War at the End of the World

by James P. Duffy

  The speedy PT boats had difficulty throttling down their engines to allow the slow-moving and heavily loaded Higgins boats to keep up. Soon the third wave lost sight of its PT boat guide and continued on its own. PT-68, the patrol craft carrying no troops, lost sight of the entire convoy and just kept scouting for enemy vessels.

  The first wave, guided with great difficulty by PT-142, overshot Nassau Bay by three miles. It took Lieutenant Commander Barry Atkins some time to herd eleven boats and a Japanese barge back to Nassau Bay. They arrived simultaneously with the second wave of twelve boats led by PT-143. Alarmed by the arrival of these boats in the dark, the boats of the first wave scattered and had to be rounded up again. While all this was going on, PT-120 arrived with its charge of seven Higgins boats and a Japanese barge. It became a regular traffic jam as the boats were tossed around in the rough seas. The three PT boats stood by while all the landing craft hit the beach. Then came a radio signal that all the boats had broached in the ten- to twelve-foot pounding surf and could not get off the beach. PT-143 and PT-120, still carrying their complement of seventy men each, returned to their port of origin, Morobe. PT-142 remained to patrol the area throughout the night. Luckily for all involved, the landing was unopposed.45

  To the Japanese soldiers and sailors at Cape Dinga, the roaring engines of the landing craft sounded like so many tanks that they reported a large invasion was in progress and quickly fled the area.46

  Over the next few days PT and Higgins boats landed additional troops, and by July 8 the entire regiment was at Nassau Bay. This unit of the American 41st Division quickly linked up with the Australians who were fighting their way toward Salamaua. Among the soldiers of the 41st Division who landed at Nassau Bay was the son of former President Theodore Roosevelt, Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Roosevelt. “Archie,” as everyone knew him, was the commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry. He had served as an infantry captain in France during the Great War, receiving a severe shrapnel wound in his right knee that put him in a Paris hospital for four months. Awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French government, he was later discharged from the Army with full disability.47

  Archie was forty-eight years old when he pestered his cousin, FDR, to allow him to reenlist in the Army. “There may come many places and many times,” he wrote to Franklin, “where you would like to have the son of a former President and someone with your name to share the dangers of soldiers or sailors in some tough spot. . . . I would be perfect for such a job. . . . You would not be throwing away [someone] who was useful elsewhere.” Archie also reached out to George Marshall, under whom he had served in France. Knowing Archie wanted frontline service, Marshall sent him to MacArthur. When MacArthur learned Archie wanted not a staff position but combat, he assigned him to the 41st Division and sent him to New Guinea.48

  A month after landing at Nassau Bay, Archie’s once-injured knee was shattered again, this time by a Japanese hand grenade. A stint in an Australian hospital was followed by a desk assignment. Informed there would be no more combat roles for him, Archie returned to the United States in late 1944. Almost immediately, he began lobbying FDR and Marshall for a new assignment. Struck down by a relapse of malaria he had acquired in the jungle, he was again hospitalized. President Roosevelt and Marshall were trying to determine what they were going to do with the persistent Archie when on April 12, 1945, the president suddenly died from a stroke. That ended the issue for Archie, who remains to this day the only American soldier to receive 100 percent disability from injuries received in both world wars.49

  —

  The number of Allied soldiers pushing in on Salamaua increased rapidly both through airlifts to Wau and additional landings at Nassau Bay. Landing craft were able to bring in a large number of artillery pieces and ammunition. Japanese forces, who were gradually pushed back toward Salamaua, had no idea that the attacks on their defenses were a diversion to pull troops from the much-better-situated Lae. MacArthur, with little interest in Salamaua, assaulted it only as means to “siphon off enemy strength from his Lae defenses and lure his troops and supplies southward to be cut to pieces on the Salamaua front.”50

  The deception worked. Major General Ryoichi Shoge, the Japanese commander in Lae, sent troops south to protect Salamaua, thinning his defensive line around Lae. Yet it was a curious decision for the general. The almost senseless defense of Salamaua is “difficult to understand,” notes one historian. The town had been all but destroyed by Allied air raids, as had the air base and port facilities. Salamaua was of little strategic value, while Lae was vitally important if Imperial forces were to hold on to the Huon Peninsula. For MacArthur, Lae served as the gateway to this vital territory. Beyond Lae were numerous flatlands that could provide excellent terrain for airfields. Valleys around the Markham and Ramu Rivers offered good routes to the Japanese stronghold up the coast at Madang. The harbor at Lae could be quickly improved and expanded to be useful to Allied shipping.51

  —

  Ever since the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, General Kenney’s Allied Air Forces had conducted regular bombing raids on a wide range of Japanese targets, including Rabaul, Kavieng on New Ireland, Salamaua, Lae, and Madang, where General Adachi had his Eighteenth Army headquarters. Yet the one base Kenney could not hit was Wewak. Located up the coast, approximately 316 miles from Lae, it was beyond reach of all Allied planes except the B-17. The few raids made against Wewak had to be done at night due to the impossibility of fighter protection, and the results of bombing under darkness were negligible. Kenney was itching to get his B-25s and fighters closer.

  Wewak had been a late occupation for the Imperial forces; Lae was invaded and occupied in March 1942, whereas Wewak was not taken until December of that year. The Japanese wasted little time in transforming the Wewak area into a major air base and port facility to receive shipments of supplies and troops. Toward the end of July, the Japanese Fourth Air Army transferred there from Java along with two hundred aircraft. By the time Kenney was able to raid Wewak in August, it had four airfields in operation and contained the highest concentration of Imperial Army troops anywhere in New Guinea.

  Reconnaissance flights over Wewak proved difficult, as air defense patrols were constant. Several planes sent to photograph the area failed to return. Those that survived reported widespread activity across the entire region, with a great number of fighters parked alongside the airfields and several small ships usually steaming in or out of the harbor.

  Frustrated by his inability to provide fighter protection to the heavy bombers he wanted to send against Wewak, Kenney was determined to build an airfield closer to the enemy’s huge base. During the first week of June, he sent a ground reconnaissance party from Wau toward a village about forty miles to the north, well within territory controlled by the enemy. He had heard that there was an old abandoned airstrip near the village. The party found that the small airstrip, which had been used years earlier by gold miners, was now overgrown with kunai grass and limited by the surrounding terrain to only twelve hundred feet in length, unsuitable for fighters. It was also subject to flooding during the rainy season. Four miles farther north, near the village of Tsili-Tsili, they discovered a site that looked ideal for an airfield, with two landing strips of seven thousand feet each. There also appeared to be plenty of space for parking additional aircraft.52

  When Kenney informed MacArthur of his plan to build an airfield behind enemy lines, the commander in chief was surprised and delighted. “How are you going to protect it from Jap ground forces?” MacArthur asked. Kenney explained that Australian general Edmund Herring promised to loan him one thousand Australian soldiers and some machine guns to guard the trails leading to the site. “Good, good,” said a grinning MacArthur. Then he asked, “Say, George, have you told my staff about this?” When Kenney responded that he had not, the commander told him, “Don’t tell them yet. I don’t want them scared to death.”53

  The 871st Air
borne Engineers flew into Tsili-Tsili and worked around the clock building the airstrip. Kenney changed the name to Marilinan, because Tsili-Tsili (pronounced “silly silly”) “might have suggested to some people that it was descriptive of our scheme of getting a forward airdrome.”54 The new airfield became active with the arrival of the first group of fighters on July 26.

  Late in the afternoon of August 16, a photoreconnaissance plane flew over the four airfields associated with Wewak and photographed 225 Japanese bombers and fighters on the ground. At dawn the following morning, forty-one B-24 Liberators and twelve B-17 Fortresses attacked the Wewak airfields. They found the enemy planes on the ground, lined up with their engines warming. They had obviously planned an attack on an Allied base that day. A few hours later, thirty-three B-25 Mitchells escorted by eighty-three P-38s came in at treetop level and strafed all the airfields. Three more raids took place over the next three days. The effect on the Japanese was devastating. More than one hundred Japanese planes were destroyed, as well as a large quantity of fuel. Many of the aircraft had their crews on board waiting to take off when they were hit and exploded into flames. Allied losses amounted to ten aircraft.55

  For the Japanese 51st Division, the loss of air support as a result of the Wewak raids made their situation at Salamaua even more perilous.56

  Commenting on the Wewak bombing raids, General MacArthur said, “It was a crippling blow at an opportune moment. Nothing is so helpless as an airplane on the ground. In war, surprise is decisive.”57

  MacArthur had issued orders that Salamaua not be taken until the attack on Lae had begun. Therefore, Australian and American forces maintained a tight ring around most of the devastated town, but held back from capturing it. The Japanese were deceived into thinking Salamaua was MacArthur’s objective, so while they were watching Salamaua and slipping additional troops into the area—further weakening Lae’s defenses—Allied forces prepared for the true objective, Lae.58

  CHAPTER 12

  Pincers Around Lae

  Although located on the island of New Britain, Rabaul had been the capital of all New Guinea until 1937, when it was partially buried under volcanic ash. Before settling on Port Moresby, the Australian government considered making Lae, the second-largest town on the main island, the new capital. With a well-developed port on the Huon Gulf near the mouth of the Markham River, Lae had grown up during the gold rush of the 1920s and 1930s, serving as a supply depot for the thousands of miners and prospectors working in the nearby mountains and valleys.1

  Japanese troops first landed at Lae in March 1942 and worked tirelessly to build a well-fortified base that, when fully garrisoned, the Allies would find extremely difficult to penetrate. MacArthur’s deceptive attacks on Salamaua, however, fooled General Adachi. He bled off troops from the more important base at Lae and sent them south in numbers that were more or less easily devoured by the Australians and Americans. By the time of the Allied invasion in early September, Lae’s defense relied on fewer than ten thousand combat and noncombat solidiers—too small a force to withstand MacArthur’s powerful drive against the base from three directions at once, with nearly thirty thousand troops.

  —

  While the forces around Salamaua were in a holding action, generals MacArthur and Blamey devised a two-pronged pincer attack on Lae. The Australian 9th Division was to be brought up the coast from Milne Bay aboard ships of Admiral Barbey’s amphibious force, set to assault the beaches near Lae, while the Australian 7th Division would move along a road running through the Owen Stanley Range toward Nadzab, twenty miles northwest of Lae. There, a small airport, idle for more than one year, offered the opportunity, once improved and expanded, to locate fighters and bombers even closer to the enemy.

  The importance of Nadzab lay not just in its airfield but also in its location in the Markham Valley, nestled between two vitally important waterways, the Markham and Ramu Rivers. The Markham runs for 110 miles southeast from its source in the mountains to Lae on the Huon Gulf. The Ramu flows northwest for nearly four hundred miles before emptying near the Hansa Bay between Madang and Wewak, two future targets for the Allies. These rivers form the huge Markham Valley, which divides the Huon Peninsula from the rest of New Guinea and offered the Allies a route to the big Japanese bases at Madang and Wewak.

  Despite the planning, the 7th Division’s role in the mission was soon forced to change. When MacArthur learned that their road through the Owen Stanleys—a route being hacked by Allied troops through thick jungle, across rivers, and up and down mountains—was proceeding too slowly to meet his timetable, he turned to an idea suggested by the Air Force’s General Whitehead: parachute troops.

  Never before had Allied paratroopers made a combat jump into enemy-held territory in the Pacific. The previous year another airborne unit, the 1st Marine Parachute Battalion, fought at Guadalcanal, but as infantry, with no tactical jumps.

  Allied intelligence believed Nadzab to be only lightly defended, as the Japanese saw no real strategic value in the airfield. Following a brief bombing raid, American paratroopers were to land, drive out any survivors, and begin work on the airfield so that C-47 transports could touch down the next day with construction equipment and reinforcements. When the airfield was ready, the Australian 7th Division would be airlifted in to begin its march toward the rear of Lae.2

  To provide the Navy a role in the operation, Admiral Carpender instructed Captain Jesse H. Carter to take four of his destroyers from Milne Bay and sweep the Huon Gulf, telling him, “There is good reason to believe that the enemy is moving both supplies and troops from Finschhafen [further up the coast] to Salamaua.” He ordered Carter to bombard Finschhafen, and that all “targets of opportunity are to be destroyed.”3

  For ten minutes during the night of August 22–23, Carter’s destroyers fired at various targets as they steamed back and forth along the coast at Finschhafen. Although they achieved complete surprise and encountered no opposition, the results were negligible. Yet the attacks demonstrated that American warships could maneuver along the New Guinea coast, provided they made judicious use of their sonar to avoid unchartered coral reefs.4

  As planners moved forward with the operation, Blamey made it clear that he wanted to transport all nine thousand soldiers of the Australian 9th Division to the landing beaches at Lae. Since the landing craft of the ESBs could deliver only a single brigade—fewer than three thousand men along with their supplies—it soon became apparent that Admiral Barbey’s Seventh Amphibious Force, with its larger ships, would take control of the landings. The 2nd Engineer Special Brigade, who had been training with the 9th, was placed under Barbey’s command.

  Admiral Barbey and Major General G. F. Wootten, commanding officer of the 9th Division, met to work out plans. Both agreed the best approach was during darkness just before dawn, so that the troops could go ashore with some light behind them to see where they were going. General Kenney, who was to provide air cover for the invasion, argued for the landings to take place an hour or so later so that his pilots could fly in daylight. Failing to reach an agreement, Barbey and Kenney took the dispute to MacArthur, who came down on Barbey’s side. The landing ships and craft would sail under cover of night, mostly without air cover, and put the troops ashore at first light.5

  —

  On December 2, 1942—forty-three days after leaving San Francisco aboard a Dutch cargo ship converted to a troop transport—the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR) landed at Cairns, in Queensland, Australia. Its arrival tactically altered the face of the war in New Guinea. A massive, jungle-covered land with virtually no roads, the island was sprinkled with small, mostly unused airfields, reachable only by air. Many of the fields in enemy territory, like the one at Nadzab, were defended by small but determined detachments of Japanese soldiers. Unable to use the fields themselves, the enemy had placed numerous obstacles across the landing strips and installed machine guns and other heavy weapons nea
rby that would destroy any plane attempting to land. The fastest way to seize these important targets was to drop in troops from above.

  The 503rd PIR was formed from several independent parachute battalions in February 1942 at Fort Benning, Georgia. The following month the troopers moved to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for intensive unit jump training. Most of the men expected to be shipped to England to join several independent parachute battalions that were preparing to drop into Vichy French territory in North Africa. To their surprise, their commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth H. Kinsler, ordered the regiment aboard a California-bound train. There, they boarded the Dutch freighter Poelau Laut shortly after midnight on October 20 and the next morning slipped through the fog of San Francisco Bay and headed south. During their first nine months in Australia, the regiment trained and participated in exhibition jumps before military and civilian audiences. General MacArthur attended at least one of these jumps.

  Colonel Kinsler, anxious to give his troopers the best possible chance to succeed, met with Brigadier Ivan N. Dougherty, commander of the Australian 21st Infantry Brigade. Dougherty had been highly praised for his leadership when his battalion defended against a German paratroop attack on Heraklion, Crete, in 1940.6 Although the Germans were ultimately successful, the initial drop had cost so many paratroopers’ lives that Hitler canceled all future plans for massed jumps. Kinsler sought to avoid whatever mistakes the Germans had made and avoid high casualties.

  After nearly a year and a half of intense combat training, the entire regiment was finally prepared for its first combat jump. On August 20, 1943, the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd flew into Port Moresby. Two days later the 1st and 3rd Battalions arrived aboard an Australian ship.