The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur

by Perry, Mark

  But the scant equipment and supplies made such a goal a mere pipe dream. Whitehead, a likable Kansan, was a masterful tactician and innovator, but he had only 517 aircraft to work with, of which only 245 were fighters. Of the thirty B-17s then stationed north of Brisbane, at Townsend, only half could fly. Kenney remembered: “Bombers were in New Guinea with no tail wheels, no props, and needing new engines, and fighters with tail feathers gone and shot up and nothing to replace them, tanks leaking.” But that wasn’t the worst of it. American repair crews were only then arriving in Australia, and the supply chain was “a mess.” Kenney spent his first days in Australia tracking down the cartons and crates with supplies for his new command. “A lot of stuff” had arrived in Australia, Kenney noted, “but no one knows what happened to it.” Kenney did the best with what he had. He reconfigured his fleet of A-20 light bombers to carry “para-frag” (fragmentation) bombs, then ordered his B-25 twin-engine bombers modified to carry four .50-caliber machine guns.

  By the first week of August, Kenney had convinced MacArthur that he had accomplished enough to send Whitehead’s flyers against the Japanese. MacArthur was enthusiastic, but only to a point. Kenney’s commanders were inexperienced and the aircraft too rickety to mount a sustained campaign. But MacArthur approved the operation—the Japanese were crawling south across New Guinea’s mountainous spine while, further east, an entire enemy army was moving south through the Solomon Islands. MacArthur had to do something to get into the fight. So Kenney went ahead, hitting the Vunakanau government outpost on the far northern coast of eastern New Guinea. A large detachment of engineers, infantrymen, and assorted support troops (some two thousand soldiers in all) was then sent across the soaring Owen Stanley Mountains to capture Port Moresby, held by the Aussies and the Americans, on the other side of the island. This was a harrowing hike up a narrow jungle trail, across swaying bridges and over chasms and canyons and along razorback ridges. Then the troops had to march through Kokoda village (at the halfway point to Port Moresby) and then down, through Ioribaiwa, to the south coast—139 backbreaking, sweat-drenching miles in all. Facing the Japanese along this trail was the 39th Battalion of the Maroubra Force, a unit of nine hundred Diggers whom Australian commander Blamey had dispatched to cover the Port Moresby approaches. The small force provided only a nominal defense, however, and when it pushed north toward Kokoda, the Japanese deployed their machine guns, artillery, and mortars and bulled their way forward, scattering the outnumbered Diggers back along the thin trail south. The Japanese overran Kokoda on July 26 and seized its valuable airfield, then fought off a sustained Australian counterattack the next day. After this initial fight, the Australians poured in reinforcements in an attempt to turn back the Japanese. On August 10, the Australians recaptured Kokoda Airfield, but lost it again on August 13, when the Japanese struck south in strength.

  Back in Rabaul, Japanese commanders exploited the Kokoda victory by sending Major General Tomitaro Horii with a group of eight thousand reinforcements from the South Seas Detachment to northern New Guinea to give heft to the Japanese descent on Port Moresby. On August 17, the first two battalions of these reinforcements arrived in Buna, along with a naval landing force, anti-aircraft batteries, and a construction battalion to expand the Buna landing strip. Supplies and reinforcements shuttled into Buna—medical personnel, tons of gasoline, a water purification unit, a bridge-building detachment, and an engineer battalion. By August 21, when the airstrip expansion was discovered by one of Kenney’s reconnaissance planes, Horii had more than eight thousand troops at Buna, along with another thirty-five hundred naval construction personnel. The Japanese beachhead was large and defended in depth. It included (from southeast to northwest), the Duropa Plantation, Buna Government Station, the village of Buna, as well as separate Japanese positions a short distance up the coast at Sanananda Point and, further on, units defending the village of Gona. In Brisbane, MacArthur’s chief of intelligence, Charles Willoughby, studied reports of the Japanese build-up and concluded that the Japanese trek up the narrow and harrowing Kokoda Trail was a feint. He scoffed at reports that Horii would send his eight thousand soldiers through the Owen Stanleys to reinforce the Yokoyama Force. It was too difficult, he said. It couldn’t be done.

  In Washington, Ernie King came to the opposite conclusion. Alarmed by the build-up at Buna, King sent a message to Marshall questioning whether MacArthur was “taking all measures in his power to deny the threat of Japanese penetration toward Port Moresby.” King was worried that the sudden Japanese move would endanger the gathering offensive in the southern Solomons. He asked Marshall to obtain MacArthur’s “views as to the present situation in New Guinea, and his plan to deny further advance by the Japanese.” Marshall cabled MacArthur, though without mentioning King’s over-the-shoulder kibitzing. Sitting in Brisbane, MacArthur patiently responded that he was dealing with the threat, but signaled his exasperation at being asked. In fact, Marshall had little need for worry; MacArthur had already dismissed Willoughby’s conclusions about what the enemy couldn’t do, and had dispatched the 7th Australian Infantry Division north, up the Kokoda Trail, to take on the Japanese. He then upped the ante, sending the 18th Australian Brigade to Milne Bay, while ordering the 21st and 25th Brigades to Port Moresby. The Australians, he said, were to retake Kokoda, hold the crest of the Owen Stanleys, attack Buna, and reinforce Milne Bay. By August 19, an Australian infantry brigade was moving up the Kokoda Trail to reinforce the Maroubra Force, the Port Moresby garrison was increased to twenty-two thousand men, and the 18th Brigade was on its way to Milne Bay.

  Fortunately for MacArthur, his reinforcement of Milne Bay, on New Guinea’s extreme southeastern tip, came just in time. While the large bay (twenty miles long and five to ten miles wide and bracketed by towering 4,000-foot mountains) featured a natural port and three valuable airstrips, it was hardly a fortress. The dock consisted of two barges placed side by side, and the airstrips, carpeted by Hugh Casey’s engineers with hastily laid steel matting, had to be scraped daily to remove mud and water. The engineers had also fashioned a network of roads to serve the airfields, but of the most rudimentary sort—scoured from the jungle, they were constructed of coconut logs and coral.

  Prying Milne Bay out of MacArthur’s grasp would be a prize for the Japanese, as it was an essential base from which they could send their navy southward and deploy bombers to cover both northern Australia and the Solomons. On August 20, Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa dispatched a landing force and a navy pioneer unit (some seventeen hundred troops in all) from Rabaul in barges to capture the port. It was Mikawa’s intention to surprise MacArthur’s garrison and overwhelm it, but when the barges of the first echelon of the detachment put in at Goodenough Island (sixty-five miles northwest of Milne Bay) on August 25, they were spotted by a group of Kenney’s P-40s. The barges were strafed and left stranded. A second echelon of troops followed, however, and landed on the bay’s north shore, where they were attacked by American B-25s. The Japanese went forward, despite the attacks and, by the twenty-eighth, were engaged in a bitter slugfest with the Australian 7th Brigade for control of the port’s airstrips.

  The fight raged through the jungle abutting Milne Bay’s Airstrip 3, which was defended by two battalions of Diggers that were supported by an American anti-aircraft battery and two companies of the 43rd U.S. Engineers. But it was the Australians who did most of the fighting, laying out a defensive line in front of the airstrip. The line forced the Japanese into a costly frontal assault; they had to use two tanks that the assault parties had wrestled ashore. The Japanese reinforced their lodgment on August 29, bringing 770 infantrymen ashore in barges. The next day, the Japanese launched another attack on the airstrip but were repulsed after a difficult fight, leaving behind 160 bodies. The Australians then cleared the north shore of Milne Bay, a thankless and bloody task that cost 45 Aussie casualties.

  The battle went on for ten days, but by early September, the Japanese force was in retreat. On September 5,
some 1,300 of the original 1,900 Japanese were evacuated to Rabaul. The Australians had lost 123 killed and nearly 200 wounded. The victory was the result of Australian tenacity, Kenney’s air force, and poor Japanese planning. While the Japanese fought tenaciously, by September 5 none of their remaining troops could mount an offensive, with nearly all of them suffering from trench foot and tropical diseases. In the end, the Japanese commander turned down an offer of reinforcements from Rabaul, a promised detachment of 1,000 soldiers that might have turned the tide. The reinforcements would be wasted, he said, as his troops were in no condition to fight. By the morning of September 6, the Japanese had been turned back—the first victory for MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific command.

  But while the Japanese were retreating at Milne Bay, they were advancing south on the Kokoda Trail. Heavily outnumbered by Major General Tomitaro Horii’s 144th Infantry Regiment, the Australians south of Kokoda retreated back along the track to a series of strong points, which were successively defended before being abandoned: from Isurava to Alola, then south again to Eora Creek and Templeton’s Crossing. Within days of Horii’s onslaught, only a few villages stood between the Japanese and Port Moresby. It wasn’t much of a contest—the Japanese had put in five battalions of battle-hardened troops, reinforced by the 55th Mountain Artillery, in a face-off against three understrength Aussie battalions. So far, the battle for control of the Kokoda Trail had been a numbers game, with the Australians continually outnumbered and outflanked. By September 6, the Australians were at Efogi, thirty-seven miles and thirty-eight hundred feet above Port Moresby. The next day, Australian Lieutenant General Sydney Rowell told MacArthur that he needed more troops. On September 9, MacArthur dispatched the 16th Australian Infantry Brigade to Port Moresby and sent the 25th Infantry Brigade north to Kokoda.

  But MacArthur remained unconvinced that simply sending more Australians up the Kokoda Trail would turn back the Japanese. Faced with his first military crisis since Corregidor, he searched for a more elegant solution. After sending Rowell more soldiers and spending a night peering at his maps in Brisbane, MacArthur decided that the best way to pry the Japanese out of their positions overlooking Port Moresby was through a wide flanking move near Wairopi, along the little-used track that ran parallel to the Kokoda Trail. This wasn’t a particularly creative tactical move; nor was MacArthur at all certain it would work. The parallel track was uncharted and even more treacherous than the one being used by the Japanese. Moreover, MacArthur was giving responsibility for the flanking move to the green 126th Regiment of the U.S. 32nd Division, whose training had just been completed. Despite these drawbacks, MacArthur thought he had little choice—by September 16, the men in Horii’s veteran Japanese column had pushed on to Ioribaiwa, within sight of their goal. At night, looking down the thin trail, Horii’s men could see the lights of Port Moresby glittering in the distance.

  CHAPTER 10

  Buna

  Bob, I want you to take Buna, or not come back alive.

  —Douglas MacArthur

  MacArthur’s plan to flank Horii’s detachment above New Guinea’s Port Moresby reflected his conviction that the Japanese would have to be annihilated to be defeated, as they had been during the Battle of the Pockets in Bataan. But MacArthur didn’t face as much of a crisis as he supposed. Although the Japanese were overrunning the Australian defenses on the Kokoda Trail, their regiments were being depleted by disease and lack of supplies. By late August, Horii’s troops were subsisting on less than a cupful of rice a day having already plucked clean the melons, sugar cane, and vegetables from the New Guinea natives’ subsistence gardens. By early September, the Japanese were starving. What’s more, as MacArthur later learned, Horii had been ordered to halt his offensive, even as his soldiers were within sight of their goal. The decision was made back at Rabaul by Lieutenant General Haruyoshi Hyakutake, who believed that Horii’s advance would falter unless Milne Bay were captured. Tokyo agreed with Hyakutake’s assessment, and so on September 20, Horii called together his commanders and ordered them to dig in at Ioribaiwa. In truth, the crisis facing Horii was the least of Tokyo’s problems. Back on August 7, as Horii was fighting his way south to Port Moresby, eleven thousand U.S. Marines had landed on Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands. The Marines seized a Japanese airfield, sending its defenders into the island’s thick jungle. The landing upended Tokyo’s plans to cut the American lifeline to Australia and unnerved both Hyakutake and the Tokyo high command.

  The Guadalcanal landing was carried out as part of Task One of the three-part plan agreed to by the Joint Chiefs back in July and was to be followed by MacArthur’s conquest of northeastern New Guinea. In fact, Guadalcanal was “step one” of Task One—a step to be conducted by the Marines based on the island of New Caledonia (a deep anchorage southeast of the Solomon Islands) and commanded by Admiral Robert Ghormley. They envisioned that conquering “the canal” would be followed by a slow, and bloody, island-by-island ascent up the Solomon’s ladder. The Japanese response was immediate. The First Battle of Savo Island, on the night of August 8, forced Admiral Jack Fletcher to pull his outgunned ships out of the Solomon Sea. His losses were daunting: Three American and one Australian cruiser were sunk, and one American and two Australian destroyers damaged. Fletcher’s withdrawal isolated the Marines on Guadalcanal, who held a weak battle line that had just gotten weaker. The heavy equipment they needed was aboard Fletcher’s fleeing ships. The Marines of Major General Alexander Archer Vandegrift’s 1st Marine Division held a thin beachhead that was only ninety-six hundred yards long and anchored by rifle companies denuded of shovels, pickaxes, and mines, all of which would have secured their position. Guadalcanal would not be “another Bataan,” Vandegrift vowed, but the Marines had their doubts; their lines were undermanned and overstretched, and now, the navy, whose offshore guns they had counted on for support, was nowhere to be seen. The Marines clung to their beachhead, but it wouldn’t take much to push them off.

  It seemed that way also to the Japanese. Taking advantage of Fletcher’s withdrawal, Admiral Gunichi Mikawa sent elements of Hyakutake’s Seventeenth Army south into the Solomons. On August 19, just under 1,000 soldiers of the Japanese relief unit commanded by Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki were landed by destroyer at Guadalcanal’s Taivu Point. They marched overland to retake the island’s airstrip, which had been renamed Henderson Field by the Marines. In the early morning hours of August 21, the Japanese attacked in waves across Alligator Creek (which anchored Vandegrift’s right wing) but were cut to pieces, losing over 900 men of their initial force. Realizing his mistake and horrified by his losses, the Japanese commander committed ritual suicide. Back in Rabaul, Mikawa remained unbowed; he ordered three more detachments of the Seventeenth Army into the Solomons, with his soldiers crammed aboard towed barges protected by three Japanese aircraft carriers and thirty destroyers and cruisers. Fletcher responded, sending his own carriers and a screen of cruisers and destroyers back north to meet Mikawa’s force. On August 24 the two sides met in the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, an indecisive night action that convinced Mikawa that he couldn’t reinforce his garrison on Guadalcanal without better protection. Wisely, he abandoned the plan to land his troops by barge, telling his subordinates that in the future, they would be landed on Guadalcanal from destroyers. The strategy worked, with 5,000 Japanese soldiers coming ashore via “the Tokyo Express” by early September. But there was a drawback to the strategy, as each destroyer could carry only 150 men and thirty to forty tons of supplies. Mikawa was faced with a choice: He could flood Guadalcanal with soldiers, or he could flood it with food, but he couldn’t do both. The result was that while the Japanese force grew larger, it also grew weaker.

  The Marines on Guadalcanal, meanwhile, were fighting for their lives. Clinging to their thin shelf and lacking sustained air protection, Vandegrift’s men fended off nightly attacks. The situation had improved only marginally by the second week of September, after sixty-four American fighter aircraft were delivered t
o Henderson Field. Like a pair of snarling dogs, snapping and withdrawing and then circling for advantage, the Japanese and Americans lunged at each other through weeks of exhausting combat. The Americans controlled the sky during the day, but the Japanese owned the seas at night, sending convoy after convoy to reinforce their Guadalcanal garrison. Meanwhile, the Japanese and American navies clawed at each other in successive battles along Iron Bottom Sound—so named because it was coated with the skeletal remains of American and Japanese battlewagons. Vandegrift’s Marines held on, but barely. Along Alligator Creek, his men were surviving on sodden rice and dehydrated potatoes. The real problem facing them was that the Japanese navy was starting to turn the tide in the Solomons. One of the biggest blows came on September 15, when a lone Japanese submarine torpedoed the aircraft carrier Wasp, sending it to the bottom, and severely damaged the battleship North Carolina.

  Several days later, Ghormley wrote out a memo for his staff questioning whether Vandegrift’s Marines could survive. When Vandegrift saw the memo at his headquarters on Guadalcanal, the blood drained from his face. He turned to Richmond Kelly Turner, the rough-hewn admiral who commanded Ghormley’s amphibious operations. With little time for pessimists, Turner dismissed Ghormley’s memo, saying that he would land the 7th Marine Regiment at Taivu Point, where the regiment could set up a second defensive perimeter. In effect, Turner wanted to up the ante.

  It was just this kind of move that the Japanese were desperate to stop. On the night of September 12, before the 7th Marines arrived, the Japanese launched a frenzied attack on Henderson Field. The assault focused on a low ridgeline against dug-in Marines. The Battle of Bloody Ridge would go down in the history of the U.S. Marine Corps as one of its fiercest fights; over a period of two days, the Japanese came at the Marines, retreated, and then came on again. During a last desperate attack, Marines rolled hand grenades into Japanese formations. By the morning of September 15, the Japanese were in full retreat. Left behind, along the slopes of the ridge, was a carpet of corpses. In Rabaul, Mikawa learned of the debacle and made a crucial decision. Like Turner, he decided to up the ante by pouring in more men. But to do that, he would have to end his resupply of Horii on New Guinea. So, during the third week of September, Mikawa ordered Horii’s force back to Buna: The Japanese, he said, would focus on Guadalcanal.