Douglas MacArthur

by Arthur Herman

  “I believe they need leadership to go on,” he went on. “They are sick but, Bob, a leader can take those men and capture Buna.” MacArthur had decided it was time to relieve Harding and every battalion commander if necessary: “If you don’t relieve the commanders, I will.”

  His staff told him that Eichelberger needed three or four days to get ready. MacArthur couldn’t give them to him. The Japanese might land reinforcements any night. He must go forward in the morning.

  MacArthur wound up dramatically: “Time is of the essence! If you don’t take Buna I want to hear that you and Byers [Brigadier General Clovis Byers, Eichelberger’s second-in-command] are buried there.”16

  —

  That story would become famous, even notorious. What didn’t become famous was that the next day at breakfast, MacArthur put his arm around Eichelberger with a wan smile: “Don’t get killed, Bob. You’re no use to me dead.”17

  Eichelberger and Harding had been West Point classmates. Eichelberger was uncomfortable with the task of relieving his friend; but he had a job to do, and his staff had concluded that Harding’s entire staff had to go as well. His immediate superior, Australia’s General Herring, saw Eichelberger’s arrival as “a very pure breath of fresh air” that “blew away a great deal of the impurities that were stopping us getting on with the job.”18

  But nothing could be done until artillery arrived. That reached Buna the second week in December; now Eichelberger could launch his heaviest attack, shortly after the Aussies had finally taken Gona on December 9 after taking 750 casualties in the assault on the last stronghold.19

  At Sanananda, by contrast, the Australians were bogged down completely. So were Eichelberger’s hopes of forward progress along the Buna front. What Eichelberger soon realized, but MacArthur had not, was that the core problem wasn’t a lack of troops but a lack of firepower. Besides a shortage of artillery, there weren’t enough rifle company troops at the front. Heavy machine guns and mortars proved useless in that dense jungle terrain, where men couldn’t advance five yards without some sort of protection.

  On December 5 Eichelberger persuaded the Australians to lend him five tracked armored vehicles known as Bren gun carriers, but each was blown to bits by Japanese artillery. Eichelberger was there personally that day to push his troops forward, but then a sniper took out the sector commander, General Albert Waldron. The lead detachment lost half its troops to withering Japanese machine-gun and mortar fire, then dropped to the ground and halted.20

  Failure.

  —

  Over the next week troops from the detachment known as Urbana Force hammered away at the Japanese positions around Buna.21 The first tanks arrived on December 12, but if Eichelberger and MacArthur expected them to create a breakthrough, they were disappointed. Since they were Australian tanks, Australian troops came up to support them. The minute they rolled into view, however, Japanese antiaircraft began taking them out one by one, and the Australians fell back.

  Failure again.

  Back at Government House, meanwhile, nerves were raw and MacArthur’s patience was at the breaking point. He sent a terse note to Eichelberger: “Time is fleeting and our dangers increase with its passage….Your mission is to take Buna. All other things are subsidiary to this. No alchemy is going to produce this for you.”

  But that same day, December 14, alchemy did work. Overnight on the 13th–14th the Japanese cleared out of Buna, and Urbana Force marched in as Eichelberger and his staff broke open liquor bottles to celebrate. Their elation was premature; the fighting for a nearby coconut grove took several more days, and General Byers fell wounded at Eichelberger’s side—almost fulfilling MacArthur’s grim ultimatum. MacArthur sent a congratulatory note to Eichelberger, but he was still worried. The strongest part of the Japanese line still lay ahead, from Buna Mission to Duropa Plantation. The Americans would need help, again from the Australians, but this time MacArthur wondered if even stronger medicine was needed.

  On the 15th MacArthur sent Sutherland off to talk to Eichelberger once more, but this time with a different agenda. “If Eichelberger won’t move,” MacArthur barked, “you are to relieve him and take command yourself. I don’t want to see you back here alive until Buna is taken.”

  It was a tense and very nervous Sutherland who set off for Buna that morning. Later in the day General Blamey stopped by to talk with MacArthur.

  Sergeant Rogers in the next room could hear their voices, as MacArthur paced, saying, “I relieved Harding. I sent Sutherland over today to get Eichelberger moving. I told him to relieve Eichelberger if necessary. If I have to, I’ll relieve Sutherland!”22

  Sutherland never took over from Eichelberger; it was a command he neither wanted nor felt comfortable in assuming. In the end, he told MacArthur that Eichelberger should stay. Still, the conversation was a sign of how far the situation had deteriorated, and whom MacArthur was willing to sacrifice in order to get the job done.

  —

  Eichelberger had tanks for reinforcements along with a battalion from the Australians’ Eighteenth Brigade, and by December 18 they were ready. He planned a double pincer move, with his Warren Force led by the tanks and the Aussies attacking Duropa Plantation, while Urbana Force pushed through the final Japanese strongholds in front of Buna Mission and then reached the sea at last.23

  The attack started well, with the tanks and the confident Australians surging forward through the plantation groves. Then a Japanese antiaircraft gun opened up, and the tanks halted, unable to advance under the punishing fire. The men of the Eighteenth Brigade had to move forward on their own, taking out the bunkers one by one with grenades.

  The next day two tanks renewed the assault, but both got mired in swampy ground and one had to be abandoned. The tanks made one more try on Christmas Eve, but this time Japanese fire was even deadlier. It knocked out three tanks at once, and the Australian commander announced there would be no more tank attacks until the Japanese guns were silenced. That meant a slow, bloody series of infantry assaults again, yard by punishing yard, even as Japanese planes, despite Kenney’s steady pounding of their airfields, still managed to swoop in and hit Eichelberger’s exhausted forces.24

  Eichelberger wrote to MacArthur that the failed attacks were “the low point of my life.” He even wondered if the entire Buna operation might not turn out to be “an American military disaster.”25

  MacArthur had already experienced one American military disaster, on Bataan. He was not about to endure another. He was already thinking ahead about how to remedy the situation, and he unburdened himself to General Herring on a visit to Government House on Christmas Day. Herring had already agreed to send the rest of the Eighteenth Brigade and more artillery up from Milne Bay, but wondered if it would do any good.

  “Well, we’re not getting on very fast, are we?” MacArthur growled. “If we don’t clean this position up quickly, I will be finished and so will your General Blamey, and what will happen to you, young man, I just don’t like to think.”26

  In the end, he didn’t have to relieve Eichelberger. During the last days of December the stubborn resistance of the Japanese, who were maddened by heat and hunger and disease, finally began to crack. Allied troops pushed through to Simemi Creek, and on January 2 they killed the last Japanese soldiers at Buna Mission. There were still survivors to track down; several Japanese soldiers were shot trying to swim away into the surf. Sanananda, the last Japanese holdout, did not finally fall until three weeks later. But MacArthur, and Eichelberger, had their victory and they were determined to make the most of it.

  MacArthur’s dispatch on January 8, 1943, read:

  “The Papuan campaign is in its final closing phase….One of the primary objects of the campaign was the annihilation of the Japanese Papuan Army…This can now be regarded as accomplished.”

  Considering that nearly half of the Japanese Papuan Army was still in action around Sanananda, MacArthur’s triumphalism seemed premature.27

  But congra
tulatory telegrams poured in from Stimson and Marshall, Australian prime minister Curtin, and even Winston Churchill. MacArthur might pretend that all had gone smoothly and according to plan. But his letter back to Marshall hinted at his truer feelings, that the difficulties at Buna were the result of a lack of support back in Washington: “However unwarranted it may be, the impression prevailed that this area’s efforts were belittled and disparaged at home, and despite all my efforts to the contrary the effect was depressing. Your tributes have had a tonic effect.”28

  With his staff at Port Moresby, he shared a rare celebratory glass. One of them remembered him quoting Robert E. Lee: “[I]t is a good thing that war is so terrible or we might learn to love it.”29 Buna veterans might have missed the point of the bon mot.

  The same day, before leaving for Brisbane, he sent a note to Eichelberger:

  “I am so glad that you were not injured in the fighting. I always feared that your incessant exposure might result fatally. With a hearty slap on the back, Most cordially, MacArthur.”

  Eichelberger, exhausted and elated, yet with hard fighting still going on a mile or two away, brooded over MacArthur’s delayed congratulations. “The boys tell me that last night San Francisco radio carried word of what troops are here and that I have been in command…The Big Chief…returned to the mainland and he evidently released the information after his arrival.” It was the first time one of MacArthur’s communiqués had ever mentioned Eichelberger, or the Thirty-second. Until then, it had been “I” and “my command.”30

  Eichelberger was sore about being ignored in the communiqués, and justifiably so. What he didn’t know was that MacArthur had been a thread’s width away from stripping him of his command, and that his fiercest critic, Dick Sutherland, had saved him. On the contrary, Eichelberger believed until his death that it was MacArthur who had saved him from being relieved, not Sutherland.31

  As for MacArthur, he had his win at last. Yet he knew it couldn’t go on like this. Buna had been a World War One–style yard-by-yard slog, of the kind MacArthur had seen many times. But he didn’t have the resources or the manpower of an American Expeditionary Force, and the tropical conditions took their own toll. Approximately 14,500 Americans were in action for barely six weeks, yet 930 had been killed, 1,918 wounded, and no fewer than 8,700 struck down by disease—a total loss rate of more than 70 percent.32

  MacArthur could console himself with the fact that the Japanese had suffered worse. The entire Buna command, 13,000 men, had been wiped out; in kill ratio terms, the Allies were beating the Japanese almost five to one, even with the Japanese on defense. That ratio would only grow as time went on, as MacArthur and his forces, including Kenney’s flyboys, learned their trade better.

  All the same, the capture of Buna ended a grim year for MacArthur—and a frustrating one for his foe. On New Year’s Day 1943 stalemate had settled over the Southwest Pacific. Despite their larger numbers and superior strength, the Japanese couldn’t figure out how to oust the Allies from New Guinea or Guadalcanal. At the same time, the Allies were a very long way from driving the Japanese out of the Solomons and the Bismarcks, including Rabaul, let alone freeing the Philippines.

  It would have taken a bold prophet indeed to predict that MacArthur was about to start the road back.

  —

  As 1943 began, Japan still held the advantage in the Southwest Pacific, in terms of air, naval, and ground strength. The Japanese high command had reached a momentous decision, to abandon the exhausting fight for Guadalcanal and to focus instead on making eastern New Guinea and the Bismarcks an impregnable barrier to U.S. and Australian operations. Starting in February they would be on the defensive, but it was a defense that looked unbeatable.

  The hub of the Japanese plan was their base at Rabaul. Its harbor, airfields, and seaplane anchorages would serve as the hub’s spokes, from which troops, supplies, and air support flowed in every direction, almost with impunity. As MacArthur wrote later, his war was not going to advance unless and until he could neutralize Rabaul.33

  Planners back in Washington understood that too.34 At the Casablanca Conference that January, Admiral King and General Marshall proposed that henceforth 30 percent of all Allied resources be devoted to the war in the Pacific, instead of the 15 percent that King claimed was currently being spent. In the end, British planners and Prime Minister Churchill balked at this division of labor, although they did pledge that once Hitler was beaten, Britain and America could turn all their attention, and direct all their forces, to the defeat of Japan.

  That left MacArthur struggling to find the shipping, bombers, and landing craft he would need to launch any effort at Rabaul, especially when Admiral King was planning his own offensive thrust in the central Pacific, along the lines of the old War Plan Orange, which would devour troops and equipment that MacArthur believed rightfully were his.

  Nonetheless, MacArthur forwarded his plan for taking Rabaul on to Washington in February, at the request of General Marshall. It was not for the faint at heart. It involved nothing less than a five-stage operation for enveloping and destroying Japan’s biggest base in the Pacific.

  First, MacArthur’s forces would seize the Huon Peninsula of New Guinea, for air support against Japanese strongholds in New Britain as well as Rabaul.

  Then Admiral William Halsey, commander of the Third Fleet, would land Marines to grab airfields on New Georgia in the central Solomons, in order to do the same thing.

  After that, MacArthur’s forces would take airfields in western New Britain while Halsey and his marines overran Bougainville. Halsey’s final move would be to seize Kavieng Airfield on New Ireland, as he and MacArthur prepared for the final advance on Rabaul itself. All in all, MacArthur surmised, the entire operation would involve five additional infantry divisions and 1,800 more planes, in forty-five air groups.35

  Once they caught their breath, the Joint Chiefs were inclined to say no. MacArthur was asking for more resources than either the army or the navy was prepared to devote to the entire Pacific, not just to MacArthur’s theater. MacArthur, however, pushed to send Sutherland to Washington to explain the details of his plan, dubbed Elkton I. The Joint Chiefs, somewhat surprisingly, agreed, but also insisted that representatives from both Nimitz and Halsey join them, as well, in a wide-ranging discussion of Pacific war strategy, to commence on March 12, 1943.

  Perhaps Marshall and King thought that bringing in the other commanders’ views would force MacArthur to modify his views of what was possible and what was not. In any case, MacArthur swiftly agreed to the meeting. He decided he would send Generals Kenney and Chamberlin, in addition to Sutherland, to take up the cudgels for Elkton I.

  There was still a war to be won on New Guinea. But at least now he had an overall strategy, an operational team he trusted, especially Kenney, and hopes of fresh new troops and equipment, including the long-range P-38 Lightning fighter.36

  But he still needed a new tactical approach, something to replace the grinding head-on attack that had been so costly at Buna. Fortunately, the man who would find it for him had touched down by seaplane in Brisbane Harbor on a rainy, blustery January 10, even as the fighting for Buna was still going on. Together with Kenney and Spencer Akin, Rear Admiral Daniel Barbey, creator and commander of the new Seventh Amphibious Force for MacArthur’s SWPA, would give MacArthur’s war a fresh new lease on success.

  —

  A warm, rather rotund and avuncular man, Barbey was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1912 and was a junior grade lieutenant on the destroyer USS Lawrence during the American occupation of Veracruz, while Captain Douglas MacArthur was tracking down locomotives in the Mexican interior.

  But after World War One and the interwar years, which had been almost as lean for the navy as they were for the army, Barbey had transferred his interest from engineering to the new military art form known as amphibious warfare. In 1940 and 1941 he had overseen the training of the First Marine Divis
ion and the First U.S. Army, the Big Red One, in fleet landing exercises, as well as taking charge of the design and construction of the navy’s bewilderingly diverse series of new amphibious craft like the Higgins boat, the drop-ramp shallow-draft boat that would carry the men of the Big Red One onto Omaha Beach; the LCT, or Landing Craft Tank, capable of carrying medium-sized tanks or equivalent vehicles directly onto the shore; and the LCI, or Landing Craft, Infantry, that could take on 188 infantry and drop them directly on the beach.

  Above all, there was the Landing Ship, Tank or LST, a 4,000-ton, 328-foot-long cargo ship that had a shallow enough draft that it could come up to shore, lower its ramp, unload up to 20 medium tanks or 1,000 men and their officers, and then head back out to sea.37 Barbey had not only overseen the ships’ design and construction but had tried them out at sea personally. He knew their strengths and their weaknesses—what they could do and what they couldn’t, under the right conditions and with the right kind of commander.

  As early as November MacArthur foresaw the advantages that these amphibious haulers would give him and his men along the harborless shores of New Guinea, and requested as many as the navy could offer him. Fortunately for MacArthur, the decision had just been made to postpone the cross-channel invasion of France, which had been slated for 1943, for another year. That not only freed up the boats and vessels that had been designated for Europe for service in SWPA; it also meant MacArthur received, in addition to Barbey’s amphibious fleet, Barbey himself, now promoted to rear admiral.38

  Barbey set out for Australia with some trepidation. MacArthur had a reputation in Navy Department offices only slightly better than that of Lucifer himself; he had already fired one naval commander, Admiral Hart, and was about to fire another. A Navy Department friend quipped as Barbey packed up his office, “So you are leaving the United States Navy to join MacArthur’s Navy. God help you. No one else will.”39