Word: buna
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Lieut. Paul Schwartz had only 13 men at his command, but he manipulated them with the tactical care of a field marshal. His patrol in jungle-matted New Guinea was working through to the coast beyond Buna. Near the grass-thatched village of Tarakena a Jap machine gun fired on them. Japs in foxholes and trenches held the village. Young Schwartz, seeing his patrol outnumbered, deployed two men to pin down the machine gun, two others as snipers on the village's sea flank. The remaining nine men and Schwartz charged the village firing. Surprised Japanese, apparently believing themselves...
...smelling swamps and man-high kunai grass are no substitutes for holly wreaths, nor the whine of Jap bullets for jingle bells, as most all the men out there will tell you (you'll find Johnston's story on Christmas with General MacArthur's men in Buna on page...
...Battle for Buna, which many observers had thought would be a pushover, was developing last week into a major struggle for control of New Guinea. It was being fought as fiercely as any battle on Guadalcanal. Allied casualties, mostly wounded, mounted steadily and piles of Jap corpses rotted in the jungles, in the swamps and on the beaches...
...Buna village had been taken, but Buna Mission, one mile to the west, had not fallen. Nor had the center of the snake-like line between captured Buna and captured Gona. The Japs were so well supplied and had dug in so strongly that they had to be dug out almost man by man. As one correspondent put it: "Destroy your opinions of this as a little side show. The numbers of men involved and the strategic importance of the objectives are relative things anyhow. Nowhere in the world today are American soldiers engaged in fighting so desperate, so merciless...
There will be neither peace nor good will nor much reason for celebration unless it is to celebrate the victory at Buna, for which the Americans and Australians are still furiously fighting as I write this dispatch with Christmas one week away...