In fact, the weather made it worse, as cascading rains soaked everyone and everything in sight and reduced visibility to a few yards. Meanwhile, the Twentieth’s thoroughly drenched headquarters staff were destroying whatever they couldn’t take with them. What they couldn’t burn they decided to bury near a streambed, hoping the steadily rising waters would cover the traces of their hasty efforts. Then they disappeared into the mountains.
A few days later an Australian advance party moved into Siop, using mine detectors to look for possible booby traps the Japanese had left behind.
One young Australian engineer heard a shrill sound in his earphones and froze. He had found something metal, but something much bigger than a booby trap or a land mine. He called out to his mates, and in a few minutes they were using shovels and pickaxes to dig it out.
It was a steel trunk, a large steel trunk with an already rusting lock, which they quickly knocked away. Inside were piles of books with the covers torn off, and some of the pages still dripping wet. One of the Australians realized at once that they were codebooks that the retreating Japanese had buried, hoping that the river waters would complete the books’ destruction.
Instead, the books were shipped off to Central Bureau in Brisbane. Major Joseph Richard and his team gingerly hand-dried the mildewing pages one by one, including putting some in a gas oven. When they started reading, they realized that what they had was the entire cipher library of Adachi’s Twentieth Division, including codebooks, key registers, and substitution tables. When they were done, they had a complete version of the four-digit, mainline Japanese army code.41
They sent the bulk of the documents off to the main ULTRA decryption center, Arlington Hall in Washington, where IBM technicians made punch card entries for each codebook and began decoding the Japanese documents—decoding so fast, in fact, that the Japanese translators couldn’t keep up.
Meanwhile, back at Central Bureau the codebreakers were facing the same problem: they were solving the Japanese army coded messages so quickly that a veritable stack of untranslated decrypts was piling up in the corner. MacArthur immediately put in a request for two crackerjack translators from the navy, who decided upon their arrival that they should start translating the latest decrypts first. One of them, Lieutenant Commander Forrest “Tex” Biard, grabbed the first document on the pile. It turned out to be a thirteen-part report of major decisions on New Guinea strategy made at a conference for Japanese admirals and generals only weeks before—all ready for MacArthur’s morning reading.42
It was as if a thick cloud cover had been lifted from the South West Pacific Area, revealing every detail of Japanese army operations. By early spring the U.S. Army and MacArthur were monitoring the Japanese army’s moves almost as closely and accurately as the Japanese themselves.
MacArthur said nothing in his memoirs about this unbelievable intelligence gift at the start of the 1944 fighting season—the single greatest intelligence breakthrough of the entire Pacific war. Likewise, still-classified sources kept his standard biographers, including Clayton James and William Manchester, largely ignorant of the role that decryption of the Japanese army codes had in changing the tempo and direction of the war in the Southwest Pacific, and in saving MacArthur’s entire strategy.
Saving it, indeed, not just from the Japanese but from the decision makers in Washington who were having serious second thoughts about how to conduct the war against Japan.
Admiral Nimitz, for one, was never convinced that the central Pacific thrust was the best strategy compared to joining MacArthur in the push for Mindanao. Nimitz’s first serious amphibious operation, on the island of Tarawa in November 1943, had been a near disaster. The Joint Chiefs, however, were still stuck on the double-prong, double-command concept. But now they were willing to push the timetable forward a bit. They were looking for landings on Mindanao for end of March 1944, instead of January 1945. They were thinking about imposing a naval and air blockade on Japan’s home islands instead of a final head-on invasion—that is, until the war in Europe was won. Until then, it seemed, they were content to let the action in MacArthur’s South West Pacific Area drift along as a strategic backwater.43
MacArthur, however, was not. He had entered a firm protest in January not to let the Pacific war dwindle away to “two weak thrusts” instead of one strong one—namely, his. On February 2 he sent Dick Sutherland back to Washington to plead his case one more time. But this time he had something new to offer the Joint Chiefs: a far bolder plan that meant bypassing the next objective after Mandang fell, namely, the well-endowed but also well-defended Hansa Bay, in favor of a fresh series of objectives two hundred miles north of the New Guinea coast: the Admiralty Islands.
—
On February 2, MacArthur was given a detailed appreciation of the Japanese Eighth Area Army’s situation in New Guinea and the surrounding islands, dated January 19. What made this document different from similar analyses drawn up by Willoughby and his G-3 staff was that this was the Eighth Army’s own chief of staff’s report for his superiors in Tokyo, all decrypted and translated by Akin’s Central Bureau team.44
The report contained much fascinating and detailed information that was invaluable for evaluating past, present, and future operations in the SWPA, but it also contained one priceless piece of intelligence gold. It revealed a crucial gap between the Japanese Eighteenth Army, stationed at Wewak, and the forces gathering to repel a future MacArthur attack at Hansa Bay, and the garrison farther west at Sarmi. This was at Hollandia, a long, broad stretch of coast overlooked by mountains and jungle, with a splendid harbor.
The question MacArthur now had to face was how to land forces there, and split the Japanese Eighteenth Army in two. That was when George Kenney appeared in his office with some interesting data about the collection of islands in the Bismarck Sea known as the Admiralties. Located north of the New Guinea coast, but parked midway between Sarmi and Hansa Bay, the two biggest of the Admiralty Islands, Manus and Los Negros, shared a fine anchorage for ships, Seeadler Harbor.
The Admiralties had been on the Joint Chiefs’ shopping lists of places to be captured in isolating Rabaul, along with Hansa Bay, but the intelligence from Akin and Kenney’s report from Ennis Whitehead’s command gave them a sudden burning importance. Whitehead’s B-25s had flown clear across the island chain without any sign of a single plane, or any enemy activity. The enemy air base at Momote on the eastern end of Los Negros, they said, looked “completely washed out.”
Willoughby had already weighed in on the matter. Given the fresh intelligence, he believed that a leap at poorly garrisoned Hollandia was now a distinct possibility.45 Clearly the Admiralties and Seeadler Harbor in particular would make perfect staging areas for such a pounce. But Willoughby wasn’t buying the story that the islands were deserted. He estimated there could still be 3,000 Japanese garrisoned there, maybe more. A slapdash amphibious landing could find itself bogged down in a long, hard slog against a fanatical enemy.46
“So let’s try a reconnaissance in force,” Kenney urged. Let’s find out if there really are Japanese on those islands, he was saying, and then deal with what we know for sure—not what we think is going on.
MacArthur paced up and down the office for a while, nodding, then stopped.
“That will put the cork in the bottle,” he said with firmness—meaning the capture of the Admiralties would keep the Japanese from reinforcing their troops in the Bismarck-Solomons area from points farther west.
The isolation of Rabaul would be virtually complete.
“Get Chamberlin and Kinkaid in here,” MacArthur ordered, referring to his new naval commander, Vice Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, who had arrived in Brisbane on November 23 to replace Carpender and was already proving to be a no-nonsense, hard-charging sea officer—and a MacArthur favorite.47
Preparations for a landing on Los Negros went into frantic high gear: Chamberlin and his operations staff had less than four days to put together the force that would be
at sea by February 29. Code-named Brewer Task Force, it would be led by Major General Innis Swift, commander of First Cavalry Division.
One thousand cavalrymen would do the landing, while another 1,500 and 400 Seabees would be ready to sail from Finschhafen forty-eight hours after D-Day if the reconnaissance showed that Los Negros was ripe for the taking.48
As the aides scattered and the paperwork began, a plan was starting to take shape in MacArthur’s mind. With the Admiralties and Seeadler Harbor in his grasp, there would be no need to take the heavily fortified Kavieng on New Ireland or any other base in the New Britain area—or anywhere else under Halsey’s command. Instead, Alamo Force would be poised to strike anywhere along the New Guinea coast, starting with Hollandia. Very suddenly, the route to Mindanao didn’t seem so dim and distant after all.49
There was one additional twist. In addition to escorting the three APDs (assault destroyers) carrying Brewer Task Force, Kinkaid and the cruiser Phoenix would be carrying a special passenger to the Los Negros landing: General MacArthur.
MacArthur had decided he would make the crucial decision of whether to press ahead or pull out from Los Negros himself, from the bridge of the Phoenix. Kenney thought this a mistake. You’ll just get seasick on the Phoenix, he told MacArthur.
“I’ll fly you over in one of my B-24s,” Kenney urged. “You can even pull the bomb release lever yourself,” he added with a smile.
But MacArthur was deadly serious. “I’ve been taking the chance of being shot at all the years I have been in the Army. I am going to continue taking that chance when it’s advisable.”50
General Krueger was equally shocked. All it would take was one stray Japanese plane dropping a bomb on the Phoenix, or a stray artillery blast from shore, and the commander in chief SWPA would be gone. MacArthur could not be moved. “I have to go,” he said, and that was that.51
On the 27th MacArthur and Kenney flew to Milne Bay, where they boarded the Phoenix, under the command of Captain Albert Noble. MacArthur showed an almost boyish curiosity about the workings of the ship, its sailors’ and officers’ routines, and he talked easily with the sailors who asked him for autographs—a ritual that he would go through many more times as the war wore on.
His eager good humor helped to cover the bad news they had received earlier that day. A six-man team of scouts that snuck over to Los Negros the night before had come back with a report that the island was “lousy with Japs.” Kinkaid, Barbey, and Kenney’s staff back at the air base at Nazdab wondered if the prudent course wasn’t to cancel the operation. MacArthur shook his head. He wasn’t going to cancel out on such an imprecise report. The landing would go ahead as planned.52
That night MacArthur was too excited to sleep. At 1:30 in the morning a marine guard awakened MacArthur’s doctor, Roger Egeberg, who had been base surgeon at the army hospital in Melbourne before reporting for duty as MacArthur’s private physician just the month before. Egeberg had been a little taken aback on February 23 when he learned he would be sailing into his first battle with the general at his side; now he was taken aback at being woken up to see the general hours before the landing would take place.
Egeberg dressed quickly and went to MacArthur’s cabin, where he found his patient “restless” and “excited in a peculiar way.” MacArthur wanted to talk to someone, like the night he had talked to Sid Huff on the PT-47, except that MacArthur didn’t want to talk about the battle the next day or the campaign or the course of the war. He wanted to talk football—his football at West Point, the games they won and one they should have won but lost, and about playing baseball at the Point as well as his early days in the Philippines when he was a shavetail lieutenant. Nothing else—certainly not the current war—seemed on his mind, and as MacArthur talked, Egeberg took his pulse. It was strong and slow and regular, so Egeberg sat back and simply listened.
Finally, after half an hour, MacArthur announced he felt like going back to sleep, thanked Egeberg, and lay back down on his bunk. The next morning the general made a joking reference to his insomnia, saying that after Egeberg left he discovered the bed was pitched so that his feet were higher up than his head. MacArthur simply reversed his position, he said, and then slept soundly until morning.53
“Morning” was a relative term, Egeberg realized, looking around. It was now 5:00 A.M. and pitch-black. But once out on deck, “we noticed a lessening of the intense blackness of night and later a uniform grayness and a drizzle. The cruiser’s engines quieted down and we seemed almost to drift slowly in the water parallel to a shore which gradually appeared as the grayness lightened,” until the first palm trees were visible, some five or six miles away.54
Also visible were two destroyers and Barbey’s LCIs loaded with First Cavalry Division troops. Then an orderly passed out cotton for everyone’s ears: the naval bombardment was about to start, including the guns of the Phoenix.
The gunfire came not in a continuous roar but in a series of short, loud explosions, as MacArthur and his staff watched the six-inch shells fly away from the cruiser into the jungle, and then watched for the blasts on shore. It was MacArthur’s first experience of a naval bombardment, and he found it fascinating and exhilarating. Then a Japanese shore battery opened up, bracketing the Phoenix with shells that exploded less than 200 yards away. “Their next salvo could be expected to land on the deck,” Egeberg realized.
Kinkaid said something to MacArthur, who stood very tall and rigid at the rail, staring hard at a point on the shore. Then the ship’s gunnery officer vectored in on the Japanese guns, and a simultaneous broadside from all the Phoenix’s six-inchers silenced the shore battery once and for all. “This performance so thoroughly converted MacArthur into a naval gunfire enthusiast that he became more royalist than the king,” Admiral Kinkaid remembered later.55
Small Higgins boats or LCVPs (Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel) were now pulling alongside the LCIs and taking on parties of thirty or forty troops for the ride in to shore. It was a dangerous ride; Egeberg watched the coxswain of one and several troops be hit by machine-gun fire as they weaved toward the beach. Then one of the LCVPs peeled off and pulled up alongside the Phoenix. Egeberg realized with a lump in his throat that this was the craft that was going to take him and the general to shore.
MacArthur was wearing no helmet or protective gear, just khakis and his customary scrambled-egg cap. He stood at the prow of the LCVP as they swept in, despite the machine-gun fire and occasional 20 mm gun bursts all around them.
On the beach MacArthur passed soldiers digging foxholes and clearing away enemy emplacements and gear. He was eager to see the condition of the Momote landing strip and insisted on walking its entire length even though it was still under fire from Japanese mortars and snipers. At one point an officer pointed at the line of trees just fifty yards away.
“Excuse me, sir, but we killed a Jap sniper in there just a few minutes ago.”
“Good,” MacArthur replied. “That’s the best thing to do with them.”56
The Dugout Doug myth was finally buried, if not forever, certainly for the duration of his command in the Pacific.
On the strip itself, MacArthur himself measured the craters American bombs had left behind and told an aide, Colonel Lloyd Lehrbas, to help him dig into the coral bed that made up the strip to see if its surface was deep enough to support Kenney’s heavy bombers. The layer of coral, in fact, was only a couple of inches deep—not deep enough to handle B-24s and B-25s.
“I’m afraid General Kenney isn’t going to like this,” he told Lehrbas and Egeberg. He stood up and surveyed the scene. The gunfire was letting up, and MacArthur had time to pin a Distinguished Service Cross on the first man ashore, Second Lieutenant Marvin Hinshaw. “You have all performed marvelously,” he told their commander, General Chase. “Hold what you have taken, no matter against what odds. You have your teeth in him now. Don’t let up.”
Indeed, casualties had been light. The Americans had suffered just four dead and six wound
ed, while only five Japanese had been killed, with the rest fleeing into the jungle. But before he returned to the Phoenix, MacArthur warned Egeberg that the cavalrymen would be seeing a banzai charge as soon as night fell (sure enough, there was one that night). He also warned his doctor to wear a helmet next time instead of his cloth officer’s cap.
“You probably took a look at me and didn’t put it on,” he said as they were sitting down to lunch in the admiral’s cabin on the Phoenix. “Well, I wear this cap with all the braid. I feel in a way I have to. It’s my trademark…a trademark that many of our soldiers know by now, so I’ll keep on wearing it, but with the risk we take in a landing I would suggest that you wear a helmet from now on.”57
It was the closest anyone ever came to hearing MacArthur talk about the visuals of leadership, the idea he had embraced during his days as the Fighting Dude in World War One. The cap and corncob pipe had become in effect his heraldic crest, like that of a knight of the Middle Ages, the sight of which told his men that their commander was with them and that, whatever dangers they faced, victory would eventually be there as well.
It was reassurance they were going to need. It turned out the reports about Los Negros being “lousy with Japs” were correct. After the beach landings and the predawn banzai attack, casualties steadily mounted. Captured Japanese mess tables became operating tables; wounded were ferried back to the destroyers offshore. It was a hellish day and night as the destroyers used illumination shells to light up the beachhead with a garish glow as naval shells rained down on the Japanese.58
But the next morning at dawn reinforcements arrived in the form of six LSTs, including Seabees to clear and repair the airfield. By March 3 enough additional troops had arrived to bolster Chase’s men through a final banzai charge that left the Japanese too weak to mount another—and to relieve the First Cavalry men who had been in combat for four continuous days and nights without any letup.
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