by Perry, Mark
What Eichelberger didn’t know was that when MacArthur’s first nominee as his primary combat subordinate was vetoed by Marshall (it was General Robert Richardson, who told Marshall he would not serve under the Australian Blamey), MacArthur had specifically asked for Eichelberger. The Southwest Pacific commander liked him and had singled him out as an officer to watch when Eichelberger served in the War Department. Furthermore, like many of MacArthur’s other commanders, Eichelberger knew the Japanese and had served in the Philippines, two qualifications that MacArthur preferred in his candidates. It was perhaps with this history in mind that on the morning after he told Eichelberger to win at Buna or “not come back alive,” MacArthur softened his approach, attempting to balance his warning with an inducement. Knowing that Eichelberger craved public attention (MacArthur had seen how Eichelberger had carefully cultivated his relationship with reporters back in Washington), the commander boorishly dangled it as a possible reward, along with a medal. “If you capture Buna,” MacArthur said, “I’ll give you a Distinguished Service Cross and recommend you for a high British decoration.” He then added: “And I’ll release your name for newspaper publication.” The words had tumbled out, and MacArthur felt suddenly chagrined. “Now Bob,” he said, “I have no illusions about your personal courage, but remember you are no use to me—dead.”
Eichelberger would later write a compelling account of his wartime service (and in letters to his wife referred to MacArthur as “Sarah,” for the famed actress Sarah Bernhardt). He recounted this conversation years later but remembered that as soon as he arrived in Buna, he thought he wouldn’t have gone north “for all the pretty ribbons of all the nations of the world.” What Eichelberger found shocked him. Harding’s men looked defeated. “Shortly after I arrived in Buna,” Eichelberger remembered, “I ordered the medics to take the temperatures of an entire company of hollow-eyed men near the front. Every member—I repeat, every member—of that company was running a fever.” Spending his first day with Harding and his staff, Eichelberger learned that few of them had ever actually been to the front. He wrote a short note to Sutherland: “The rear areas are strong and the front line is weak. Inspired leadership is lacking.” Eichelberger’s intelligence officer, brought with him from Brisbane, was even more damning. “The troops were deplorable,” he wrote. “They wore dirty long beards. Their clothing was in rags. Their shoes were uncared for, or worn out.”
Eichelberger took quick action. He dismissed Harding, replaced the ground commanders, and trimmed the headquarters staff of Harding partisans. He stopped all fighting for two days, reorganized the chain of command, ordered his own staff into the line of battle, and made sure his soldiers had dry shoes. He put Colonel John E. Grose in command of Urbana Force (the designation of the troops on the left), and Colonel Clarence Martin in charge of Warren Force, on the right. After straightening out his troop’s communications problems, he gave every soldier a hot meal. Then, during the early morning hours of December 5, he ordered an attack. He was confident when his men went forward, but soon enough, the attack bogged down. There was firing up and down the front, but no one was moving. Back at his headquarters, Eichelberger ordered his staff to follow him toward the sound of battle, then watched as another assault went forward. When the “typewriter clatter of Jap machine guns” drove his soldiers to ground, scrambling to find purchase on any dry piece of land, Eichelberger stood up and moved down the trail toward the Japanese lines. As he moved forward, he eyed the men of the 32nd Division. Pinned down by enemy fire, they gripped the ground on the trail beside him. They looked up at Eichelberger as he walked past them toward the Japanese lines—ramrod straight and unafraid—his staff trailing behind. Machine gun rounds clipped the bushes near him, but he kept moving. As he did, he motioned to his men. “Lads,” he said, “come along with us.” And they did. Here and there and then in groups, the soldiers of the 32nd Division stood and followed Eichelberger forward—into the teeth of the Japanese fire.
CHAPTER 11
Rabaul
If you come with me, I’ll make you a greater man than Nelson.
—Douglas MacArthur
Buna had been a challenge for MacArthur, who rarely fired a subordinate. Harding’s dismissal was the exception, not the rule. MacArthur shaped his command’s strategy, but he listened closely and usually followed the suggestions of his senior subordinates on how they wanted to deploy their forces. Once he had in place commanders whom he trusted, he only interfered to move up a timetable or to chide them for not moving quickly. His was not a hidden hand, but it certainly was a light one. In this, he and Franklin Roosevelt were much alike.
While Roosevelt was never removed from the war’s planning, he only intervened when George Marshall or Ernie King attempted to shift its focus—he had insisted on Operation Torch in the face of their opposition and ignored their fears that his relationship with Churchill would divert U.S. resources into unwanted theaters. He fretted when the navy proved incapable of stopping the Japanese along Iron Bottom Sound, and he sought Marshall’s assurance that MacArthur was doing everything he could to help Ghormley. Then, in October 1942, with the Marines barely holding on at Guadalcanal, he approved the replacement of Ghormley with Admiral William “Bull” Halsey. But even this was not enough. One week after Halsey’s appointment, after rifling through dispatches from the Solomons, Roosevelt boiled over, shouting at aides that the JCS should make certain that “every possible weapon gets into that area to hold Guadalcanal.”
Roosevelt had reason to worry. Just prior to Ghormley’s relief, the Japanese succeeded in landing fifteen thousand additional troops on the island. Seven thousand of them hacked their way through the jungle and, on October 24, attacked Vandegrift’s lines along the east bank of the Lunga River. The Japanese were finally repulsed on October 26, with fifteen hundred enemy corpses laid out in front of the American position. That same day, a U.S. task force commanded by Admiral Thomas Kinkaid forced Japanese carriers coming south toward the Santa Cruz Islands back north, though the Japanese sank the carrier Hornet and pummeled the Enterprise. The Japanese navy fought with grim obstinacy, sending the “Tokyo Express” relief convoys down “the Slot” every night. By early November, they had successfully reinforced their Guadalcanal positions, forcing the Marines into a series of costly attacks on their lines. In Rabaul, Admiral Yamamoto decided that he could retake Henderson Field and win the battle if he could find a way to bring an additional twelve thousand Japanese troops onto the island. He sent a well-protected convoy into the Slot to clear the way for the reinforcements on November 12.
Desperate to stop the Japanese, the newly appointed Halsey scratched together a force of two heavy cruisers, three light cruisers, and eight destroyers. The resulting series of night attacks—the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal—was a bloodbath. Only a single American cruiser and one lone destroyer were able to escape the maelstrom, and task force commanders Daniel Callaghan and Norman Scott were killed. Vice Admiral Hiroaki Abe, scarred by the carnage, ordered his ships to withdraw. Abe’s decision was the battle’s tipping point, for the Japanese thereafter proved unable to appreciably reinforce their Guadalcanal garrison. At the end of December, as Eichelberger’s Diggers and GIs were preparing their last assault at Buna, the Japanese high command decided that Guadalcanal would be abandoned. But the decision’s aftermath showed that the Japanese refused to be pried from the rest of the Solomon Islands—they hurled aircraft at Guadalcanal, as if protesting the American victory, launching hundreds of raids. Despite these efforts, the Japanese had lost Guadalcanal. Eichelberger chronicled the lesson thus learned: “Sometimes just plain stubbornness wins the battle that awareness and wisdom might have lost.” The same was true at Buna.
It was not enough for Eichelberger to insist that courage alone would win battles—that was the Japanese way of war. So after the failure of an all-out frontal assault that he had ordered for December 5, Eichelberger told the Aussies to probe the Japanese lines and destroy strongpoints one
by one. This knee-buckling fight pitted small units against each other within grenade range. The tactic worked: Gona was captured after hand-to-hand fighting on December 8. But the toughest fight of all came at Sanananda, at the center of the beachhead, where the Japanese had constructed a gun-bristling roadblock. On Christmas Day 1942, eight companies of the 127th Infantry clawed their way into the Government Gardens section west of Buna and headed to Sanananda, while the Australians broke up concentrations of Japanese defenders near Sanananda Point. The bedraggled U.S. 163rd Regiment finished the battle, pinning a last-gasp group of Japanese against the coast.
The final accounting showed that the Japanese suffered 8,000 dead, and although Allied casualties were not as severe, they were daunting: Nearly 35,000 Australians and Americans fought at Gona, Buna, and Sanananda, with nearly one-third of them dead, wounded, or incapacitated by disease. The 32nd Division was eviscerated, with 586 killed in action, 1,954 wounded, and more than 7,000 sick—two-thirds of the division’s strength. To this must be added more than 8,000 Diggers and GIs who suffered from battle fatigue, the highest percentage of any campaign in the war. “I am a reasonably unimaginative man, but Buna is still to me, in retrospect, a nightmare,” Eichelberger said.
The growing lists of dead, wounded, and those taken by disease and the long roll of destroyers, cruisers, and aircraft carriers torn to pieces had a relentlessly bleak effect on Franklin Roosevelt. Even so, the president didn’t slow his routine or cease cultivating his political standing with the American people. His intervention in the Guadalcanal campaign when he insisted that more transports be sent to the battle theater was inspired by a gnawing public desire for more victories and public worry over the growing casualty lists. George Marshall had worked to relieve the public pressure. When the anti-Roosevelt Republican press speculated, incorrectly, that the president had supported the navy’s Guadalcanal operation over MacArthur’s at Buna, Marshall briefed Henry Stimson on why the Pacific was divided into two commands to begin with. Roosevelt had nothing to do with it, the army chief said. The decision was made by the Joint Chiefs. “I doubt if the President even knew of the subdivision at the time it was made,” he pointed out.
Marshall was also quick to defend his Southwest Pacific commander, whose public statements on Buna highlighted the limited resources the region’s forces worked with. MacArthur’s comments, Marshall said, shouldn’t be interpreted as an attack on the president; MacArthur wasn’t criticizing Roosevelt to promote his political future any more than Roosevelt was keeping MacArthur undersupplied to make certain the general had none. But Secretary Stimson was skeptical; MacArthur’s high-profile complaints kept his name in circulation as a possible Roosevelt successor or replacement. Stimson also realized that Marshall defended MacArthur because the commander was a lever against Ernie King and needed little guidance.
In fact, MacArthur was much less of a headache for Marshall than other American commanders, such as Eisenhower subordinates George Patton and Mark Clark. Patton, a bombastic showman, cultivated public acclaim and feuded with nearly everyone he met. His ego might have been unrivaled—except for Clark’s. Despite being Eisenhower’s best friend, Clark trailed a coterie of worshipful reporters and regularly disparaged anyone whose fighting qualities garnered public acclaim. Patton and Clark weren’t the only problems Marshall had. Cultivating public attention was a virus among American commanders, sparking constant interservice and inter-Allied feuding: King despised Patton, Hap Arnold couldn’t bring himself to speak to King, and Eisenhower thought British commander Bernard Law Montgomery “conceited.” The animus didn’t end there: Patton held all British commanders in disdain, Clark stewed over the headlines given his peers, and General Omar Bradley plotted ways to take advantage of Patton’s antics. Meanwhile, General Terry de la Mesa Allen, one of the best American combat leaders, described Bradley as “a phony Abraham Lincoln.”
Among all these interpersonal rivalries, MacArthur’s efforts to push himself into the limelight stand out. He failed to publicize his subordinates’ demonstrations of perseverance and valor. For example, when the Australians caved in the right flank of the Japanese position at Buna, MacArthur’s headquarters remained silent, and when Eichelberger’s soldiers were assailing the Triangle (rotting Japanese corpses were piled so high that the defenders wore gas masks), MacArthur issued a Christmas circular to the press: “On Christmas Day our activities were limited to routine safety precautions. Divine services were held.” MacArthur also tended to exaggerate his command’s strategic successes: Two weeks after the Allied assault on the Triangle, as Eichelberger gathered his soldiers for a final push, MacArthur’s headquarters told the public that Sanananda “has now been completely enveloped. A remnant of the enemy’s force is entrenched there and faces certain destruction.” It wasn’t true. The Sanananda position had not been enveloped, and several thousand Japanese defenders—not a “remnant”—remained.
What was so surprising about the releases is that they were so unnecessary. The American people didn’t want their soldiers in divine services, but wanted them in battle. The issue here is not whether MacArthur was courageous, but whether he was honest. His press releases were datelined from Buna, but they were written in Port Moresby. Such duplicity embittered his relationship with Eichelberger. In Eichelberger’s letters to his wife, Emmalina (the letters were published after the war under the title Dear Miss Em), he paints a damning portrait of MacArthur during the Buna fight. At the same moment that MacArthur was issuing a release that his forces were engaged in “mopping up” operations in New Guinea (in mid-January 1943), Eichelberger was preparing for the final assault on Sanananda, a headlong clash that lasted for eight days and only concluded with the elimination of the last Japanese stronghold. MacArthur praised Eichelberger in a personal letter, awarded him the Distinguished Service Cross, bragged about him to visitors to his headquarters, but was irritated when Eichelberger was featured in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post and Life. “Do you realize I could reduce you to the grade of colonel and send you home?” he asked, but then relented: “Well, I won’t do it.” Eichelberger later told a friend at the War Department that he would rather have the friend “slip a rattlesnake in my pocket than have you give me any publicity.”
But Eichelberger was a lot like Eisenhower. He complained about MacArthur in one breath, then praised him in the next. MacArthur is “a fascinating person and an inspiring leader,” he told “Miss Em,” but added that the commander “knew nothing of the jungle and how one fights there.” Eichelberger resented being named with eleven others in the citation awarding him the Distinguished Service Cross (he thought he should have been singled out). He also felt slighted when MacArthur sidelined his nomination for the Medal of Honor, though the nomination (in effect a self-nomination—to spite MacArthur) never gained steam at the War Department. Eichelberger’s complaints about his commander reflect poorly on MacArthur, but they were hardly unprecedented. As Eichelberger was simmering about MacArthur in the wake of Buna, his buddy George Patton was fuming about Eisenhower in North Africa: “Ike is more British than the British and is putty in their hands,” he confided to his diary. “Oh, God, for John J. Pershing.”
These personality tussles found their way into the War Department, where the petty interservice and interpersonal jealousies of the war were fought and refought. But there was no contest more bitter than that fought over George Kenney’s victory at the Bismarck Sea. In February 1943, as the dead were still being buried at Buna, the Japanese attempted to contest control of central New Guinea by sending a convoy of eight destroyers and eight transports carrying six thousand soldiers into Wau, on the Huon Gulf, where the Australian 17th Brigade was building an airfield. Back in Port Moresby, Charles Willoughby warned MacArthur and Kenney of the move, and reconnaissance aircraft were put into the air south of Rabaul to scout out the Japanese convoy. Kenney also shuttled over 150 aircraft into central New Guinea’s airfields and put aircraft stationed at Port Moresby and Miln
e Bay on alert. When several B-24s sighted the Japanese convoy on March 1, Kenney ordered twenty-eight B-17s over the Bismarck Sea to intercept it. The attacks sank a transport, damaged two others, and left one other dead in the water. The next day, Kenney committed thirteen B-17s, thirty-one B-25s, twelve A-20 light bombers, twenty-eight P-38 fighters, and over a dozen Australian medium bombers to the battle. The attacks were met by Japanese fighters, but by the end of the day, Kenney had scored a decisive victory.
MacArthur received the last of Kenney’s reports on the morning of March 4 (“I have never seen him so jubilant,” the air commander reported) and issued a communiqué based on assessments made by his staff: