In fact, Eichelberger said, “Everyone [at the front] feels that the Sanananda campaign is going to be every bit as difficult, if not more so, than the Buna campaign,” and afterward he wrote Miss Em: “General MacArthur announced his return to Australia by saying there was nothing left in Papua but some ‘mopping up’ at Sanananda. This was just an excuse to get home as at that time there was no indication of any crackup of the Japs at Sanananda.” In another letter Eichelberger complained that the General “didn’t prove much help—his offices had wonderful aerial photographs . . . taken early in December which gave the details of the Jap positions. These appeared in a later report but, in spite of our many requests, did not reach us during the fighting.” Indeed, Eichelberger observed, the commander in chief’s “knowledge of details was so faulty that his directives to me, e.g. a letter of December 24th [that] spoke of attacking ‘by regiments, not companies, by thousands, not hundreds’ indicated that he knew nothing of the jungle and how one fights there—that he had no detailed knowledge of how our forces were divided into many corridors by swamps.”103
Although MacArthur honored him as promised, and though his admiration for the General’s later strategic feats was unbounded, Eichelberger’s resentment over Buna was acute at the time. In a guarded reference on January 13, he told his wife that “I was always the senior American commander north of the mountains, if you get what I mean.” MacArthur, in short, never saw the battlefield. Six days later the field commander wrote bluntly that the commander in chief hadn’t visited the front once “to see at first hand the difficulties our troops were up against,” and later he wrote bitterly that “the great hero went home without seeing Buna before, during or after the fight while permitting press articles from his GHQ to say he was leading his troops in battle. MacArthur . . . just stayed over at Moresby 40 minutes away and walked the floor. I know this to be a fact.” After the war Douglas Southall Freeman, a biographer of Lee, asked Eichelberger, “Just when did General MacArthur move his headquarters to Buna?” Eichelberger dodged the question, and subsequently the General said to him, “Bob, those were great days when you and I were fighting at Buna, weren’t they?” and laughed. Eichelberger interpreted this as “a warning not to disclose that he never went to Buna. ”104
The fact that he did not is baffling. In Brisbane he told Philip LaFollette that he would never follow the example of those World War I commanders who had clung to their châteaux in rear areas while flinging “millions of men to their slaughter in the stupidity of trench warfare.” Yet in Papua he did something very close to that. Toward the end of the fighting, when the rains subsided, Kenney flew in two divisions of infantry, with their light artillery, across the Owen Stanleys, and while this was not, as he claimed, “the first air envelopment in history”—German parachutists had invaded Crete in the spring of 1941—it demonstrates that the commander in chief could have visited the front on a few minutes’ notice. The fact is that Eichelberger pulled his chestnuts out of the fire in the third week of January, when the last of Nippon’s fifteen thousand defenders were liquidated at Sanananda Point. After the war Eisenhower told a group of New Guinea veterans that he had never heard of Sanananda. No wonder; MacArthur’s communiques had casually mentioned it as a “mopping-up operation. “ Eichelberger wrote that “after the unutterable boredom and danger and discomfort of fighting at the front,” the typical GI “expected kudos when he was relieved. It was disconcerting to find out that he had only been ‘mopping up.’ Was that why his outfit had taken its casualties? If there is another war, I recommend that the military, and the correspondents, and everyone else concerned, drop the phrase ‘mopping up’ from their vocabularies. It is not a good enough phrase to die for.”105
MacArthur was lucky: not only was the fighting far from over when he returned to Brisbane; it could have been prolonged for weeks if the enemy had chosen to contest every foot of ground. Instead Hirohito’s chiefs of staff decided to abandon both Papua and Guadalcanal. Since the last of their troops on Guadalcanal weren’t evacuated until the first week of February, MacArthur, thanks to Eichelberger and his men, had dealt the Japanese their first major setback. Then the General stunned his victorious troops by announcing that “the utmost care was taken for the conservation of our forces, with the result that probably no campaign in history against a thoroughly prepared and trained army produced such complete and decisive results with so low an expenditure of life and resources.” That was, quite simply, preposterous. Papua had in fact been bloody. On Guadalcanal American troops had lost 1,100 killed and 4,350 wounded. The cost of Buna-Gona-Sanananda had been 3,300 killed and 5,500 wounded. If the differences in the size of attacking forces is taken into account, the loss of life on Papua had been three times as great as Guadalcanal’s. Later, MacArthur’s brilliant maneuvering would produce the war’s shortest casualty lists, but except for Bataan and Corregidor, this was his darkest hour.106
In Tokyo the emperor told his war minister, Hajime Sugiyama, “The fall of Buna is regrettable, but the officers and men fought well.” He added, “Give enough thought to your plans so that Lae and Salamaua don’t become another Guadalcanal.” The ports of Lae and Salamaua, about 150 miles above Buna, were obvious jump-off ports for Cape Gloucester, the western tip of New Britain, the great island on the other side of Dampier and Vitiaz straits. Rabaul, on New Britain’s eastern tip, was an obsession for both sides that year. MacArthur was taking dead aim on the approaches to it. He had already ordered his engineers to pave landing strips at Buna, to support raids on the two ports, on Nadzab, just above Lae, and on Finschhafen, at the western end of New Guinea’s Huon Peninsula. Not only was the General no longer a prisoner of Papuan geography; he was now in charge of all Allied forces in both the Southwest and South Pacific. With the fall of Guadalcanal, Halsey’s remaining objectives lay in MacArthur’s theater, and the Joint Chiefs had placed him under the General’s strategic command, where, Halsey said, he was proud to serve. The admiral and his men had become, in effect, MacArthur’s right wing. Halsey had already occupied the undefended Russell Islands, a part of the Solomon Islands, on February 21. This was intended to be a prelude to the admiral’s advance up the long ladder of the Solomons toward Rabaul, which would then be trapped between Halsey on the east and MacArthur on the west.107
Sugiyama, realizing that Lae and Salamaua were in peril, decided to strengthen their tactical position by sending three thousand of the emperor’s soldiers to seize an airstrip at Wau, thirty-two miles southwest of Salamaua in the mountainous hinterland. MacArthur was ready for him; he airlifted in an Australian brigade, which routed the enemy four hundred yards from the field. Then Imperial General Headquarters ordered that a fleet carrying massive reinforcements sail from Rabaul to Lae. MacArthur anticipated that, too. If he could control the seas north of New Guinea, he told his staff, he needn’t plow through the fifteen hundred miles of jungle that lay between him and the staging areas necessary for a successful return to the Philippines. Therefore he had decided to use war’s newest weapon, the airplane, to follow one of its oldest principles, the isolation of the battlefield. He ordered Kenney to watch for the next front of heavy weather. When it came, he predicted, the enemy would attempt to send a big convoy from Rabaul across the Bismarck Sea and through Dampier Strait to Lae. On the afternoon of March 1 a scouting B-24 sighted packed transports, shepherded by warships, steaming westward above New Britain. During the next two days waves of B-25S, employing new skip-bombing tactics (like skipping a flat stone over water), sank at least eight transports and four of their escorts—all of the convoy, in fact, except four destroyers. The few Japanese who reached New Guinea from the lost ships had to swim ashore. Henceforth Nipponese strengthening of the garrison confronting MacArthur would be limited to reinforcements which could be transported there on barges or in submarines.108
The General was at Lennon’s during the Bismarck Sea battle, and Kenney awoke him at all hours to relay reports from the bombers. Kenney said afterward, “
I had never seen him so jubilant.” He said, “Nice work, Buccaneer,” over and over. Then he issued a triumphant communique and held a press conference at which he declared that control of the sea “no longer depends solely or even perhaps primarily upon naval power, but upon air power operating from land bases held by ground troops. . . . The first line of Australian defense is our bomber line.” This deeply offended the U.S. Navy, which had fought, and was still fighting, a series of historic surface engagements in the waters east of Buna. The Pentagon launched an investigation and challenged MacArthur’s extensive claims of destruction. Kenney sensibly commented, “Just how many ships were actually sunk in the Battle of the Bismarck Sea may never be known . . . . I personally am satisfied that around twenty vessels went to the bottom, but the actual number is unimportant and the whole controversy is ridiculous. The important fact remains that the Jap attempt to reinforce and resupply their key position at Lae resulted in complete failure and disaster.”109
The victory had been pivotal—MacArthur later called it “the decisive aerial engagement” in his theater—and among those who appreciated its significance was Winston Churchill, who cabled him: “My warmest congratulations to you on the annihilation of the Japanese convoy. . . . The United Nations owe you a deep debt of gratitude for your inspiring leadership during these difficult days.” From time to time the General received similar messages from the British prime minister, who never missed an opportunity to remind him that the operations in the Southwest Pacific were part of a global design. The General needed reminding; all theater commanders did, though he, perhaps, more than any other.110
Worldwide U.S. and U.K. priorities in men and materiel were being determined by the Allied Combined Chiefs of Staff under the supervision of Churchill and Roosevelt. They met often. If 1943 was the Year of the Sheep in Japan, John Toland has pointed out, it was “the year of the conference for Japan’s adversaries, and other conferences were scheduled for the future. Assembling in Casablanca, Cairo, Tehran, and Quebec, in meetings to which Churchill assigned such grand code names as “Trident,” “Quadrant,” and “Sextant,” the political leaders toasted one another and contemplated what the prime minister called “the mellow light of victory” while their generals and admirals moved pins on enormous wall maps, exchanged intelligence reports, and argued over who should do what to whom, and when.111
The transcripts of these discussions repeat the same themes over and over. The British want the Americans to limit their Pacific objectives until Germany has been defeated, meanwhile sending every rifle and every rifleman that can be spared to Europe. George Marshall and Admiral King think that the English are underestimating the Japanese; they want the Anglo-American commitment in the Pacific doubled, from 15 percent of Allied resources to 30 percent. The Americans propose a twin offensive against Dai Nippon, with Nimitz and his marines driving across the central Pacific, seizing Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands first and then leaping westward to Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Guam, Saipan, and Peleliu, while MacArthur conquers the Bismarck Archipelago and the great land bridge of New Guinea. Both thrusts will converge on the Philippines; the question of whether Luzon or Formosa will be invaded after that will be decided later. The British reluctantly consent. Then the Americans disagree among themselves. King wants the emphasis on Nimitz’s central Pacific; Marshall thinks it should be on MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific. Staff officers representing the two Pacific commanders have flown in, and they are invited to state their cases. Nimitz’s representative says that the waters around New Guinea are too crowded for America’s growing fleet of aircraft carriers, that they would be exposed to attacks from land-based Japanese bombers. (Though he doesn’t say so, everyone knows that the navy has another motive: to keep the carriers out of the General’s hands.) Then it is Sutherland’s turn. He argues that the Southwest Pacific route will deprive the enemy of his raw materials, and that MacArthur believes that capturing the heavily fortified islands in Nimitz’s path will be a bloody business. As events will later demonstrate, MacArthur is right, but he has sent a poor spokesman. Sutherland has a gift for offending people; Marshall calls him “the chief insulter of the Navy.” Preference goes to the central Pacific, a heavy blow to MacArthur. But even Nimitz is dissatisfied with his share. The war against Japan winds up near the bottom of the Combined Chiefs’ list of concerns, below the second-front buildup in Britain, the strategic bombing of Germany, aid to Russia, the fighting around the Mediterranean, and the struggle against Nazi U-boats.112
Actually the two drives in the Pacific became mutually supporting, each of them protecting the other’s flank: Nimitz, for example, diverted enemy sea power which would otherwise have pounced on MacArthur from the east. Their strategies differed—MacArthur’s was to move land-based bombers forward in successive bounds to achieve local air superiority, while Nimitz’s was predicated on carrier air power protecting amphibious landings on key islands, which then became stepping-stones through the enemy’s defensive perimeters—but that was because they were dealing with different landscapes and seascapes.113
The performance of both theater commanders was stunning, and the best evidence of their success is found in enemy documents seized after the war. Wau had been the last Japanese attempt to add new territory to Hirohito’s empire. Their tide had begun to ebb, and some of them suspected it. The defeats of Papua, Guadalcanal, Wau, and the Bismarck Sea had convinced them that they were overextended. The commanders in Imperial General Headquarters vowed to hold their present positions until the spring of 1944, while their fleet was being built up to its prewar strength and their warplane production was trebled. They were reconciled to drawing in their horns then and eventually shortening their defensive arc by abandoning most of eastern New Guinea, the Bismarcks, the Solomons, the Gilberts, and the Marshalls (Kwajalein and Eniwetok). Under what was called the “New Operational Policy,” this would create the “absolute national defense sphere,” essential to the fulfillment of Japanese war aims. Now, in 1943, their Southwest Pacific perimeter extended from Timor through Lae, New Britain, and Santa Isabel and New Georgia in the central Solomons. They believed that their multi-tiered defense would hold, but they were on the defensive; the initiative had clearly passed to the Americans and Australians. Nimitz with his fast carriers and MacArthur with his triphibious thrusts would be moving in tandem, threatening to pierce the enemy’s lines and outflank his major bases again and again.114
By the late spring of 1943, the General probably knew more about the geography of New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomon Islands than any other man before or since. He had familiarized himself with the area’s coral reefs, its tidal tables, its coves and inlets, its mountain passes, and its rainy seasons; he could pinpoint existing airstrips and land shelves where new strips could be hacked out of the kunai grass; he could identify targets within the range of P-38s (which could fly 2,260 miles on a tank of gas), P-40s (2,800 miles), and B-17s (1,850 miles carrying a 3,000-pound bomb load). In addition, MacArthur understood the enemy: the strength and disposition of his forces, his supply lines, his capacity for reinforcement, the quality of his equipment (high), his morale (higher), and his courage (highest of all). The Nipponese 7.7-millimeter Arisaka rifle, with a muzzle velocity of 2,500 feet per second, was a superb infantry weapon. So were the 50-millimeter and 81-millimeter mortars, the 6.5-millimeter Nambu light machine gun, and the 7.7-millimeter heavy machine gun, a modification of the deadly French Hotchkiss. On the other hand, the puzzling Japanese failure to take full economic advantage of the islands they had captured puzzled the Americans and annoyed Yoshio Kodama, who fumed in his Shanghai office. And none of them could fathom MacArthur. They simply didn’t know how to cope with his fluidity and flexibility in the campaigns after Buna—his feinting, parrying, shifting, and striking where blows were least expected. In Papua he had been preoccupied with the nuts and bolts of fighting: shifting troops, extending communications, bringing up Long Toms. A skilled tactician like Eichelberger could h
andle that sort of thing as well as he could. The General’s gifts were those of a strategist, an architect of warfare. There, quite simply, he had no peer in any World War II theater, in any army.
As he saw it, his war was a war of supply, protected by air. “Victory,” he told his staff, “depends on the advancement of the bomber line.” To him, warplanes were simply an extension of artillery firepower. He was always looking for islands which could support airdromes, and once he got one of them, he would order Pat Casey’s engineers to pave it. B-24 barrages, protected by short-range fighters, were the essential forerunners of his land offensive. Pushing forward fighter strips in the rugged country, he would vault slowly toward his objectives, always warning Kenney to remember the lessons of Clark Field and hold reserve squadrons of pursuit planes in readiness, in the event that the enemy suddenly moved westward toward MacArthur’s own supply lines.115
In early 1943 his goal was still the seizure of Rabaul, with its bulging munitions warehouses, its naval anchorage, its four great airfields, its garrison of 100,000 annealed Japanese infantrymen, and its huge depot at Kavieng, on nearby New Ireland. Rabaul was the key to the Bismarck barrier. Capturing New Guinea’s Huon Peninsula would tear a big hole in that barrier, and subjugating Cape Gloucester and Rabaul would open the Vitiaz Strait between New Britain and Huon, permitting him to break through into the Bismarck Sea and start the long drive back to the Philippines. That was a distant dream then. Achieving it depended upon the GIs, diggers, and marines who had to knock out vital links in the enemy’s chain of defenses so that Casey’s bulldozers, followed by Kenney’s crews, could go to work. Acquisition of bomber bases had been Halsey’s goal in taking the Russells, and when MacArthur was joined by Walter Krueger—who had been the army’s war-plans chief when MacArthur was Chief of Staff, and who, with Eichelberger, would be one of the General’s two American field commanders—Krueger was told to prepare for a similar mission off the New Guinea coast.116
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