by Perry, Mark
No one was more worried about the Marines on Guadalcanal than George Marshall, who was increasingly distressed by reports that the Japanese were sweeping the Solomons of American ships. But if Marshall was anxious, Ernie King was nearly frantic, telling Marshall that Guadalcanal might be lost unless he could get fifteen air groups to Ghormley. Marine commanders in the Pacific were even more outspoken, particularly when told that the JCS was withholding air assets from the Pacific because of concern about the coming landings in North Africa. As one later historian noted, the Marines had “no time for the subtleties of global strategy” and blamed “MacArthur, Arnold and Marshall” for Vandegrift’s plight. While he was one of the targets of the criticism, Marshall sympathized with the Marines: Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to postpone an invasion of Europe in favor of, as Marshall phrased it, “nipping at the heels” of the Germans in North Africa meant that supplies that would help the Marines in the Solomons would end up in Morocco. The United States was shipping assets across the Atlantic for soldiers who were preparing to fight, while Marines who were actually killing the enemy were getting much less. It didn’t make sense. Could the Marines hang on? Marshall decided to find out. On the day that the Wasp went to the bottom of the South Pacific, he directed Army Air Forces chief Hap Arnold to visit Nimitz, Ghormley, and MacArthur to see what could be done to salvage the Solomon offensive. Marshall uncharacteristically lectured the fiery Arnold about the visit. “Don’t get mad,” Marshall advised, and added that Arnold should “let the other fellow tell his story first.”
The usually pugnacious Arnold did just this—though barely. He heard from Nimitz in Hawaii the surprisingly optimistic view that Guadalcanal could be held, before flying to New Caledonia. There, Ghormley’s staff greeted him “with blood in their eyes.” Seated behind his desk overlooking the harbor at Noumea, Ghormley and his senior advisors (what Arnold disparagingly described as a bunch of navy commanders “in their snug offices”) made it clear that they didn’t welcome Arnold’s visit. The exhausted and opinionated Ghormley greeted Arnold with a growl: This was his command, he announced, and he didn’t need any help in running it. Arnold nodded, held his temper, and listened patiently as Ghormley detailed his problems. When the admiral finished, Arnold asked a series of questions, which ended with a nod out the window toward Noumea harbor. Arnold had noticed, he said, that there were more than eighty ships at anchor in the port, but it didn’t appear that any of them had been unloaded. “What’s the problem?” Arnold asked. Ghormley’s staff chimed in, telling Arnold that they didn’t know exactly what was on the ships (which, as Arnold noted, wasn’t an answer), while Ghormley added that he hadn’t left his office “in over a month.” Arnold thought about this for only a moment. “Maybe you should,” he said. General Alexander Patch, Ghormley’s outspoken army ground commander, was not nearly so reticent. As Arnold walked from Ghormley’s office, Patch told him that the reason the navy was so short of everything was because they had underestimated what they needed. The problem wasn’t poor planning; it was no planning.
After spending two days in New Caledonia, Arnold flew on to Australia, where he was forced to land west of Brisbane because his B-24 was too big for any of Brisbane’s airfields. He was welcomed by Major General George Kenney, then put aboard a dilapidated Lockheed Hudson for the short flight to MacArthur’s headquarters. It was an uncomfortable ride, but Kenney didn’t apologize: They were short of aircraft, he said, and so they had to make do with what they had. As Arnold sat on a coil of rope for the thirty-minute flight, Kenney gave him a rundown on what it was like to work for MacArthur. To hear Kenney talk of it, he was having the time of his life. “We’re going to win it out here,” he said, “and I’m going to get along with General MacArthur.”
In Brisbane, Arnold and MacArthur greeted each other like old friends (despite their previous spat when MacArthur was the army chief and Arnold flew a group of bombers to Alaska—and back), and MacArthur briefed the air chief on the situation. This was MacArthur at his best—or worst: During a two-hour monologue, the Southwest Pacific commander paced up and down his office (his signature corncob pipe poking at the air), painting a grim picture of America’s prospects for victory. The Japanese could easily take New Guinea, he said, after which they would “control the Pacific for a hundred years.” They had “a better coordinated team than the Germans,” he said. America’s “cordon defense system across the Pacific,” MacArthur added, “is as old and out of date as a horse and buggy.” The only part of this that Arnold agreed with was MacArthur’s opinion of the invasion of North Africa (“a waste of effort”) and his appreciation for Kenney. MacArthur’s final note betrayed his mistrust of King, Nimitz, and his own navy commander—Arthur Shuyler “Chips” Carpender, the latest in a series of revolving-door commanders the navy had sent to Brisbane. The navy, MacArthur averred, “couldn’t stop the Japanese.”
A few hours later, Arnold scrawled his reflections on MacArthur into his diary. The Southwest Pacific commander hadn’t recovered from his defeat in the Philippines and was darkly pessimistic, Arnold wrote. This was not the outspoken and self-confident officer who had once done battle with Franklin Roosevelt. MacArthur “gives the impression of a brilliant mind—obsessed by a plan he can’t carry out—dramatic to the extreme—much more nervous than when I formerly knew him. Hands twitch and tremble—shell shocked.” Surprisingly, Arnold’s judgment would not have been resented by MacArthur or contradicted by his staff. The Philippine surrender still gnawed at the general, who was haunted by reports of the Bataan Death March. Evidence for this comes from staff aide Paul Rogers, who, shortly before Arnold’s visit, documented a sobering conversation MacArthur had with Richard Sutherland. Emerging from his office one afternoon in Brisbane, MacArthur stopped by Sutherland’s desk to share his feelings. “Dick,” he said plaintively, “I know the troops don’t like me. It wasn’t always that way. Back in France I was a combat officer out in front of my men. Now I’m an old man. My legs are like toothpicks. I can’t operate anymore.” The startling admission explains much about MacArthur’s tentativeness in his meetings with Arnold—and the trembling hands. The problem wasn’t stamina; it was confidence.
If Arnold had returned to Washington immediately after his meeting with MacArthur, he would have surely urged Marshall to relieve the Southwest Pacific commander. But he spent three valuable days in Brisbane, and the more he talked with MacArthur’s commanders, the more convinced he became that MacArthur was the man for the job. Kenney remained optimistic: Supplies were beginning to arrive at Australia’s docks, and the two divisions Marshall had sent to the theater were ready for combat. Moreover, MacArthur’s staff was well organized, the commander’s relationship with the Australians was good, and Port Moresby’s anchorage was being improved. Finally, Milne Bay was secure. So when Arnold returned to Washington, he told George Marshall he was convinced that the Japanese could not only be pushed off Guadalcanal, but also be stopped on New Guinea. The only thing missing, he added, was unity of command, where all the forces in the Southwest and South Pacific would serve under a single commander. He recommended that either MacArthur, Lieutenant General Joseph McNarney, or Lieutenant General Lesley McNair (the head of U.S. Army Ground Forces) be given the job. Marshall listened closely to Arnold’s report, nodded his agreement, and promptly kicked the suggestion to a War Department committee, where he knew it would languish. Furthermore, Ernie King would never agree to the change, particularly if the new commander came from the army, and Marshall didn’t want a unified command in the Pacific. He wanted competition.
At Marshall’s direction, Arnold briefed Roosevelt on his trip. The president listened without comment, but was relieved by Arnold’s conclusion and sent him on to see Frank Knox. A former publisher of the influential New Hampshire Union Leader newspaper and Republican vice presidential candidate on Alf Landon’s ticket in 1936, Knox had been appointed secretary of the navy to give the administration a bipartisan look. Surprisingly, for he had been a
member of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, Knox was transformed by rubbing shoulders with King and Nimitz, becoming an outspoken supporter of navy prerogatives. Knox greeted Arnold affably, listened to his briefing in silence, but shifted uncomfortably when Arnold offered his critique of Robert Ghormley. Finally, having heard enough, Knox waved him away. He wasn’t in the meeting to hear the navy criticized, he said. Taken aback, Arnold raised his voice: He was simply presenting the facts, and if Knox didn’t want to hear what he was saying, he would be more than happy to leave. Knox leveled his gaze at Arnold and said nothing. Arnold waited, then waited some more—and then got up and left.
Ordered back to Buna, General Tomitaro Horii started moving his troops north along the Kokoda Trail on September 24. Probing the weakened Japanese lines, the Australian 25th Brigade overran Ioribaiwa on the twenty-eighth, then pushed north, only to find that the enemy was sprinting away and was doing so without putting up much of a fight. The Japanese retreat over the Owen Stanleys was done so quickly that the Australians could hardly keep up. In Brisbane, MacArthur charted these movements and shook his head. He had assumed that Horii would defend his position to the last man or launch an attack down the trail towards Port Moresby. In fact, the Japanese could hardly wait to return to Buna, with its stocks of rice and fish, and left a trail of corpses on their way north. Three days after ordering the retreat, Horii slipped along a river bank, plunged into a rushing stream, and drowned. Back in Brisbane, MacArthur celebrated. “An ignominious death,” he crowed.
The Japanese retreat, while welcome, presented MacArthur with an entirely new opportunity, and he directed his staff to plan an offensive aimed at overwhelming the enemy beachhead on New Guinea’s northern shore. On October 11, he ordered his forces toward Buna along three tracks and warned his commanders that should their supply lines become vulnerable (that is, should the Japanese overwhelm the Marines on Guadalcanal and shift their troops west), they should be prepared to move south again. Several days later, he inspected the 32nd Division at Camp Cable, near Brisbane. MacArthur was at his best—expansive, eloquent, patriotic. As his soldiers crowded around, he told them what he expected them to do. They were going to New Guinea “to fight,” he said, and then, index finger punching the air, added, “and I want each of you to kill me a Jap.”
Attacking Buna was a gamble. The Japanese could easily reinforce their beachhead, their units were experienced in combat, their defenses were strong and defended in depth, and they retained a large complement of their heavy weapons. The Americans, on the other hand, could put troops into Buna only by sending them on foot over the backbreaking Owen Stanleys or by barge along New Guinea’s northern shore. Worse yet, the U.S. 32nd Division was green, untested. Even so, MacArthur thought the gamble worth taking. While the navy continued to struggle in the Solomons and the Japanese controlled the waters along New Guinea’s northern shore, Allied inaction in Port Moresby would give the enemy time to refit or—worse—allow it to shift the South Seas Detachment to Guadalcanal. Then too, although the Australians were exhausted by their hard fight at Milne Bay and many of Kenney’s aircraft were being diverted to help the Marines in the Solomons, Horii’s retreat along the Kokoda Track (and his “ignominious death”) provided a rare opportunity to test Japan’s weakened formations. In truth, however, MacArthur wouldn’t have been so tentative had he known the extent of the Japanese crisis. The South Seas Detachment was suffering from beriberi, dysentery, and malnutrition, and when Australian soldiers entered Eora Creek Gorge in the Owen Stanley Mountains, they uncovered evidence of cannibalism. The Japanese were eating their dead.
On November 2, the Australians secured Kokoda while the patched-together bombers of Kenney’s newly christened Fifth Air Force swept over them, scouring the trail to Buna. A coastal shuttle of luggers (flat-bottomed barges), meanwhile, brought Australian detachments along the north shore of Papua New Guinea from Milne Bay, landing them at Cape Nelson, some twenty-five miles from the Japanese lines at Buna. A third force of the U.S. 32nd Division’s 126th Regiment scaled the Kapa Kapa Trail, paralleling the movement of the Australians.
The advance of the 126th was uncertain, harrowing, and slow. In places, the trail was so narrow that, as one American remembered, “even a jack rabbit couldn’t leave it.” The troops were forced into a single file through steep ridges that arched upward two thousand feet, forcing the soldiers onto their hands and knees. Reaching the summit, these same soldiers tumbled and slid precipitously down, covering in minutes the same amount of ground that it took them hours to conquer going up. The men of the 126th subsisted on a meager Australian diet: hardtack, canned corned beef, rice, and tea.
But before the 126th completed its movement to Buna, MacArthur learned from a missionary’s report about an unpaved and waterlogged airfield hacked out of the jungle just off the Kapa Kapa Trail at Fasari. Use of the airfield would cut the 126th’s movement north by days and save the 32nd Division from having to make the debilitating climb through New Guinea’s mountains. But MacArthur was unconvinced that such ferrying operations would actually work and questioned his air commander’s plan to implement it. Kenney dismissed his pessimism: “Give me five days,” he said confidently, “and I’ll ship the whole damned U.S. Army to New Guinea by air.” MacArthur reluctantly gave his approval, but with the evidence from the Japanese cooking pots on his mind, he required that Kenney supply his soldiers with ten days’ worth of food. If the ferrying operation actually worked, the Australians and Americans would come into the Buna-Sanananda-Gona beachhead along three tracks, and at exactly the same time. Kenney, straining every resource, ran shuttles of troops into eastern New Guinea, then belatedly added an airstrip at Dobudura, in the foothills south and east of Buna.
MacArthur watched all of this from his headquarters at Brisbane’s Lennon’s Hotel, then decided he would join the operation. He jumped aboard one of Kenney’s rattle-and-shake bombers for the 1,500-mile jaunt to southern New Guinea before returning to his office less than twenty-four hours later. He was ecstatic. Kenney was his new hero. “This little fellow has given me a new and pretty powerful brandy,” he exclaimed, throwing his arm around him for the press at Brisbane. “And I’m going to keep right on taking it!” None of this sat well with the “Bataan Gang,” who enviously nattered away at Kenney’s newcomer status. When Kenney promoted one of his youngest officers, they complained until MacArthur shut them down. “We promote them out here for efficiency, not age,” he snapped. MacArthur was confident then, but cautious about the battle-worthiness of the 32nd. This was going to be a tough fight—the Japanese lodgment on Papua New Guinea’s north coast near Buna encompassed an area stretching for eleven miles, from Cape Sudest in the east to Gona in the west. In some places, the Japanese positions extended inland only a thousand yards, but in others, the positions stretched for several miles and were defended in depth. The Japanese planned their defense well. Having arrived at Buna in mid-November after their daunting retreat from the Owen Stanleys, they had constructed reinforced trenches, camouflaged their pillboxes, and laid out interlocking fields of fire. They had shuttled heavy weapons into their perimeter and now awaited the inevitable Aussie and American attack.
As MacArthur looked at the map, he could envision a joint Australian-American assault taking place along three lines, with the 126th regiment coming in on the right (at Buna), while to the left the 144th Australian infantry peeled off to attack Sanananda and, further west, the Japanese defenses in front of Gona. On November 6, MacArthur moved his headquarters from Brisbane to Port Moresby, shortening his line of communication to the front. Several days after his arrival, on November 10, and with the 126th Regiment still descending on Buna, his intelligence chief, Charles Willoughby, appeared in his door with some unsettling news. While Aussie and American commanders believed that they were about to face only one thousand malnourished and disease-ridden Japanese, Willoughby told MacArthur that his most recent estimates, based on U.S. intercepts and decryption of Japanese command co
des, told an entirely different story. There were at least four thousand soldiers and naval marines inside the Japanese perimeter, he announced, adding that the number had been confirmed by New Guinea natives.
In fact, however, Willoughby was wrong—there were not four thousand Japanese stretched out from Buna to Gona, but fifty-five hundred, including the remnants of those who had survived the treacherous trek back from Ioribaiwa. This force was complemented by reinforcements that the Japanese high command had brought in from Rabaul. There were actually over fifteen thousand Japanese in the Buna-Gona beachhead—more than three times the numbers given by Willoughby. To make matters worse, as MacArthur was to discover, Kenney’s fliers were having difficulty dropping supplies into the jungles of the New Guinea coastline facing Goodenough Bay and landing on its wire mesh runways. Kenney didn’t have enough transports to keep MacArthur’s soldiers supplied and had to rely increasingly on unreliable Papuan natives to unload his DC-3s.
Nor was the discovery of new airfields in northern Papua New Guinea of much use. Ten inches of rain fell on this northern coast every month, grounding Kenney’s bombers and frustrating Hugh Casey’s suffering engineers. Air intelligence officers regularly scrawled the words “most of the terrain waterlogged” across large swaths of their hastily drawn maps. Kenney’s pilots, having conquered the stomach-churning updrafts of New Guinea’s mountainous terrain, were often forced to return their transports fully loaded. Worse yet, Buna was itself nearly always underwater. There was some elevation along the flat coastal plain, but the combined Australian-American “New Guinea Force” would approach Buna through waist-deep swamps tangled with mangrove, nipa, and saga trees. Mounting a sustained attack would be nearly suicidal, as it was impossible to move without sinking knee-deep into a Buna bog. When the Americans and Aussies were not on the firing line, they could rest in trenches that were knee-deep in water. Here and there amid all this muck were small hillocks overgrown with knife-sharp grasses, choking vines, and creepers and filled with leeches and insects everywhere. Within days of the troops’ entering the jungle, none of the radios given to platoon radiomen worked, and the Americans’ jungle fatigues, dyed green in Australia, disintegrated when exposed to the constant precipitation, leaching green dye into the skin. Finally, the Japanese knew how to fight in the jungle, and although they might have proved overly confident in their headlong charges at Kokoda, they were expert night fighters. The Americans, Japanese officers reassured their men, were afraid of the dark.