So MacArthur told them he planned to take Kiriwina and Woodlark in the Trobriand Islands on or around June 30. The advance on New Georgia would start on the same date, and in September the First Cavalry and three Australian divisions would commence operations on the Madang-Salamaua area. Meanwhile, MacArthur’s Forty-third Division would start the conquest of southern Bougainville on October 15, while the First Marines and the Thirty-second Division would take on Cape Gloucester on the southern tip of New Britain, on December 1.
In retrospect, it seems a long time to take a handful of tropical islands and jungle outposts, without even getting within striking distance of Rabaul. But MacArthur and his staff knew that the Japanese would fight them like wounded tigers at every step. The battle for Buna had shown them that the Japanese soldier was prepared to fight to the death, even for the tiniest sliver of territory. They knew that despite the blow to morale with Yamamoto’s death, the enemy still had formidable air and sea forces in the area that could strike at every move MacArthur’s forces made.
But MacArthur believed he could make CARTWHEEL work. He now understood how airpower could isolate the enemy from support by land or sea. Given enough bombers, it could neutralize the port and the airfields at Rabaul while CARTWHEEL got under way. He also foresaw how Barbey’s amphibious fleet could give his troops decisive mobility to jump from island to island with the support of Kenney’s air force and Halsey’s carriers and cruisers. And he had the battlefield commander he needed to carry out CARTWHEEL, the fourth crucial member of his team who had joined him in Brisbane in February, General Walter Krueger of the United States Sixth Army.
Krueger’s presence was part of an administrative shakeup that MacArthur had set in motion after the Papua operation, in order to give himself more direct control over the flow of troops, supplies, and other logistics for his Elkton offensive, and now CARTWHEEL. MacArthur’s USAFFE headquarters was now the administrative nerve center for all American army commands in the area—Kenney’s Fifth Air Force, the Sixth Army consisting of the Thirty-second and Forty-first Divisions, the First Marines, two antiaircraft brigades, a paratroop regiment, and a field artillery, soon to be joined by the First Cavalry and a new infantry division, the Twenty-fourth; and Army Services of Supply (MacArthur made sure it performed according to his orders, not Washington’s).
MacArthur made Krueger not only head of the Sixth Army but head of something called Alamo Force, a special tactical force that would carry out CARTWHEEL under MacArthur’s ultimate authority—and that also happened to include the exact same units as the Sixth Army. It was a subtle change, but it was not lost on General Blamey. By a bit of administrative sleight of hand, MacArthur had given Krueger and American ground forces their own independent command as Alamo Force. The redesignation of the Sixth Army as Alamo Force rendered Blamey’s title of Commander, Allied Land Forces effectively meaningless.20
It was a bitter blow to Blamey, although it took him two years before he registered a formal complaint about his decapitation by flowchart.21 The commander in chief of SWPA, however, was determined to have a free hand for himself and his officers to develop the new combined operation formula as they saw fit. Blamey and the Australians would have their own force, New Guinea Force, to carry out the overland conquest of New Guinea as far west as Madang. But it was Alamo Force that, in MacArthur’s mind, would revolutionize modern warfare, starting in the Trobriand Islands at Woodlark.
—
Australian Navy Lieutenant P. V. Mollison was asleep when villagers suddenly burst into his hut. Mollison was assigned to Woodlark Island as a “coastwatcher,” and the natives had alarming news. A flotilla of ships was headed into Guasopa Bay on Woodlark’s eastern side. Mollison hastily drew up his native militia force into a skirmish line one hundred yards from the beach, gleaming pure white in the darkness. They watched as the first boats landed and began to pull up on the beach. One by one, ramps dropped, and armed men began to spread out. With a sigh, Mollison signaled his men not to fire. The armed men were Americans, he realized with relief, who were landing where there were no Japanese to fight.22
The men of the Eighteenth Regimental Combat Team were relieved to be there, as well. They had spent hours being seasick as waves tossed their tiny boats around on the way into Guasopa Bay; it was later determined that almost half the force had been so incapacitated by seasickness they could not have fired a rifle if they had had to fight their way onto the beach.23 But fortunately there were no Japanese on Woodlark or on Kiriwina, the bigger island to the northwest, where another combat team came ashore that same early morning after an even stickier landing (every single landing craft got stuck on coral reefs as they approached the beach and had to be tugged out).
Within a few days, engineers blew a channel through the reef, and Barbey’s sailors began ferrying over supplies from Port Moresby to build its first pier, then airfields on both islands. In just three weeks, by July 24, fighters were ready for operations on Woodlark; by August 18 the Seventy-ninth RAAF Squadron was flying from Kiriwina. By November the Seabee construction battalions would complete airstrips large enough for Kenney’s heaviest bombers, all within 350 miles of Rabaul.24
MacArthur’s Alamo Force also did the Australians a favor with a landing at Nassau Bay, which was also unopposed. Troops then began pushing inland to hook up with a bigger Australian force holding the village of Wau, site of a major airstrip twenty miles southwest of Salamaua—a strip that would be essential for the landward push to Salamaua in September. Now they had a way to supply the Australians by sea, and to stage more shore-to-shore strikes on their march up the New Guinea coast.25
At the same time, a hundred miles away, Halsey’s forces were landing on New Georgia, northwest of Guadalcanal. Their objective: the big Japanese airfield at Munda, which couldn’t be approached by large naval vessels and would have to be taken by the advancing American soldiers, marines, and New Zealanders, one jungle clearing at a time.
CARTWHEEL had started, and MacArthur followed its progress that summer from his map in Brisbane. The joint American-Australian drive for Salamaua, in his mind, was really only a feint. The main objective was Lae, to be taken by both overland and amphibious assault, and then Finschhafen, the small port on the tip of the Huon Peninsula, while Halsey completed the reduction of New Georgia and Munda.
Then “both prongs,” as MacArthur described it, “the Southwest and South Pacific, covered and supported by the newly won bases, would push on to strike simultaneous blows against New Britain to the west and Bougainville to the east”—all with the goal of cutting off Rabaul and rendering it helpless to halt MacArthur’s advance to the Philippines.26
To do all this, however, was going to require more complete control of the air, and for that MacArthur turned to George Kenney. His chief objective that summer was the Japanese air base at Wewak, 500 miles south of the Allied airdrome at Dobodura—the one the Japanese had been trying to knock out for months.27 Starting on August 17, bombers with P-38s in support reduced Wewak to a wreck, with 175 Japanese planes destroyed on the ground.28
The Allies now had air superiority over the entire Huon Gulf region. At last, CARTWHEEL could begin to roll.
By the first week in September, Salamaua and Lae were virtually isolated, thanks to a series of coordinated air, ground, and sea operations. Barbey’s amphibious force landed fresh Alamo Force troops northeast of Lae, cutting the Japanese line of communication with the port at Finschhafen. Then Kenney dropped troopers of the 503rd Parachute Regiment and an Australian artillery battery into Nadzab, northwest of Lae. That town and Salamaua fell to the Allies at the end of the month, and on October 2 MacArthur’s men had taken Finschhafen. At the same time Australian troops had marched up the Markham Valley in central New Guinea, giving MacArthur complete control of the Huon Peninsula—while Nadzab became another air base for raids on Hollandia, Rabaul, and the hapless Japanese who were still stuck on Wewak.29
It was a spectacular success. Kenney and Dan Barb
ey had their disagreements over the kind of air support the Third Amphibious Force wanted. Barbey wanted more or less continuous fighter and bomber coverage for his ships and landings, like an airborne umbrella. Kenney thought this tactic a waste of time, and preferred to pound Japanese airfields in advance to render them useless, so that an air umbrella would be unnecessary—while keeping his fighters in reserve to smother any Japanese air counterattack.30
But the man who really brought airpower into its own was the SWPA commander, MacArthur, who saw at last that Billy Mitchell had been half-right. Wars couldn’t be won by airpower alone, but they couldn’t be won without it.
One person who understood that was the supreme air chief, Hap Arnold, who wrote to Kenney from Washington: “I want to tell you that I don’t believe the units could possibly perform in the manner they are doing without the most sympathetic support from General MacArthur. It requires complete understanding between General MacArthur and you. In this respect, our Air Forces are very, very fortunate.”31
However spectacular Kenney’s expert use of airpower had been, and Barbey’s skilled amphibious moves, once the troops moved from the beach into actual fighting, the going got agonizingly slow, as the fighting degenerated into vicious, no-quarter combat between companies and platoons that ground out the casualties one by one in the most inhospitable environments God ever created.
The 503rd Parachute Regiment found this out after their jump into Markham Valley to secure Nadzab, the first major parachute drop of the Pacific war. MacArthur had insisted on going along, in spite of the danger that his plane might be intercepted by Japanese fighters (this was only months after Yamamoto had suffered a similar fate). “I decided that it would be advisable for me to fly in with [the troopers],” he remembered later. “I did not want them to go through their first baptism of fire without such comfort as my presence might bring to them.”32
MacArthur watched from a B-17 as the 503rd made the jump, their delicate white parachutes floating down into the lush green jungle. Hugh Reeves was one of those who jumped, and he was knocked unconscious by a tree limb as he fell. When he came to, a medic orderly was standing over him with a submachine gun.
“Lager,” the orderly said in a warning tone.
“Label,” Reeves quickly answered. They had chosen that word as the counter password because it was believed the Japanese couldn’t handle the L sounds. Reeves looked up and saw his chute hanging above him, entangled in a vine with one-inch needlelike thorns sticking out.
His comrade Rod Rodriguez wasn’t so lucky. “I landed in a tall tree and drove a branch as sharp as a spear through my thigh,” barely missing the main artery. For two days medics fed him morphine to hold back the agony, until they could get him evacuated from the airfield they had just secured.33 The rest of the 503rd, along with the Australian Ninth Division, were soon bogged down in the hard fighting in front of Lae until the town finally fell on September 13.
The XIV Corps found out the same hard truth on New Georgia, where for weeks the 169th and 172nd Regiments of the Forty-third Division tried to advance on the Munda airfield without success. The Americans had a new weapon, the flamethrower, introduced into combat for the first time on New Georgia. Under the relentless assault of flamethrower teams backed by mortar and artillery fire while parties of riflemen and light machine guns cut down any Japanese trying to escape the fierce jets of flame, Japanese resistance began to crumble. By August 5 the Munda airfield was declared secure—although it took two more weeks of mopping operations to clear the last Japanese defender from the island.34
And the First Marines, “The Old Breed,” conducted their first landing under MacArthur’s command, on Cape Gloucester on the day after Christmas, in the last major operation of CARTWHEEL. Kenney and the Fifth Air Force had prepared the way all October, with a series of punishing raids on Rabaul, dropping bomb loads that daily set Pacific war records. Many of the marines were veterans of the hard slogging on Guadalcanal, but few had seen terrain as harsh and unforgiving as this, the extreme western tip of New Britain—the watchtower overlooking the Dampier Strait that connected the Solomon Sea with the Bismarck Sea, and which would serve as the vital passageway for any further American progress west.
After a fierce air and naval bombardment, Barbey’s landing craft got them on the beach virtually unopposed, but the marines faced an even more formidable obstacle in their advance on the unfinished airfields in the middle of the cape. It was the weather, a virtually constant monsoon that soaked everything and everyone—while seething out giant trees whose roots had been destroyed by shell fire, that fell and crushed men underneath them.35
After clearing out Japanese positions around the airfield, the weary and soaked marines planted an American flag on the last day of 1943. Yet the real fight still lay ahead: securing the two large hills overlooking the airstrip. The last two hundred feet or so were virtually perpendicular rock.
A Seventh Marines battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Walt dragged a 37 mm gun up the jagged, rain-slimed slopes and used it to batter the Japanese off one of the summits. A Japanese counterattack couldn’t dislodge them; instead they pushed on to the next hill, where mortar fire forced them to halt. Sherman tanks and artillery gave them cover the next day to wind around through the jungle until they found a path leading to the top. The fighting raged another two days in the mud and among the rocks until finally Cape Gloucester was declared secure on January 16, twenty-one days after the operation began. It had cost the marines 248 men killed (25 of them crushed by falling trees) and 772 wounded to take a position barely fifteen miles wide. Virtually every veteran of Guadalcanal swore that Cape Gloucester had been far worse, because of the constant rain.
Things were not going much better for Halsey’s men on Bougainville. To everyone’s surprise—especially MacArthur’s—CARTWHEEL was stuck, as all forward movement seemed to cease. Even after the striking successes on the Huon Peninsula, in twenty months MacArthur had advanced only some 300 miles, barely one-third of New Guinea’s northern coast, and the most formidable objectives still lay ahead. The Australians were faring no better. The day the marines landed at Cape Gloucester, the Seventh Division struck at Japanese positions near Dumpu in the Ramu Valley, where the Aussies, toting Enfield rifles and Bren guns, promptly got stuck in brutal fighting around a 4,900-foot-high line of hills known as Shaggy Ridge.36
So far, 11,000 Americans had been killed and wounded in 1943 on MacArthur’s watch, in addition to 4,000 Australians. CARTWHEEL had cost the Japanese much more: some 50,000 soldiers and sailors; 150 merchant ships and 75 warships, and some 3,000 aircraft.37 Yet General Adachi’s Eighteenth Army, despite numerous defeats, remained intact and in charge in northern and western New Guinea. And MacArthur was still a very long way from Manila.
MacArthur was still convinced that the problem was not his strategy but a lack of resources with which to carry it out. He wrote to his friend General George Moseley, “Out here I am busy doing what I can with what I have, but resources have never been made available to me for a real stroke. Innumerable openings present themselves which because of the weakness of my forces I cannot seize. It is truly an Area of Lost Opportunity.”38
Just days before the twin offensives on the 26th, General George Marshall had wound up his first and only tour of the Southwest Pacific Area, including a stop in Brisbane, where he told MacArthur the facts of life from Washington.
“Admiral King [has] claimed the Pacific as the rightful domain of the Navy,” Marshall said. “He seems to regard the operations there as almost his own private war; he apparently feels that the only way to remove the blot on the Navy disaster at Pearl Harbor is to have the Navy command a great victory over Japan.”
King felt a personal resentment toward MacArthur, Marshall said, and he encouraged other navy officers to feel the same resentment. King’s strategy of a concerted push across the central Pacific, from the Gilbert Islands to the Marianas, had the strong support of Navy Secretary Knox, C
hief of Staff Admiral Leahy, and even Roosevelt himself.39 For MacArthur, it must have been cold comfort to know his belief that the navy had a vendetta against him wasn’t just paranoia—or at least George Marshall didn’t think so.
Yet the truth was, despite MacArthur’s carping, the resources allocated to the war in Japan were nearly equal to those allocated to the fighting in Europe (7,900 aircraft were stationed in the Pacific, for example, compared to 8,800 in Europe), and MacArthur himself now commanded the biggest land-based air force and one-third of all U.S. ground forces—their numbers had doubled from December 1942 to December 1943, to nearly 700,000.40
Yet even as MacArthur wallowed in the Slough of Despond, the Japanese were about to leave him a treasure trove that would make up for lost opportunities and change the course of the war.
—
On January 2, 1944, shells began falling around the headquarters of the Japanese Twentieth Division at Sio. They were Australian artillery shells as the Ninth Division sought to cut the Twentieth Division off from their comrades to the west. The final phase of the battle for eastern New Guinea was under way.
General Hatazo Adachi, the general in charge of the defense of Lae and Finschhafen, was now engaged in a desperate rear-guard action to cover his retreat to Madang, which he believed was MacArthur’s next objective. The 8,000 troops holding Lae had barely escaped the enclosing Allied trap; more than 2,000 starved to death on the twenty-six-day trek over the 12,000-foot-high Sakura mountain range. Adachi didn’t want the retreat of his Twentieth Division from Siop to be as desperate or disorderly; he came over on January 4 to personally supervise the pullback.
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