Free The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea--The Forgotten War of the South Pacific by James Campbell

Upon arriving in Australia, however, most of the soldiers were sent to Queensland to perform menial labor, finishing airfields and fortifying the coastline, thus forfeiting valuable training time, so when they arrived in Port Moresby in mid-August, they lacked the skills for jungle fighting. They had the wrong equipment, too. For example, instead of jungle green, they wore bright khaki-colored battle gear; instead of pants to keep away the mosquitoes, leeches, and chiggers, they had knee-length shorts similar to the ones they wore in the deserts of North Africa. And in a land where every additional pound was a burden, they carried too much weight in their fieldpacks.
    MacArthur was not ready to send in the 32nd yet. As Colonels Yokoyama and Tsukamoto marched inland, the American division was thousands of miles from New Guinea, traveling by train from South Australia to a tent encampment called Camp Tamborine. Situated in semi-tropical country thirty miles south of Brisbane, Camp Tamborine was fifteen hundred miles north of Adelaide. Rather than launching into jungle training exercises the moment they arrived at Tamborine, the troops had to build the camp from scratch. Soldiers who should have been learning to patrol and to maneuver at night were forced to cut down and clear trees and dig latrines.
    It was weeks before the division was able to drill again. Watching the Red Arrow men, Harding remembered that General Marshall had counseled him against taking over the division. The 32nd, Marshall said, was poorly trained and rife with Midwestern small-town politics, enmities, and allegiances. At the time, Harding thanked his old friend for the advice and accepted the division anyway. The chance at his first field command was too attractive to resist.
    As soon as he was able, Harding implemented a live-fire infiltration course called the Sergeant York and set up commando, sniper, and tommy gun schools. One of his most capable instructors was a man named Herman Bottcher.
    Bottcher was not new to Australia. Though German-born, Bottcher left his native country at the age of 20, bound for Sydney, Australia, in May 1929. As he roamed the city looking for employment, he studied a German-English dictionary. Eventually he found a job as a carpenter on a sheep station in New South Wales. While there he saved his money and nursed a dream of coming to America. In November 1931, when he landed in San Francisco, that dream became a reality.
    With sixty dollars in his pocket, he took a room at a hotel on Third Street and searched for work. Jobs were few, so he traveled south to San Diego. Nine months later he had saved enough money to get back to San Francisco, where he took a job in San Francisco’s Crystal Palace markets and attended classes at night at San Francisco State College. Four years later, he was off again, lured to Spain by the Civil War, where he enlisted with the International Brigade. He spent two years fighting with the Loyalists, rose to the rank of captain, and was twice wounded. Attempting to re-enter the United States, he was detained by Immigration officials at Ellis Island. After questioning him about his political affiliations, Immigration eventually let him go. Bottcher returned to San Francisco, where he worked as a cabinetmaker. The day after the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor, Bottcher enlisted, and less than a month later he reported to Camp Roberts, California.

    No one would have known from watching the 32nd that MacArthur was preparing to transport it to New Guinea. The majority of the division’s training consisted of twenty-five-mile marches through the modest terrain of the Mount Tamborine area; field exercises, where men lived in tents and ate from mess kits; compass and first aid courses; and pulling sentry duty along the coastal beaches. The kinds of small-unit activities that worked in the jungle were not stressed. Harding understood their importance, but how could he teach sudden attacks and withdrawals,