American Caesar

by William Manchester

  On May 6 a terrible silence fell over Corregidor. White flags were raised from every flagstaff that was still standing, and the triumphant Japanese moved their eleven thousand captives to Bataan. The next day the prisoners began the brutal Death March—the long trek northward in which between seven thousand and ten thousand Fil-Americans died of disease, starvation, sadistic beatings, and outright execution. Quezon learned of the island’s surrender just as the President Coolidge was carrying him into San Francisco Bay, and he was overcome. Romulo was profoundly shocked; “when I left Bataan, I expected the peninsula to fall, but not the Rock,” he recalls. “I believed I’d be back in a month.” MacArthur told the press; “Corregidor needs no comment from me. It has sounded its own story at the mouth of its guns. It has scrolled its own epitaph on enemy tablets. But through the bloody haze of its last reverberating shot, I shall always seem to see a vision of grim, gaunt, ghastly men, still unafraid.” Unlike his Bataan panegyric, this one had been prepared in advance. Otherwise it would have been far less polished, for when the news of the Rock’s capitulation reached him he was preoccupied with another struggle, a naval engagement being fought in his theater, the Battle of the Coral Sea.25

  “It looks, at this moment,” Roosevelt wrote MacArthur that month, “as if the Japanese Fleet is heading toward the Aleutian Islands or Midway and Hawaii, with a remote possibility it may attack Southern California or Seattle by air.” On May 8 the General radioed the President: “At least two enemy divisions and all the [Japanese] air force in the Philippines will be released for other missions . . . . A preliminary move is now under way probably initially against New Guinea and the line of communications between the United States and Australia . . . . If serious enemy pressure were applied against Australia . . . the situation would be extremely precarious. The extent of territory to be defended is so vast and the communication facilities are so poor that the enemy, moving freely by water, has a preponderant advantage.” MacArthur told Hap Arnold that the Japanese could take New Guinea almost at will, that Hawaii was probably safe, but that he believed the enemy was preparing to invade Alaska.26

  The fact is that no one on the Allied side that year had any idea of what the long-term goals of Dai Nippon’s commanders were. In retrospect the weaknesses of their position are evident, among them the fact that they, like the Germans, were fighting a two-front war, their second front being in China, but as their orgy of conquest approached its peak, they seemed capable of anything. Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s task force had sunk two British heavy cruisers and the carrier Hermes in the waters off Ceylon. General Joseph Stilwell limped into India muttering, “We got run out of Burma and it’s as humiliating as hell.” The last Filipino and American troops in the Philippines surrendered on June 9, leaving only guerrilla resistance in the archipelago. Attu and Kiska, two of the Aleutian Islands, off Alaska, were seized by the enemy that same week. A Japanese submarine shelled the Oregon coast at Fort Stevens; Nipponese aircraft dropped incendiary bombs on the southern Oregon coast; antiaircraft batteries and barrage balloon screens were rising around California defense plants. With Rommel attacking toward the Suez Canal, and Hitler’s legions penetrating the Caucasus, there was widespread speculation that the Japanese and the Germans might link up in India before the end of the year.27

  The mood down under was one of desperation. Robert L. Eichelberger has recalled: “Our fighter planes began to arrive by ship, but it was already evident that the Japanese Zero was superior in maneuverability, and that the Japanese pilots of that time were well trained and highly skilled. Our radar in northern Australia was almost worthless. . . . We were outnumbered five to one. Replacements were easy for the enemy and hard for us.” The Joint Chiefs were so pessimistic about the continent’s chances of survival that fresh American troops were being landed, not at Adelaide, but in the New Hebrides, the Fijis, and New Caledonia. “By midsummer,” wrote Huff, “there seemed to be nothing to prevent a Japanese landing in Australia.” MacArthur wrote: “The immediate and imperative problem which confronted me was the defense of Australia itself. Japanese invasion was momentarily expected.” In the words of James MacGregor Burns, “India and Australia lay open to invasion.” As late as mid-October, with MacArthur and the Marine Corps starting their side-by-side drives northward, the General warned the President: “If we are defeated in the Solomons . . . the entire Southwest Pacific will be in gravest danger.” He asked that America’s “entire resources” be diverted to the southern Pacific.28

  Actually the Japanese themselves were uncertain about what their next moves should be. They had never anticipated such dazzling successes. At the time of Pearl Harbor they had expected to lose a quarter of their naval strength in their first offensives. Instead they had won their new imperial empire at the cost of less than twenty-five thousand tons of shipping. The largest Nipponese warship to go down had been a destroyer. Never in history had military skill, speed, and daring gained so much. Not only had the emperor’s forces acquired enough petroleum and other raw materials to satisfy their needs indefinitely; they had at the same time denied them to the Allies, and it was doubtful that the war economies of Britain and the United States could survive that deprivation for long. The Japanese believed the war was practically over. Yoshio Kodama, a Nipponese administrative official who managed the exploitation of these raw materials from a Shanghai office, remembers that “each time the Japanese triumphs in the hot southern regions was [sic] announced, the leaders of the Japanese army and navy in Shanghai held banquets and feted victory. I believe that it was the same in Japan proper. While a large number of Japanese were fighting at the risk of their lives in the front lines, the Japanese people on the home front, drunk with temporary victory, had forgotten all thought of the heavy sacrifices involved in these triumphs.”29

  Kodama recalls that the mobs, who were wasting their time “in foolish dilly-dallying,” kept shouting, “Banzai Tojo,” not realizing that the key figure was, not Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, but Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, a former Harvard student whose brilliant mind and powerful will dominated the emperor’s naval advisers. In the United States Yamamoto had learned to play poker and roulette. Since then he had become a confirmed gambler, both with money and with men. After the destruction of the Allied fleet in the Battle of the Java Sea on March 1, Yamamoto and his fellow admirals decided that the Japanese goals at the outbreak of war had been too modest. They wanted to conquer Australia first, skirting the Great Barrier Reef and landing five divisions on the continent’s heavily populated eastern coast. Then, with Australia subdued, they proposed to seize Hawaii and invade India. Tojo was interested in the first step; he had been chagrined at MacArthur’s escape from the Philippines, and he knew the General would attempt to use Australia as a springboard for counterattacks. But he and the imperial army felt that Yamamoto’s more extravagant schemes were too reckless. Tension between the services was even greater in Tokyo than in Washington, and the great admiral settled for a temporary compromise. He believed that if he gained limited objectives—and he never doubted that he could do it—Hirohito’s generals would agree to bolder casts of the dice.30

  Possessing a mighty armada, he planned two devastating strokes. Vice Admiral Takeo Takagi, the victor of Java Sea, would subdue the perimeter of islands north and east of Australia. Then Yamamoto himself would capture Midway, which would become a stepping-stone to Hawaii, from which he could move on the California coast. Takagi’s first major enterprise, “Operation Mo,” was to capture New Guinea’s Port Moresby, on the Coral Sea. All New Guinea would inevitably fall once Moresby had been taken. From Moresby, amphibious forces could infiltrate northern Australia while Japanese marines seized Fiji, Samoa, and New Caledonia. The continent would then be blockaded. The Australians could be either defeated in battle or starved into submission. As a prelude to Operation Mo, on May 3 Takagi’s men occupied Tulagi, one of the minor Solomon Islands, lying just twenty miles off the north shore of a larger island which the Japanese
called Gadaru-kanaru and which the world would later know as Guadalcanal. While Mo’s engineers began constructing a seaplane base on Tulagi—news of this move was radioed to Australia by British coconut planters who had enlisted as coast watchers, and were hiding in the jungle—Takagi’s main force sailed from the huge new Japanese base at Rabaul, on New Britain, the largest island in the Bismarck Archipelago. They were accompanied by transports packed with Japanese infantrymen, and their destination was Moresby.31

  Anyone trying to come to grips with the geography of the Southwest Pacific must start with New Guinea. The world’s second largest island (second to Greenland), it is a roadless and largely trackless fastness which sprawls fifteen hundred miles, east to west, directly above Australia. On a map it resembles an obese, gigantic buzzard. The head, on the left, points toward Indonesia. The tail, which was of tremendous strategic value to both sides in 1942, is called the Papuan peninsula, or simply Papua. At Papua’s eastern tip lies Milne Bay, about six hundred miles west of Guadalcanal. The villages of Buna and Gona are on the north side of the peninsula. Port Moresby, the jumping-off place for Australia, is on the southern side.

  If you put a clock face in the middle of the Solomon Sea, which Takagi’s fleet was now crossing, Papua is situated at eight o’clock. Rabaul is at eleven o’clock. The Solomon Islands run from one o’clock (Bougainville) to four o’clock (Guadalcanal). New Caledonia is in the direction of five o’clock, but far off the clock face. The Coral Sea is at six o’clock. Below the Coral Sea, to the left, is the Great Barrier Reef and Australia’s eastern coast.

  Glancing at the map, one might assume that the easiest way to capture Moresby would be to land troops at Buna and lead them across the Papuan peninsula to their objective. What the map does not show is that the Owen Stanley Range, with the highest and wettest jungles in the world, forms a mountainous spine running down the length of the peninsula. That is why Takagi’s force was coming by sea. If he could put his troops ashore at Port Moresby he would win a tremendous victory, because at that time the Moresby outpost was weakly held by frightened, inexperienced Australian militia. Once they had been routed, the Japanese could leap across the Coral Sea to the militiamen’s homeland.32

  Takagi didn’t make it. Thanks to American cryptographers, the enemy’s code had been broken. In later years MacArthur loved to tell the story of how his aircraft had first spotted the pagodalike Japanese masts, and since the Coral Sea battle of May 7-8, 1942, took place in his theater, he issued the communiques,leading Americans at home to assume that he had directed it. In reality, his land-based bombers played a minor role. This was largely a navy show. The first electrifying news of what was happening came in a radio message from Lieutenant Commander Robert Dixon, the leader of a scout bomber squadron. In his cockpit he cried: “Scratch one flattop! Dixon to carrier. Scratch one flattop!” He and his men had sunk the Japanese light carrier Ryukaku. In the melee that followed, the first naval engagement in which opposing fleets never sighted each other, two other enemy carriers were damaged. Japanese planes sank more American ships—the Lexington, a tanker, and a destroyer—giving them a tactical victory, but the Americans had won the strategic victory, because Takagi turned back to Rabaul. The first enemy thrust at Moresby had failed.33

  Three weeks later Yamamoto’s attempt to seize Midway was thwarted in an even more significant engagement, again with an invaluable assist from U.S. code-breakers. Historians have concluded that this was the turning point of the Pacific war, but neither side thought so at the time. Japanese confidence was undiminished; Kodama recalls that his countrymen’s “stupidity was continued thoughtlessly by a large number of Japanese people even after the Combined Fleet of the Japanese Navy had been destroyed.” The dupes included Hirohito, Yamamoto, Tojo, and their staffs, who were confident that they could control the Coral Sea and keep MacArthur out of New Guinea. To be sure, four days after Midway, Imperial General Headquarters ordered a two-month postponement of the invasions of Fiji, Samoa, and New Caledonia, but as Stanley L. Falk writes, “By now the Japanese controlled most of the Southwest Pacific. They held an area from Singapore through the Indies to the Solomons. And they continued to press forward. A repulse in the naval and air battle of the Coral Sea and a punishing defeat at Midway a month later failed to halt them. By summer they were preparing air bases in the lower Solomons and simultaneously driving . . . toward Port Moresby . . . little more than 300 miles across the Coral Sea from Australia.”34

  Certainly the Allies thought that the enemy’s momentum was as great as ever. Darwin, which had been the first Australian town to be bombed by the Japanese, and which would probably have been the first to meet invasion forces from the sea, was still in deadly peril. The strategic port villages of Lae and Salamaua, on the New Guinea coast northwest of Buna and Gona, had been taken by the foe in March and were being heavily fortified. A fighter strip had been built on Bougainville; another was under construction on Guadalcanal, now Japan’s southernmost outpost. The pattern was clear. The enemy was developing airfields all along the chain of the Solomons, southeast of Rabaul. These would serve as stepping-stones for their Zeros, which would escort Betty and Zeke bombing attacks on the supply line between the United States and Australia. Simultaneously, landing barges would be massed for an attack on Australia itself. The only question was whether the Japanese would strike directly at Darwin, to their southwest, or first protect their flank with fresh assaults on Moresby, to their southeast. MacArthur thought that they would again try to take Moresby, and he was right.35

  He had to convince a lot of people. In Washington the Joint Chiefs were absurdly optimistic. On July 2 they ordered the recapture of the Solomons, New Ireland, and New Britain, including Rabaul, objectives which were as unattainable to their field commanders that year as the suburbs of Berlin. Curtin’s military advisers, on the other hand, were defeatist. They continued to be wedded to their Brisbane Line, which would be fixed along the Tropic of Capricorn, actually just above Brisbane. The great western and northern regions of the continent would be sacrificed. Plans had been drawn up to scorch the earth there—destroying military installations, blowing up power plants, and burning docks. MacArthur, obsessed with the need for taking the offensive, told them that passive defense would lead to defeat and that he would resign his commission unless the concept of the Brisbane Line was scrapped. Curtin yielded, but many of his aides despaired, believing the last chance to save the heavily populated eastern coast of Australia had been lost.36

  As both the Japanese and the Allies groped toward one another in the unmapped tropical wilderness, MacArthur moved his headquarters from Melbourne to Brisbane, 1,185 miles closer to the Japanese, on July 20. That evening he, his family, and his staff took over picturesque Lennons Hotel, and in the morning he was at his desk on the eighth floor of the nine-story AMP Building, an insurance building whose underwriters had been evacuated to the south. He had scarcely arrived when Willoughby reported that a scouting plane had sighted a large Japanese troop convoy preparing to leave Rabaul. MacArthur strongly suspected that the transports were headed for Buna and Gona, then held by neither side. Willoughby dismissed the possibility, telling him that there was no evidence to support it. The General nevertheless ordered that an Allied force be assembled to seize the villages and construct a major airfield at Buna. He was too late; the enemy convoy reached there first, and a force of a thousand Australian militia in the area faded into the mountains. Recapturing Buna and Gona would take six months, but the long Allied retreat was about to end. On August 7 the 1st Marine Division waded ashore at Tulagi and Guadalcanal, and when the enemy landed at Milne Bay eighteen days later, MacArthur was ready for them. Anticipating this end-around run toward Moresby, he had set a trap there and armed it with Mideast veterans of the 7th Australian Division. In the ferocious Battle of Milne Bay, Japanese barges were destroyed, a transport sunk, and the enemy infantrymen forced to flee. It was the first time in the war that a Japanese amphibious force had been turned
back after it had established a beachhead. The struggle lasted ten days, and when it was over the victors found the corpses of comrades, captured in the seesaw fighting, who had been tortured and then obscenely mutilated.37

  Other approaches to Port Moresby having failed, the Japanese now attempted the incredible, an offensive over the Owen Stanleys. At first the small rear guard of the digger militiamen, who remained in the range until August 8, assumed that the enemy soldiers climbing toward them were merely patrolling. To their astonishment, massed infantrymen, manhandling mortars, machine guns, and fieldpieces, crept slowly up the slimy, zigzagging, hundred-mile Kokoda Trail. In four weeks Major General Tomitaro Horii’s fourteen thousand men had crossed the raging Kumusi River at Wairopi and struggled through thirteen-thousand-foot Kokoda Pass. Five jungle-trained battalions leapfrogged one another into Isurava village, fifty-five miles from their starting point, and pushed down the precipitous southern slopes toward Imita Ridge and Ioribaiwa, twenty miles from the bluffs around Port Moresby. How many men succumbed in this heroic endeavor will never be known. Many perished in the Kumusi, and others disappeared in quicksand or plunged into gorges. In places the winding trail, a foot wide at most, simply disappeared. It took an hour to cut through a few yards of vegetation. The first man in a file would hack away with a machete until he collapsed of exhaustion; then the second man would pick up the machete and continue, and so on. In that climate the life expectancy of the men who lost consciousness and were left behind was often measured in minutes.38

  MacArthur had sent two of his best brigadiers, Pat Casey and Harold George, to survey the Papuan terrain. They returned to Brisbane shaken. Until now they had assumed that Bataan and Samar were covered with the densest jungle in the world, but New Guinea was unbelievable. They told the General that they didn’t see how human beings could live there, let alone fight there. From the air, whence they had first seen it, Papua’s most striking feature had been the razorback mountain range, stretching down the peninsula like the dorsal vertebrae of some prehistoric monster, its peaks obscured by dark clouds swollen with rain. It wasn’t until they had landed and ventured into the rain forest on steep, slippery, root-tangled trails that the full horror of life there had struck them. Blades of grass seven feet high could lay a man’s hand open as quickly as a scalpel. The jungle was studded with mangrove swamps and thick clumps of bamboo and palms. Often the trail was covered with waist-deep slop. The air reeked with vile odors—the stench of rotting undergrowth and of stink lilies. Little light penetrated the thick matted screens of liana vines overhead, but when the rain stopped and the sun appeared, vast suffocating waves of steam rose from the dank marshes.39