by Perry, Mark
Into this jungle maelstrom, the 32nd Division’s commander, Major General Edwin Harding (a graduate, with George Patton, of West Point’s Class of 1909), plotted his attack with Australian Major General George Alan Vasey, a square-jawed survivor of the First World War’s brutal maw. Vasey had graduated tenth in a class of thirty at Australia’s prestigious Royal Military College, but by 1918, all of those who had graduated ahead of him were dead. Vasey knew how to fight and was optimistic, having personally led his veteran division against Japanese strongpoints on the Kokoda Trail. Harding found it difficult to share this optimism, even though MacArthur ordered that the 128th Regiment supplement the 126th for the Buna attack. Unlike Vasey, Harding was beset by nagging doubts: The 32nd Division’s two regiments, composed of farm boys from the upper Midwest, needed more training. “From February when I took over until November when we went into battle,” Harding later acknowledged, “we were always getting ready to move, on the move, or getting settled after a move. No sooner would we get a systematic training program started than orders for a move came along to interrupt it.” What’s more, Harding discovered that although many of his GIs had arrived fresh for battle (thanks to George Kenney), a large number of those who had hiked over the Owen Stanleys were without rations. An unpredicted supply bottleneck had developed along Papua New Guinea’s northeastern shore. His regiments were short of artillery, his engineers lacked equipment, and his medical teams would have to rely on kerosene burners to sterilize their equipment.
The Allied assault on Buna began on the morning of November 19, with the Australian 25th Brigade leading the attack on the Japanese right, at Gona. The Japanese defenses surprised the Aussies, who stumbled into a roadblock at the head of the trail that had dumped them out of the foothills of the Owen Stanleys. The Australians went forward, under the cover of their meager artillery, to take on the Japanese—and recoiled. Although the Aussies had fought the Japanese before, this was different. The 800 Japanese defenders, convinced they would soon get more reinforcements from Rabaul, fought tenaciously. Within twenty-four hours, the Australians had pulled back into their own lines and counted their dead; this first attack and others over the next two days cost the 25th 204 of its soldiers. Worse yet, as successive attacks fizzled with little apparent effect, just as many Australians who suffered from Japanese bullets were now beginning to suffer from malaria. In the midst of this conflict, on the twentieth, Harding ordered his 128th Regiment to reinforce the Aussies in the hope that the additional weight would hammer the Japanese forces toward the southeast. Reinforced, Vasey ordered Australian General Edmund Herring, a soft-talking Melbourne barrister and Great War veteran, to send the 128th forward against Japanese positions at Sanananda, to the east of Gona, but like the Australian 25th, it made no headway.
Further to the east, the assault by Harding’s 126th Regiment was delayed by an unexpected Japanese attack on his tenuous coastal supply line. On November 16, as the men of the 126th were crawling into their attack positions on the far left of the Japanese line, three heavily armed luggers and a captured Japanese supply boat dispatched from Fort Milne were sunk by Japanese Zeros. The attack killed 52 men in a single swat, with Kenney’s fliers nowhere to be seen. On the morning of the seventeenth, Harding assessed the damage; he had lost all of his heavy weapons, along with tons of rations and ammunition. His men would now be going into battle without artillery. Harding nonetheless went ahead, sending the 126th lunging toward Buna on the morning of the nineteenth. The green-dyed Americans stormed the Japanese defenses through a tropical downpour, just as the Australians were launching their first attacks on Gona. But the planned breakthrough of the 126th failed, as camouflaged Japanese strongpoints funneled Harding’s GIs into waist-deep swamps, where hidden snipers picked them off. The Japanese were masters of deception: One American found himself standing atop a Japanese bunker without knowing it, before a bullet ripped off his arm. “The parade of injured GIs was heartbreaking to watch,” a veteran later remembered. “The walking wounded struggled past us. . . . A few were being carried on litters, and some were left where they died, until the next day when they could be taken care of by special burial squads.”
For three days after this attack, the 126th crept forward, probing the Japanese lines and attempting to eliminate the defenders, bunker by bunker. The casualties mounted, with a single battalion suffering forty-one dead in a single day. Harding was stunned by the losses. Finally, on November 21, he requested that Herring return a part of the American reinforcements that Harding had sent him two days before. Herring obliged, ordering Herbert C. “Stutterin’” Smith’s battalion, the legendary Ghost Mountain Boys, back to the Allied right. Smith’s battalion had gotten its name by shadowing the Australian march from Port Moresby to Buna—an exhausting uphill and downhill trek of 126 miles—and, while Smith’s men were tattered and hungry, they were the best troops Harding had. On November 24, Harding put them into a line fronting Buna, where the Japanese had formed an essentially three-sided defensive area (the “Triangle”), and then he sent them forward on the double quick. It was a mistake: With eighteen hundred well-armed soldiers dug in at the Triangle, the Japanese were protected by interlocking fields of fire and flanked by impassable swamps. The attacking Americans piled into the Triangle, then stopped, unable to move and pinned down by murderous Japanese fire. “We’d walked right into the middle of them,” one of Smith’s GIs recalled. “We started to dig in, and I mean quick. Three of us dug a hole in five minutes flat, with our hands.” Smith’s men remained pinned down into the night, suffering through a drenching downpour while messengers shuttled to and from Harding’s headquarters. “Tommy guns . . . were full of muck and dirt, and even the M1s fired well only for the first clip, and then jammed because clips taken from belts were wet and full of muck from the swamp,” one of Harding’s soldiers remembered.
Writing years later about the fight of the Americans and Australians at Buna, MacArthur’s detractors would point out that Harding’s soldiers had no artillery, grenade launchers, antitank weapons, or flamethrowers. George Kenney’s air force, these critics added, was ineffective, and at key moments in the fight, his fliers mistook American positions for Japanese defenses, loosing bombs on Harding’s vulnerable GIs. Harding’s soldiers felt isolated, forgotten, unappreciated. Many of them blamed Harding, but many more blamed MacArthur, saying that while they were facing the Japanese at Buna, he was making decisions for Harding “from the safety of Port Moresby.” This was an accurate observation: MacArthur lived well in Port Moresby’s Government House, with its hardwood floors, flying verandas, and expansive rooms that overlooked a long beach and shimmering bay. MacArthur and his senior staff had moved into the residence in the days just before Harding’s Buna attack, with a small, furnished office for most of them and a large living room that doubled as a command center. Bougainvillea and frangipani draped the house, while exotic birds squawked loudly from the nearby jungle. MacArthur appeared on the veranda, from time to time, wearing a Japanese kimono as aides rushed into and out of his office.
But this was a different MacArthur than the one who had mordantly spoken with Sidney Huff about his failures or whose hands shook when he greeted Hap Arnold. The spring in his step had returned, and though he sometimes seemed tentative, he drove himself through fifteen-hour days, innumerable meetings, and detailed planning sessions. In retrospect, it’s obvious that the difference between this new MacArthur and the Corregidor MacArthur was due to the energizing impact of the irreverent and ever-optimistic George Kenney, whose can-do attitude was infectious. “He was rough, unpolished, and very shrewd,” a junior member of MacArthur’s staff remembered. “Although he seemed to rush blindly into GHQ, bursting with the enthusiasm of a young flight pilot fresh from a victorious mission, speaking irreverently of both trivial and urgent matters, in reality he was as wary as the proverbial cat on a hot tin roof. I do not know of a time when he lost his step.” In the midst of the Buna crisis, Kenney reassured MacArthur that
his fliers could do the impossible: lift entire armies over mountains; assemble, pack, unpack, and reassemble artillery pieces; and put enough men and supplies into Buna to ensure victory. And the more that Kenney said it, the more MacArthur believed him. But with Herring and Harding bogged down at Buna, the pressure was on, and Kenney was scrambling to make good on his claims.
In all, Kenney’s fliers had three missions: to provide support for the Buna offensive, to keep Japanese reinforcements out of northeastern Papua New Guinea, and to help fly cover for Vandegrift’s Marines on Guadalcanal. Although Kenney’s overly ambitious missions risked spreading his resources too thin, his aerial runs into Buna successfully delivered over one hundred planeloads of supplies during Harding’s offensive, keeping the soaked and sleepless regiments of the 32nd Division flush with ammunition. When, years later, he recounted the criticism of MacArthur, he struck back. The problem wasn’t in Brisbane, and it wasn’t with his fliers, he said. The problem was at Buna. “The trouble with the 32nd Division,” Kenney later said, “was that, in addition to being a green outfit, they sat around in the jungle for about ten days doing nothing except worrying about the rain and the mud and listening to strange noises at night. They had been careless about their drinking water and as a result nearly everyone got dysentery.” His commentary may have been uncharitable, but much of it was true—and endorsed by the Australians: The Americans showed they could fight, the Aussies said, but their leadership was lousy.
On the morning of November 25, Australian generals Thomas Blamey and Edmund Herring met with MacArthur at his headquarters in Port Moresby to discuss the Buna stalemate. Seated in the living room at Government House, a sobered MacArthur listened carefully to what they said. Blamey and Herring were harsh: Harding wasn’t getting the job done, they reported, and MacArthur should rely instead on their more experienced Australians, who were better fighters. This painful exchange was embarrassing for MacArthur. Before Buna, he had held little regard for the Australians’ combat prowess, believing they had outnumbered the Japanese on the Kokoda Trail and had fought poorly. He had attempted to keep the American command separated from Blamey’s and had brushed aside George Marshall’s directives that more Australian officers be included on his staff. They weren’t up to the task, MacArthur claimed. Now, it was apparently the Americans who weren’t up to the task. Reluctantly, he confirmed Blamey and Herring’s assessment, saying that if reinforcements were sent to Buna, they would come from Australian outfits; then, the next day, he sent Sutherland and an aide to Buna to assess Harding’s leadership. They found that the men of the 126th and 128th were “gaunt and thin, with deep black circles under their eyes,” Sutherland later recalled. “They were covered with tropical sores and their jackets and pants were tattered and stained. Few wore socks or underwear. Often their soles had been sucked off their shoes by the tenacious, stinking mud.” Sutherland was shocked by what he saw and urged Harding to new exertions, hinting that MacArthur was thinking of relieving the American division commander.
Harding rejected the idea that all that was needed were more attacks. It would take more than that, he told Sutherland, to defeat the Japanese, including more and better weapons. Even so, Harding agreed to launch one last push, and on the night of November 29, he put the men of Herbert Smith’s battalion once more into the fray in front of the Triangle. His hope was that the Japanese would be stunned by the surprise night assault and flee onto their beaches. The jungle was so dense that the GIs put their hands on the shoulder of the man in front of them, feeling for their jump-off points in the dark. Finally, just before dawn, two companies of Smith’s battalion surged forward, tripping across a Japanese picket line of machine guns. “All hell broke loose,” a veteran of the attack recalled. A Japanese outpost was overrun, but a second line of machine guns drove Smith’s men into the jungle. GIs fell along Buna’s trails, the survivors hugging the jungle floor. But Smith had scored a major success in driving the Japanese back onto successive defensive lines. As the attack sputtered to an end, Harding met with Sutherland at his headquarters. MacArthur, Sutherland said, was “worried about the caliber of his infantry.” Suddenly enraged by Sutherland’s interference, Harding snapped: He wouldn’t replace any of his senior commanders, he told Sutherland, and anyone who thought his men weren’t fighting hard enough “didn’t know the facts.” Sutherland heard Harding out, then returned to Port Moresby to report to MacArthur. The Australians were right, he said—the problem in Buna was a lack of leadership.
MacArthur had already come to that conclusion. The day of Sutherland’s return, Major General Robert Eichelberger ambled up the front walk of MacArthur’s headquarters with his chief of staff, Clovis Byers. The two were ushered in, were given coffee, and then met with MacArthur, Sutherland, and Kenney on MacArthur’s veranda. Kenney was the only one smiling. There were no preliminaries: “Bob,” MacArthur said, “I’m putting you in command in Buna. Relieve Harding. I am sending you in, Bob, and I want you to remove all officers who won’t fight. Relieve regimental and battalion commanders; if necessary, put sergeants in charge of battalions, and corporals in charge of companies—anyone who will fight. Time is of the essence; the Japs may land reinforcements any night.” MacArthur strode down the veranda, talking as he paced. The fight had gone out of the Americans, he told Eichelberger, with some of them even throwing away their weapons. MacArthur reached the end of the veranda and turned to face Eichelberger. He raised his voice to a near shout, pinning Eichelberger with his words, his pipe stabbing the air: “Bob, I want you to take Buna, or not come back alive.” He fell silent then, but only for a moment. “And that goes for your chief of staff, too,” he said, nodding to Byers. “Do you understand?”
Eichelberger nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said.
It is an injustice that in the pantheon of great American commanders, Robert Eichelberger holds a minor place. Eichelberger was wise enough to know he lived among a group of military officers who would be celebrated, but he was every bit as worthy. Articulate, well-read, and ambitious, he coupled his personal resolve to an ego the size of MacArthur’s, although Eichelberger’s was better controlled. Eichelberger coveted public attention, then built a career that seeded it. His ambition was like a little engine, constantly running, though accompanied by a crucial command quality—he could read a battlefield. A West Point graduate of Harding and Patton’s Class of 1909, Eichelberger missed World War One but served in the American Expeditionary Force in Siberia in the wake of Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution. His two years in Siberia, from 1918 to 1920, brought him in close contact with Japanese officers heading up their own incursion. What he saw of the Japanese convinced him of their “perfidy”—they had “entered the country on the pretext of preserving law and order—and had created disorder,” he later wrote. The Japanese were bent on dominating Asia, he said, and their commanders were ruthless.
In the wake of his Siberia deployment, Eichelberger served in China and the Philippines, then returned to the United States and graduated from the Army’s Command and General Staff School, in the same class as Dwight Eisenhower. He served at the War Department when MacArthur was chief of staff, then with Malin Craig, MacArthur’s successor. Eichelberger was close to Craig, calling him his “mentor.” In October 1940, Eichelberger was promoted to brigadier general, which brought a telegram from George Patton, who was promoted with him. “At least they have the sense enough to promote the two best damn officers in the U.S. Army,” Patton wrote. But Eichelberger’s path to war was temporarily untracked when he was appointed superintendent of West Point. His time at West Point allowed him to carry through the reforms undertaken by MacArthur and add some of his own, including courses on flying. Graduates of West Point, however, remember Eichelberger as the man who hired Earl “Red” Blaik, the most successful football coach in academy history. MacArthur, an avid football fan, was thrilled, as Blaik had been an outstanding cadet during his time as superintendent. In the years ahead, over the roar of Japanese bombardments, Eiche
lberger could be found in his tent listening to West Point football games on his shortwave radio.
Eichelberger’s name was written in George Marshall’s little black book, and in July 1941, he was promoted to major general—a sign that he would be among the senior commanders in the coming war. During a talk he gave at a New York banquet three days before Pearl Harbor, he predicted the attack. Within hours of the Japanese strike, Eichelberger’s friends asked him how he had gained advance knowledge of the Japanese move. “The truth was, of course, that I had no inside military information,” Eichelberger later wrote. “My prediction was based on the steadily disintegrating international situation, my experience with the Japanese militarists in Siberia, and a certain familiarity with the pattern of Japanese history.” Eichelberger was named to head an army corps destined for the invasion of North Africa, but at the end of August 1942, he was unexpectedly summoned to the War Department. Marshall told Eichelberger that he was being transferred to Australia, where he would be put in charge of a senior combat command. Eichelberger was disappointed. He had looked forward to his role in Operation Torch, where he would fight alongside Eisenhower and garner the headlines he dreamed might be his. Now his command in North Africa was being given to his old friend, Patton. Confused by Marshall’s sudden decision, Eichelberger initially thought he was being punished or shunted aside. But then, staring back at Marshall, he realized what the army chief wanted him to do. “Isn’t that General MacArthur’s command?” Eichelberger asked. Marshall, who rarely betrayed any emotion, turned to Eichelberger with a smile. “Why, yes,” he said, “it is.”