War at the End of the World

by James P. Duffy

  The area around Aitape was little more than a coastal plain covered mostly with wetlands and cut by numerous streams and rivers. Its primary value to the Allies was an airfield constructed by the Japanese eight miles east of Aitape near the Tadji Plantation. Two additional airfields were under construction, but were delayed by a combination of poor terrain and shortages of equipment for the engineers.

  The landings at Hollandia, code-named Reckless, and at Aitape, code-named Persecution, presented MacArthur with an entirely new set of challenges. The three simultaneous invasions would be the largest operation so far undertaken by the Allies in SWPA. Nearly 220 ships would transport or escort eighty thousand men and their supplies and equipment over six hundred miles along enemy-occupied and -fortified coast. It would also be the first time he made a large-scale attack without being able to provide his troops the protection of land-based aircraft, both fighters and bombers. He was going to have to rely on the Navy for air cover by carrier aircraft, if Admiral Nimitz would agree to it.7

  The issue of carrier-based air cover for the invasions was front and center when Nimitz and his deputy chief of staff, Rear Admiral Forrest Sherman, arrived in Brisbane on March 25. Just as MacArthur suspected, Nimitz was reluctant to commit any of his carriers to an operation in an area dominated by Japanese land-based aircraft. He was worried about the 351 aircraft that intelligence reports claimed were at the Hollandia airfields. General Kenney assured Nimitz that although his newer, long-range heavy fighters, the P-38 Lightnings, could not provide extended coverage for the invading troops, they could and would escort heavy bombers to attack the Hollandia airfields and decimate the enemy aircraft stationed there before the carriers arrived. As the naval officers looked on skeptically, Kenney boldly claimed he would wipe out the Japanese air units in Hollandia by April 5.

  Still somewhat reluctant, Nimitz agreed to send his fast carriers to Hollandia in support of the assaults there, but stipulated they would remain only until the third day after the invasion, scheduled for April 22. He did agree to allow several of his smaller escort carriers to remain on station near the Aitape landings for as much as eight days to allow Kenney enough time to begin flying fighters out of the Tadji airfield.

  As preparations proceeded for the landings at Hollandia and Aitape, MacArthur’s headquarters devised a separate plan to reinforce General Adachi’s opinion that Wewak and/or Hansa Bay were MacArthur’s next targets. During late March and early April, Allied aircraft attacked both bases frequently, and American destroyers regularly made shore bombardment attacks at both locations. PT boats patrolled offshore nightly, several times leaving behind life rafts to convince the enemy that advance reconnaissance patrols had come ashore to prepare for landings.8

  True to his word, Kenney began launching attacks on the Hollandia and Tadji airfields, as well as those at Wewak and Hansa Bay, on March 30. Reconnaissance photos of the three airfields at Hollandia taken that morning revealed just how unprepared the enemy was, as nearly three hundred aircraft sat on the ground, neatly parked. Later that day, sixty-five B-24 Liberator heavy bombers attacked. Among their first targets were antiaircraft guns, fuel dumps, and of course the idle aircraft. Eighty P-38s, retrofitted with external fuel tanks to extend their range, escorted the bombers and battled the few Japanese fighters that managed to become airborne. Kenney reported that the black smoke rising from the Japanese fuel dumps reached ten thousand feet and were visible 150 miles away.9

  The following day, a second group of bombers and fighters attacked the three airfields. By day’s end, at least 138 enemy planes lay destroyed on the ground, and over two dozen had fled the area, headed west for safety. The final bombing run was on April 3. Photoreconnaissance showed over 285 total planes destroyed in all three attacks. Both Nimitz and MacArthur were more than pleased with the results. The landings were on, with the fast carriers providing air cover, although there were not many enemy aircraft to protect against, thanks to Kenney’s Fifth Air Force.10

  Following the landings and capture of the badly damaged airfields, 340 enemy planes were found destroyed on or near the strips. Hidden in the jungle surrounding the Hollandia area were an estimated fifty more fighters that had dared to rise up to challenge the Americans and had been shot down in furious dogfights. When aircraft from the carriers of Rear Admiral Marc A. Mitscher’s Task Force 58 arrived over the Hollandia airfields on April 21, they found few targets left unscathed by the Army Air Force bombers.11

  Despite the destruction at Hollandia and Tadji, the Japanese, especially General Adachi, continued to believe that Hansa Bay and/or Wewak were MacArthur’s next targets. In fact, many of the planes destroyed on the ground at Hollandia had been moved there to avoid expected Allied air assaults, and to prepare to attack enemy landings, at Hansa Bay and Wewak. Adachi had been ordered by Second Area Army headquarters to plan to send troops from Hansa Bay and Wewak to Hollandia in case the Allies landed there. He dragged his feet, however, finding one delaying excuse after another since he remained convinced that Wewak or Hansa Bay was next in the Allies’ plan.12

  MacArthur’s plan of attack was straightforward. In command of Operation Reckless—the landings at Humboldt and Tanahmerah Bays—was Lieutenant General Eichelberger, who had spent his time since his success at Buna training troops for just such an operation. Under him were three U.S. Army generals. Humboldt Bay was to be taken by Major General Horace H. Fuller’s 41st Division (code-named Letterpress Landing Force), while Tanahmerah Bay was the target of the 24th Division (code-named Noiseless Landing Force) commanded by Brigadier General Frederick A. Irving. Once ashore, the 41st Division would circle around the Cyclops Mountains and head west toward the airfields. The 24th Division would do likewise, except it would head east. The two divisions were to link up on the Sentani Plain and take complete control of the airfields. Operation Reckless engaged 37,527 combat troops and 18,184 service and support troops, all of whom would be both transported to the landing sites and protected by more than two hundred naval vessels. Included among these were two cruiser forces, one Australian and one American, and eight escort carriers from Nimitz’s Fifth Fleet.

  Allied intelligence reports estimated between twelve thousand and sixteen thousand Japanese troops in the Hollandia area, but that most of these were service troops who did not even carry rifles. On the day of the landings, only about five hundred actual combat troops defended both bays and the airfields. Most of the military population consisted of air force personnel who no longer had any aircraft with which to fight, and construction and other support personnel.

  The Japanese were clearly unprepared for what was coming. Prior to the landings on April 22, the senior officer in charge of all service personnel was Major General Toyozo Kitazono, who had previously commanded a field transportation unit at Wewak. Having been transferred from Adachi’s Eighteenth Army, he evidently brought with him the latter’s belief that the action was to be at Wewak or Hansa Bay, and that Hollandia was a backwater. He had no comprehensive plan to defend Hollandia. On the very day of the invasion, Kitazono would be replaced by an officer from the 6th Air Division, Major General Masazumi Inada. General Inada made a valiant effort to form a defense against the invading forces, but he had little to work with, and the Japanese forces quickly collapsed as many of the service troops fled into the nearby hills when the Allied ships began their shore bombardment.

  Unable to find enough combat troops to form a decent defense, Inada as much as admitted defeat toward the end of the day of the invasion, when he issued orders that his men should attempt to withdraw from the area during that night.13

  The situation at Aitape was different. Of the 3,500 Japanese estimated to be there, over half were known to be combat troops who would be expected to mount a vigorous defense. Brigadier General Jens Doe commanded Operation Persecution and led the 163rd Regimental Combat Team, a Montana National Guard unit that had been detached from the 41st Division. An experienced unit, the 163r
d had fought at Buna-Gona. Once the Allies were in control of the Aitape area, Major General William H. Gill’s 32nd Infantry Division would relieve the 163rd for duties elsewhere.

  All three simultaneous landings succeeded in completely surprising the Japanese. While there were the usual problems associated with amphibious assaults—some troops landing at the wrong beaches, others having to wade ashore because of the coral—what was absent was any serious opposition. Shore bombardments from the American and Australian cruisers and destroyers drove many of the enemy into the hills and nearby jungle. At both Humboldt Bay and Tanahmerah Bay, most of the enemy abandoned fixed positions without firing a shot. Troops from General Fuller’s 41st Division found Japanese living quarters with half-eaten breakfasts and tea still brewing. At both bays, the Americans were happy to find pillboxes and other firing locations empty. The biggest obstacle encountered by the invading troops at Hollandia was the swamp. It proved to be mostly impassable to wheeled vehicles, and even several Marine Corps tanks on loan to the Army were bogged down with swamp water flooding their engines.14 Staying on narrow pathways, the infantrymen gradually made their way toward the three airfields.

  Less than four hours after the landings began, General MacArthur, who had joined the invasion fleet aboard the cruiser Nashville, went ashore at both landing sites to inspect the situation. Admiral Barbey and Generals Krueger and Eichelberger accompanied him as the commander in chief, ignoring mud and swampy water, greeted shocked American soldiers. It was a classic MacArthur visit to the front. Stomping around in the mud in his beat-up officer’s cap with the gold braid while everyone else wore a helmet, he shook hands, chatted about the fighting, and complimented soldiers on the job they were doing. Author John Gunther described one of these trips: “He stalks a battlefront like a man hardly human, not only arrogantly but lazily.”15

  So pleased was MacArthur by what he found at Hollandia that, according to Admiral Barbey, the commander in chief suggested that the forty-five thousand reinforcements then on board ships en route to Hollandia be diverted to Wakde, 140 miles farther on, to surprise the Japanese there. Eichelberger thought it was not a good idea—they had no way of knowing if Japanese reinforcements were at that moment on their way to the Hollandia landing zones from bases farther west. MacArthur thought better of his impulsive idea.16

  At Aitape, invading troops took less than six hours to reach and seize both airstrips at the Tadji Plantation. Australian RAAF airfield construction crews immediately started repairing the fighter airstrip, and two days later P-40 fighters began using the strip.17

  At Humboldt Bay, American soldiers were shocked as groups of emaciated people emerged from the nearby jungle. They counted 120 Sikh soldiers who had been captured at Singapore and used as slave labor. Angered at the horrendous treatment they had received from their captors, many of the Sikhs begged for weapons so they could join in the search of their tormentors. Another group of more than one hundred soon came forward, mostly missionaries, including several nuns. All had been prisoners of the Japanese. Both groups were taken to ships offshore, where they were fed, clothed, and eventually transported to Australia.18

  Over the next few days, as American troops made their way toward the airfields at the Sentani Plain between the bays, they encountered small groups of enemy soldiers willing to stand and fight, at least for a time. All the Japanese succeeded in accomplishing was to slow down an already slow-moving advance.

  In addition to swamps, infantrymen had to endure a shortage of food. Supplies were stacking up on the beaches because the only means of transporting them to the front was by drafting soldiers into the role of porters. Everything had to be carried by hand. Adding to the difficulty, a lone Japanese plane had bombed one of the beaches at Humboldt Bay on D-Day plus one. One bomb struck a huge Japanese ammunition dump near the beach, causing a series of explosions that killed twenty-four Americans and injured one hundred others. The resulting fires raged for days, and were finally extinguished on the twenty-seventh, but by then 60 percent of the supplies on the beach had been destroyed.19

  The situation went from bad to worse for both the movement of supplies to the troops in need of them, and the forward movement of those troops themselves. On March 24, several hours of heavy rain turned what passed for a road leading to the Sentani Plain into a virtual lake. The deluge ground nearly everything to a halt, including the airdrop of supplies. On the twenty-seventh, B-25s from Saidor were finally able to air-drop in badly needed ammunition. By then, all three airfields were in American hands while Japanese units continued to flee the area.

  The 21st Regiment from General Irving’s 24th Infantry Division captured Hollandia Drome on April 26. The same day, soldiers from the 186th Regiment of General Fuller’s 41st Division took control of both Cyclops and Sentani Airdromes. Except for a few scattered groups, enemy soldiers had evacuated all three airfields.

  The Hollandia landings cost the Americans 159 lives, including the men killed in the beach explosion. More than 600 Japanese surrendered, while a rough body count reported 3,300 dead enemy troops. The thousands of others who fled headed mostly toward the base at Sarmi, located farther up the coast opposite Wakde Island, but fewer than a thousand arrived. The rest were killed by Allied patrols, or died from disease, starvation, or infected wounds.

  General Anami, commander of the Second Area Army, which included Hollandia, had wanted to send a reserve division to attack the Americans. His superior, General Hisaichi Terauchi, commander of the Southern Expeditionary Army, denied his request. Terauchi was more concerned about defending the Wakde-Sarmi area northwest of Hollandia.20

  Meanwhile, a hundred miles east of Aitape at Wewak, General Adachi’s concern about being surrounded and isolated by American and Australian forces had been heightened when he learned how quickly the defenses at Aitape and Hollandia had fallen. Fewer than three hundred men reached Wewak from Aitape, indicating that over six hundred had died of various causes, including enemy action. Another twenty-seven surrendered. The Aitape operation cost the Americans three deaths.21

  At Hollandia, it quickly became clear to the Americans that the Japanese had intended to build a large base there. General Eichelberger reported the discovery of more than six hundred supply dumps loaded with thousands of tons of supplies left behind by the fleeing enemy. He wrote of “tarpaulin-covered hills of rice which looked like Ohio haystacks.” There were tons of medical supplies, including quinine, thousands of canned goods, as well as sake and beer. Looking back on Hollandia, Eichelberger later wrote that he believed it was “the richest prize—supply-wise—taken during the Pacific War.”22

  Since the Japanese were monitoring Allied communications, in all likelihood General Adachi quickly understood what MacArthur’s plan had been by assaulting Hollandia and what it meant for him and his troops when they translated a communiqué from his headquarters dated April 24, 1944. In it, MacArthur explained that the successful landings had thrown a “loop of envelopment” around Adachi’s Eighteenth Army. He described the Imperial forces as “completely isolated.”23

  MacArthur departed the Hollandia area aboard the Nashville and headed back to Port Moresby, and then on to Brisbane to plan his next moves. Fighting around all three landing zones continued as small units of enemy soldiers attempted to die for their emperor or struggled to find their way to safety.

  —

  Meanwhile, General Inada, commander of Japanese troops at Hollandia, made an effort to gather his surviving forces and organize a less chaotic withdrawal. He sent word that all Imperial soldiers should head toward a village fifteen miles west of Lake Sentani called Genjem. With most of their food supplies left behind, Genjem was an obvious gathering place, since the Japanese had begun growing a wide variety of foodstuffs in this agricultural center. If his men were going to make it to the safety of the Wakde-Sarmi area 125 miles through nearly untracked jungle, they would need all the food available at Genjem.

&
nbsp; By April 30, Inada had managed to gather slightly more than seven thousand men at Genjem. They departed in ten separate groups and followed two routes toward their objective, without the benefit of their maps, which were now in the hands of the enemy. Japanese records estimate that only 7 percent of these men arrived at Sarmi. The rest fell victim to American patrols and roadblocks, or to disease and starvation. Inada was among the handful of survivors.24

  At Aitape, General Gill’s 32nd Infantry Division was reinforced by the 124th Regimental Combat Team from the Florida National Guard. Later the 112th Cavalry RCT was added. General Krueger was convinced that General Adachi, whom he knew to be an aggressive combat officer, was not about to wait around and allow his Eighteenth Army to be completely surrounded and isolated by the Americans. From MacArthur, Krueger requested and received additional troops, including the 43rd Infantry Division, waiting in New Zealand for assignment.

  When the strength of the forces at Aitape reached the equivalent of three divisions, a corps headquarters was required for overall command. In late June, Major General Charles P. Hall and the XI Corps headquarters staff arrived. By that time, the Persecution Task Force, as it was known, had pushed its defense lines out in three directions. The most important of these was twenty-two miles to the east along the banks of the Driniumor River, facing the general direction from which enemy troops from Wewak might be expected.

  At Wewak, General Adachi’s Eighteenth Army remained a powerful force, with roughly fifty-five thousand men in three divisions and support units. Cut off from Japanese supply bases in western New Guinea, Adachi could not sit idly by and watch his army disintegrate as increasing numbers of units ran dangerously low on food supplies. Determined to take some positive action against the Americans, he ordered elements from each of his three divisions to begin the overland trek to Aitape. In early June, nearly twenty thousand men from the 20th, the 41st, and the 51st Infantry Divisions undertook the arduous task of a forced march through rain-soaked jungle. It took most of them a month to walk the ninety miles to the nearest American lines. With barge traffic all but eliminated by American PT boats, and wheeled vehicles unable to travel the narrow native paths, the men were required to carry everything they needed on their backs. Many of these men were already battle weary and weakened by disease before they started out. Meanwhile, Southern Expeditionary Army headquarters continued to be concerned about MacArthur moving farther along the coast to the Wakde-Sarmi area, so on June 17 they instructed Adachi to engage in only delaying actions at various locations throughout eastern New Guinea. By this time, it was too late to stop a Japanese attack at Aitape as portions of the 20th Division had already reached the outer edge of the Allied perimeter around Aitape, at the Driniumor River.