Ted Baker’s fight for survival on Bougainville

By MARK BAKER
The Register-Guard 2017

It was about 4 a.m. in a dark hole on a dark mountain, deep in the South Pacific, when the chaos that would forever change the life of Pvt. Ted Baker began.

Welcome to war.

“All hell broke loose around the entire perimeter,” Baker wrote years later in a retelling of the ordeal. “The enemy was coming across our barbed wire in droves …

“Fear and a strong adrenaline attack and violent shaking all over. It was just not controllable. The only salvation was that all of my buddies were in the same condition. And the enemy was there, and they would surely kill us if we did not kill them … we were not aware that killing was not a good thing to do. It was them or us.”

A University of Oregon freshman when he was called for duty in 1943, the 20-year-old Baker was in a dugout on Hill 260 on Bougainville Island — east of Papua New Guinea — on March 10, 1944, when Japanese forces made their move.

He was bespectacled and whip-thin — but also an Eagle Scout.

While at the UO, Baker registered for the Army’s Enlisted Reserve Corps (precursor to the U.S. Army Reserve). “Theoretically, you joined to avoid leaving college,” says Baker, 93, who served as The Register-Guard’s general manager from 1961 to 1982 and publisher from 1982 to 1987.

America’s involvement in World War II had grown massively by 1943, though. More than 16 million Americans would serve in the war between 1941 and 1945.

Thus, in spring 1943, Baker was off to Fort Lewis, Wash., and then to Camp Roberts, Calif., for basic training until September. By October, he was on a ship to the South Pacific, sailing under the Golden Gate Bridge with 4,000 other troops.

After stops in New Caledonia and Figi, they arrived at Empress Augusta Bay on the west side of Bougainville on Jan. 2, 1944.

The Bougainville Campaign, between Allied forces and the Empire of Japan, began in November 1943 and lasted until the end of the war. It was part of Operation Cartwheel, the Allies strategy in the South Pacific, led by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, to neutralize Japan’s major base at Rabaul, New Britain, about 200 miles northwest of Bougainville.

The Army had established two fighter airstrips and one bomber strip on Bougainville, flying daily missions to Rabaul to bomb the Japanese supply base, according to Baker, who was part of the Army’s 182nd Infantry Regiment. They were there to protect the airfield so Allied planes could fly to Rabaul.

On March 8, 1944, Baker’s patrol was selected to join others from the 182nd’s Company G, about 80 men in all, to man the observation post on Hill 260. They would man dugouts in a perimeter around the post, a platform at the top of a 125-foot banyan tree that allowed observation of enemy activity for miles around.

Baker and three others — Sgt. Walter Landry of Massachusetts, Pvt. Robert Demuth of Ohio and Pvt. Juan Bautista of California — were assigned a dugout along the front side of the hill, near the Torokina River.

“Well, the first night — nothing; no problems,” Baker says during an interview in The Register-Guard’s boardroom. “The second night — nothing. The third night — boom! First thing in the morning, on the third day, the Japanese broke through the wires.”

A couple of hours into the fight, a grenade landed in their dugout. “I flattened out and stuck my left foot up against it, and it exploded. (Shrapnel) went up my right leg, mostly, and went up the body,” Baker recalls.

Hours went by, the Japanese storming the hill, the men exchanging gunfire with them from the dugout. Baker estimates there were about 1,000 Japanese soldiers. A blog post at www.182ndinfantry.org says there were 78 men from Company G vs. about 1,300 Japanese.

About dinnertime, Demuth stuck his head up to see what was happening.

“And one of our own shells dropped very close; blew the side of his face off,” Baker says. Demuth lay flat, the others trying to do what they could with compresses, but the damage was done.

Landry was soon killed, too. “By a grenade, probably,” says Baker, who was never sure.

That left just him and Bautista. Another grenade came in. Bautista threw it out. “But at the same time he was throwing it out, they dropped one in right beside him,” Baker says. “And that killed him.

“So, now, all three of these guys are dead. And they squirted some gasoline in, and then they threw a heat-burning grenade. But I was not going to stay in there and burn to death.

“I had multiple burns, second- and third-degree burns, but I was outside (the dugout).

“While I was laying out there, a Japanese (soldier) started walking up, and I think he pointed his rifle at me, and I think he fired, but he missed. He didn’t hit me. Then, somebody shot him.”

Knowing the Torokina River was nearby, Baker rolled to it through the barbed wire.

He would be on his own for three days, burying his body at one point in some bushes along the river as Japanese forces walked within 10 feet of him in the middle of the night.

Besides the burns that covered him, Baker’s right elbow was permanently damaged when a shell from nearby American artillery hit a rock and shot it into him. He tried to call out for help, but his voice was too weak.

After three days in the jungle, surviving on river water alone and suffering from fever and infection, Baker decided his only chance of survival was to find his way back to American troops.

Moving about 10 feet at a time with the help of a staff he fashioned from a stick, Baker stumbled upon a group of foxholes, fearful they were occupied by Japanese troops. But what he heard was this: “Hey, Sarge, there’s a guy out here!”

“And I knew they were American,” Baker remembers. “And I went down, and that was the end of me until a couple of days later.”

They put him on a stretcher and took him to an aide station where they cut off his clothes, cleaned him up and applied bandages to his wounds. “I was covered up like a mummy,” Baker remembers.

He would undergo a series of small surgeries — most to remove shrapnel from his scalp and the rest of his body from the original grenade explosion — on Guadalcanal. After intense pain in his right elbow and upper arm wouldn’t subside, Baker was diagnosed with osteomyelitis, an infection of the bones in his elbow, causing the joint to grow together and become solid and immobile.

To this day, Baker’s lower right arm is fixed at about a 45-degree angle. He learned long ago to eat, shave and dress with his left hand.

But the Americans did win the battle of Hill 260, which lasted three weeks, despite the loss of the majority of those 78 GIs who made the initial stand.

“I don’t know,” Baker says, when asked how many of them survived. “I’ll never know. Not many. How could they?”

On March 28, 1944, American forces advanced up Hill 260 and found the few remaining Japanese soldiers had retreated back into the jungle, according to www.182ndinfantry.org.

The banyan tree was now nothing but a stump. A 2008 story posted on the Army’s website called it “The Battle for the Million Dollar Tree,” because the Americans used an estimated $1 million of artillery during the battle that killed an estimated 500 Japanese soldiers.

After months in four different hospitals, Baker arrived home in Eugene in fall 1944.

He didn’t want to talk about what happened, but his father, Alton Baker, then publisher of the Eugene Register-Guard, insisted that holding it all inside would cause greater psychological damage.

“It took me two days to do that,” Baker says, his sister, Louise, taking notes that he would use years later to record his story.

He received both the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star, the latter given for heroic and/or meritorious achievement.

It wasn’t for bravery, Baker says. “You may call some of that bravery. It was for survival — in a tough situation.”