War at the End of the World

by James P. Duffy

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  Several times Japanese supply and reinforcement convoys attempted to approach the beachheads. Most often American planes drove them off, but on a few occasions they were able to put fresh troops as well as limited rations and ammunition ashore. On November 24, several destroyers landed at least five hundred fresh soldiers. Several hundred more, who had fought along the Kokoda Track and returned to the shore several miles to the north, soon arrived by small boats at Gona.

  At Japanese army headquarters in Rabaul, officers continued to hatch unrealistic plans for reinforcing the Buna-Gona area despite their inability to control the skies over the nearby seas. Finally, Imperial Headquarters in Tokyo recognized the futility of continuing the fight. Whereas a telegram to Rabaul dated November 16 had stated, “It is essential for the execution of future operations that the Buna area be secured. Our strategy position in the seas will be fundamentally shaken if this area is lost,” a December 12 telegram changed the picture entirely: “Great importance must be placed on securing the northeastern end of New Guinea. Buna will not be reinforced, but should eventually be evacuated.”19

  Meanwhile, with all Allied troops—Australian and American—bogged down before the fortified Japanese positions, General Blamey met with MacArthur on the afternoon of November 25 to discuss additional troops to put in the line. The conference took place at MacArthur’s headquarters in Port Moresby, called Government House because it had been the residence of the civilian territorial governor before the war. Also present were General Kenney and Lieutenant General Edmund Herring, commanding general of the Australian I Corps, which included the 7th Division and all the Australian troops fighting at Buna-Gona. Herring also commanded the American forces at the scene.

  MacArthur suggested that the American 41st Infantry Division that had been training at Rockhampton, Australia, be sent to the Buna-Gona front to support the troops there. Blamey disagreed; he said he would rather have the Australian 21st Brigade, because he had confidence in their fighting ability. Both Australian generals said they did not think much of the fighting qualities of the 32nd, and even less of the division’s leadership. It was, as Kenney reported, “a bitter pill for General MacArthur to swallow.” He ordered Kenney to fly in the Australian 21st Brigade, as Blamey requested.20

  Two American officers MacArthur sent to investigate the condition of the 32nd Division reinforced the comments of the two Australian generals. Lieutenant Colonel David Larr, of the operations staff, returned to Port Moresby with a negative assessment of the fighting ability of the troops and reported that Harding had located his command post at Embogo, some thirteen miles from the front. MacArthur’s chief of staff, Major General Richard K. Sutherland, visited the front and reported that the soldiers lacked the will to fight and lacked aggressive leadership. All this reinforced rumors that had been drifting back to Port Moresby of American soldiers throwing down their weapons and fleeing from the Japanese. Sutherland recommended Harding’s removal from command.21

  A few days later Blamey informed the Australian chief of the general staff, Lieutenant General Northcott, of conditions at the front and his plan to use the 21st Brigade. He then told Northcott of MacArthur’s offer to call up the 41st Infantry Division. “The Americans say the other division which they left in Australia is a much better one than the one they have here, but since they chose this as number one, I believe their view to be merely wishful thinking. I feel quite sure in my own mind that the American forces, which have been expanded even more rapidly than our own were in the first years of the war, will not attain any high standard of training or war spirit for very many months to come.” He then bemoaned the fact that the Australian 9th Division, which was still in the Middle East, had been replaced by two American divisions whose “fighting qualities are so low, I do not think they are a very considerable contribution to the defense of Australia.”22

  Although MacArthur was not privy to Blamey’s report, he would have been apoplectic had he heard American soldiers described in such disparaging terms. So too would another American military giant: Eddie Rickenbacker, who was visiting the general at the front. The famed World War I ace was on a secret mission to meet with MacArthur on behalf of Secretary of War Stimson. On the journey from Pearl Harbor, Rickenbacker’s B-17 had crashed in the Pacific, and he and several crew members spent twenty-four days lost at sea in three small life rafts. They had no food but for a few fish and a seagull they killed, and no water other than what they could collect from the occasional rainfall. Rickenbacker carried a message from Stimson he was to deliver personally to MacArthur. To this day, it is unknown what the message contained, because neither man ever revealed it. Some historians suggest that Stimson told MacArthur to stop publicly complaining about not receiving enough men and supplies to fight the war. Others believe he came to tell MacArthur about the pending landings on North Africa, information Marshall would not have trusted to radio communications.23

  Despite having once been antagonists during their careers, the two old soldiers hit it off surprisingly well. In one conversation, MacArthur made a confession that surprised Rickenbacker. “You know, Eddie, I probably did the American Air Forces more harm than any man living when I was chief of staff by refusing to believe in the future of the airplane as a weapon of war. I am now doing everything I can to make amends for that great mistake.”24

  Eddie Rickenbacker described MacArthur’s living arrangements as “not luxurious. His headquarters consisted of a frame shack and an outhouse. MacArthur was interested not in comfort but in winning a war.” He went on to describe Port Moresby as a “hellhole,” and a “bombed-out ruin of a city in the center of a cloud of swirling red dust.”25

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  November 29 was a sunny, quiet Sunday at Rockhampton, Queensland, where General Eichelberger was overseeing the jungle training of the 41st Infantry Division. Unexpectedly, Eichelberger received a message from General Chamberlin, chief of the operations staff, to gather up a small staff and await orders to fly to Port Moresby. Allowed to bring a small staff, Eichelberger sent a messenger to retrieve his chief of staff, Brigadier General Clovis E. Byers, who was swimming at a beach thirty miles away. At midnight, he received orders that two C-47 planes were being sent for him and his men. They were to take off at dawn.

  Upon arrival at Port Moresby, Eichelberger and Byers were told they would spend the night at MacArthur’s headquarters. Driven to Government House, they were taken directly to the screened veranda on which MacArthur kept a desk. In addition to the commander in chief, Generals Sutherland and Kenney were waiting for them.

  Without preliminaries, MacArthur, pacing up and down the veranda as he spoke, told Eichelberger, “Bob, I’m putting you in command at Buna. Relieve Harding. I am sending you in, Bob, and I want you to remove all officers who won’t fight. Relieve regimental and battalion commanders; if necessary, put sergeants in charge of battalions and corporals in charge of companies—anyone who will fight. Time is of the essence; the Japs may land reinforcements any night.”

  With increased emphasis, he added, “Bob, I want you to take Buna, or not come back alive; and that goes for your chief of staff too. Do you understand?” Eichelberger responded, “Yes, sir.” He intended to leave first thing in the morning.26

  At breakfast with Eichelberger the following morning, MacArthur amended his statement of the night before: “Now, Bob, I have no illusions about your personal courage, but remember that you are no use to me dead.”27

  After breakfast, Eichelberger flew from Port Moresby to a small airfield a few miles from the front that was under expansion and entered a radically different world. “My staff and I landed at eleven a.m. on December 1. Forty minutes from Moresby—but when the stink of the swamp hit our nostrils, we knew that we, like the troops of the 32nd Division, were prisoners of geography. And like them we would never get out unless we fought our way out.”28

  Some writers have taken Eichelberger to ta
sk for unkind remarks he made concerning some of the officers and men of the division soon after his arrival at the front. Perhaps as a mea culpa for those comments, in his own memoir of the war he went to great lengths to identify the root causes of the problems faced by the division, beginning with the lack of adequate training. “A great deal has been said and whispered about the 32nd Division, and much of it makes no sense. The 32nd, which failed at Buna, was the same 32nd that won the victory there. No one else did.”29

  Eichelberger found an army in disarray and in need of aggressive direction. The troops were in deplorable condition. Many had long, dirty beards, their uniforms were in rags, and they were ill fed. When he visited the soldiers facing Buna Village he found them in need of food, vitamins, and cigarettes. Those closest to the Japanese positions had gone without food since the day before, and when some did arrive, it was only two tins of C rations per man.

  Eichelberger knew that as corps commander, he did not have to relieve Harding just because MacArthur had told him to; such a command change was up to his own judgment. Yet based on what he witnessed at the front and reports from his own staff, he concluded that Harding had to go, as did his regimental commanders. After relieving Harding, Eichelberger put the division’s artillery commander, Brigadier General Albert W. Waldron, who had a much-deserved reputation for ingenuity and bravery, in command of the entire division.30

  An early attempt by Eichelberger to smash the enemy fortifications ended badly. As a result, he allowed all troops two weeks to rest and replenish their strength. The airfield that engineers had been expanding at Dobodura was finally ready to receive large aircraft, such as C-47s, on December 3. Supplies began pouring in, including rations that allowed the troops their first hot meal in days, if not weeks in some cases. Uniforms and boots arrived, as did artillery, and up the coast from Milne Bay came vessels large enough to carry the badly needed tanks. The situation began to turn around perhaps in part because Eichelberger was able to get better cooperation and support from both the American and nearby Australian units.

  When the fighting resumed, Eichelberger did something that Harding had probably never thought of doing: he spent a lot of time at or near the front. He made a point of wearing his three silver stars, even though it increased the danger of enemy fire. Eichelberger exposed himself to risk so that his troops would know their commander was with them.31

  Fresh troops, nutritious rations, artillery, tanks, Bren gun carriers, and a renewed aggressive attitude among the American commanders made the difference. On December 8, the Australians took Gona Village, counting 650 dead Japanese as they swept through the village.32

  Six days later, troops from the 32nd Division occupied Buna Village. Four days after that, Japanese warships landed thirteen hundred reinforcements, but by then the die had been cast. On Christmas night a Japanese submarine managed to elude patrolling PT boats and put ashore a quantity of rations and ammunition for the troops holding out at Buna Mission. Before it departed, the boat fired a few shells at the American forces facing the mission. That was the last time supplies got through to the Japanese.33

  After days of bloody and ferocious fighting, the 32nd Division, aided by the Australian 18th Brigade, and especially by tanks from the Australian 2/6th Armored Regiment, captured the Japanese positions at Buna Mission on January 2, 1943.34

  The last holdout of any consequence was Sanananda Village, which was perhaps the best-fortified and -supplied of all the Japanese coastal locations. On January 12, Major General Kensaku Oda sent an urgent appeal to the Eighteenth Army headquarters in Rabaul: “Starvation is taking many lives, and it is weakening our already extended lines. We are doomed.” He begged that reinforcements arrive “at once.”35

  The next day Lieutenant General Hatazo Adachi, the recently appointed commander in chief of the Eighteenth Army in Rabaul, ordered all remaining troops evacuated. Those who could not be reached by small boats and barges were instructed to make their way up the coast to the nearest Japanese base. Estimates of the number of Japanese who were evacuated or managed to work their way up the coast to safety range from 800 to 1,000. Of the more than 7,000 Japanese who fought at Buna-Gona, roughly 6,000 died there. Fewer than 200 surrendered. American losses were approximately 1,000 killed, while the Australians lost 1,300. Over half the Allied troops who fought there suffered at least one, sometimes two of the debilitating diseases associated with the jungle and swamp-infested territory. Looking back on the casualties resulting from combat and the environment, General Eichelberger wrote that they were a “high purchase price for the inhospitable jungle.”36

  The commander in chief acknowledged what the American and Australian troops had been up against at Buna-Gona when he told the Australian war minister, Frederick Shedden, “Of the nine campaigns I have fought, I have not seen one where conditions were more punishing of the soldier than this one.”37

  MacArthur was shocked at the cost in lives in taking Buna. Determined never again to make a direct assault on an enemy position, he implemented a new policy, which he explained at a staff conference, of bypassing enemy strongholds and using the Air Force to help isolate them so they could not be resupplied. He told General Kenney, “You incapacitate them!” Let the Japanese sit in their jungle fortifications and wait. “The jungle,” he said with great flare, “starvation. They’re my allies.” That was the way he would conduct the rest of the war. Large, powerful enemy formations would be isolated and left to wither. There would be no more Bunas.38

  Part Two

  1943

  CHAPTER 10

  Sailing the Bismarck Sea

  As congratulations poured into MacArthur’s headquarters over the Buna-Gona victory, the SWPA commander in chief was hard at work planning his future strategy for dealing with the Japanese. MacArthur knew that in order to avoid future battles like Buna, he would need to control the sea—and, just as important, the air over the sea—to prevent reinforcements and supplies from reaching large, isolated enemy forces along the New Guinea coast.

  To accomplish this, he badly needed a navy capable of landing troops on an assault beach in a timely and safe manner. MacArthur and Blamey both had attempted to convince Vice Admiral Arthur Carpender, commander of Allied naval forces, to supply destroyers to escort the luggers and trawlers that brought men and matériel up the coast from Milne Bay. The admiral refused, believing the shallow, reef-ridden waters south of Buna would endanger his vessels. He was also concerned the ships would be easy targets for enemy aircraft due to an absence of reliable charts reducing their ability to maneuver.1

  Several attempts by MacArthur to have large warships assigned to his theater, including aircraft carriers, had met with resistance from Admiral King. As a result, the battle for Buna-Gona had been fought without assistance from the Navy, other than a squadron of motor torpedo patrol boats based at Milne Bay. MacArthur, who had been impressed by the vessels during his evacuation of Bataan, had pressured Admiral Carpender to force the Navy to send these four PT boats, along with a PT boat tender to service them.2 These powerful wooden boats were heavily armed, but their fuel consumption limited their range to less than two hundred miles without a means to refuel. Though they played havoc with Japanese attempts to sneak troop barges and supply submarines onto the beachheads, providing a valuable service, they were not the navy MacArthur needed. If he could not have large warships, then he wanted amphibians such as landing craft to get his troops to shore for future assaults.

  Samuel Eliot Morison claimed, “If the Southwest Pacific command had been blessed with an amphibious force of shoal-draft beaching craft supported by carriers, cruisers and destroyers, the Japanese garrisons on that coast could have been cleaned up in a week. Carrier air strikes against enemy airfields on New Britain would have kept Japanese flyers grounded, and combat air patrol would have intercepted many who broke through.”3

  Supporting this view is a report made to the War Department by a Naval off
icer from Washington who visited the Buna front in December. He wrote that there was “every reason to believe that Buna could have been taken during November if one of our units could have put a minimum of one combat team afloat.”4

  For months, MacArthur had beaten the drum for the establishment of an amphibious force in his theater to facilitate troop landings. He also wanted an experienced amphibious officer assigned to his naval force who could build and command an amphibious fleet. In addition, he told Marshall and King he wanted Marines trained in amphibious landings. King promised him the 1st Marine Division as soon as Army troops relieved them on Guadalcanal. The 5th Marine Regiment began arriving in early December. Over 75 percent of the division had suffered from malaria while on Guadalcanal, and on their arrival at a camp outside Brisbane, they discovered the site infested with the same malaria-bearing mosquito that had caused them so much misery. Although they were quickly relocated to a site near Melbourne, hundreds of the men were reinfected and the number of new cases mounted. With more than 7,500 men incapacitated by malaria, and a rehabilitation period of as long as six months, the Marines would not be fully ready for combat for close to a year.

  Admiral King finally did agree to assign an amphibious officer to MacArthur’s naval forces. On December 15, 1942, King ordered Rear Admiral Daniel E. Barbey to the South West Pacific Area. A 1912 Naval Academy graduate, Barbey was a leading expert in amphibious warfare. His interest began when he saw photographs of landing craft with hinged bows that the Japanese had used while assaulting the northern Chinese port city of Tianjin in July 1937. After immersing himself in the subject and gaining a reputation as an authority, Barbey was assigned to update the Navy’s official manual on amphibious landings, which had last been revised in 1918. Barbey’s revision became the “bible” of amphibious warfare, used by the Navy throughout the war.5