War at the End of the World

by James P. Duffy

  As for the three airfields, aviation engineers decided to abandon the idea of using Namber when they discovered it was badly graded and the base soil too rough. Kamiri, on which work began the day after it was captured, received its first aircraft, a squadron of Australian P-40 fighters, on July 6. The jewel of the three fields was Kornasoren. Australian group captain William Dale, the engineer in charge of construction, put every engineer and work party, including combat soldiers and native laborers on the island and nearby ships, to work twenty-four hours a day at what quickly became two seven-thousand-foot runways, complete with dispersal areas. The massive effort was able to meet MacArthur’s instructions that Kornasoren be able to accommodate fifty P-38s by July 25. American B-24 Liberator heavy bombers soon arrived and began the first bombing attacks against Japanese petroleum-producing facilities on Borneo.28

  The speed and low cost in casualties of the Noemfoor operation, as well as quick airfield construction, earned General Patrick, who personally oversaw everything, a commendation from MacArthur as well as an Oak Leaf Cluster of the Legion of Merit. On Krueger’s recommendation, the “Green Hornet” was soon appointed commanding officer of the 6th Infantry Division.29

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  General MacArthur’s final target in the conquest of New Guinea was the Vogelkop Peninsula and several of its offshore islands. If his engineers could find locations to build airfields, he could neutralize the large Japanese forces at Manokwari and Sorong, and even reach across the sea to the southern end of the Philippines, his ultimate objective.

  There was some talk and even early planning at MacArthur’s headquarters for an amphibious assault on one of the two Japanese bases on the peninsula. The problem was, the enemy was believed to have some fifteen thousand combat and service troops at Manokwari on the peninsula’s east end, and seventeen thousand at Sorong on the western end. The commander in chief was unwilling to attack such well-defended locations. Relying instead on his “hit them where they ain’t” theory of conquering the Japanese, he decided to find a place between the two bases that might be suitable for the building of a major airfield and possibly even a naval base. Using air reconnaissance photos, he focused his attention on two small coastal villages, Sansapor and Mar, located roughly halfway between the two large bases. In order to make a final decision, his planners needed to know much more about these two villages and the area around them than could be learned from photos. On June 23, a U.S. Navy submarine put a scouting party ashore near Mar. The group included members of the Alamo Scouts, Fifth Air Force terrain experts, hydrographic experts from the Seventh Amphibious Force, and Allied Intelligence Bureau agents.

  After a week of scouting the area, the men reported there were good beaches for use by amphibious landing forces, and there were good locations on the coastal plane for the construction of airfields. They also reported that the nearest Japanese, no more than one hundred troops, were at a small barge station at Sansapor. That was all MacArthur needed to know. He ordered General Krueger to prepare his Sixth Army for a landing near Mar on July 30. Air Force and Naval headquarters received instructions to plan to support the landings.30

  Operation Globetrotter, as it was called, took place right on schedule, on July 30, 1944. Major General Franklin C. Sibert, commanding officer of the 6th Infantry Division, was chosen to command the 7,300 troops who made simultaneous landings a few miles east of Mar, as well as on two islands, Middelburg and Amsterdam, directly offshore. The following day, a battalion landed a Sansapor just as the Japanese troops stationed there fled into the jungle. Each landing began at seven a.m. and took about two hours to complete. There was no opposition, and there were no Japanese soldiers to be seen.

  Because airfield construction was the main objective of the landings, the 7,300-man invasion force had an unusually high percentage of service troops, especially engineers. Work began on airfields almost immediately. By August 17, a new landing strip on Middelburg Island was ready for fighters. On September 3, a six-thousand-foot steel-mat runway near Mar was reported ready to receive medium bombers. Construction was also completed on 2,800 feet of taxiways, and seven dispersal lanes. Too small for an airfield, Amsterdam Island became home to a PT boat base and a flying boat base, and Sansapor Point, just east of the village of Sansapor, housed a new air warning radar station. Patrols periodically engaged small numbers of Japanese, killing some and taking others prisoner.

  The first Japanese air reaction to the landings did not take place until August 27. In the weeks before the landings, the Fifth Air Force, aided by Dutch and Australian aircraft, had neutralized most of the enemy airfields throughout the peninsula. Three enemy planes made a night raid in the Mar area, but caused little damage.

  The airfield at Mar was soon home to the 347th Fighter Group and the 419th Night Fighter Squadron. The 418th Night Fighter Squadron and 18th Fighter Group were based at Middelburg. These airfields helped further isolate the large enemy forces at Manokwari and Sorong, leaving them little to do but attempt to survive.31

  When Operation Globetrotter was officially declared over, fourteen Americans had died, several from scrub typhus, and thirty-five had been wounded. Enemy dead were estimated at 385, while 215 had surrendered.32

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  The occupation of the Mar-Sansapor area marked the end of MacArthur’s offensive operations in New Guinea, a campaign that had spanned nearly three years and fifteen hundred miles. From Milne Bay at the east end of New Guinea to Sansapor at the west end, the Allies killed an estimated fifty thousand Japanese, and left nearly two hundred thousand more isolated and starving in their fortified defensive positions. MacArthur’s “hit them where they ain’t” policy resulted in fewer Americans being killed throughout the New Guinea campaign than died during the battle for tiny Iwo Jima in the central Pacific. Yet he had one more stop to make before heading to the Philippines: the island of Morotai.

  Halfway between Sansapor and the southernmost territory of the Philippines are a group of several hundred islands named the Maluku Islands. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese traders had called them the Spice Islands because they produced large quantities of nutmeg, mace, clove, and other spices. The largest of these islands was Halmahera, while the most northern, and closest to the Philippines, was Morotai. General MacArthur required one more island from which his aircraft could reach the Philippines and provide land-based air support for his planned invasion of Mindanao, which he had tentatively scheduled for November 15.

  Halmahera was MacArthur’s first selection, based on its location and the nine airfields the enemy had constructed there. That changed when intelligence reports estimated that at least thirty thousand Japanese combat troops of the 32nd Infantry Division, supported by a large number of service troops, defended the seven-thousand-square-mile island. Another drawback was that reconnaissance indicated that there were only a few beaches to serve as landing zones, and all appeared to be well defended by strong enemy fortifications.

  Just six miles northeast of Halmahera was Morotai, a much more attractive target that intelligence analysts believed contained fewer than a thousand enemy soldiers. The actual number turned out to be closer to five hundred. Less than seven hundred square miles in area, Morotai, like most islands in the New Guinea area, was blanketed in heavy forests and had a rugged, mountainous interior. A special attraction to the commander in chief was the single airfield the Japanese had built on the Doroeba Plain, a large tract of relatively flat territory on the island’s southeast coast. Japanese engineers had abandoned the airfield because they found the soil throughout the area too soft to support aircraft operations.

  The Morotai defenses were the responsibility of the 2nd Raiding Unit, a commando force composed mostly of Formosan soldiers under Japanese officers. The unit’s commander was Major Takenobu Kawashima, who along with most of his officers had been trained at the Imperial Army’s Nakano School, which was used to develop in
telligence and guerrilla warfare specialists. Since arriving on Morotai in late July, Kawashima, who suspected the Allies might invade his little island along with the larger target, Halmahera, had constructed a series of dummy gun positions and empty campsites at which he had fires lit at night, as if Japanese soldiers occupied them.33

  MacArthur informed Krueger that his next target was Morotai, and set September 15 as the D-Day. Krueger selected Major General Charles P. Hall, then at Aitape, to head up what he called the Tradewind Task Force, with overall responsibility for the operation. Nearly sixty one thousand troops were assembled for the task force. Approximately forty thousand were combat troops from Major General John C. Persons’s 31st Infantry Division, and the 126th Regimental Combat Team from the 32nd Division. Supporting these were American and Australian air force personnel assigned mainly to quickly build an airfield on the island as the combat units moved forward. The 6th Infantry Division, stationed at Sansapor, was designated as a reserve in case additional troops were required.34

  Admiral Barbey’s Seventh Amphibious Force picked up most of the 31st Division, less the 124th Regiment that was at Aitape, at Maffin Bay. The 124th loaded aboard the ships at Aitape and headed to Wakde Island, where it rehearsed the planned landings on September 6. Once the training was completed, the ships of Task Force 77 assembled and headed to Morotai. This fleet, commanded by Admiral Barbey, numbered over a hundred ships. Escorting the troop-carrying convoy was a support group of eight Australian and American cruisers and ten destroyers. Escort carriers and destroyer escorts searching for enemy submarines offered an outer ring of protection. Overhead, American and Australian aircraft flew wide-ranging patrols. The entire trip to Morotai went off without a hitch.35

  Rear Admiral Russell S. Berkey commanded the support group aboard his cruiser Phoenix. Also aboard was General MacArthur, who made it clear he was not in command of the invasion, just along as an observer.

  To reduce enemy air action against the landings, Allied aircraft bombed and strafed Japanese airfields on Halmahera and other nearby islands, reportedly destroying several hundred aircraft while most were still on the ground. No bombing raids were made on Morotai. In fact, Morotai suffered no attacks until the morning of the landings, when destroyers bombarded the Gila Peninsula, a long finger of land sticking out of the south coast of the island a short distance from the abandoned airfield. Several of General Kenney’s bombers joined in, including some that dumped DDT behind the beaches to eliminate mosquitoes and other insects carrying malaria and scrub typhus, diseases that had caused a high casualty rate in the Sansapor-Mar landing areas.36

  Aside from some accidents caused by large areas of dead coral covered in slime, beginning on the morning of September 15, the landings at two beach sites went off with only a few major problems. Engineers found the beaches too muddy for heavy equipment, and coral ridges just below the sea surface made it difficult for many of the landing craft to even approach the beaches. The coral reef grew clogged with vehicles and craft whose engines had been drowned in the four feet of surf or simply could not climb over the ridge. As a result, soldiers discharged at the reef had to wade through chest-high water to reach the muddy beaches. A survey party found a more acceptable beach less than a mile away, and it became the primary unloading site the next day.37

  The men struggling to get to shore were fortunate that no Japanese snipers were lying in wait. In fact, the few enemy troops stationed near the landing beaches fled as soon as they saw the size of the invading force.

  Sporadic small-unit fighting continued on Morotai for some time, but the Japanese on Halmahera were never able to reinforce the island’s small garrison as Allied aircraft and PT boats blocked the Halmahera Strait between the two islands. American and Australian engineers ignored the partially built Japanese airfield and, as soon as the combat troops established a defensive perimeter around the Doroeba Plain, began construction on what would eventually be three airfields. The Wawama Airfield received fighters on October 4, and heavy bombers on October 19. Soon after, a flying boat anchorage and a PT boat base were operating.

  The invasion of Morotai cost thirty-one American lives, along with eighty-five wounded. Enemy dead, those who could be found and counted, were 117, and another 200 are believed to have perished when the barge they were using to evacuate the island was attacked and sunk by PT boats.38

  When MacArthur’s troops landed on the Philippine island of Leyte on October 25, 1944, the airfields on Morotai would be the closest in Allied hands and able to contribute land-based bombers and fighter escorts to the invading forces.

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  Shortly after one p.m., following the successful landings on Morotai, the Phoenix headed south to MacArthur’s headquarters at Hollandia, where he resumed planning his invasion of the Philippines and the fulfillment of his promise to return. Before leaving Morotai, however, the commander in chief had one final act to perform.

  Less than two hours after the initial landings, MacArthur went ashore with a small party that included Admiral Barbey. From some fifty yards offshore, the general and his group waded through treacherous water up to their waists to reach the muddy beach.39

  Once ashore, they met briefly with General Persons. Then MacArthur did something he always enjoyed: he stopped to chat with soldiers. An Australian journalist accompanying the party reported that he congratulated his men on a job well done. It is widely recounted that at one point, while standing on the beach with some officers, he suddenly stopped talking and looked off to the north, where the nearest of the Philippine islands lay less than three hundred miles away. “They are waiting for me there,” he said quietly. “It has been a long time.”40

  EPILOGUE

  General MacArthur considered the Philippines part of the United States, and as such, he believed Americans and Filipinos together should liberate the country. He broke this news to General Blamey on July 12, 1944, explaining that on November 1 Australian forces were to take full responsibility for military operations throughout New Guinea and New Britain, excluding the Admiralties, which the U.S. Navy now controlled. By then, American forces, without Australians, would be substantially out of New Guinea and engaged in fighting in the Philippines. This news disappointed Blamey, who had expected that at least two of his Australian divisions would go to the Philippines with the Americans.1

  MacArthur expressed his view of the future of the Japanese forces he had bypassed and isolated on New Guinea and New Britain when he responded to a related question from General Marshall. He told the Army chief that the isolated enemy troops did not present a threat to existing operations or threaten those to come. He was confident that their ability to undertake successful operations was negligible. For the Allies to initiate offensives against them would “involve heavy loss of life,” and those Japanese troops should be left alone to eke out their food supplies until the war ended.2

  With the Americans’ exit from the New Guinea area almost complete, General Blamey was in a difficult situation. He was struggling with some members of the Australian parliament who felt that since MacArthur had moved on to the Philippines and Australia was no longer directly threatened, the war was nearly over for Australia and it was time to reduce the size and cost of her army. Instead, Australian forces started offensive operations against the trapped enemy troops in New Guinea, in what some Australian politicians called “unnecessarily aggressive operations.”3

  In December 1944, the Australian II Corps attacked the Japanese concentrations on Bougainville. In February the Australian 6th Division launched a campaign against General Adachi’s Eighteenth Army around Wewak, while the 5th Division developed a perimeter across the neck of the Gazelle Peninsula, further isolating Rabaul from the rest of New Britain. Following Emperor Hirohito’s announcement on August 15, 1945, instructing his forces to lay down their arms, and the formal surrender signing ceremony on board the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945, the bypassed garrison
s each surrendered in turn.

  On September 6, the Imperial Army and Navy forces at Rabaul, represented by Lieutenant General Hitoshi Imamura and Vice Admiral Jinichi Kusaka, surrendered to Lieutenant General V. A. H. Sturdee, commanding officer of the First Australian Army. The ceremony took place aboard the Royal Navy carrier HMS Glory. Three days later, General Blamey accepted the surrender of Lieutenant General Fusataro Teshima, commander of the 126,000 men of the Japanese Second Army. That event took place on Morotai Island. Lieutenant General Hatazo Adachi surrendered the thirteen thousand surviving soldiers of his Eighteenth Army to Major General H. Robinson, commanding officer of the Sixth Australian Army, at a small airstrip on September 13. Similar smaller ceremonies took place at Japanese outposts throughout the South Pacific and southwest Pacific until October 1, 1945.

  The war in New Guinea took the lives of slightly more than two hundred thousand Japanese soldiers, sailors, and aviators. The United States and Australia each lost approximately seven thousand members of their military forces.

  President Roosevelt’s decision, prompted by Churchill and Australian prime minister John Curtin, to send MacArthur to Australia in command of all Allied forces in the theater gave him the win he and the American people so desperately wanted: victory over the nation that attacked Pearl Harbor. Could another American general have achieved the same result at so little cost in lives?

  Assessing MacArthur’s leadership, Lieutenant General Ryozo Sakuma, chief of staff of the Imperial Second Army, said, “I think that they were excellent tactics. I say this without prejudice. If any other plans had been used, the Americans would have had a very difficult time.”4