How One Apache’s “Crazy” Footprint Trick Exposed a Hidden Japanese Base in the Jungle…
May 15th, 1943. The dense canopy of the New Guinea jungle filtered the afternoon sun into scattered patches of golden light across the muddy trail. Sergeant James Whitehorse of the United States Army crouched low, his fingertips hovering inches above a barely visible depression in the wet earth. To the five soldiers standing behind him, it looked like nothing more than a natural indent created by falling rain. They were certain this patrol would end like the previous 17, trudging back to base camp with empty hands and sore feet, no closer to finding the enemy supply depot that intelligence insisted existed somewhere in these endless green mountains.
What none of them could have anticipated was that this Apache tracker’s unconventional interpretation of a single footprint would unravel a deception so elaborate that it had fooled Allied reconnaissance aircraft, ground patrols, and even local informants for nearly 4 months, leading to the discovery of one of the most sophisticated hidden bases in the Pacific theater.
James Whitehorse had arrived in the Southwest Pacific barely 6 weeks earlier. One of 14 Native American soldiers specifically recruited for their traditional tracking skills. The son of a cattle rancher from the Fort Apache reservation in Arizona, he had spent his childhood learning to read the earth the way other boys learn to read books. His grandfather, a man the Apache called he who sees what others miss, had taught him that every living thing leaves not just a mark upon the ground, but a story.
Every bent blade of grass, every displaced pebble, every subtle change in the texture of soil, spoke volumes to those trained to listen. The war in the Pacific had become a grinding battle of supply lines and hidden positions. The Japanese forces, masters of camouflage and concealment, had turned jungle warfare into an art form. In the dense rainforests of New Guinea, they had constructed elaborate underground facilities that could house hundreds of soldiers completely invisible from the air. Allied intelligence had intercepted radio transmissions suggesting a major supply depot existed in the Finister Range.
Somewhere within a 20 square mile area of nearly impenetrable jungle. 23 patrols over 14 weeks had found nothing. Captain Richard Morrison stood behind White Horse sweat streaming down his face despite the shade. Morrison commanded Easy Company, third battalion, and he had personally led nine of those fruitless patrols. A graduate of West Point, he had studied military history and tactics under some of the finest instructors in America. But nothing in his education had prepared him for an enemy that seemed to vanish into the landscape itself.
He watched the Apache Sergeant with a mixture of hope and skepticism. White Horse remained motionless for nearly 2 minutes, his eyes moving across the forest floor in a pattern that seemed random to the uninitiated. Then he stood slowly, turning to face Morrison, with an expression that combined certainty with something that might have been amusement. The captain asked what he had found. White Horse replied that someone had walked backward through here, deliberately placing their feet in existing footprints to hide their passage, but they had made a mistake, a small one that only someone looking for the impossible would notice.
Morrison felt his pulse quicken. He had worked with White Horse on three previous patrols, and had come to respect the man’s abilities, even when they seemed to border on the mystical. He asked, “What kind of mistake?” The sergeant knelt again, gesturing for Morrison to join him. He pointed to the depression in the mud, explaining that when a person walks normally, their heel strikes first, creating the deepest impression at the back of the footprint. When someone walks backward trying to step in their own tracks, the weight distribution reverses.
The toe becomes the deepest point because that is where they must look to aim their step. This print showed towe first weight, but it pointed in the direction of travel that appeared to lead away from the interior mountains toward Allied positions. Private Tommy Chen, a Chinese American soldier from San Francisco who served as the unit’s interpreter, moved closer to examine the print. He had grown up in a city where concrete covered everything, where tracking meant following street cars and automobiles.
The subtlety of what White Horse described seemed almost supernatural. He asked how the sergeant could be certain it was not simply an unusual walking pattern. White Horse stood and began walking along the trail, pointing out six more prints over a distance of 30 yards. Each showed the same characteristic, the same reversal of pressure points. He explained that no one walks naturally with this pattern. It was deliberate, careful, and it meant someone was working very hard to make it appear that traffic flowed away from the mountains rather than toward them.
Morrison ordered the patrol to spread out in a defensive perimeter while he radioed battalion headquarters. Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Hayes, the battalion commander, received the report with cautious interest. Hayes was a veteran of the North Africa campaign who had learned to trust unusual sources of intelligence. He authorized Morrison to follow the trail, but insisted on reinforcing the patrol with an additional squad and a radio team. While they waited for reinforcements, White Horse continued his analysis of the area.
He discovered something else that troubled him. The vegetation along the trail showed signs of careful management. Certain plants had been trimmed in ways that appeared natural, but actually created clear sight lines at specific intervals. It was subtle enough that it might occur in nature, but the pattern was too regular, too methodical. When Corporal David Sullivan, a farm boy from Iowa, asked what this meant. White Horse explained that someone was maintaining this trail to look abandoned while actually using it regularly.
The Japanese were not just hiding their presence, they were creating an active deception. By the time reinforcements arrived 3 hours later, White Horse had identified 12 more backward footprints and mapped what he believed to be three different routes that converged deeper in the mountains. Sergeant Robert Tanaka, a Japanese American soldier from the 442nd Regimental Combat Team who had been attached to the battalion as a translator, studied White Horses observations with growing excitement. Tanaka had interrogated dozens of prisoners and studied Japanese military doctrine extensively.
He told Morrison that this level of deception matched training he knew was given to special engineering units responsible for constructing hidden facilities. The expanded patrol moved inland as afternoon faded toward evening. White Horse led them along a route that seemed to contradict common sense, following the backward tracks deeper into terrain that became increasingly difficult. The jungle grew thicker, the ground more treacherous. Several times Morrison questioned whether they were being led into a trap, but each time White Horse discovered new evidence that someone had worked to make this path seem impossible while actually maintaining it.
As darkness approached, they made camp in a small clearing that White Horse declared safe, because it showed no signs of the careful management he had observed elsewhere. The night passed slowly, filled with the sounds of the jungle, and the quiet tension of men who knew they were close to something significant. Dawn brought rain, a heavy tropical downpour that turned the forest floor into a maze of streams and mud. Morrison worried that the tracks would be washed away, but White Horse seemed unconcerned.
He explained that he was no longer following footprints, but rather the pattern of deception itself. Once you understood what to look for, the signs were everywhere. They discovered the first concrete evidence. Shortly after noon on the second day, Private First Class Michael O’Brien, a former construction worker from Boston, literally stumbled over it. A piece of metal half buried in the mud. It appeared to be part of an ammunition crate, Japanese markings still visible despite months of exposure.
But what caught White Horse’s attention was not the crate itself, but where it had been placed. Someone had deliberately buried it here, far from any logical supply route, in a location designed to suggest that Japanese forces operated to the east rather than the west. Tanaka examined the markings and determined that the crate had contained 75 mm shells, ammunition for type 88 anti-aircraft guns. This was significant because intelligence had reported no Japanese anti-aircraft positions in this region. If they were bringing in that kind of ammunition, they were protecting something important.
The patrol continued deeper into the mountains, climbing now through terrain that grew increasingly rugged. The backward footprints had disappeared, washed away by the rain. But White Horse guided them using other signs. A tree that had been cut and repositioned to block a path. Rocks that had been placed to make a route seem impossible. Vegetation that grew in patterns just slightly too uniform to be natural. On the afternoon of the third day, they found the garden. It was Private Chen who spotted it first, a small clearing perhaps 50 ft across where edible plants grew in neat rows.
But someone had gone to elaborate lengths to make it appear wild, weaving vines through the crops, scattering dead leaves, even allowing weeds to grow in carefully planned locations. Only when examined closely did the artificial nature of the chaos become apparent. Morrison radioed this discovery to battalion headquarters, and Hayes responded with orders to proceed with extreme caution. The presence of a concealed garden meant they were very close to an occupied position, possibly within a few hundred yards. He was sending two more platoon to provide support, but they were at least 6 hours away through the difficult terrain.
The patrol moved forward with weapons ready, every sense heightened. White Horse led them along a route that seemed to spiral around something path that never quite approached, but never moved away. He whispered to Morrison that they were being channeled, guided along a route that someone wanted them to follow. The question was whether that someone knew they were here, or whether this was simply part of the general deception. The answer came suddenly and terrifyingly. Sergeant Firstclass William Drake, the assistant patrol leader, stepped on what appeared to be solid ground and plunged downward into a concealed pit.
His scream was cut short as he landed 8 ft below on a bed of sharpened bamboo stakes. The patrol froze, weapons pointing in every direction, expecting an ambush. But no attack came. Drake was pulled from the pit with severe lacerations to his legs and lower back. Injuries that required immediate evacuation, but were not life-threatening. White Horse examined the pit carefully, then announced something that seemed impossible. He declared that the trap was old, perhaps 3 months or more, and it had not been maintained.
The bamboo stakes showed weathering inconsistent with active defensive positions. Someone had dug this pit and then largely forgotten about it. Morrison asked what this meant, and White Horse provided an explanation that changed everything. He suggested that whatever they were looking for had been here long enough that the defensive perimeter had become overgrown, neglected. The Japanese were not expecting enemy patrols this deep in the mountains. They had become comfortable, complacent. As medics worked on Drake, preparing him for evacuation, Tanaka pointed out something else.
The pit had been dug with precision tools, not field implements. The edges were too straight, the depth too uniform. This suggested engineer units, soldiers with specialized training and equipment. Morrison made the decision to split the patrol. He would take Drake and three soldiers back to meet the reinforcements and guide them forward. White Horse would continue ahead with a small reconnaissance team of five men, moving slowly and reporting every 30 minutes by radio. It was a dangerous division of forces, but Morrison trusted the Apache scouts ability to avoid detection.
The reconnaissance team moved like ghosts through the jungle. White Horse leading them along routes that seemed impossible but proved navigable. They discovered two more concealed gardens, both showing the same pattern of artificial wildness. They found a stream that had been subtly diverted, its course changed to flow away from rather than toward something deeper in the mountains. And then, just as the sun began its descent toward evening, they found the ventilation shaft. It was Private O’Brien who spotted it, a slight shimmer in the air above a cluster of rocks.
At first, it appeared to be heat rising from sunwarmed stone, but O’Brien had worked in construction long enough to recognize the distinctive pattern of air moving through a confined space. White Horse approached carefully, examining the rocks with his fingertips. They were real stone, not camouflage, but they had been arranged around a metal pipe that extended perhaps 6 in above ground level before being covered with a cap that resembled natural rock. The team spread out, searching the surrounding area with new understanding.
Within 20 minutes, they had located four more ventilation shafts, all expertly concealed, all positioned to disperse air flow across a wide area to avoid detection. The implications were staggering. Whatever lay beneath their feet was large enough to require substantial ventilation, sophisticated enough to hide it from aerial observation, and important enough to justify the enormous effort of construction. White Horse radioed Morrison with the discovery, and the captain responded with barely contained excitement. The reinforcements had arrived and were moving forward.
Hayes had authorized a full company strength probe of the area with artillery support on standby. They were to locate the entrance to whatever this facility was, but not attempt entry until overwhelming force was available. The search for the entrance consumed the remaining daylight hours. The reconnaissance team worked outward from the ventilation shafts in a careful spiral, looking for any indication of how the Japanese accessed their underground base. They found nothing. As darkness fell, they established a concealed observation post on high ground overlooking the area where the ventilation shafts were concentrated.
The night brought revelation. As the last light faded from the sky, Corporal Sullivan noticed something strange about a particular hillside about 200 yd from their position. The vegetation seemed to shift slightly, an almost imperceptible movement that might have been wind except that the air was still. He pointed this out to White Horse, who studied the hillside through binoculars for nearly 10 minutes before announcing his conclusion. The entire hillside was artificial, a massive camouflage net or structure built to conceal the entrance to the underground facility.
But it was not just covering the entrance. It was the entrance itself. The Japanese had constructed something that functioned as both door and disguise. A engineering achievement that bordered on the incredible. Morrison and the main force arrived shortly after midnight, moving into positions surrounding the hillside. Hayes accompanied them along with a combat engineer team and two intelligence officers who had flown in from Port Moresby specifically for this operation. Everyone maintained strict radio silence and light discipline, watching the hillside for any sign of activity.
Dawn came slowly, the jungle gradually emerging from darkness into gray morning light. And with dawn came movement. The hillside opened. It happened so smoothly, so naturally that it took several seconds for the observers to fully process what they were seeing. A section of the slope that appeared to be solid earth covered in vegetation simply swung outward on concealed hinges, revealing a tunnel entrance large enough to drive a truck through. Two soldiers emerged, stretched in the morning air and began what appeared to be a routine perimeter check.
Hayes made the decision to wait. He wanted to see how many personnel occupied the facility and what kind of supplies they possessed before launching an assault. Throughout the morning, they observed 17 different soldiers entering or leaving the tunnel. All appeared relaxed. None showed any indication they suspected enemy presence nearby. At 1000 hours, something extraordinary happened. A column of civilians emerged from the tunnel. 14 men and women of various ages, all appearing thin and exhausted. They were not prisoners in the traditional sense.
There were no visible restraints, no guards immediately supervising them, but their body language spoke of captivity and fear. They carried bundles of what appeared to be vegetation and roots, heading into the jungle under the loose supervision of three soldiers. Tanaka studied them through binoculars and made a troubling observation. He told Hayes that these appeared to be local villagers who had been impressed into service, likely forced to work in the garden areas and perform other labor. This complicated the tactical situation significantly.
Any assault on the facility would have to account for civilian presence. Hayes consulted with his officers and made his decision. They would wait until the civilian workers returned to the facility, then seal the entrance and force a surrender. The alternative, a direct assault, risked significant civilian casualties and would likely result in the Japanese destroying whatever supplies and intelligence materials the facility contained. The weight stretched through the afternoon. The civilian workers returned shortly before dusk, carrying their harvest back into the tunnel.
The large camouflage door closed behind them, once again becoming nearly invisible as an artificial hillside. Hayes gave the order to move into assault positions. Under cover of darkness, three infantry platoon moved to surround the facility entrance. Combat engineers prepared demolition charges that could seal the tunnel if necessary. Artillery forward observers established communications with gun batteries positioned 5 mi to the east, ready to provide fire support if the situation deteriorated. At 0500 hours, as the jungle began its transition from night to dawn, Hayes broadcast a surrender demand in Japanese through loudspeakers that had been positioned during the night.
The message was clear and repeated every 2 minutes. The facility was surrounded by overwhelming force. Resistance was futile. Civilians would not be harmed. Surrender immediately and orderly evacuation would be permitted. The response came after nearly 15 minutes of silence. The camouflage door swung open and a single Japanese officer emerged, hands raised above his head. Through Tanaka, he identified himself as Lieutenant Teeshi Yamamoto, commander of the supply depot. He wished to negotiate terms for the safety of the civilian workers before discussing military surrender.
The negotiation took 3 hours. Yamamoto was adamant that the 14 civilians be released immediately and provided with safe passage to their village. Hayes agreed, provided that Yamamoto ordered his soldiers to disarm and exit the facility in an orderly manner. The Japanese lieutenant accepted these terms. What emerged from that tunnel over the next 2 hours astonished everyone present. The facility contained not the expected 30 or 40 soldiers, but rather 97 military personnel, including engineers, supply cls, communications specialists, and a small security detachment.
They had been operating underground for nearly 7 months, constructing and maintaining what intelligence officers would later describe as one of the most sophisticated supply depots in the Pacific theater. But the true revelation came when Allied soldiers entered the facility itself. The underground complex extended more than 400 ft into the mountain with multiple chambers and storage areas carved from living rock. They found stockpiles of ammunition, medical supplies, and food sufficient to support a full regiment for 6 months.
They discovered a complete radio communication center with equipment capable of reaching as far as the Philippines. They found detailed maps showing other hidden facilities throughout New Guinea. Intelligence that would prove invaluable in subsequent operations. In a small office deep within the complex, intelligence officers discovered Yamamoto’s personal journal. The left tenant had meticulously documented the construction of the facility, including the specific deception measures implemented to avoid detection. One entry dated February 9th, described the decision to create backward footprint trails leading away from the mountains.
Yamamoto had written that this technique, taught to him by a sergeant who had served in China, had proven effective at misdirecting local informants and allied patrols. He had not anticipated encountering someone trained to read such deception. The journal also revealed something that troubled the intelligence officers deeply. Yamamoto had maintained detailed records of Allied patrol activity, noting 17 different incursions into the area over the previous 4 months. He had observed Morrison’s patrol specifically, commenting on their predictable search patterns and lack of tracking expertise.
The Japanese had watched Allied soldiers walk within a/4 mile of the facility entrance multiple times, confident in their concealment. What changed everything was that single patrol led by an Apache scout who understood that even deception leaves traces for those trained to see them. The 14 civilian workers were indeed released and provided with medical care, food, and safe transport back to their coastal village. Through interpreters, they described months of forced labor, but also noted that Yamamoto had ensured they were adequately fed and had prohibited his soldiers from mistreating them.
It was a small mercy in the context of war, but it spoke to complications that simple narratives of good and evil could not fully capture. The 97 Japanese prisoners were processed and transferred to a P camp in Australia. Yamamoto himself was extensively debriefed by intelligence officers who were fascinated by the engineering and deception techniques his unit had employed. He spoke freely with the resigned professionalism of a soldier who had been defeated but had done his duty well.
When asked about his reaction to being discovered by tracking techniques, he responded that he had greatly underestimated the diversity of skills Allied forces could deploy. For James White, the discovery brought recognition that he found somewhat uncomfortable. He was awarded the Silver Star for his role in locating the facility, a ceremony that he attended with quiet dignity, but obvious discomfort. When a war correspondent asked him to explain his tracking methodology, he struggled to put into words what was largely instinct and tradition.
He finally said that his grandfather had taught him that deception is itself a form of truth, revealing what someone wishes to hide through the very effort of hiding it. Morrison wrote a detailed afteraction report that praised White Horse’s abilities, but also acknowledged his own failures during previous patrols. He recommended that tracking specialists from various indigenous backgrounds be more widely utilized in Pacific operations, a suggestion that military intelligence took seriously. Over the following year, dozens of Native American soldiers were recruited specifically for their traditional skills in reading terrain and tracking.
The intelligence gathered from Yamamoto’s facility proved instrumental in locating six other hidden supply depots throughout the New Guinea Highlands. The maps and documents discovered there contributed to Allied understanding of Japanese defensive strategies and supply networks throughout the Southwest Pacific. Military historians would later estimate that the single discovery shortened operations in New Guinea by several weeks, potentially saving hundreds of Allied lives. But perhaps the most significant impact was how the incident changed tactical thinking about jungle warfare. Military doctrine was updated to include tracking and deception analysis as core components of patrol training.
The assumption that modern warfare had made traditional skills obsolete was challenged and ultimately revised. Commanders learned to value diverse expertise, recognizing that technology and tradition were not opposing forces but potentially complimentary tools. Lieutenant Colonel Hayes submitted a classified report to Pacific Command arguing that the military needed to fundamentally rethink how it recruited and utilized soldiers with specialized cultural knowledge. He wrote that the Apache sergeant had accomplished through careful observation and traditional wisdom what aerial reconnaissance signals intelligence and conventional patrols had failed to achieve over 4 months.
The report sparked debates that extended far beyond the immediate tactical situation, raising questions about cultural diversity in military service and the value of non-traditional expertise. For the soldiers who had participated in the patrol, the experience remained a defining memory of their service. Private Chen, who had watched White Horse read meaning in marks on the ground that appeared meaningless to him, returned to San Francisco after the war and became a teacher. He often told his students that education came in many forms, that wisdom existed in traditions as well as textbooks, and that the most important skill was recognizing what you did not know.
Corporal Sullivan went home to his Iowa farm and found himself looking at the land differently, seeing patterns and signs he had walked past his entire life without noticing. He wrote a letter to White Horse years after the war, thanking him for teaching him to see rather than merely look. Sergeant Tanaka, who had translated during the negotiations with Yamamoto, carried with him the complexity of fighting soldiers who shared his ethnic heritage while defending a country that had imprisoned his parents in an internment camp.
The discovery of the facility and the humane treatment of civilian workers by Yamamoto complicated his understanding of the conflict in ways that never fully resolved. He spent his post-war years working for reconciliation and understanding between former enemies. James Whitehorse returned to the Fort Apache reservation in 1946, declining offers to remain in military service or pursue opportunities in law enforcement, where his tracking skills would have been valued. He resumed working on his father’s ranch, living a quiet life that few outside his community knew had included such remarkable achievements.
When asked about the war, he spoke little of his own role, but often emphasized the importance of remembering that wisdom comes in many forms and from many traditions. In 1968, a military historian researching Pacific theater operations tracked White Horse down and requested an interview. The former sergeant, now in his late 40s, agreed reluctantly. During that conversation, he reflected on what the discovery of the Japanese facility had meant to him personally. He explained that his grandfather had taught him to track not to find enemies, but to understand the land and the creatures that moved across it.
The war had forced him to use those skills in ways his grandfather had never intended, and he carried some sadness about that transformation. But he also expressed pride that traditional Apache knowledge had proven valuable in a modern conflict, demonstrating to those who might doubt it that the old ways held wisdom worth preserving. He hoped that the story might encourage younger generations to learn from their elders to value cultural traditions not as quaint relics but as living bodies of knowledge with practical application.
The historian asked White Horse if he had ever felt that the single footprint, the tiny reversal of pressure that had started everything, might have been chance rather than deliberate deception. The former sergeant smiled slightly and replied that in tracking there is no such thing as chance. Every mark on the earth is created by cause and effect, by choice and consequence. Whether Yamamoto’s soldier had consciously reversed his steps or had simply made a natural error while walking backward, the mark remained and told its story to anyone trained to read it.
That story had exposed not just a hidden base, but a fundamental truth about warfare and human endeavor. No deception is perfect. No concealment is absolute. Somewhere, somehow, evidence remains for those with the knowledge and patience to find it. The Japanese had constructed an engineering marvel, had fooled technology and conventional tactics for months, but they could not fool the Earth itself or someone trained from childhood to listen to what it whispered. The facility itself was destroyed by Allied engineers shortly after its capture.
The tunnels collapsed to prevent reuse. Today, the site is covered again by jungle, nature reclaiming what had been taken from it. Local villagers sometimes find fragments of metal or concrete when clearing land, remnants of that hidden war machine buried beneath layers of soil and vegetation and time. But the lessons learned there about the value of diverse expertise, about the limitations of technology, about the importance of cultural knowledge, those lessons were preserved in military doctrine and historical records.
They influenced how Allied forces conducted operations throughout the remainder of the Pacific campaign and contributed to evolving understanding of how modern military organizations could benefit from incorporating traditional skills and knowledge.