Almost a Family Read online

  “Now it’s October 16, there having been an interruption.… My goodness, we near November and that’ll be one (birthday) for Johnnie. Heigh-ho! I’m tired out and going to bed in a few moments. But not before I tell you for at least the second time that you’re a damn swell gal. I shouldn’t be so tired. I should write you a love letter. Will you take the wish for the act? Oh, my dear, it’s going to be pretty nice under that apple tree with that Tom Collins.… Good night, my dearest. Some time I’ll really tell you what you are and what you’ve done. Or maybe you know? … Tell Bob I hope he has a lot of fun in the snow this winter. He’ll have to enjoy it for me, too, for I’m afraid I won’t see any. Night, Sweet.”

  He wrote a large “BOB” on the last page. (He had been told that Bob poured over his letters, looking for the one word he could recognize.) He jumped in a jeep and drove along a dusty road to a tent, where he dropped off the letter and the cable for transmission to the censor. Then he drove back, packed his full field kit, and went to bed, crawling under the mosquito netting to lie on his cot. He would have to get up early in the morning to catch a flight over the Owen Stanley Mountains, the treacherous ridge that split the Papuan peninsula, to reach the northern coast.

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  Meanwhile, two old fishing boats requisitioned by the U.S. Army were making their way toward the north by circumnavigating the island’s eastern tip. One was the King John, a seventy-foot wooden trawler plucked from its berth in Sydney in July. The other was a sister ship, the Timoshenko, a fifty-footer, also from Sydney. They were hardly impressive—not what you’d expect to spearhead MacArthur’s long-awaited amphibious counteroffensive. The King John had a balky reverse gear, her engine wheezed, and her sun-scorched decks reeked of fish and copra. She rode low in the water, looking about to sink at any moment, and her most conspicuous feature was the hoist bar angled off the mast for hauling nets. The Timoshenko looked, if anything, even stranger. Someone had painted a large red hammer and sickle on her funnel, apparently in jest. Neither ship had weaponry beyond a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on a shoulder-high tripod in the prow. The two vessels belonged to the “small ships” fleet, a ragtag group of luggers, trawlers, and ketches assembled to carry troops and supplies for the army in the absence of the U.S. Navy, which was otherwise occupied in the Central Pacific. One American general, taking his first look at the rust buckets, was said to have exclaimed, “Goddamn war’s gone all old-fashioned on us here!”

  The ships left Port Moresby on October 12 under the fleet commander, Lt. Col. Laurence A. McKenny, the division’s quartermaster, who in his prewar incarnation had been a Detroit elementary school principal. By October 14, they had made it to Milne Bay, on the island’s far eastern tip. It had been the site of an attack five weeks earlier, in which Australian soldiers, the “diggers,” had repulsed the Japanese in hand-to-hand combat, much of it at night during torrential rains. Enemy tanks were still mired in muddy ditches beside the road, their narrow treads splayed and the hatches on their cylindrical turrets blown open. At Gili Gili wharf, the crew loaded supplies: ammo, gasoline, medical equipment, and rations.

  The next morning, the King John and the Timoshenko departed Milne Bay. On board was a handsome lieutenant, already well known at thirty-one, Bruce Fahnestock. Bruce and his brother, Sheridan, were renowned for their prewar explorations of the South Seas. They had sailed schooners around the islands, collecting songs, cultural artifacts, and rare specimens of birds and fish for the American Museum of Natural History. Now in wartime, they had returned, scouring Australian ports for suitable vessels for the “small ships” fleet. So Lieutenant Fahnestock was riding in one of his own recruited trawlers.

  The ships arrived at Wanigela just after noon on the sixteenth. Immediately, there was confusion, leading to a change in plans. McKenny, believing his mission was to bring up more supplies from the rear, had expected to turn right around and head back east to Milne Bay to load up again. But after taking a dinghy to shore to confer with Gen. Hanford MacNider, commander of MacArthur’s coastal force, he was stunned to learn that instead the ships were to go in the other direction. They would push on west, farther up the coast, toward the Japanese, carrying troops. Instead of gradually building up supplies, their job was to forge ahead and stake out ground for a rapid assault. The pressure was on. Fearing that the Japanese would reinforce their stronghold at Buna, MacArthur wanted to seize it quickly and set up an air base that would push the enemy out of New Guinea. That way, he would protect Australia and begin the long island-hopping road to Tokyo.

  The new route meant that the ships would round a large cape, Cape Nelson. Already, MacNider had sent two battalions on foot to cut across the neck of the peninsula, where preliminary reconnaissance indicated the trails were good. (The recon reports turned out to be wrong; the trails were inundated with seven-foot-deep fetid swamp water, and the overland crossing had to be aborted.) All the troops were to meet up at a speck on the map called Pongani, a village of a dozen or so thatched-roof huts on a half-moon bay lined with tall coconut palms. Buna, heavily fortified and surrounded by chest-high swamps and razor-sharp kunai grass, was only thirty miles to the north. The problem with the new route, MacNider realized at once, was that ships never ventured into those waters because they were treacherous. The reefs, some a mere two feet below the surface, were uncharted. Crossing one could rip the bottom of a boat and peel it back like a tin can. Getting stuck on one could mean being a sitting duck for the Japanese aircraft, which dominated the skies during daylight hours from their feeder base at Rabaul, New Britain.

  The next morning, October 17, Barney got up at dawn and took a jeep to Laloki airfield, outside of Port Moresby. At 8:00 a.m., he boarded a DC-3 along with a contingent of troops from the 128th Infantry Regiment of the 32nd Division. “I still don’t see how these things can fly,” said the congenial private next to him. “This beats walking,” said another. Barney reached into the front breast pocket of his uniform and pulled out a notebook and a thick, dark-lead army-issue pencil. He jotted the remarks down. He believed you could never collect too many quotes, and you never knew which ones would come in handy later on. The soldiers were National Guardsmen, young men mostly from farms and small towns in Wisconsin and Michigan. They had been rushed up by air transport from Australia and they were scared. The places where they had trained, at Camp Livingston, Louisiana, and then Camp Cable, near Brisbane, with its semiarid terrain, looked nothing like the steaming haze they could see from the plane’s portals. Everything about New Guinea was foreign and forbidding. The jagged mountains were impassable and the jungle impenetrable. The island was filled with exotic animals—one species of kangaroo actually lived in trees—and most of them were dangerous. The troops heard stories of man-eating crocodiles and huge bats and wild boars and poisonous snakes, not to mention cannibals and headhunters. At night a man’s imagination could turn a shrieking cockatoo into a charging Japanese soldier, a branch crashing down from a rotting tree into a grenade. Already they had been ravaged by mosquitoes bigger than any insects had the right to be, along with wasps, scorpions, cockroaches, leeches, flies, and biting ants. Some men were already laid low by malaria or dengue or blackwater fevers. They were sweltering in the heat and soaked by the tropical downpours. Their uniforms, still wet from hastily applied green dye, a last-minute stab at camouflage, made everything worse: The dye closed off the breathing spaces in the cloth, so that wearing it was like being wrapped in canvas. In private reports, the top commander had rated the Americans “barely satisfactory” in combat efficiency.

  The plane trip took forty-eight minutes. The aircraft flew over the jutting ridges of the mountains, obscured from time to time by heavy mist, and then dropped low over the green canopy of the tropical rain forest and the coastal mangrove swamp. It put down on a grassy strip in the middle of a damp field. Barney climbed out. So did the soldiers, moving awkwardly in full battle gear. A group of seven native women, bare to the waist and carrying bunches of bananas and
pawpaws, chattered and stared at the DC-3, then turned their backs and disappeared into the jungle. When the piercing sound of the engines cut out, the men heard silence for a moment. Then abruptly the solid green walls around them echoed with the cries of raucous birds and the droning of insects. Suddenly they were in a different world, one that made the dusty roads and tents and squat huts of Port Moresby seem like bustling civilization. The place was Wanigela, a mission station rapidly turning into an American supply depot on Collingswood Bay, sixty-five miles south of Buna.

  The men were ordered to form up on the edge of the field, then walked along paths cut through towering eucalyptus until they reached a small bay. There, at anchor, waited the two ships. Fluttering from their masts in a languid breeze were flags not seen in these contested waters since Pearl Harbor, ten and a half months earlier: the Stars and Stripes. The soldiers massed on the beach under clouds of mosquitoes. Above the ebb and flow of the surf could be heard the sounds of men slapping their necks and foreheads. They rowed out to the trawlers.

  Barney thought the King John looked like a pirate ship and jotted that down in his notebook. He boarded it, along with Fahnestock and fifty-six men. The soldiers sat down, squeezing in among oil drums lashed to the sideboards and crates of ammo. The first arrivals picked the choicest spots along the sides and under the launch suspended upside down in the stern. Another forty-six men climbed aboard the Timoshenko.

  Shortly after noon, the two ships lifted anchor and set off, following the coastline several miles out. The shore was lined with leaning palm trees and deceptively placid-looking beaches. It was mostly overcast and, when the sun broke through, unbearably hot. The going was slow. The diesel engine chugged away, sending a plume of smoke into the air. The King John was the lead ship, and in her bow a young native sat on his haunches, staring intently ahead for a reef. Whenever he spotted a telltale patch of blue-green, he flicked his hand to the left or right. In the wheelhouse, the skipper, Bill Priest, yanked the wheel to port or starboard, sometimes so violently that it jolted the soldiers. At dusk the lookout pulled out a lead line and let it down every two or three minutes, softly calling out the marks over his shoulder.

  At night the young soldiers were quiet and reflective, too jittery to sleep. From time to time one would stand up on deck to stretch, staring down at the sparkling phosphorescence in the water or tilting his head back to take in the brilliant, eerily unfamiliar constellations in the southern sky. Fahnestock stayed on deck to direct the course—he knew more about navigating than anyone else—and in the cramped cabin below, as a swinging lantern threw shadows around, McKenny pulled out aerial maps of Pongani. Barney watched. He felt the excitement of a newsman on a big story—the army’s first ground assault, the first engagement with the enemy—and he would be the only one to write about it.

  By 3:00 a.m., the ships reached their destination off Pongani. They anchored a half mile out to sea and shut off the engines. Barney slept two hours in the cabin. When he awoke he spotted Orion and waited for the sunrise. At 6:00 a.m., he wrote, “just turning light,” as the sun’s rays shot across the water and cast a rose-tinted hue on the hulking mountains ahead. The silhouette of the palm trees and half a dozen square huts could be seen now, and so could the beach, which was beginning to turn golden. The men “caught a mackerel and a pike for stew,” he wrote. By 6:45, “the mountains had emerged” and were clearly visible. “Grenades distributed” to the troops. The two ships weighed anchor and crept toward shore, preparing to launch landing parties. The huts came into focus. He could make out the stilts that held them up six feet off the sand and the thatched roofs. But no natives. Nothing was stirring.

  Then, at 8:00 a.m., the silence was broken. A plane roared out of the southeast. It was a twin-tailed, two-engine bomber, hard to identify. It could have belonged to either side. Barney stared up at it and squinted and shielded his eyes from the early-morning sun for a better look. So did all the men. He pulled out his notebook.

  “Plane across course,” he scribbled. “Jap or our?” The plane circled in a wide loop, apparently trying to identify the two ships five thousand feet below. Then it left.

  The men watched the mysterious bomber fly off to the southeast. They exhaled a collective sigh of relief. Some looked at the U.S. flag at the top of the mast in the stern, clearly visible. They stood up, gathering their gear to go ashore, causing the ship to rock gently. An officer in short pants went to the crank in the stern to lower the launch for the first landing party.

  Then, at 8:05, out of the south, the bomber returned.

  Aghast, the men looked up and saw that its bomb-bay doors were open. Fahnestock leapt up and ran to the machine gun in the prow. Barney stood by the wheelhouse door and again pulled out his notebook. The plane was coming in low, its nose pointed at the King John. The men on board were still unable to read its markings. Fahnestock swung the machine gun toward the sky. The noise shook the boat. The first bomb, a five-hundred-pounder, was dropped. Most of the men flattened themselves on the deck before it exploded on the water, sending up a cascade of spray. Barney scribbled in his notebook: “bombed by 2 eng. plane—500 yd. miss.” The boats zigzagged frantically, the King John heading toward shallow water, the Timoshenko out to sea. Barney grabbed the door-jamb of the wheelhouse. He stood there looking out, guiding the captain away from the path of the bombs.

  The plane rose, veered around in a long loop, and banked. It came in for a second run, lower this time, its machine gun strafing and diving directly at the King John. Fahnestock fired back and some of the men raised their M1s and shot blindly into the air. Another bomb came plummeting down, sending a waterspout one hundred feet into the air. The plane rose, left again toward the southeast, and curved back. Now it was strafing the deck of the ship and taking machine-gun fire. A third bomb smashed near the port side of the bow. Fragments screamed past or thudded into the thick wood of the sideboards. Fahnestock, hit in the back, slumped over the gun. Barney wrote quickly: “Fahn shot 50 cal.” The plane dropped its fourth and last missile near the stern. An antipersonnel bomb, it exploded on the water’s surface and a fragment flew off and came thundering toward the boat. The men close to Barney huddled on the deck and looked up, to see him lurch. The heavy splinter caught him in the back of the neck. He fell inside the door, onto the floor of the wheelhouse.

  The plane disappeared into the blue sky and suddenly it was quiet, as if nothing had happened. The birds stopped shrieking. Dazed, the soldiers began to stand up, touching themselves, checking their gear. Natives on the beach launched outrigger canoes to come to help them. The officers took stock. None of the bombs had scored a direct hit. The King John was damaged and barely serviceable. Eighteen men were wounded, and two were dying. Fahnestock, hit in the spine, was taken to the beach and expired in the arms of a friend. Barney, wrapped in a GI blanket and bleeding profusely, was placed in a canoe paddled by a native. By the time it reached the shore and soldiers lifted him off, he, too, was dead.

  The two bodies were laid out on the sand, where villagers gathered, talking softly and shooing the young ones away. A third man, badly wounded in the legs, was set down, too. The ammunition and supplies were carried to land. The Papuans helped care for the wounded, holding their hands and comforting them. Later, rations were handed out, but some of the soldiers were too upset to eat. The sand fleas began biting, and they moved farther inland. Then the bodies of Lieutenant Fahnestock and Barney Darnton were carried back out to the ships and the King John and the Timoshenko returned slowly to Wanigela. From there the bodies were flown to a new American hospital at an old Catholic mission outside Port Moresby.

  The funeral was held two days later, at 9:00 a.m., in the small military cemetery called Bomana, twelve miles to the north. The towering Owen Stanleys were shrouded in clouds and bombers were coming and going on a nearby airfield. The hillside was covered in mud and in places with the flaming red blossoms of a croton tree. Barney’s simple redwood coffin, draped in an American flag, was
transported on an open truck. Six correspondents dressed in khaki were the pallbearers and hoisted it off the truck and carried it up a slope and placed it next to Fahnestock’s. In a long line of khaki, five generals stood with hats off, including General Harding, who had given Barney permission to accompany the troops. An Episcopal minister delivered the eulogy. Taps were played, fighter planes skimmed the treetops, and a rifle squad from the 126th Infantry Regiment of the 32nd Division fired two salutes of three volleys over the white crosses. Nearby were the graves of American fliers who had died on missions.

  The following day, my mother got a phone call from The New York Times. The publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and his wife, Iphigene, drove out to Westport to meet with her. General MacArthur sent a telegram, then released a statement saying that my father had served “with gallantry and devotion at the front and fulfilled the important duties of war correspondent with distinction to himself and to The New York Times and with value to his country.” President Roosevelt sent my mother a letter of condolence. Later that week, as she recounted years afterward, she heard a booming noise that seemed to shake the house to its foundation. She rushed outside in time to see five planes, flying low in V formation, dipping their wings at our rooftop.

  She never remarried. She had had her allotment of love, she said. Barney’s older brother Robert sent her the letter our father had written before shipping out, the one that explained his decision to go off to war. She kept it in the center drawer of her vanity table right up until the end of her life. From time to time she would pull the letter out and read it, less frequently as the years went by. And each time she read it, she would weep. As far as I could tell, the part that provoked her tears, the sentence that broke her composure, was always the same: his expression of confidence in her. “Bob and Johnnie can safely be left to her. She isn’t the stuff that cracks under a bit of difficulty.” Afterward she would replace the letter in its worn envelope and put it back in the drawer. Sometimes she would say to me, “The two of you would have gotten on so well—you are so much alike.” On those occasions when I was standing near her, even when I was older, unable to console her and unable to put things right, I was flooded with a welter of emotions. I felt self-conscious, as if someone were watching us—me standing there awkwardly, her crying. Far from helping her overcome her grief, I couldn’t even share it. I felt helpless and ashamed of my helplessness and, strangely, disconnected from what was happening—even a little embarrassed by it.