Instead, MacArthur turned out to be a pleasant surprise.
When Barbey walked into the SWPA chief’s Brisbane office for the first time, he was taken aback, as most visitors were, by its spartan starkness. Its furnishings consisted of some straight-backed chairs, a single black leather couch, a desk completely devoid of papers, and a single map on the wall. The conversation was entirely one-sided, with MacArthur providing a nonstop monologue on his strategy in the Southwest Pacific, including the capture of Rabaul, and of his desire to make sure that the liberation of the Philippines remained the single top U.S. priority, not just as a moral commitment but as a way to give heart to guerrilla movements all across Southeast Asia. He lamented at length his lack of material support from Washington, the lack of planes, ships, and men, and the terrible casualties his men had suffered at Buna. He did not intend to allow similar casualties for the rest of the war in New Guinea, or later in the Philippines.
“Your job,” he said finally, with deadly seriousness, “is to develop an amphibious force that can carry my troops in those campaigns.”
Then he paused, and asked Barbey his first question of the meeting: “Are you a lucky officer?”40
The question took Barbey aback, but he soon realized what MacArthur was driving at. Technical skill was one thing, but men could be led willingly into a new and dangerous enterprise if they believed the man leading them was not just knowledgeable and experienced, but had that indefinable quality that instinctively brought his troops success. MacArthur had had it until Bataan; he was looking to recover it, and he would need men like Barbey to help him do so.
Still, Barbey left MacArthur’s office with some misgiving. He wondered how things would work out with someone who had no touch of small talk or humor, none of the camaraderie or informality of Nimitz’s headquarters. In the event, “General MacArthur proved to be the finest commander I ever worked for,” Barbey later wrote. “He delegated authority far more than do most commanders. He gave his subordinates a job and then left to them the details of how it was to be done.” That suited Barbey fine, since there really was no one else in the armed forces who understood amphibious tactics better.
Barbey (“Uncle Dan” to his subordinates) would turn the Seventh Amphibious Fleet into the best ship-to-shore operating force in the war—especially with the help of the Army Engineer Amphibious Brigade, commanded by General William Heavy, which specialized in unloading a fighting force on a hostile shore. Indeed, MacArthur’s campaigns over the next two years would have been almost unimaginable without Barbey—or “Dan the Amphibious Man”—at his side.
Still, MacArthur knew his resources were distressingly meager. He had less than 10 percent of the one million army and air force personnel serving outside the United States, and less than 1 percent of the air force’s planes. In terms of naval forces in ships and personnel compared to the U.S. Navy’s total, he had an even smaller share—even though his theater area extended over almost two million square miles of ocean.41
But he was going to fight with what he had—and in January 1943, even before the fighting at Buna was over, he learned that the Japanese were planning to turn up the heat on his positions in New Guinea.
—
He learned this from Akin’s Central Bureau codebreakers, who sent General Kenney a warning that a Japanese transport convoy was setting out from Rabaul. The cryptographers were finally having some success in penetrating the meaning of Japanese naval radio traffic—although the Japanese army’s messages were as baffling as ever—and had picked up indications that the convoy was set to sail on January 6. Navy radio interceptors were getting even more menacing news from the traffic they were picking up from their station in Melbourne. Veteran Japanese units from China, the Philippines, and the home islands were heading into the SWPA from their staging areas in the Palau Islands northwest of New Guinea.42
The Japanese commander on Rabaul was preparing a hot reception for MacArthur if he tried to venture forth from his newly won position at Buna, starting with fresh reinforcements for the Japanese garrison at Lae and capturing the island of Wau, 150 miles northwest of Buna, the perfect place from which to send fighter and bomber squadrons to threaten MacArthur’s seaward lines of supply.
When Kenney got word of what was happening, he immediately sent his bombers into the air, in the direction of Rabaul. “I’m having an interesting time inventing new ways to win a war on a shoestring,” he told a fellow air force officer, and he and Pappy Gunn showed their pilots and ground crews how to do the same thing. Planes that crash-landed in the jungle were immediately hunted down by salvage parties for parts and ammunition. Airdrome crews learned to jerry-build repairs and equipment, for example inserting Australian sixpence pieces into engine magnetos and substituting Kotex tampons for air filters.43
In this way, although the Fifth Air Force’s total number of planes barely increased from September 1942 through December, the total number of missions jumped dramatically, from 1,000 to 4,000, including raids on the dreaded defenses on Rabaul. Then on January 6 Kenney’s reconnaissance planes picked up the Japanese convoy and for the next two days pounded the transports—although Japanese Zero escorts fought them off so that only one transport was hit and set adrift, as Japanese destroyers had to rescue some six hundred survivors.
So Kenney shifted his tactics. He moved his Eleventh Air Fleet away from the convoy to Lae itself. When the transports arrived on January 8 they found the remains of Japanese fighters that had been destroyed on the airfield, and they themselves were soon under constant air attack as they tried to disembark their troops. “Bombs come down like rain and explode around the ships,” one awed Japanese survivor remembered. “Several tens of planes coming in rapid succession made their intensive attacks which were utterly indescribable,” was how he put it.44
MacArthur learned the final results from ULTRA. Two Japanese transports had been sunk and another damaged; six hundred Japanese soldiers had died. Less than one-third of Rabaul’s reinforcements had reached Lae, and only half of its equipment. Still, the commander on Rabaul, General Imamura Hitoshi, pressed ahead with his plan.
ULTRA and the Central Bureau missed the next convoy departure of 10,000 Japanese troops from the Palaus to Wewak in western New Guinea. An unexpected change of Japanese cipher keys delayed decoding until ten days after the transports sailed. But the success of the landings on Wewak encouraged Hitashi to go ahead with his next troop move on February 14, ordering the entire Fifty-first Division under General Adachi Atazo to Lae, even though his own planners predicted that the move only had a fifty-fifty chance of success given Kenney’s growing command of the air around New Guinea.45
That same day an American reconnaissance plane snapped a photograph over Rabaul, showing the harbor choked with shipping, some seventy-nine vessels. They were clearly headed somewhere—but where? Another photograph on February 22 showed that the number of merchant ships had grown from forty-five to fifty-nine, almost 300,000 tons. Since nothing was happening in the Solomons, Charles Willoughby issued a warning: this could be readying reinforcements for New Guinea including Lae, where a new navy decrypt revealed there were plans to send new troops.
On the 24th came the final confirmation of Japanese plans, again from ULTRA in Washington. A six-ship convoy would be landing at Lae on March 5, carrying the Japanese Fifty-first Division. The message had been dated February 21. But when would it sail, and what route would it take? There was no time to lose; they had to find some answers.
The next day MacArthur and Kenney spent the afternoon in front of the map in the SWPA chief’s office, going over the ULTRA report. Kenney decided the convoy would sail the first week in March. “The weather will be bad along the west coast of New Britain,” he remarked. “I’ll bet they’ll use it for cover.”
He announced that he would head over to Port Moresby the next day to make final plans. He was supposed to be going to Washington for the big Pacific Military Conference in March, but he would wait unt
il “this show is over.”
MacArthur asked, “Are you calling off all other air operations except this?”
Kenney said yes—everything, that was, except reconnaissance flights and supply planes to keep the Australian garrison on Wau going, which had landed on January 29 and had been fighting there ever since (the fighting was so close and intense that some Australian troops were hit by enemy fire as they stepped off the plane). He would also be spending the next several days rehearsing a simultaneous low- and high-altitude attack, going out as far as a combined air operation could reach.
When Kenney arrived at Moresby, Ennis Whitehead and his staff had already worked out contingency plans in case the convoy didn’t land at Lae but went on to Madang, or split apart to go to both. On the 27th his bombers and fighters ran a full-dress rehearsal so realistic that one aircraft crashed and two others were badly damaged.46
“The Japs are going to get the surprise of their lives,” Kenney told his men and headed back to Brisbane.
Kenney went over his plan for the Japanese convoy one last time with MacArthur, and told him, “The kids are hot for it,” meaning his crews.
“I think the Jap is in for a lot of trouble,” was MacArthur’s final judgment. “Don’t forget to keep me informed as fast as any news comes in.”47
Late the next day, March 1, a lone American reconnaissance plane off the northern coast of New Britain spotted wakes in the water illuminated by the setting sun. It banked and saw a collection of ships, sixteen in all, but then lost the convoy in the gathering darkness.
It was a tense dawn and early morning on March 2 as the Eighteenth Air Group waited for reconnaissance planes to reacquire the convoy. At 8:30 they finally did locate it, but then rain and a series of squalls blanketed Port Moresby, making takeoff impossible. It wasn’t until 10:00 that Kenney’s B-17s and B-24s were able to reach the convoy and begin their deadly high-altitude attack.
The first wave of B-17s managed to sink one transport; a second wave of eleven bombers took out another. Then darkness fell again, as the rest of the convoy sailed on, bound for the Dampier Strait between New Britain and New Guinea.
The morning of March 3 brought the convoy within reach of Kenney and Whitehead’s medium-range bombers and fighters, as the Japanese well knew. Their lookouts watched with relief as Japanese fighters moved in, to protect the transports from another high-altitude attack.
Then by 10:00 relief turned to alarm. Out of the western sky came a cloud of more than one hundred Allied planes, not at high altitude but flying almost at mast height.
They were American A-20s, Australian Beaufighters, and thirty B-25s modified by Pappy Gunn to bristle with .50-caliber guns that sprayed death in all directions as they skimmed over the Japanese transports—while the A-20s and other bombers practiced another technique that Gunn and Kenney had invented, of skip-bombing: dropping bombs that literally skipped once on the water before hitting their targets’ hulls. Some planes came in so low that Japanese sailors thought they were torpedo bombers.48
Bombs blew holes through the hold that continued down into ships’ engine rooms, as soldiers scrambled onto the deck, where they were machine-gunned down in droves. Japanese soldiers and sailors who made it into the water and tried to climb onto rafts or rubber dinghies were also fair targets. Planes swooped in to strafe lifeboats again and again, and then strafed survivors floating in the water.
The water was whipped into a bloody froth, the blood mixing with chunks of flesh and the oil from the sunken ships. There was no respite for the survivors, who now floated defenseless, naked and exposed to machine gun fire. The grisly business continued into the night. When nothing was seen to move in the water, the strafing runs ended.
During the last hours of what would come to be called the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, some Allied pilots and crews became sick and vomited at the low-level sight of the carnage their bullets and cannon shots were causing.49
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Back in Brisbane, MacArthur grew more and more excited as the news of the battle began to come in. Jean MacArthur remembered him pacing back and forth in their dining room, the latest dispatches in his hand. “Mitchell! Mitchell!” he kept saying over and over. It was the name of his former friend and martyr Billy Mitchell, whose predictions of what airpower could do were finally, horribly, being realized in the waters of the Bismarck Sea.
When Kenney came over to the apartment at 3:00 A.M. with the final tally, he said, “I have never seen such jubilation.” He sent off his own jubilant telegram to Ennis Whitehead before his plane left for Washington at 6:00 A.M.: “Congratulations on that stupendous success. Air Power has written some important history in the past three days. Tell the whole gang that I am so proud of them I am about to blow a fuze.”50
In his press release MacArthur claimed twenty-two ships sunk (fourteen transports and eight destroyers) with 15,000 Japanese soldiers confirmed dead. The numbers were wild fantasy, as air force brass in Washington well knew.51 The reality, however, was stunning enough. Eight Japanese transports had been sunk, together with four destroyers—without a single Allied vessel in sight. Almost 3,000 Japanese soldiers had been killed. More than half of the 7,000 men of the Fifty-first Division managed to survive the savage attack, but only 1,000 actually reached Lae. The rest had been rescued at sea and sent back to Rabaul, where they had started. The Battle of the Bismarck Sea was not the holocaust MacArthur and Kenney at first thought, but it had rendered Japan’s effort to reinforce New Guinea a failure. Emperor Hirohito himself, when he heard the news, warned his generals to learn the lessons for future landings.
Even worse for Hirohito, the virtual destruction of the crack Fifty-first Division severely weakened Japan’s southeastern defenses of Rabaul. It was no longer enough just to reinforce existing garrisons and confidently wait for MacArthur to exhaust himself pounding on the gates. A new, more offensive strategy was going to be needed, one that shifted resources from the Solomons to New Guinea, where the fate of Rabaul would now be decided.
Meanwhile, the fate of MacArthur’s own strategy was being decided in far-off Washington.
The minute Kenney’s plane touched down at Wright Field in Ohio on March 9, he learned that he and MacArthur were the talk of the nation.
News of the Battle of the Bismarck Sea had spread across America’s newspapers. Many people, including many in the air force, couldn’t believe it was possible; Kenney, however, was able to fill them in on the details (later he and MacArthur would bitterly dispute the attempts to roll back the final numbers of Japanese ships and soldiers destroyed). “It was the best news to come out of the Pacific for some time,” Kenney later remembered, and it was the perfect setup for establishing MacArthur’s credibility at the Pacific conference over the next two weeks.52
He and MacArthur had discussed the upcoming conference in Washington before he left. “Help keep Dick out of trouble,” MacArthur said bluntly, speaking of Sutherland. “He’s unpopular and sarcastic and might get us in Dutch if you don’t help smooth things over”—and come back, SWPA’s chief stressed, with plenty of extra planes. MacArthur sensed they were going to need them.53
Sure enough, the first week of the conference became an arm-wrestling match between Sutherland and the Joint Chiefs, including General Marshall, over the details of MacArthur’s master plan. Kenney could sense the hostility toward the Elkton strategy, especially from King and the navy brass, but he also thought Sutherland was “obsessed with the idea that everyone in Washington is out to get him.” Kenney felt that as long as MacArthur was winning in New Guinea, “he is bound to get support. If I can get some airplanes, he will keep on winning.”54
Surprisingly to some, two of MacArthur’s biggest supporters were Admiral William “Bull” Halsey and Halsey’s air chief, General Millard Harmon. They didn’t agree that Elkton would overstretch their resources; in fact, Halsey, the navy’s most innovative fighting admiral, Kenney, and MacArthur were finding their way toward a mutual respect and su
pport that would ultimately be enormously beneficial to the Pacific war effort.
They would prove a lethal combination against the Japanese, but they could not move Admiral King and his chief strategist, Rear Admiral Charles Cook. They and Marshall knew the American larder didn’t have on hand nearly the resources needed for the MacArthur plan, and probably never would.
So in the end there was a compromise. The Joint Chiefs asked what the Pacific representatives thought they could accomplish in 1943 with the best reinforcements Washington could deliver. Sutherland and Halsey’s representatives all agreed they could carry the original Task Two that Washington had assigned: the taking of northeastern New Guinea and the Madang-Salamaua-Huon Gulf triangle, along with Bougainville, New Georgia, and Cape Gloucester on New Britain. All these islands and airfields would tighten the noose on Rabaul, they said, but there wouldn’t be enough left over for them to take Rabaul itself.55
The Joint Chiefs finally said, in effect, let’s forget about Rabaul for now, and focus instead on giving Allied forces complete control of the Bismarck Archipelago, as a prelude to any final push. MacArthur wrote from Brisbane that he thought the plan was a mistake. “We are already committed to the campaign in New Guinea….If at the same time we enter upon a convergent attack on the New Georgia group, we have committed our entire strength without assurance of accomplishment of either objective.” So Halsey said he was willing to wait to launch his attack on New Georgia until MacArthur had achieved his first round of objectives, the islands of Kiriwina and Woodlark in the Trobriand Islands.56
The deal was done. To nearly everyone’s amazement, Admiral King accepted the revised MacArthur plan with very little complaint or modification. The final directive went out on March 28, canceling the earlier three-stage drive on Rabaul. Instead, the objectives for 1943 would be first Woodlark and Kiriwina, to provide new airfields for extending the range of American airpower; then the Madang-Salamaua-Finschhafen triangle as well as western New Britain; and finally the Solomon Islands, including the southern part of Bougainville. The exact sequence of moves, and the exact timetable, remained to be set by the Joint Chiefs, not MacArthur or Halsey. But for the first time in the Pacific war, there was an agreed-to strategy for winning in the Southwest Pacific, and if MacArthur didn’t get everything he wanted in terms of objectives (nothing had yet been said about the Philippines), he now had an achievable plan and overall “strategic direction”—and a steadfast navy ally in Bull Halsey.
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