This was a generous comment about the man MacArthur knew was responsible for convincing President Roosevelt that Germany had to be defeated first, and that that was where most American resources must be expended. The war against Japan would wait until victory over Germany was achieved.
CHAPTER 9
“Take Buna, or Not Come Back Alive”
As fighting raged along the Kokoda Track and at Milne Bay, Japanese engineers at the Buna-Gona beachheads constructed virtually impregnable defenses. The high water table precluded deep bunkers, so instead they constructed hundreds of ground-level bunkers from steel plates, forty-four-gallon drums packed with sand, and thick tree trunks. Steel plates or three layers of eighteen-inch-thick coconut logs provided overhead protection. The bunkers were then covered with several inches of soil in which fast-growing tropical vegetation was planted—so well were they camouflaged that many were invisible up until a few feet away. Each contained several machine guns that provided supporting fire to each other, catching the enemy in a deadly cross fire. Some bunkers served only as shelters during an air attack or artillery barrage; crawl tunnels connected them to nearby machine-gun positions. When the artillery or bombing halted, soldiers would crawl to the machine-gun positions on each side of the bunker and prepare to resist infantry attack.
Covered with dense jungle and decaying swamps, the coastal plain over which the coming battle for Buna and Gona would be fought stretched inland to the foothills of the Owen Stanleys. Along the coast and a half mile southeast of Buna Village was Buna Mission, also called Buna Government Station. This had been the seat of local government as administered by the Australians. Before the arrival of the Imperial troops, three government officers lived here. It was also home to between one hundred and two hundred native villagers.
What made this otherwise near-worthless stretch of coast valuable to both sides was found less than a mile and a half south of Buna Mission: In a large expanse of kunai grass was the Buna Airfield. Japanese engineers had been busy expanding its 800-yard-long runway to over 1,300 yards, and widening it from 60 yards to 90 yards. South of the airfield, the engineers built a dummy airstrip where some Allied pilots were tricked into attacking mock aircraft parked along the decoy strip.
Once in control of Milne Bay, MacArthur set his sights on the powerful enemy bases at Buna and Gona. On September 6, one day after the Japanese evacuation of Milne Bay, MacArthur cabled General Marshall, explaining the importance of the U.S. Navy winning control of the sea-lanes between northern Australia and Papua. MacArthur still had no ships under his helm other than the few small vessels he had lent to the Navy for the Guadalcanal operation. Despite the victory at Milne Bay, he believed the situation remained precarious with the enemy in control of the north coast of New Guinea. “If New Guinea goes,” he told Marshal, “the result will be disastrous.”1
MacArthur emphasized his belief about the consequences of a potential Japanese victory in New Guinea during a September 25 visit by Army Air Force commanding general Hap Arnold. With a bit of hyperbole, he told Arnold that if New Guinea fell, the Japanese would rule the Pacific for the next hundred years. MacArthur then praised General Kenney’s performance since taking over air operations in SWPA, telling Arnold, who was the first member of the Joint Chiefs to visit the theater, that he would “not exchange Air Force units for any others.”2
General Arnold, who kept a diary throughout the war, wrote that his meeting with MacArthur gave him “the impression of a brilliant mind—obsessed by a plan he can’t carry out—frustrated.”3 On his return to Washington, Arnold suggested to the Joint Chiefs that the entire Pacific be placed under MacArthur’s command.4
MacArthur’s frustration was a product of several factors that were hampering his plans to push the enemy out of New Guinea and then out of his beloved Philippines: delays in receiving large numbers of American troops, lack of support for his operations by the Navy, and Washington’s emphasis on the war against the Germans.
A major problem for MacArthur in planning action against the enemy bases along the north coast of New Guinea was the shortage of ships. At the time, what was beginning to be called “MacArthur’s Navy” consisted of five cruisers, eight destroyers, twenty submarines, and seven smaller vessels. MacArthur had earlier requested the assignment of two aircraft carriers to the SWPA naval commander, but was turned down. This was a tough pill to swallow for the man Samuel Eliot Morison described as “perhaps the most enthusiastic advocate of carrier-based air outside the Navy.” It was clear to Morison that in the worldwide Allied strategy, the southwest Pacific led the list of “have nots,” and “won’t gets.”5
During MacArthur’s preparations for the Buna-Gona assault, two talented men joined the MacArthur circle. On September 11, “MacArthur’s Navy” was given a new commander when Vice Admiral Arthur “Chips” Carpender replaced Vice Admiral Herbert F. Leary, who was reassigned as commander of battleships, Pacific Fleet. It is possible that MacArthur, who was behind the change in naval commanders, had learned of Leary’s resistance to lending two of his new B-17s to General Brett to rescue MacArthur’s party from Mindanao and bring it to Australia. MacArthur was not one to forget or forgive such a slight.
The second addition resulted from the growth of the U.S. Army in SWPA, which had grown to 110,000 American soldiers in-theater. Although most were engineering or supply troops, there were two National Guard combat infantry divisions, the 32nd and the 41st. A corps commander was now required to direct all Army operations. MacArthur tapped Major General Robert L. Eichelberger for the position. Like MacArthur, Eichelberger was a former superintendent of West Point who had missed action in Europe during the First World War, instead spending two years in Siberia with the American Expeditionary Force in support of the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. Among several decorations he received there were the Distinguished Service Cross for bravery, and, ironically, the Order of the Rising Sun from America’s then ally, the Imperial Japanese government. MacArthur considered Eichelberger “a commander of the first order, fearless in battle, and especially popular with the Australians.”6
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With the Japanese retreating along the Kokoda Track across the mountains to Buna, and the Australians hot on their tail, MacArthur was anxious to get some American infantry into the fight. While he wanted to use his troops to attack the enemy’s beachhead facilities along the coast, his biggest handicap was an absence of amphibious craft that could get his soldiers ashore safely. With an eye on the fighting on Guadalcanal, where the enemy was heavily committed, MacArthur issued an operation order on October 1, stating, “In the absence of secure lines of communication on the north coast of New Guinea we still are unable to maintain large forces there.” As a result, if Allied troops arrived in large numbers, planners had to have a contingency plan for the rapid withdrawal of such forces if the enemy overwhelmed them.7
General Kenney suggested that he fly troops to the small landing strip Australian engineers had built at the deserted Wanigela Mission, halfway along the coast between Buna and Milne Bay. Kenney claimed he could keep troops supplied by airdrop and then by landing his transports on a newly expanded airfield. During the first week of October, American Douglas C-47 Dakotas flew the Australian 2/10th Battalion of the 18th Brigade to Wanigela. American antiaircraft guns and their crews, as well as U.S. Army Engineers, joined them. Tasked with expanding the airfield in order to accommodate heavy bombers and fighters, the engineers accomplished their mission in a couple of weeks without the enemy’s knowledge, distracted as they were by the assaulting Australians sweeping down from the mountains.
On October 14, Kenney’s planes flew the 2nd and 3rd Battalions of the 128th Infantry Regiment of the 32nd U.S. Infantry Division and the Australian 2/6th Independent Company to Wanigela, where they awaited orders to move northwest along the coast to attack the Japanese at Buna. A plan soon developed to move some of these troops along a coastal trail to Pon
gani, about thirty miles from Buna. Air reconnaissance claimed it was free of Japanese troops. An attempt by Australian and American forces was made to reach Pongani, but swollen rivers and deep swamps halted all but the lightly encumbered commandos of the 2/6th Independent Company from reaching their destination. The men of the 3rd Battalion had to settle for setting up camp at a place called Guri Guri. The battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Kelsie E. Miller, called it “the most filthy, swampy, mosquito infested area” he had seen in New Guinea.8
On October 17 a coastal shuttle began operations from Milne Bay to Pongani, which was now the most forward allied base facing Buna. Fishing vessels brought supplies from Milne Bay through a route charted through the numerous coral reefs by several Coastwatchers to Wanigela. There the supplies were off-loaded and put aboard shallow-draft luggers at night to evade Japanese aircraft, to sail to Pongani. Unable to close in more than several hundred yards from the coast without risking striking coral and sinking, the luggers dropped anchors, and American troops, led by Lieutenant Colonel Laurence A. McKenny, quartermaster of the 32nd Division, stripped off their clothes and jumped naked into the sea. The supplies were loaded aboard a mix of small vessels, including canoes, rowboats, and canvas-sided engineer boats. One soldier recalled “waves pounding over their heads” as they pushed the boats through the breakers to the beach. The quartermaster troops “made dozens of exhausting trips without rest each night in order to get the vulnerable trawlers on their way again before daylight.”9
Construction of an airfield suitable for military use was under way at Pongani when Major General Edwin Forrest Harding, commanding general of the 32nd Division, learned of the existence of a small field only forty-five miles away that could serve as a landing strip. A missionary, Cecil Abel, brought the information to him. The thirty-nine-year-old Abel was a lifelong resident of New Guinea and realized the potential value the field had for the Allies. Harding asked Abel to return to the field and enlist local labor to prepare it for a landing strip. Hand tools dropped by parachute from an Air Force plane enabled the project. The first C-47 landed at “Abel’s Field” on October 19.10
General MacArthur moved his advance base to Port Moresby on November 6. Four days earlier, he had selected November 15 as the tentative date of attack against Buna. The 32nd Division was ordered to send patrols as far as Oro Bay, fifteen miles southeast of Buna. Meanwhile, the Japanese were holed up in a well-fortified zone that varied from several hundred yards to several miles deep from the coast, and was approximately ten miles long. A promontory called Cape Endaiadere anchored the southeastern end just beyond Buna Village, and its northwestern end was at Gona. In between, the zone encompassed both old and new airstrips, Sanananda Point and Basabua. Occupying the zone were over seven thousand Japanese troops, all of whom had had combat experience. About half had survived the fighting along the Kokoda Track. They all waited for the attack they knew was coming while enemy forces maneuvered around them.11
Because it was not possible to bring heavy artillery over the mountain trails, or along the swampy coast, the Allies had no long-distance weapons with which to bombard the enemy fortifications prior to assaulting them. The Japanese, on the other hand, had numerous field artillery pieces well positioned to defend their beachhead.
The American 32nd Division, which had received only minimal training, was entering combat for the first time. The Australians, coming over the mountains, had more experience, but all, including the enemy, suffered terribly from diseases. The Japanese, whose supplies were drastically reduced by General Kenney’s air attacks on ships approaching the coast, also suffered from malnutrition. Yet these soldiers were trained and determined to die for their emperor, and despite all handicaps, remained a powerful and deadly force.
No one among the Allied leaders realized how powerful the Japanese forces were. Division commander General Harding thought Buna, where battalions from his 32nd Division were to attack, would be “easy pickings,” as only “a shell of sacrifice troops” defended it.12 MacArthur’s intelligence chief, Brigadier General Charles Willoughby, reported his belief that there were only a few thousand starving Japanese clinging to makeshift defenses at the water’s edge.13
On November 16, the 1st and 3rd battalions from the 128th Infantry Regiment of the 32nd Division moved out in a drenching rain along two tracks toward Buna. Their first contact with the enemy was made about one mile from Buna, close to the dummy airstrip at Cape Endaiadere. Despite noise from the rain and gunfire, the Americans could hear the sounds of trucks moving around behind enemy lines, a clear indication there were forces held in reserve to be sent wherever the Allies attacked. Heavy and well-directed machine-gun fire stopped the Americans in their muddy tracks. Japanese planners had done an excellent job establishing their defensive positions. Visibility in the jungle and swamps was so poor that companies lost sight of each other for hours on end. Even squads from the same company found it hard to keep in contact with one another.
Japanese positions were too well fortified to attack directly with infantry. What was needed was artillery. Yet General Kenney had earlier convinced MacArthur that his aircraft could replace field artillery pieces that were at best difficult, and at worst impossible to transport to the Buna area aboard the small boats that were bringing in men and supplies. Another weapon that might have helped, despite the risk of their being bogged down in the mud, as happened to the Japanese at Milne Bay, were tanks. Not until December 18 would artillery and tanks arrive on the scene.
Air support’s arrival added to the confusion. Battle lines were so indistinct, and enemy fortifications so well hidden, that when the A-20s and B-25s of the 3rd Bombardment Group dropped their ordnance from medium and even low altitude, their bombs caused casualties among members of the 3rd Battalion.
The following day, the 2nd Battalion from the U.S. 128th Infantry Regiment attacked the enemy fortifications from the northwest. A battalion from the 126th Infantry Regiment joined it, but was soon diverted north to meet the Australian 16th Brigade of the 7th Division; they headed to Sanananda, while the Australian 7th Division’s 25th Brigade set out for Gona.
On the night of November 17, Japanese reinforcements arrived aboard six destroyers, bringing over a thousand fresh troops, including a battalion from the 229th Infantry Regiment that had fought in China, Hong Kong, and Java. These soldiers proved to be among the best fighting force the enemy had at Buna-Gona. Most of these men went directly to the Buna area.14
The days dragged on with little progress. The 7th Division took more than two hundred casualties in the first three days. American units lost contact with one another, and everyone was suffering from the hundred-degree daytime heat and the nightly rainstorms. Exhaustion and disease were taking more men out of the line than combat.
New Yorker writer E. J. Kahn Jr., who served in the 32nd Division during its time in New Guinea, left this description of the soldiers of the division fighting at Buna: “They were gaunt and thin, with deep black circles under their sunken eyes. They were covered with tropical sores and had straggly beards. Few of them wore socks or underwear. Often the soles had been sucked off their shoes by the tenacious, stinking mud. Many of them fought for days with fevers and didn’t know it. During one comparative lull, an inquisitive medical officer with a thermometer inspected some hundred men, and everybody involved was surprised to find that sixty of them were running temperatures of from two to three degrees above normal. Malaria, dengue fever, dysentery, and in a few cases, typhus hit man after man.”15
The situation for the Japanese was much the same, with the exception that they had the protection of well-planned and well-constructed fortified bunkers. Food was always the issue, especially as Allied warplanes were doing their best to sink ships attempting to resupply the bases. Some Japanese, cut off from most resupply efforts even within their defense zone, were soon forced to exist on a half-pint of rice a day. For some, the desperate hunger overcame norma
l inhibitions. One machine gunner wrote in his diary, found after the fighting had ceased: “Our food is completely gone. We are eating tree bark and grass. In other units, there are men eating the flesh of dead Australians. There is nothing to eat.” Yet they continued to fight on ferociously as long as they could fire their weapons. There was no thought of surrender.16
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The Americans had entered the field of action only lightly armed. The heaviest weapons they carried for the attack on Buna were light machine guns. Coastal trawlers were supposed to bring .50-caliber machine guns and 81mm mortars, ammunition, rations, and other supplies.17 Yet Japanese Zeros relentlessly attacked the trawlers, sending several of them and their cargoes to the bottom of the sea. Attacks were especially prevalent in the evenings, when American fighter escorts had to fly back over the mountains to Port Moresby before dark, leaving the skies and the fate of the trawlers to the enemy. In one instance, the 32nd Division’s commander, Major General Harding, was aboard a trawler when it came under attack. It was part of a four-vessel convoy loaded with ammunition and other supplies for the division. Harding was having dinner with the trawler’s captain shortly after the fighter escort had departed when he heard the sounds of approaching aircraft. Eighteen Zeros swept in out of the evening sky, guns blazing. All four vessels were set aflame, and the men who survived the initial explosions of gasoline tanks or ammunition cases jumped overboard and swam for shore. Harding was among them. Rowboats and life rafts pushed out from the nearby shore to rescue all they could. In addition to fifty-two killed, one hundred men were wounded, many with serious bullet wounds. Also lost were several tons of rations, artillery shells, two twenty-five-pounders, and the 128th’s heavy weapons.18
War at the End of the World Page 19
