For now, however, MacArthur felt confident enough after the victory at Midway to unveil his own plans for surrounding the Japanese on New Guinea, and pressing on to capture Rabaul. He knew that by taking the fortress on New Britain, he could wipe out any Japanese air superiority over the entire region—and drive any Japanese shipping back to the island of Truk, more than 700 miles to the north. On June 8 he wrote to Marshall, emphasizing that the victory at Midway had created a situation that should be “exploited at once.” He proposed sending a task force of two carriers with an amphibious division to strike at Rabaul. Marshall was convinced, and did MacArthur one better by adding three infantry divisions to MacArthur’s amphibious force—even if it meant diverting troops from the buildup in Europe—and putting in a third carrier to the supporting task force.46
The navy, however, killed the plan cold, and in the end, it was a good thing they did. The plan called for three carriers more than King and his colleagues were willing to commit to a venture that would expose them to round-the-clock land-based air attacks—and certainly not a venture commanded by the likes of Douglas MacArthur. Even more, the resources that MacArthur and Marshall were committing to a ground attack would have been woefully inadequate in the face of the forces the Japanese had built up in Rabaul. Any amphibious landing in 1942, given the Japanese advantages in Rabaul and American inexperience with assaults of this sort, would have been a slaughter. So MacArthur’s idea died a merciful bureaucratic death, as planners in Washington scrambled to find other ways to take the initiative away from imperial Japan.
The navy veto of the Rabaul plan revealed something else as well. Nimitz had thought nothing of sending two carrier task forces during Coral Sea operations without seeking MacArthur’s permission, yet his superiors thought nothing of vetoing MacArthur’s plan inviting carriers into the same area. And when earlier on April 24 MacArthur had begged for carriers to be part of SWPA naval forces, with Prime Minister Curtin personally signing on, the navy had said no—even as Yorktown and Lexington were steaming toward the Coral Sea, which sat in the middle of MacArthur’s jurisdiction.
Historian H. P. Wilmott, hardly a MacArthur partisan, has pointed out that the treatment of MacArthur on this occasion was “dishonest.”47 Secretary of War Henry Stimson, meanwhile, complained bitterly of the navy secretary’s and the president’s seeming inability to rein in their admirals, especially Ernest King, in their detestation of MacArthur. While “the extraordinary brilliance of that officer was not always matched by his tact,” Stimson noted, “the Navy’s astonishing bitterness toward him seemed childish.”48
The truth was, not only was MacArthur a lower priority than winning the war in Europe. He was also a lower priority than supplying and equipping Nimitz’s forces in the central Pacific. In an area as large as the continent of North America, from San Francisco to New York, and from Alaska to Guatemala, MacArthur and his generals would be chronically starved for ships and planes and men. Prime Minister Curtin noted it too. He wrote to Churchill, “[T]he commander in chief…is bitterly disappointed with the meager assistance promised for the Southwest Pacific Area for the performance of the tasks imposed upon him by his directive.”49
Yet Churchill had passed the Australian problem on to Roosevelt, and washed his hands of it—while Roosevelt and General Marshall acquiesced in the navy’s takeover of overall strategy. This was maddening for MacArthur, who blamed George Marshall for letting it happen. “The complete absorption of the national defense function by the Navy,” he exploded at one point, had left the army “relegated to merely base, training, garrisoning, and supply purposes.”50
MacArthur set out to change that. On May 8 he had even sent a letter to Roosevelt insisting that the SWPA was now the real second front to help the Soviet Union, and should receive its share of resources accordingly. Even Winston Churchill had to tell FDR that with this letter MacArthur had crossed the line that separated military responsibility from political authority, and had to be admonished not to do it again.51 It was not the first time MacArthur had trod close to that line, and it would certainly not be the last.
So there was no Big Push coming from the SWAP, and no big buildup in men or materiel for MacArthur. But one thing was clear. With the victory at Midway, he and Curtin agreed on June 17 that the threat of immediate invasion had lifted. Now it was time to take the initiative.52
That meant MacArthur’s attention was now riveted to the north and west, on the green expanse of the island of New Guinea.
Roughly the size of California, Papua New Guinea is the second-largest island in the world after Australia. A sprawling 175,000 square miles of jungle, swamp, and volcanic mountains, it is split across the center by the Owen Stanley Range running from the northwest to the southeast. The Owen Stanleys rise to 13,000 feet at certain points, and are virtually impenetrable except across two or three passes.53 Every place else on the island is covered by a thick canopy of jungle and inhabited by a bewildering variety of tribal people who speak one-fifth of all the languages spoken in the world. In 1942 it had no roads or infrastructure; no real towns except its capital, Port Moresby; and was home to mind-destroying heat and humidity, and every tropical disease known to humanity.
But New Guinea was vital to Japanese plans—and now to MacArthur’s. The Japanese had already occupied the western part of the island, along with Lae and Salamaua farther east. Their original plan had been to seize Port Moresby as a forward base for attacks into northern Australia and to halt any Allied buildup in the Southwest Pacific Area from moving north, especially in the direction of Rabaul—the linchpin of Japan’s entire empire in the South Pacific.
That plan had been foiled at Coral Sea. But only days later the threat from Rabaul had taken a dangerous new twist, when on May 18 MacArthur received a message from his new naval commander, Vice Admiral Arthur Carpender. MacArthur didn’t have any better relations with Carpender than he had had with Thomas Hart; he was just as convinced that the navy saw its job in SWPA as undercutting his authority, and limiting support for his operations, as much as possible.54
But in this case Carpender’s help was vital, because it was a message from the navy’s ULTRA decrypt office in Melbourne, which Nimitz ordered the admiral to share with MacArthur. It predicted that by June 15 the Japanese would attempt an overland invasion of Moresby from Lae and Salamaua, just 200 miles northwest of Port Moresby, by using the Kokoda Trail over the Owen Stanley Mountains.55
At first MacArthur was not overly alarmed. He didn’t imagine the Japanese could pull such an invasion off. He knew the Owen Stanley terrain was murderously rugged; it seemed impossible anyone could get across those mountains, certainly not a large force. Yet he had seen the Japanese do something similar on Mount Natib on the Bataan Peninsula. So he sent a minatory message to Blamey that there was a possibility that “minor forces” might make a stab at Port Moresby from the Law-Salamaua area, and telling him to put his forces on the lookout.56
Meanwhile, MacArthur was focused on his own plans for using New Guinea as the stepping-stone for his advance running in the opposite direction as the Japanese, toward New Britain and Rabaul. That meant first building an adequate airbase at Milne Bay, one that could knock out any seaborne attack on Port Moresby, and also stationing troops at Buna, farther up the northern coast, where there was already an airstrip. A survey had revealed that the Buna strip was not suitable for large numbers of combat aircraft, but engineers could build another strip at Dobodura, ten miles to the south, that would do the job.57
MacArthur was getting excited at the possibilities of going on the offensive, even with his severely slender resources. Starting on June 25, two Australian army brigades set to work at Milne Bay building and protecting an airfield, while the American Thirty-second and Forty-first Divisions were moved north to Queensland from their bases in Adelaide and Melbourne.58
Then on July 2 he received the revised plan for SWPA from the Joint Chiefs. They had finally decided MacArthur was right; the capture
of Rabaul should be the essential goal for the entire campaign. How to accomplish that, however, had triggered a tumultuous week of meetings and arguments between General Marshall and Admiral King, who insisted that taking the island fortress would be impossible without the navy in charge, while Marshall pointed out that since taking Rabaul was entirely in MacArthur’s theater of operations, MacArthur and the army should be in charge.
The result was a three-phase compromise, all spelled out in the July 2 directive to MacArthur. Phase or “Task” One would involve an assault on the island of Tulagi in the southern Solomons, as a way to both neutralize any Japanese effort to sever communications between the United States and Australia and also prepare a staging area for the attack on Rabaul. This assault was tasked to Nimitz and the navy by the simple expedient of moving the previous boundary between his theater and MacArthur’s one degree west (MacArthur’s feelings when he learned that can be imagined).
Task Two, however, was entirely MacArthur’s. This involved advancing along the northeast coast of New Guinea with a simultaneous westward move up the Solomon Island chain, until the two forces met in preparation for Task Three, the final assault on Rabaul itself.59
MacArthur was less than pleased with the new plan, dubbed WATCHTOWER. He told Marshall and King he was fine with the three-phase timetable; he had simply hoped to be in charge of the entire operation—and the Joint Chiefs were reserving for themselves the authority to decide who would be in charge of the final Task Three.60 Also he and Admiral Robert Ghormley, the man in charge of Nimitz’s naval forces protecting New Zealand, thought the August 1 deadline was premature. They sent a joint communiqué on July 8, pointing out their lack of ships, materiel, and port facilities and asking for a postponement.
Washington abruptly turned them down.61 Indeed, the navy had discovered that the assault on Tulagi might be hampered by a Japanese airfield being built on a large, jungle-covered island to the south of Tulagi called Guadalcanal. So Task One orders were altered to include landing marines on Guadalcanal. It would be the start of one of the most epic battles of World War Two; and for MacArthur, it would be a source for more bitter recriminations as men and resources that he needed for his advance in New Guinea were diverted instead to Guadalcanal.
Still, at least there was a plan, and a call to action. MacArthur set August 10 as the date for the move on Buna, dubbed Operation PROVIDENCE, to be led by Brigadier General Robert Van Volkenburgh and the soldiers of the American Fortieth Artillery Brigade, an antiaircraft outfit at Port Moresby. Then Australian troops would move up to begin securing the site as Buna Force dug in, until by the end of August MacArthur expected to have no less than 3,000 soldiers in place.62
Five days later, on July 20, MacArthur began the move of his headquarters up from Melbourne to Brisbane, to oversee the entire operation. Their train pulled into Brisbane on July 21, where MacArthur was met by chagrined members of his intelligence staff.
They had bitter news. The Japanese had gotten to Buna first, and were there in force.
—
In fact, they had landed that same day, July 21, and how MacArthur and everyone else were caught flat-footed was a tale of missed communications and misread intelligence, including by his own ULTRA people.
In June Allied analysts picked up radio messages suggesting the Japanese were assembling amphibious forces for a strike somewhere in New Guinea, while a navy decrypt in early July actually disclosed the possible destination as Buna. It even named the landing date: July 21. But there is no indication that the bulletin ever reached MacArthur’s chief of staff, Richard Sutherland, or that anyone else at SWPA headquarters ever saw it.63
Even so, Charles Willoughby was reading other ULTRA sources, and concluded on July 15 that the enemy destination was Buna or perhaps Milne Bay, and suggested that Chamberlin as G-3 start concentrating air reconnaissance efforts over those areas. Then suddenly, three days later, Willoughby reversed himself, and backed away from predicting an invasion threat. The new Japanese movements were to reinforce existing positions on New Guinea, he decided, not to establish new ones.64
It was not the first, or last, time Willoughby’s penchant for second-guessing himself would have dire consequences. MacArthur chose to accept his G-2’s revised judgment—especially when he had few resources with which to watch where, along New Guinea’s 3,000-mile coastline, any Japanese attacker might be headed.
Not even a frantic phone call from General Van Volkenburgh on the 17th, reporting that the navy had spotted a large assembly of transports at Rabaul that he was convinced were headed for Buna, could disturb MacArthur’s inclination to stick to his original timetable.65 Willoughby told him the ships could just as well be headed for Lae or even Guadalcanal. And how was he going to pull together the transports he would need for landing at Buna two weeks ahead of schedule, even if he had wanted to?
It may have been an inevitable delay, but it was a costly one. On July 19 navy decryptologists had evidence of Japanese warships escorting four troop transports off Salamaua and bound for—destination unknown. The hope was that Allied planes at Port Moresby might be able to get a quick strike in, but heavy rains were sweeping over the area, grounding every plane.66 By the time the weather cleared, some 16,000 Japanese had splashed ashore at Buna and were beginning to probe their way toward the Kokoda Trail, the first step on their overland advance on Port Moresby.
Overnight the first phase of Task Two had turned into the battle for Buna. Australian and American forces that were supposed to use Buna as the jumping-off point for the recapture of New Guinea would now have to scramble to plug the Kokoda Trail. That “trail” was only a narrow track through some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth, winding through steep gorges, across torrential streams, and over mountains that required men carrying forty-pound packs and a rifle or machine gun on their backs to crawl on their hands and knees—all the while facing poisonous snakes, malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and a sniper’s unexpected bullet.
By the 29th the Japanese were in Kokoda, which the first Australian arrivals briefly retook on August 8. Over the rest of the month Australian units were fed piecemeal into the fighting under the overall command of Lieutenant General S. F. Rowell, while two brigades of Australians also beat back a second Japanese landing on Milne Bay on August 25—the first time any Allied troops had ever defeated a Japanese amphibious force.67
MacArthur was unimpressed. In general, he and his staff did not appreciate the difficulties of fighting along the trail, where 75 percent of Allied casualties never even saw a Japanese soldier before being cut down by malaria, dysentery, or a particularly virulent form of typhus. Sutherland paid one visit to Port Moresby and met with Australian commanders.68 But he never took a trip to the interior to see the conditions under which outnumbered, sick, underfed, and exhausted men were struggling to halt an enemy who seemed as impervious to the tropical conditions as he was to the idea of defeat. Needless to say, neither did MacArthur.
As August turned into September, MacArthur’s mood darkened. His New Guinea campaign was entirely stymied; the growing battle for Guadalcanal was consuming more and more resources that he believed should be going to him; and if the Australians were looking poorly prepared for battle, his men of the Thirty-second and Forty-first Divisions were even more in need of additional training. Even worse, the Japanese advance from Kokoda was starting to remind him of Bataan, or even Malaya.
By mid-September, General Horii Tomitaro’s troops were on the Imita Ridge overlooking the last defensible barrier before Port Moresby.69 A week or so later an unnamed member of MacArthur’s staff (probably Sutherland) personally told Admiral Nimitz that “the Australians won’t fight” and that New Guinea was “gone.”70
Yet the man who was about to turn the war—and MacArthur—around had been in Australia more than a month.
CHAPTER 19
GREEN HELL
There is hardly any celebrated enterprise in War which was not achieved by endless exertion, pai
ns, and privations; and as here the weakness of the physical and moral man is ever disposed to yield, only an immense force of will, which manifests itself in perseverance admired by present and future generations, can conduct us to our goal.
—CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ, ON WAR
The new commander of the Air Forces of the Far East was General George Kenney. A short, strutting gamecock of a man who bore a striking resemblance to the actor Humphrey Bogart, with an air of contained insolence to match, he had been born in 1889 in Nova Scotia, and had been a fighter pilot in World War One. He had gone on to serve as U.S. air attaché in France in 1940 when the Germans unleashed their devastating blitzkrieg tactics of fast-moving tank columns backed by interdiction bombing from the air. The experience taught him valuable lessons about the use, and misuse, of airpower that he brought back with him to the States. When he was told he was going to relieve General George Brett as MacArthur’s air chief, Kenney was determined to bring those lessons with him when he arrived in Brisbane at the end of July 1942.
George Kenney made an unlikely addition to MacArthur’s inner circle. Yet they soon established a close cooperative relationship; indeed, Kenney would become closer to MacArthur than any other individual except Jean. It was far more than an attraction of opposites. Each man instinctively understood that he needed the other in order to achieve his goals; the bond of trust that resulted would sustain them both for the remainder of the war.
Bonds of trust were hard to find when Kenney made his first visit to SWPA headquarters, and his diary entries paint a fascinating picture of MacArthur and his court that late summer of 1942. His first meeting was with Sutherland, who immediately blasted Kenney’s predecessor as responsible for “the terrible state the air [force] is in,” and also blamed Brett’s predecessor General Brereton for the December 8 debacle at Clark Field.
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