War at the End of the World

by James P. Duffy

  General Walter Krueger’s Sixth Army was selected to invade New Britain. Headquartered on Goodenough Island, the troops assigned to the invasion were army soldiers of the 32nd Infantry Division, the 126th Regimental Combat Team, and the 112th Cavalry Regiment.

  Krueger’s soldiers would be joined by the 1st Marine Division, who had been undergoing rest and recuperation at a base near Melbourne, Australia, after their exhausting campaign on Guadalcanal. Admiral Halsey transferred the Marines from the South Pacific to the South West Pacific Area and placed them at MacArthur’s disposal, which pleased him because he needed troops experienced in amphibious operations for the assault on New Britain.

  While planning for the New Britain operation was under way, MacArthur learned of the reassignment of Admiral Carpender, who he believed was much too reluctant to commit his small Seventh Fleet force to combat. MacArthur had requested that Carpender be replaced twice during the year, and Admiral King finally agreed, assigning Carpender to command the 9th Naval District headquartered in Illinois. King did not ask the general’s opinion of Carpender’s replacement. He never lost sight of the fact that the commander of the Seventh Fleet, and simultaneously commander of the Allied Naval Forces SWPA, reported directly to him. King was also very aware that the Seventh Fleet commander operated in MacArthur’s theater and commanded what many American newspapers were calling “MacArthur’s Navy.” When General Marshall learned of King’s exclusion of MacArthur from the decision, he contacted the general, discussed the replacement, and gave him the option of disapproving the new man.

  MacArthur gladly accepted Vice Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid as his new naval commander. The grim-faced, forty-five-year-old Kinkaid had earned a reputation as a fighting admiral in several of the Navy’s biggest battles to date: the Coral Sea and Midway. What’s more, Kinkaid had earned his second Distinguished Service Medal as commander of a carrier task force during the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, when the Imperial Navy tried to prevent the Marine landings on Guadalcanal. A proven warrior, he was just the man MacArthur wanted to command his Navy.15 Of course, it did no harm that MacArthur’s favorite living naval officer, Admiral “Bull” Halsey, accompanied Kinkaid to Brisbane to introduce him personally to MacArthur on November 23. Kinkaid took command of MacArthur’s Allied Naval Forces, which included Australian and Dutch units, three days later.

  After months of haggling among Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine planning officers, the final plan called for landing the Marines on Cape Gloucester at the northwestern tip of New Britain, where there was at least one enemy airfield in operation. The site had command of Dampier Strait and Rooke Island. A few days before the Marine landing, the 112th Cavalry Regiment would go ashore at Arawe, sixty miles cross country from Cape Gloucester, as a diversion to draw Japanese troops away from the Marines’ landing site. In Allied hands, Arawe’s small harbor on the southern coast facing the Solomon Sea could serve as a PT boat base.

  MacArthur delayed selecting dates for the two invasions until he felt confident about enemy strength at Arawe. He did not want to send his troops into battle while there remained open questions about Japanese troop movements and strength. Insisting on almost daily reconnaissance flights over the area, he did not want to be responsible for a bloodbath such as the Marines had suffered on Tarawa, where they endured over three thousand casualties in less than seventy-six hours for territory half the size of New York’s Central Park.16

  Because General Krueger was distrustful of the intelligence he received from other sources, including MacArthur’s HQ, he formed and trained his own reconnaissance units, known as Alamo Scouts. The men selected for this duty, all volunteers, went through six weeks of training that included using rubber boats to get ashore, scouting enemy positions, and counting enemy forces, as well as survival training, use of various weapons and communications equipment, and navigation techniques.17

  On December 13, General MacArthur flew to Goodenough Island to visit Krueger and the troopers of the 112th Cavalry Regiment, commanded by Brigadier General Julian W. Cunningham. The commander in chief inspected Cunningham’s soldiers and watched as they boarded the vessels that were to transport them to the landing zone at Arawe. At midnight, the fleet departed Goodenough in a heavy rain. In the lead were two high-speed destroyer transports, USS Humphreys and USS Sands. Following was a landing ship dock, USS Carter Hall, loaded with a variety of small landing craft and amphibious tractors and tanks for crawling over the coral surrounding the landing beaches. Joining these three U.S. Navy ships was HMAS Westralia, an Australian former armed merchant cruiser that had recently undergone conversion to an LSI. The ships moved up the New Guinea coast to the area off Buna, where ten escort destroyers joined them. They then turned east toward Arawe.18

  A cluster of small islands around a narrow peninsula jutting into the sea, Arawe possesses a small harbor accessible only by shallow-draft vessels because of coral blocking its entrance. The Japanese used it to support limited barge traffic and maintained a small garrison near the beach. The plan of attack called for each of the two destroyer transports to put ashore small landing parties at two locations prior to the main assault.

  The fleet arrived in the area at three thirty a.m. for a scheduled assault at six thirty. A few minutes after five a.m., the Humphreys sent 150 men aboard fifteen rubber boats to Pilelo Island, which dominated the harbor entrance and contained a radio transmitter. The small number of enemy troops stationed there quickly withdrew into nearby caves. When they refused to come out, they were killed with hand grenades and flamethrowers.

  Fifteen rubber boats from the Sands were to land cavalrymen of Troop A at a small beach designated Blue Beach, a few miles east of the harbor. Once ashore, they were to proceed west toward the harbor to block any enemy troops fleeing the main invasion. Unfortunately, the local Japanese commander had learned that a small American reconnaissance party had landed on that same beach the week prior, and surmised from this that Blue Beach was going to be the site of an insertion. He had positioned several heavy machine guns in the woods behind the beach. When the rubber boats, each containing ten men, were about a hundred yards from shore, and clearly visible in the moonlight, the guns opened fire. Riflemen located throughout the wooded area joined in. Twelve of the boats suffered punctures from enemy bullets and quickly sank. The men on board who survived the gunfire swam seaward, seeking rescue.

  Less than half the invaders, seventy-one men, survived the aborted landing. The escorting destroyer Shaw, meanwhile had opened fire on the gun flashes emanating from the dark woods. A few minutes later, the enemy machine guns fell silent as the Japanese who endured the salvos quickly withdrew. The American survivors were picked up by the SC-699, a 110-foot wood-hull subchaser that also claimed credit for shooting down an enemy plane that arrived to attack the invasion force. Admiral Barbey later singled out the small warship’s skipper, Lieutenant James W. Foristel, for the performance of his vessel.19

  The main landing at Arawe took place at a site the Australians called House Fireman Beach. It was preceded by a shore bombardment by the five-inch guns of the destroyers and several bombing and strafing runs by B-25s. The landing of the Army troops was assisted by the inclusion in their force of ten tracked amphibious landing vehicles known as “Buffalos,” which were on loan from the Marines and operated by troops from the 1st Marine Tractor Battalion. Opposition to the landing was minor and sporadic, as only two companies of Japanese soldiers occupied the entire area.20

  Once the landings had given American forces control of the area, including the nearby small Lupin airfield, PT boats quickly moved in and began regular patrols, guarding against a possible Japanese counterattack using troop-carrying barges. Although no barges approached the Arawe beaches, over the next week the PTs fought off several attacks from Japanese dive-bombers and fighters, shooting down five.21

  Responsibility for the defense of Arawe and the entire western end of New Britain was in the ha
nds of Lieutenant General Yasushi Sakai, commanding officer of the 17th Infantry Division. The division had recently arrived from Shanghai but had lost over twelve hundred men on the voyage as Allied submarines and aircraft struck the convoys in which it sailed. Sakai kept his headquarters at Cape Hoskins, about halfway between Rabaul and Cape Gloucester. He had entrusted command of the direct frontline defense to Major General Iwao Matsuda, a seasoned officer who had commanded an infantry regiment in Manchuria. His men, known as the Matsuda Force, consisted of troops from the 65th Infantry Brigade—some of whom had taken part in the conquest of the Philippines—elements of the 51st Division that had fought in New Guinea, and some artillery and antiaircraft units. Matsuda’s headquarters was located five miles east of the airfields at Cape Gloucester. Major Masamitsu Komori was in overall command of the immediate Arawe section, but when the invasion took place, he was still traveling overland from Rabaul with some of his troops.

  When word of the Arawe invasion reached General Sakai, he sent word to Major Komori to rush troops to the beachheads. Komori ordered the 1st Battalion of the 141st Infantry Regiment, which was at Cape Bushing some forty miles east of Arawe along the southern coast, to mount seven barges and race to the scene. During early dawn on December 17, the Japanese barges loaded with troops encountered two American landing craft halfway toward their goal. The Higgins boats were manned by a patrol from the 112th Cavalry Regiment that General Cunningham had sent out to watch for just such an approaching enemy force. Outnumbered and outgunned by the heavy barges, the two American boats made a forced landing along the swampy coast and the cavalrymen quickly moved inland. The Japanese did not pursue them; instead, they continued along the coast and landed the next night at the coastal village of Omoi.

  The American cavalrymen found their way to a native village where the locals welcomed them and made them at home. With help from the villagers, the soldiers located a trail that would eventually return them to their own lines. The Japanese who landed at Omoi moved out the following morning, December 19. Their orders were to meet Major Komori and the troops he had with him seven miles north along the Pulie River at a place called Didmop. Anxious to launch a counterattack on the Americans, Komori waited impatiently for the 1st Battalion to arrive. When there was still no sign of it by December 24, he decided to attack with the men he had brought with him and those who had retreated from Arawe. It took the troops from the barges eight days to travel the seven miles to reach Didmop. They had wandered around the trackless jungle, continuously getting lost.22

  Komori’s initial attack against the thin defense line guarding the Lupin airfield was successful in driving the Americans back and taking control of the landing field. The six-hundred-yard-long strip had been constructed in 1937, but was totally unusable, as it was overgrown with kunai grass six to eight feet tall and had deep burrows plowed across it in several locations. A Marine Corps historian called it “perhaps the most useless piece of real estate in the whole region.”23

  Major Komori, incorrectly guessing the enemy’s objective was the airfield, was determined to hold on to it at all costs. Yet he was unable to beat back the main line of American defense on the other side of the field, even when the lost troops from the 1st Battalion arrived. Over the next few weeks, Komori’s force of more than a thousand men fought gallantly defending an airfield the enemy did not want. All General Cunningham wanted was to tie down as many Japanese troops as possible and distract the enemy from the main landings by the U.S. Marines at Cape Gloucester.

  —

  While MacArthur was on Goodenough Island, meeting with Alamo Force commander Walter Krueger and Major General William H. Rupertus, commander of the 1st Marine Division, he was visited by George Marshall. Following the Second Cairo Conference of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, Roosevelt, and Churchill, Marshall decided it was time he had a face-to-face meeting with his South West Pacific Area commander.

  Marshall left Cairo suddenly, accompanied by General Tom Handy and other members of his staff. The president was not informed of his departure until several hours later. The night before, the two men had privately discussed who would be the supreme commander for the Normandy invasion. Roosevelt, who considered Marshall irreplaceable, knew that his Army chief of staff wanted the post, but the president did not want to lose Marshall from Washington, where he was both extremely popular and influential with the Congress. Knowing Marshall was too proud to ask for the assignment, FDR did what he was famous for: He manipulated the general into allowing the job he wanted so badly to pass to Dwight Eisenhower.24

  Although we cannot know Marshall’s frame of mind at the time, it is not difficult to assume he was unhappy at the way the president had played him. Perhaps this is why he decided to cancel his plans to fly to Italy to visit his favorite stepson, who was fighting north of Naples, and instead flew to New Guinea to spend time with the general that Roosevelt probably disliked above all others. According to his principal biographer, Marshall “wanted to show MacArthur he had not been forgotten.”25

  After landing in Port Moresby, Marshall and his party flew to Goodenough, landing in time for lunch on December 15. Afterward, the two groups—Marshall and his staff, and MacArthur and his commanders who were present, including Generals Kenney and Krueger—discussed the war in Europe. MacArthur then outlined the situation in his own theater and emphasized, according to Kenney, the need for additional planes and pilots to maintain the highest level of air strength for future operations. The next morning there was a briefing on the Arawe landings and a discussion of the plans for the Marine landings at Cape Gloucester the day after Christmas. Marshall departed late the following morning.

  It is unfortunate that minutes were not kept of this one and only meeting between MacArthur and Marshall during the entire war. All we know about what transpired comes from memoirs of various participants.

  MacArthur later wrote of the meeting that Marshall was extremely open about Admiral King’s opposition to naval forces commanded by Army officers and suggested that King viewed the entire Pacific as the Navy’s domain. King was, MacArthur quoted Marshall, on a campaign to rid the Navy of the blot caused by the Pearl Harbor attack. Marshall promised to address additional support for Kenney’s Fifth Air Force with Air Force chief General Arnold on Marshall’s return to Washington.26

  The Goodenough Island meeting between the two American generals garnered wide attention. The London Times wrote that it would increase the apprehension of Japanese leaders, while the Melbourne Herald remarked that Marshall’s visit was “evidence of the importance attached by the Allied Command” to operations in New Guinea.27 During a Christmas Eve 1943 broadcast to the nation and the nearly four million Americans serving in the armed forces around the world, President Roosevelt claimed that the meeting would “spell plenty of bad news for the Japs in the not too distant future.”28

  With the successful Arawe landings behind him, it was now time for MacArthur’s main event: landing the 1st Marine Division on Cape Gloucester. Beginning on December 15 and running through Christmas Day, the Fifth Air Force pounded the area around the tip of New Britain in what the Canberra Times called a “terrific bombardment.” General Kenney’s planes dropped over four thousand tons of bombs and fired several million rounds of cannon and machine-gun shells on “anything that looked like a target” in reconnaissance photographs.29

  On December 23, MacArthur was again on Goodenough Island, despite suffering from a severe cold and sore throat. This time it was to wish Major General William H. Rupertus and his 1st Marine Division good luck in their invasion of Cape Gloucester. MacArthur told Rupertus he knew that when the Marines “go into a fight they can be counted upon to do an outstanding job.”30

  D-Day was December 26, 1943. For the Marines, sailors, coast guardsmen, soldiers, and aviators committed to the landings, it was the day after Christmas, but back home on the other side of the International Date Line it was Christmas Day. The invasion pl
an called for putting more than twelve thousand Marines ashore at two main beaches east of the Cape, along with a smaller number of Army personnel to provide additional firepower.

  Admiral Barbey personally commanded Task Force 76, charged with getting the troops safely ashore. The task force included eighty-two troop and equipment landing ships and craft, twenty-three destroyers, four cruisers, forty-three PT boats, two subchasers, eight minesweepers, and ten miscellaneous small craft for patrolling and coastal transport duty. As this vast fleet converged on the Cape Gloucester landing zones, the western end of New Britain was subjected to high-level bombing by five squadrons of B-24s and shelling from destroyers. Once the shelling stopped, B-25s bombed and strafed the beach landing areas.

  The enemy had not failed to notice the buildup of Allied warships and landing craft. Lieutenant General Sakai, commander of the 17th Division, with responsibility for the defense of western New Britain, warned that an invasion was imminent. Yet the Japanese expected that the landing of additional Allied forces would occur at Arawe. So on the morning of December 26, as the Marines waded ashore at beaches around Cape Gloucester, two Japanese combat battalions—over a thousand men who had fought in China and the Philippines—were engaged in driving U.S. Army troops from the small, nearly useless airfield near Arawe, miles from the Marine landing zones.

  The invasion convoy itself was used as further deception to draw enemy forces away from Cape Gloucester. On December 25, the day before D-Day, the convoy had sailed in daylight toward Arawe. A Japanese coast watcher and a patrolling submarine reported this to Rabaul. Once night fell and the convoy was no longer visible to prying enemy eyes, it turned sharply toward the Vitiaz Strait and Cape Gloucester. Having fallen for the ruse, Rabaul sent aircraft from the Eleventh Air Fleet and the Fourth Air Army to attack the invasion fleet. When the planes arrived over the Arawe area, they of course found no enemy fleet.31