D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

  Fresh troops are going up the track…. The men are bearded to the eyes. Their uniforms are hotch-potches of anything that fits or is warm or affords some protection from the insects….

  In the green half-light, amid the stink of rotten mud and rotting corpses, with the long line of green-clad Australians climbing wearily along the tunnel of the track, you have a noisome, unforgettable picture of the awful horror of this jungle war….

  The Japs have made their stand in the toughest area of the pass through the Owen Stanleys—a terrible terrain of thick mountain timber, great rocks drenched in rain, terrifying precipices and chasms. Often the troops have to make painfully slow progress by clawing with hands and feet at slippery rock faces overlooking sheer drops into the jungle. The almost constant rain or mist adds to the perils of sharp limestone ridges, narrow ledges flanked by chasms, slimy rocks, and masses of slow moving mud.

  In this territory the Japanese are fighting, with a stubborn tenacity that is almost unbelievable, from an elaborate system of prepared positions along every ridge and spur. Churned up by the troops of both armies, the track itself is now knee deep in thick, black mud. For the last ten days no man’s clothing has been dry and they have slept—when sleep was possible—in pouring rain under sodden blankets. Each man carries all his personal equipment, firearms, ammunition supply and five days’ rations. Every hour is a nightmare….

  The Australians have reconquered the Owen Stanley Range. Today, on November 2 [1942], they marched into Kokoda unopposed, through lines of excited natives who brought them great baskets of fruit and decked them with flowers….

  Kokoda, “key to the Owen Stanleys,” has been abandoned by the Japanese without a fight.41

  The Allies trapped the Japanese at the coastal villages of Buna, Gona, and Sanananda. The Americans under Major General Edwin F. Harding concentrated on Buna, while the Australians moved against Gona and Sanananda. At Buna, the Japanese dug in behind massive camouflaged bunkers, fronted by nearly impassable swamps. Under orders from MacArthur at Port Moresby, Harding’s green, poorly equipped infantry regiments, lacking heavy artillery, flamethrowers, or tanks, attacked repeatedly and recklessly and were massacred. With the remaining troops of Harding’s 32nd Division near collapse from hunger, fever, and energy-sapping heat, a frustrated MacArthur replaced Harding with Lieutenant General Robert L. Eichelberger. “Bob, I want you to take Buna, or not come back alive,” MacArthur told him.

  When Eichelberger landed near Buna on December 1 the horrible stink of the coastal swamp told him that he and his army were “prisoners of geography…. We would never get out unless we fought our way out.” The troops were “riddled with malaria, dengue fever, tropical dysentery, and were covered with jungle ulcers.” But Eichelberger quickly found out that “sick men can fight.”42

  Eichelberger was an inspirational leader, but his men could never have held on without supplies flown in over the Owen Stanley Range by MacArthur’s new Air Force chief, Major General George C. Kenney, one of the greatest air commanders of the war. On December 9, the Australians broke through and took Gona; then Eichelberger, with Australian reinforcements, reopened the assault on Buna.

  “It was a sly and sneaky kind of combat,” Eichelberger wrote in his memoirs, “which never resembled the massive and thunderous operations in Europe, where tank battalions were pitted against tank battalions and armies the size of city populations ponderously moved and maneuvered. The Pacific was a different war. In New Guinea, when the rains came, wounded men might drown before the litter bearers found them. Many did. No war is a good war, and death ignores geography. But out here I was convinced, as were my soldiers, that death was pleasanter in the Temperate Zone.”43

  TROOPS OF THE ARMY’S 41ST DIVISION PINNED DOWN ON A BEACH IN NEW GUINEA (SC).

  In jungle fighting, troops didn’t bother to build elaborate trenches; the daily rains would have filled them up. And the fighting was “informal,” reported Yank correspondent Sergeant Dave Richardson:

  WHEN AMERICANS, AUSTRALIANS, AND JAPS CLASH, no more than a few dozen men on either side are involved. There’s none of that dramatic “over the top” stuff here. Patrols go out every day to feel out the Jap pillboxes and strong points. Then stronger forces come in to knock them out, supported by mortar and light artillery.

  When the pillboxes and machine-gun nests are gone, more Yanks and Aussies come in to mop up the snipers and occupy the area.

  The Yanks, most of them from Wisconsin’s thickly wooded country, are beating the Japs with tactics borrowed from America’s original fighting men—the Indians. These tactics involve swift, silent movement, sudden thrusts out of jungles. The rifle is the basic weapon.44

  The last fighting around Buna took place in torrential rains that prevented the Japanese from burying their dead. The stench of decomposing bodies stacked in heaps just outside the Japanese lines was overwhelming. “We wondered,” said a corn bat reporter, “how the live Japs had borne it until we discovered they were wearing gas masks as protection against their own dead.”45

  On January 2, 1943, Buna fell, and three weeks later Sanananda was overrun. The cost of the campaign was high for both sides. The Americans suffered 3,000 casualties and almost three times as many men were treated for serious diseases. Japanese and Australian losses were horrifying: 21,000 Australians troops killed, wounded, or treated for disease; 13,000 Japanese killed.

  Eichelberger attributed the victory to sheer stubbornness. “The Japanese morale cracked before ours did.”46 But it cracked only because the besieged enemy ran out of food.

  The diaries of Japanese soldiers found in the enemy’s bunkers and dugouts record the grinding attrition of the battle and slowly changing Japanese perceptions of the American combat soldier. These excerpts, taken from several diaries, follow chronologically the progress of the siege:

  THE ENEMY HAS RECEIVED ALMOST NO training. Even though we fire a shot they present a large portion of their body and look around. Their movements are very slow.

  The enemy has been repulsed by our keen-eyed snipers. In the jungle it seems they fire at any sound, due to illusion. From sundown until about 10 P.M. they fire light machine guns and throw hand grenades recklessly.

  The enemy has become considerably more accurate in firing.

  The nature of the enemy is superior and they excel in firing techniques.

  Artillery raking the area. We cannot hold out much longer. Our nerves are strained; there is a lack of sleep due to the continuous shelling.

  Mess gear is gone because of the terrific mortar fire. Everyone is depressed. Nothing we can do. It is only fate that I am alive today. This may be the place where I shall find my death. I will fight to the last.

  Now we are waiting only for death…. Can’t anything be done? Please God.”47

  In the final stages of the siege, the hemmed-in Japanese ate the flesh of dead enemy soldiers. When hope ran out, they attacked and died rather than surrender. As an Australian reporter wrote: the battle had to be fought until there was “not one Japanese left who was capable of lifting a rifle.”48

  Eichelberger had done the impossible, but MacArthur took complete credit for the victory, even though he had never left his headquarters in Port Moresby, forty minutes away by air. After Buna was taken, Eichelberger wrote with unconcealed wrath: “The great hero went home [to Australia] 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.” Not long after the war, MacArthur approached Eichelberger and said, “Bob, those were great days when you and I were fighting at Buna, weren’t they?” Eichelberger took this as “a warning riot to disclose that he never went to Buna.”49

  Coming just a month before the Japanese evacuation of Guadalcanal, Buna was the first great victory by American ground forces in the Pacific. It gave Kenney air bases from which to attack Japanese strongholds in the region in preparation for a great push toward Rabaul, the center of Japanese power in th
e South Pacific. Guadal canal would be a defensive victory; this was an offensive strike, the beginning of what the troops called “The Hard Way Back.”

  For MacArthur, the victory had personal meaning. “The dead of Bataan will rest easier tonight,” he told reporters after Buna fell.50

  AFRICA AND THE ATLANTIC

  On November 8, 1942, a week before its great naval victory at Guadalcanal, the United States launched its first great land offensive against the German army. An Anglo-American force headed by Lieutenant General Dwight D. Eisenhower landed at Casablanca, on the Atlantic coast of French Morocco, and two other task forces made up of British arid American troops landed at Oran and Algiers on the Mediterranean coast of Algeria. Altogether, 65,000 troops were put ashore in a beautifully synchronized amphibious operation. In a gigantic pincer movement, they would pressure Axis troops from the west while General Bernard Law Montgomery’s British Eighth Army, which had just broken through General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps at El Alamein, barely sixty miles west of Alexandria, Egypt, the gateway to the Suez Canal, came at them from the east.51

  While the converging Allied forces battled the German army in brutal desert warfare, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, together with high-ranking officers of the Anglo-American coalition, met for ten days at Casablanca to plan future military operations. Roosevelt’s chief military advisor, General George Marshall, pushed hard for a 1945 invasion of northwest Europe, the Second Front that Russian premier Joseph Stalin claimed he needed to turn back the Nazi invaders. Churchill thought an invasion of northern France was premature. With thousands of landing boats diverted to the Pacific an adequate invasion fleet had not yet been built, German U-boats were inflicting catastrophic damage on Atlantic convoys headed from America to England and Russia, and the Luftwaffe had air mastery of the skies over Northern Europe. Marshall was persistent, but Britain was then the stronger of the two partners, and Churchill had immense persuasive powers over Roosevelt. The next offensive, it was decided, would be in the Mediterranean the following summer, probably against Sicily and then Italy. As a concession to the Americans and to Admiral King, a larger percentage of the war effort was to be allocated to the Pacific theater. Churchill and Roosevelt also agreed to continue the bombing campaign the Royal Air Force had begun against the cities and industries of the Third Reich, launching a stepped-up, around-the-clock offensive from England by the RAF and the American Eighth Air Force, the British bombing at night and the Americans in daylight.

  At a press conference at the conclusion of the Casablanca Conference. Roosevelt sprang a surprise, announcing that the Allies would demand nothing less from the Axis powers than “unconditional surrender.” It was apparently a spontaneous statement, but Churchill immediately endorsed it, for the two leaders had recently discussed the idea. This meant nothing at the time, as it was made from a position of military weakness, but it was to have huge consequences later in the war when a fully mobilized America had the unrivaled power in both the Pacific and European theaters to back up its bellicose language.

  After the disorganized Americans barely stopped an audacious offensive by Rommel near Kasserine Pass, command of the American II Corps was given to General George S. Patton, with General Omar N. Bradley as his deputy. Patton performed a minor miracle, turning the corps into a crack desert fighting force. Now Montgomery from the south, and Patton from the north, closed in for the kill, beginning the great push that ended in the annihilation of the Axis forces in North Africa and their surrender on May 3, 1943. All Africa was now cleansed of the Axis stain and restored to Allied control.

  That May, the Allies won another huge victory, the Battle of the Atlantic, the life-or-death struggle to prevent German U-boats from severing the ocean lifeline between Britain and her allies, as well her fighting forces around the world, including those in Burma, India, and the South Pacific. In 1942, it had had looked like the Allies might lose the battle for control of the sea lanes. That year the U-boats sank over 1,000 Allied ships in the Atlantic, at a cost of only eighty-six submarines. Later that year, however, a brilliant intelligence coup helped change the course of this desperate sea battle, and of the war itself.

  U-boat captains used sophisticated little Enigma machines, each with a complex system of three rotors and a typewriter-like keyboard, to encode and decode messages. The Germans were confident this message system could not be compromised. But beginning in 1940, British cryptographers operating out of Bletchley Park, a top secret facility near Oxford, began using computer-like machines called “bombes” and Enigma machines and codebooks seized from captured U-boats to break the supposedly unbreakable German naval codes, allowing the British naval office to deflect convoys from prowling U-boat wolf packs. The Germans never learned their code was broken but they kept changing it to insure its security, making it necessary to continue raiding U-boats to capture Enigma machines and codebooks. All the while, the carnage continued at an alarming rate.

  Then came the most sudden and dramatic turnaround of World War II. In May 1943, the Allies gained supremacy in the Atlantic, sinking forty-one U-boats, more than they had sunk in the first three years of the war. Using small escort carriers, fast destroyers, and long-range bombers and other planes equipped with sophisticated radar and homing torpedoes, Allied hunter-killer teams forced Admiral Karl Doenitz, commander of the German submarine service, to pull his boats from the North Atlantic and put them in safer waters.52 “We had lost the Battle of the Atlantic,” Doenitz privately admitted in May 1945. “Black May,” the German would call it.53

  From this point on, the Allies would apply ever-growing American industrial might with crushing impact, on land, on sea, and in the air. That May, after initial successes unlike any in modern warfare, both Germany and Japan had been stopped. Now the Allies, building up for the kill, would begin the great drives toward Tokyo and Berlin. “The age of managerial, organizational war was in full flex,” James Jones recalls of that May 1943, “almost without having realized it had been born.” 54

  In a dispatch he filed just after Tunisia was won in the spring of 1945, war correspondent Ernie Pyle wrote that there were days in 1942 when he sat alone in his tent “and gloomed with the desperate belief that it was actually possible for us to lose this war.” The home front didn’t seem to be contributing with full energy and the raw GIs he loved seemed no match for the battle-toughened Germans. But then American production went into high gear. The world’s greatest automobile society stopped making cars and transformed its auto plants into production machines for the making of every imaginable instrument of mobile warfare—tanks, planes, ships, landing gear, and mobile artillery that Eisenhower, Patton, MacArthur, Halsey, and Nimitz began using with devastating effect. And after going through the hell of combat initiation, GIs and Marines became calloused, hard-cursing warriors whom their folks back home would hardly have recognized.

  “Apparently it takes a country like America about two years to become wholly at war,” Pyle wrote. “We had to go through that transition period of letting loose of life as it was, and then live the new war life so long that it finally became the normal life to us.” America had finally become “a war nation.” While Pyle was not sure how it would happen or how long it would take, “no longer do I have any doubts at all that we shall win.”55

  On Guadalcanal, John Hersey had come to the same conclusion months before this. But neither reporter, embedded with the fighting men he was covering, could give his readers the big picture. Along with Guadalcanal and Buna, El Alamein and Stalingrad, Midway and the Battle of the Atlantic, Tunisia “clearly signified to friend and foe alike,” Eisenhower wrote later, “that the Allied nations were at last upon the march.”56

  Amphibious Advance

  THE ALEUTIANS

  With Guadalcanal secured, the United States sent an Army amphibious force in May 1943 to retake two barren islands far to the north, in the Bering Sea sealing grounds off Alaska. During the Battle of Midway, a Japanese diver
sionary fleet had attacked and occupied Attu and Kiska in the Aleutians, the long string of islands between Asia and the American continent, on the roof of the Pacific. This occupation, by which the enemy hoped to block any American assault against the Kuriles and northern Japan, caused a surge of concern in the United States. Alaska and the Pacific Northwest now seemed vulnerable to an enemy invasion. These fears were unfounded, but America wanted to finish the business the Japanese had started, expelling them from U.S. territory.

  On May 11, the Army’s 7th Infantry Division, which had recently undergone amphibious training, began landing on the forbidding Arctic landscape of Attu. Seventeen days later the cornered and starving Japanese, outnumbered five to one, staged a desperate banzai charge, screaming that they would drink American blood. The few hundred who survived the slaughter pressed hand grenades to their chests and pulled the pins. The Americans buried some 2,400 Japanese and took only twenty-nine prisoners, but they suffered an appalling 1,700 casualties. Attu turned out to be one the bloodiest island battles of the Pacific war in proportion to the number of men engaged. Time-Life correspondent Robert Sherrod was there and saw this “primitive, man-against-man fighting” as an ominous harbinger of the approaching island warfare in the Central Pacific.1

  Three months later, American and Canadian forces invaded Kiska, but discovered that the entire Japanese garrison had evacuated under the cover of night and heavy fog. A report said they had left only a few dogs and some hot coffee. “What does this mean?” Navy Secretary Frank Knox asked the irascible Admiral Ernest King, who was with him when this report reached Washington. “The Japanese are very clever,” replied King. “Their dogs can brew coffee.”2