Kenney called on MacArthur the next day just before noon, and for more than an hour heard a heated lecture on what a mess the air force and AAF/SWPA was in. “I have no use for anyone in the organization,” MacArthur said flatly, from Brett on down (Brett had shown Kenney into MacArthur’s office but refused to stay around). Brett in particular had been “disloyal,” and MacArthur used terms like “scatterbrain” to describe most of his subordinates.
Kenney finally stepped in. “I’m here to take over the air show,” he said, “and I intend to run it. If it’s a matter of loyalty, if for any reason I can’t work with you or be loyal to you, I’ll tell you myself and will do everything in my power to get relieved.”
MacArthur was taken aback. Then he grinned, put his hand on Kenney’s shoulder, and said, “I think we’re going to get along all right.”1
They settled into a more comfortable talk, as MacArthur gave Kenney his views on the course of the war.
He thought the entire Europe-first strategy was a mistake. “He feels Washington has let him down and will continue to do so,” Kenney wrote.
“In general, he acted quite depressed over the whole show,” especially now that the Japanese had stolen a march on him at Buna. But Kenney had to admit, MacArthur “looked good” for a man of sixty-three.2
Kenney’s private meeting with his predecessor was predictably bitter.
Brett “was almost boastful when he told me he hadn’t spoken to MacArthur for a month and only to Sutherland on the telephone.” Brett was particularly furious with Sutherland, whom he described as “primarily an egotist with a smatter of knowledge pertaining to air operations.” He warned Kenney that MacArthur was prone to making all operational decisions himself without consulting with any other services chiefs.
“General MacArthur has a wonderful personality when he desires to turn it on,” Brett told him. “He is, however, bound up in himself. I don’t believe he has a single thought for anybody who is not useful to him.” Above all, MacArthur didn’t understand airpower or the miserable conditions in which his men, particular his airmen, were forced to fight.
“The lads at the front,” Brett concluded gloomily, “are beginning to wonder when this is going to end.”3
It was Kenney’s intention to turn this situation around, starting with the morale among his aircrews. He had met them at Port Moresby for the first time, and found the whole setup “chaotic” and morale at rock bottom.
All the mission briefings were being done by Australian personnel, whom the Americans often couldn’t understand, and no group or squadron organization was in place, and there were no formation leaders. Weather reports were prepared from the previous year’s data; meals were cooked in the open without mosquito netting or any other pest control, so it wasn’t surprising that after two months’ duty most units had to be relieved because of losses from malaria and dysentery.4
When he got back to Brisbane, Kenney had a two-hour sitdown with MacArthur. He outlined his impression of what was wrong and how he intended to correct it, both in Australia and in New Guinea. But he would need authority to make heads roll, he said.
“Go ahead,” MacArthur told him. “You have my enthusiastic approval.”
In Kenney’s mind, his number one mission was “take out Jap air strength until we own the air over New Guinea.” There was no possibility of checkmating the advance on Port Moresby, or kicking the Japanese off the island, until air superiority had been established.
“There’s no use talking about playing across the street until we [get] the Nips off the front lawn,” Kenney said, and MacArthur again agreed. The effort against the Japanese airdromes on New Guinea had to be continuous until the runways were so damaged that “they even stop filling in the holes.” That meant almost round-the-clock bombing, a much bolder and more comprehensive operation than the air force had tried so far. Six B-17s per mission seemed to be the current limit. Kenney wanted to increase that to sixteen or eighteen, or more.
MacArthur “looked as though he was about to kiss me,” Kenney wrote in his diary. “I don’t care how your gang looks,” was how MacArthur wrapped up their meeting, referring to complaints about the sloppy appearance of the air force boys. He could remember similar complaints about the men of the Forty-second Rainbow, including from Pershing himself.
“I don’t care whether they raise the devil or what they do,” he continued, “as long as they will fight, shoot down Japs, and put bombs on the target.”5
Kenney and his flyboys. MacArthur was going to need them if he was going to turn the battle for the Kokoda Trail around.
—
He was finally getting help in the fighting department, as the first experienced Australian units began to move up into the line. By the end of September, Rowell had a formidable force with which to hit the Japanese, consisting of the Australian Sixth and Seventh Divisions, who relieved the battered regular troops who had been holding the Japanese back, along with two other brigades and the U.S. 128th Regiment, the first Americans to go into battle. Other units from the Thirty-second and Forty-first Divisions were on the way. On October 1 MacArthur declared it was time to go on the offensive. The next day he visited New Guinea for the first time, and to the commander of the Australian Sixteenth Brigade, John E. Lloyd, spearheading the assault, MacArthur said, “Lloyd, by some act of God, your brigade has been chosen for this job. The eyes of the Western World are upon you and your men. Good luck and don’t stop.”
A worried General Blamey warned MacArthur that in a land without roads or any form of wheeled transport, his 7,000 troops and 3,900 native bearers on the ground would have to be supplied by air.6 Kenney assured him he now could do that. His bombers had been pounding Japanese airfields on a regular basis, first at Vunakanau on August 7 with the sixteen B-17s that Kenney had promised. He had also convinced General Marshall back in Washington that he should reorganize the existing personnel, planes, and facilities in Australia and New Guinea as the Fifth Air Force, with the units at Moresby under the one air force officer who had impressed Kenney, Brigadier General Ennis Whitehead, serving as commander of the Fifth Air Force Advanced Echelon.7
Kenney was also experimenting with new bombing techniques, like the use of fragmentation bombs attached to parachutes, the brainchild of an eccentric former Philippine Air Lines pilot named Irvin Gunn, known to the crews at the base at Charters Towers near Brisbane as “Pappy” on account of his very advanced age of thirty-three. Gunn would introduce other important innovations with the two-engine bombers like the A-20 and B-25, such as multiple packages of .50-caliber machine guns for ground strafing, which would eventually make the Fifth Air Force one of the most fearsome tools in MacArthur’s arsenal.
Kenney himself was proving to be a fearsome tool. On August 4 he had a showdown with Sutherland. “I’m running the Air Force because I’m the most competent man in the Pacific,” he said in an explosive meeting after the chief of staff rescinded some orders Kenney had made. Kenney even pulled out a piece of paper and made a pencil mark. “This piece of paper represents what I know about air operations,” he went on. “[T]hat dot represents what you know.”8
The two men were shouting at each other when Kenney finally said, “Let’s go in the next room and see General MacArthur and get this straightened out.” At that, Sutherland backed down, confirming Kenney’s suspicion that he was an interfering bully and nothing more. From that point on it was clear who was in charge of what the Fifth Air Force did, and who was not.
The Fifth Air Force now began a massive supply operation from Australia to the troops along the Kokoda Trail—some 50,000 pounds a day. The soldiers never got all they wanted; they complained when drops went astray or when enemy planes appeared and the unarmed C-47s and DC-3s had to bank away without dropping their loads of food, medicine, and ammunition. But in the end the air supply train from Brisbane was a game changer, as was Kenney’s steady bomber offensive.
After thirty days of hard, often savage fighting, the Aus
tralians had pushed the Japanese back up the Kokoda Trail as far as Eora Creek, joined by the American Thirty-second Division pushing up from trails to the south. The last fight in the mountains was just below Kokoda, where some 600 Japanese were killed and their commander, General Horii, drowned trying to cross the treacherous Kumusi River.
Kokoda fell on November 2, and the first of Kenney’s supply planes was able to land on the airstrip there two days later.
As MacArthur’s pincers began to close, the Japanese survivors were steadily falling back to a tiny triangle of villages: Gona, Sanananda, and Buna itself. MacArthur ordered the new Australian commander, General Edmund Herring (MacArthur had preemptorily ordered the removal of General Rowell, probably unfairly, for not being aggressive enough), to prepare an offensive on the Buna beachhead for November 15. Lloyd’s Sixteenth Brigade was slated to take Sanananda; the Twenty-fifth Brigade was to take Gona; and Buna, the southernmost Japanese position, was assigned to the Americans, under Major General Edwin Harding, with the 128th Regiment advancing north along the coast with the 126th Regiment on its left. They had arrived by air, flown in by Kenney over Sutherland’s objections, on October 19—proof that the Fifth Air Force could not only supply MacArthur’s army by air, but move them where he needed them as well.
On November 19 the GIs of the Thirty-second Division moved toward Buna, expecting to find maybe 500 starving and battle-weary Japanese defenders. Instead, they ran into 3,500 fresh and battle-seasoned veterans, who poured out a torrent of fire that cut down the Americans where they stood.
What no one knew was that the Japanese at Buna had been turning every bunker into a veritable fortress, with logs reinforced with concrete and even armor plating sometimes ten or fifteen feet thick, over which natural vegetation had regrown, providing perfect camouflage for the Japanese to bring converging machine-gun fire over the four approaches through a swamp.9
With no covering artillery (Sutherland had decided that transporting guns over the Owen Stanleys was too dangerous, and vetoed General Harding’s request for them), and no flamethrowers, the Thirty-second Division actually had less firepower than MacArthur’s men had had on Bataan. The attack soon ground to a halt. Meanwhile, the Australians fared no better. At Gona the Australian Twenty-fifth Brigade took a heavy mauling at the hands of the Japanese, then ran out of food and ammunition and stopped dead. At Sanananda the Sixteenth Brigade met the same frustrations, with similar casualties. Then the skies opened up and rain poured down on the tired, discouraged troops as they crouched in the mud and swamps and counted their wounded and dead.
Meanwhile, MacArthur had now moved his headquarters to Port Moresby. He set up his staff in Government House, a rambling bungalow with a long veranda where he could pace and think to his heart’s content. He was watching the advance at Buna with intense interest, but also the fighting on and around Guadalcanal, where the American and Japanese navies were engaged in a deadly duel, each striving to cut the other’s ground forces off from all help or relief. MacArthur feared that if Guadalcanal fell and the Japanese could use its airfield for launching bombers and fighters over the New Guinea coast, any hope of driving out the Japanese would vanish.
It made him anxious about the fighting in front of Buna, impatient for victory—and impatient with anyone who threatened not to deliver it.
—
Attempts to resume the attack on Buna the next day were a disaster. Major David Parker, an engineer with the 128th, was equally appalled at how well camouflaged the Japanese were and at the lack of American preparation for a hard, grinding fight. “The first opposition from the enemy…was a surprise and shock to our green troops,” he reported. “The enemy habitually allowed our troops to advance to very close range—sometimes four or five feet from a machine gun post—before opening fire…It was impossible to see where the enemy fire was coming from…Snipers were everywhere.”10 Men began turning, running, fleeing. Machine-gun crews threw down their weapons and headed for the rear.11
Kenney had spent the day with “Pappy” Gunn yanking everything including the bombardier’s position out of the North American Aircraft Company’s B-25 bombers, the ones that had hit Tokyo in the Doolittle raid back in April, and filling the plane with .50-caliber machine guns with five hundred rounds each. The idea they had worked out was to create a plane that could shoot up Japanese shipping more effectively than bombing could, and thereby give the Allies a decisive advantage in the war at sea around New Guinea.
That day Kenney had finally shipped the third 105 mm gun from Brisbane to Port Moresby. The first two were already in action east of Dubodura, against the Japanese—and against Sutherland’s wishes. But no troop carriers had gotten through in three days because of the miserable weather, and no supply drops—which meant the troops around Buna were eating their last meal.
Kenney wasn’t worried; the weather would clear and the supplies would be delivered. He was (according to his own account) whistling when he strolled into MacArthur’s office at Government House. MacArthur looked up and said, “Hullo, George, let’s go for a walk.”
They went into the garden and sat on a bench. Then MacArthur began.
“George, you know there’s a lot of men over there”—meaning around Buna—“eating their last meal tonight.”
“Yes, General,” was Kenney’s response, “but tomorrow we serve breakfast at 6:30 and by noon I’ll have five days’ chow over to them.”
Kenney explained the problems with the weather, and how his new organization of the Fifth Air Force meant these problems would be solved, permanently.
MacArthur listened. Then he told Kenney about the meeting with his entire staff earlier that morning, how they lashed into MacArthur for “his foolhardy endorsement of this nutty airborne show” and how “they recommended throwing in the towel and pulling out although,” MacArthur added, “where the troops were to go I don’t know.”
Kenney looked up and MacArthur smiled.
“George, the Fifth Air Force hasn’t failed me yet and I’ll never doubt them again. We’ll get this show across. I’m not worried any more about it.”12
Kenney went back to his bungalow and wrote in his diary: “The General stuck by me today. I’ll stick by him in spite of hell or high water and I think he knows it.”
The next day, November 21, the weather broke. Kenney’s pilots delivered 300,000 pounds of supplies, mostly rations, enough to sustain Harding’s men for an entire week.13 Now it was up to Harding and the commanders on the ground to break the deadlock.
—
The next attack was scheduled for November 22. It was Sergeant Roland Acheson of the Thirty-second’s twenty-first birthday. “They was all dug in at Buna,” as he later put it, meaning the Japanese, “pillboxes, redoubts.” Acheson and his buddies soon learned that “Japan-man,” as they called him, “was very smart. Lot of their equipment was stuff they had captured from the British, Lewis or Vickers machine guns. They’d turn it right around and use it on you.” On the other hand, “dumb Americans like we are, we did our supply during the day. Japan-man would always barge at night. Their planes sank about five of our barges.” One of them even contained General Harding and his staff, who had to swim ashore.14
“From then on everything was by air,” which meant every supply or reinforcement came in from the new Fifth Air Force. Despite the vaunted air-drops, the men of the Thirty-second Division were living on C rations and dried crackers and powdered milk. Officers could not get their men to advance into the Japanese furnace of fire. If we don’t shoot at them, went the rationale, they won’t shoot at us. Discipline had collapsed. Americans at Buna had lost all will to fight or win.
That at least was Dick Sutherland’s report to MacArthur after a brief visit to the Buna front, almost a month after the battle had begun. Sutherland blamed the problem on a failure of nerve among the Thirty-second’s commanders, conveniently ignoring the fact that he and MacArthur had sent General Harding with inexperienced troops into an unexpectedly
tough fight, with no fire support and little backup. MacArthur was already hearing snide remarks from Blamey about the failure of U.S. troops in combat; it seemed only fair after Sutherland’s remarks about how Australian troops “won’t fight.”
MacArthur began pacing the Government House veranda with increasing fury. He was remembering World War One, when despite the mud and bad weather and hunger, Americans from National Guard units still pushed themselves forward, forward, crawling at night and taking on every challenge, in order to achieve victory. Now, it seemed, they were stalling out and quitting.
“Dick,” he said one morning to Sutherland, “I think you better bring Bob Eichelberger up here. We’re going to need him.”15
Robert Eichelberger, from Ohio, was three years older than Kenney. Like MacArthur, he came from a divided family; his father was a prominent Union officer during the Civil War, and his mother’s family was from Mississippi. He himself was West Point, class of ’09, and first met MacArthur at the Command and General Staff College at Leavenworth. Later he served on the General Staff when MacArthur was chief of staff. He was awed by the general’s powerful personality and “unconventional hours,” as Eichelberger remembered—and now was assisting his old mentor by commanding I Corps, consisting of Thirty-second and Forty-first Divisions, both originally National Guard units—which must have made MacArthur’s disappointment all the sharper.
Eichelberger arrived at Government House on November 30, and found MacArthur agitated and furious at the news that the attacks at Buna were stalling out. “Never did I think I’d see American troops quit,” MacArthur raged. “I can’t believe that those troops represent the American fighting man of this war.”
—
MacArthur was marching back and forth, his voice trembling, his eyes flashing. He made it clear to Eichelberger that Buna was of crucial importance to the campaign, far more than the numbers going in showed. MacArthur was convinced he had the manpower to win. One more concerted push at Buna would do it, he insisted; it only required the right man for the job.
Douglas MacArthur Page 53