A gritty and gut-wrenching story of Midwestern unfortunates who drew the shortest stick of World War II. They were the first U.S. Army division sent into combat and had the misfortune to be the spearhead of General Douglas MacArthur’s first inept offensive against the Japanese in New Guinea. Told they would face a push-over – a starving, sickened enemy -- the green 32nd Infantry Division found itself outnumbered and outgunned by veteran Japanese troops, adversaries of unparalleled tenacity quite at home in New Guinea’s impenetrable jungles and fetid malarial swamps.