called him Sam). Warmenhoven was a devoted husband and father, and the son of staunchly religious parents. When his parents emigrated to the United States from the Netherlands in 1921 (Simon was eleven years old), they chose the community of Sunnyside, Washington. Sunnyside was founded in 1898 as a Christian cooperative colony by members of the German Baptist Progressive Brethren, who selected the beautiful Yakima Valley as the site for their experiment in Christian living. In every land deed it sold, Sunnyside included a morality code: no drinking, dancing, gambling, or horseracing. By the time Warmenhoven was of high school age, his parents sent him off to Hull Academy, a Christian school in Hull, Iowa, where he boarded with the minister’s family. Later, with a student loan from the Christian Reformed Church, he attended Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was preparing to enter the seminary, fulfilling his parents’ dream, when he signed up for dance lessons, and realized that thanks to the church’s austere code of conduct, he had been missing out on one of life’s great joys. He switched his major to biology, got a Bachelor of Science degree, and later attended medical school at Marquette, a Jesuit university in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
    On Sunday, March 9, 1941, while most of the men were dragging themselves back to camp after boozy weekend jaunts to Alexandria or Natchez or New Orleans,