In 1942, as the battle for the Pacific raged, a battalion of American soldiers spent 42 days traversing a deadly mountain range to drive the Japanese from Papua New Guinea. They trekked through some of the most geologically-disturbed terrain on earth: a chaotic jumble of sheer mountains and valleys, impenetrable jungle full of malarial mosquitoes, unknown tribes and poisonous snakes, weird icy forests of luminous fungi, and misty peaks where the earth itself seemed haunted. Chronicled in the book The Ghost Mountain Boys by author James Campbell, the journey of these soldiers and their subsequent battle at Buna—suffering a casualty rate of nearly 90%—is an astounding story of human courage and a meditation on the suffering experienced by men in conflict.

This September, StoryHouse will travel to Papua New Guinea with author James Campbell to retrace the path taken by these men and help geolocate a downed American C-47. Using interviews and footage from this trip, along with archival material, artistic recreations, satellite imagery and cutting-edge motion graphics, we’ll bring the story of these brave soldiers to life and create a powerful, moving film.

Artistic Vision

An impressive aspect of The Ghost Mountain Boys is its versatility of scope: the author’s willingness to appreciate tiny eddies of detail amidst the greater flows of history. Millions of Japanese soldiers swarm the Pacific, while a lonesome American surgeon pens a letter to his wife, listening to the Blue Danube Waltz. Perspectives of men from across the chain of command are juxtaposed. One minute we’re listening in as General Douglas MacArthur and Edwin F. Harding butt heads over the correct plan of attack for the 32nd Division, the next we are shivering in rainy mists over Ghost Mountain or up to our waists in swamp water with the enlisted men of Company G.

Our film will take a similar approach, constructing a spine out of likewise intimate moments in the experiences of men of the 32nd Division. These moments, selected for their historical and thematic content, will be ordered sequentially against the larger historical backdrop, and interwoven with a modern day trek along that same path. The result will be an immersive experience where the audience member feels connected to the story: not like they are attending a history lecture, but like they are living the story alongside the Ghost Mountain Boys in a real, detailed, visceral way.

The Crew

I first met James Campbell while working on a video project for Panthera, a big cat conservation organization that researches and advocates for the world’s large cat species including lions, tigers, pumas and jaguars. In the summer of 2022 we followed renowned jaguar biologist Howard Quigley around the Yucatan as he assessed the impact of the forthcoming mega infrastructure project, the Maya Train, on the local jaguar habitat. Our director of photography, Taylor Turner, was also there, and it was a great chance for us all to get to know each other and work together.

James has been telling stories about earth’s wild places for a long time, first as a magazine writer and then as an author. His book, The Final Frontiersman, ended up being the inspiration for the television series The Last Alaskans. Like many of the Ghost Mountain Boys, James is a Wisconsin native and the story resonates for him personally. In 2006, he traveled to New Guinea to retrace the footsteps of the Ghost Mountain Boys across Papua New Guinea, and completed the arduous journey in spite of a debilitating knee injury. You can read about it here. During this trip, they shot over 40 hours of footage, which will also be a priceless asset for our project.

Accompanying us as well will be our Director of Photography, Taylor Turner. Taylor’s the perfect man for the job: he’s spent the last 10 years filming in Earth’s wildest places under the most extreme conditions. Head over to his website and watch his reel, you’ll be blown away! Taylor’s style fits perfectly with the imagery of Papua New Guinea: the deep jungles and peaks scarved in mist, the exotic animals and insects, the rich brown and green tones of mud and foliage, even the total darkness of night or the flickering orange of the evening’s cooking fire. It’s a wild, primal environment that hearkens back to the past of our ancestors, and should be feel like a threatening antagonist in and of itself.

Archival

One exciting prospect is the rich archival material, much of which is in the public domain. Recent developments in technology have lowered the cost of image processing. We can now enlarge, adjust frame rates, interpolate frames, remove artifacts, dynamically-stretch, sharpen and color old archival footage at a very modest cost to our production budget.

I am also greatly interested in using archival material and documents in new, innovative ways. For example, we could imagine an opening sequence: in darkness, we hear the sound of a projector spinning up. The style of the music, title cards, and narration invokes training films of the time. A voice actor declares:

New Guinea is a primitive, hard country and a new world to men from overseas. You go there to fight a dangerous enemy, the Japanese. But they are not the only enemy. The country itself will fight you with all its forces — its mountains, swamps and forests, its heat and rain, its snakes, crocodiles, scorpions and lice, above all with its mosquitoes and its countless invisible army of disease germs…

These words are from an actual historical document, the Allied Geographical Section’s 1943 pamphlet Getting About In New Guinea. The audience member has become a draftee watching a training film, which through art, graphics and archival footage, advises them how to avoid the crocodiles, build lean-to’s, trap for bandicoots and generally get around in New Guinea. The sequence highlights in a lighthearted yet engaging way the extremity of the conditions these men would face, and just how difficult it would be to prepare soldiers for such conditions, and would make a perfect gateway into the film.

Such uses can be envisioned for various sequences. Historical sequences in general will be great creators of tension in the film, and sequences should be devoted to the Japanese national character and expansion, to Pearl Harbor, to the history of Papua New Guinea, to the impact of malaria and disease on the fighting in the Pacific, to Guadalcanal and the concurrent the fighting in Europe and Africa, and so on.

Continuity

An oft-overlooked yet critical aspect of all film endeavors is known as continuity. While watching a film, we all subconsciously construct a a version of the film’s world inside our heads, with its own time and space. We’re searching for signposts, landmarks, things we can connect with to help us imagine ourselves inside that world and better understand it. If the filmmaker doesn’t give us enough information to do this, or suddenly violates our assumptions, we tend to get disoriented and lose interest in what we’re watching.

One thing I’ve noticed while working on videos about mountain expeditions is that it’s hard to help your audience understand where they are. There is often a strong sense of beginning (say, at base camp) and of completion (the summit), but middle of the film might get garbled with regards to time and space. Audiences can tune out, and the filmmaker fails to generate sufficient tension such that the final summit feels like a true achievement. It’s a difficult balance to maintain but one tool I’ve found helpful is quality maps and graphics, correlated very closely with what’s happening on screen. Check out the video above featuring of a technique I’ve been developing on our project about blind mountaineer Rafa Jaime. I’m very excited to apply these tools to the story of the Ghost Mountain Boys. Below, you can see another idea for helping people who are not familiar with the army understand the idea of Chain of Command.