The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur (30 page)

If Arnold had returned to Washington immediately after his meeting with MacArthur, he would have surely urged Marshall to relieve the Southwest Pacific commander. But he spent three valuable days in Brisbane, and the more he talked with MacArthur’s commanders, the more convinced he became that MacArthur was the man for the job. Kenney remained optimistic: Supplies were beginning to arrive at Australia’s docks, and the two divisions Marshall had sent to the theater were ready for combat. Moreover, MacArthur’s staff was well organized, the commander’s relationship with the Australians was good, and Port Moresby’s anchorage was being improved. Finally, Milne Bay was secure. So when Arnold returned to Washington, he told George Marshall he was convinced that the Japanese could not only be pushed off Guadalcanal, but also be stopped on New Guinea. The only thing missing, he added, was unity of command, where all the forces in the Southwest and South Pacific would serve under a single commander. He recommended that either MacArthur, Lieutenant General Joseph McNarney, or Lieutenant General Lesley McNair (the head of U.S. Army Ground Forces) be
given the job. Marshall listened closely to Arnold’s report, nodded his agreement, and promptly kicked the suggestion to a War Department committee, where he knew it would languish. Furthermore, Ernie King would never agree to the change, particularly if the new commander came from the army, and Marshall didn’t
want
a unified command in the Pacific. He wanted competition.

At Marshall’s direction, Arnold briefed Roosevelt on his trip. The president listened without comment, but was relieved by Arnold’s conclusion and sent him on to see Frank Knox. A former publisher of the influential New Hampshire
Union Leader
newspaper and Republican vice presidential candidate on Alf Landon’s ticket in 1936, Knox had been appointed secretary of the navy to give the administration a bipartisan look. Surprisingly, for he had been a member of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, Knox was transformed by rubbing shoulders with King and Nimitz, becoming an outspoken supporter of navy prerogatives. Knox greeted Arnold affably, listened to his briefing in silence, but shifted uncomfortably when Arnold offered his critique of Robert Ghormley. Finally, having heard enough, Knox waved him away. He wasn’t in the meeting to hear the navy criticized, he said. Taken aback, Arnold raised his voice: He was simply presenting the facts, and if Knox didn’t want to hear what he was saying, he would be more than happy to leave. Knox leveled his gaze at Arnold and said nothing. Arnold waited, then waited some more—and then got up and left.

O
rdered back to Buna, General Tomitaro Horii started moving his troops north along the Kokoda Trail on September 24. Probing the weakened Japanese lines, the Australian 25th Brigade overran Ioribaiwa on the twenty-eighth, then pushed north, only to find that the enemy was sprinting away and was doing so without putting up much of a fight. The Japanese retreat over the Owen Stanleys was done so quickly that the Australians could hardly keep up. In Brisbane, MacArthur charted these movements and shook his head. He had assumed that Horii would defend his position to the last man or launch an attack down the trail towards Port Moresby. In fact, the Japanese could hardly wait to return to Buna, with its stocks of rice and fish, and left a trail of corpses on their way north. Three days after ordering the retreat,
Horii slipped along a river bank, plunged into a rushing stream, and drowned. Back in Brisbane, MacArthur celebrated. “An ignominious death,” he crowed.

The Japanese retreat, while welcome, presented MacArthur with an entirely new opportunity, and he directed his staff to plan an offensive aimed at overwhelming the enemy beachhead on New Guinea’s northern shore. On October 11, he ordered his forces toward Buna along three tracks and warned his commanders that should their supply lines become vulnerable (that is, should the Japanese overwhelm the Marines on Guadalcanal and shift their troops west), they should be prepared to move south again. Several days later, he inspected the 32nd Division at Camp Cable, near Brisbane. MacArthur was at his best—expansive, eloquent, patriotic. As his soldiers crowded around, he told them what he expected them to do. They were going to New Guinea “to fight,” he said, and then, index finger punching the air, added, “and I want each of you to kill me a Jap.”

Attacking Buna was a gamble. The Japanese could easily reinforce their beachhead, their units were experienced in combat, their defenses were strong and defended in depth, and they retained a large complement of their heavy weapons. The Americans, on the other hand, could put troops into Buna only by sending them on foot over the backbreaking Owen Stanleys or by barge along New Guinea’s northern shore. Worse yet, the U.S. 32nd Division was green, untested. Even so, MacArthur thought the gamble worth taking. While the navy continued to struggle in the Solomons and the Japanese controlled the waters along New Guinea’s northern shore, Allied inaction in Port Moresby would give the enemy time to refit or—worse—allow it to shift the South Seas Detachment to Guadalcanal. Then too, although the Australians were exhausted by their hard fight at Milne Bay and many of Kenney’s aircraft were being diverted to help the Marines in the Solomons, Horii’s retreat along the Kokoda Track (and his “ignominious death”) provided a rare opportunity to test Japan’s weakened formations. In truth, however, MacArthur wouldn’t have been so tentative had he known the extent of the Japanese crisis. The South Seas Detachment was suffering from beriberi, dysentery, and malnutrition, and when Australian soldiers entered Eora Creek Gorge in the Owen Stanley
Mountains, they uncovered evidence of cannibalism. The Japanese were eating their dead.

On November 2, the Australians secured Kokoda while the patched-together bombers of Kenney’s newly christened Fifth Air Force swept over them, scouring the trail to Buna. A coastal shuttle of luggers (flat-bottomed barges), meanwhile, brought Australian detachments along the north shore of Papua New Guinea from Milne Bay, landing them at Cape Nelson, some twenty-five miles from the Japanese lines at Buna. A third force of the U.S. 32nd Division’s 126th Regiment scaled the Kapa Kapa Trail, paralleling the movement of the Australians.

The advance of the 126th was uncertain, harrowing, and slow. In places, the trail was so narrow that, as one American remembered, “even a jack rabbit couldn’t leave it.” The troops were forced into a single file through steep ridges that arched upward two thousand feet, forcing the soldiers onto their hands and knees. Reaching the summit, these same soldiers tumbled and slid precipitously down, covering in minutes the same amount of ground that it took them hours to conquer going up. The men of the 126th subsisted on a meager Australian diet: hardtack, canned corned beef, rice, and tea.

But before the 126th completed its movement to Buna, MacArthur learned from a missionary’s report about an unpaved and waterlogged airfield hacked out of the jungle just off the Kapa Kapa Trail at Fasari. Use of the airfield would cut the 126th’s movement north by days and save the 32nd Division from having to make the debilitating climb through New Guinea’s mountains. But MacArthur was unconvinced that such ferrying operations would actually work and questioned his air commander’s plan to implement it. Kenney dismissed his pessimism: “Give me five days,” he said confidently, “and I’ll ship the whole damned U.S. Army to New Guinea by air.” MacArthur reluctantly gave his approval, but with the evidence from the Japanese cooking pots on his mind, he required that Kenney supply his soldiers with ten days’ worth of food. If the ferrying operation actually worked, the Australians and Americans would come into the Buna-Sanananda-Gona beachhead along three tracks, and at exactly the same time. Kenney, straining every resource, ran shuttles of troops into eastern New Guinea, then belatedly added an airstrip at Dobudura, in the foothills south and east of Buna.

MacArthur watched all of this from his headquarters at Brisbane’s Lennon’s Hotel, then decided he would join the operation. He jumped aboard one of Kenney’s rattle-and-shake bombers for the 1,500-mile jaunt to southern New Guinea before returning to his office less than twenty-four hours later. He was ecstatic. Kenney was his new hero. “This little fellow has given me a new and pretty powerful brandy,” he exclaimed, throwing his arm around him for the press at Brisbane. “And I’m going to keep right on taking it!” None of this sat well with the “Bataan Gang,” who enviously nattered away at Kenney’s newcomer status. When Kenney promoted one of his youngest officers, they complained until MacArthur shut them down. “We promote them out here for efficiency, not age,” he snapped. MacArthur was confident then, but cautious about the battle-worthiness of the 32nd. This was going to be a tough fight—the Japanese lodgment on Papua New Guinea’s north coast near Buna encompassed an area stretching for eleven miles, from Cape Sudest in the east to Gona in the west. In some places, the Japanese positions extended inland only a thousand yards, but in others, the positions stretched for several miles and were defended in depth. The Japanese planned their defense well. Having arrived at Buna in mid-November after their daunting retreat from the Owen Stanleys, they had constructed reinforced trenches, camouflaged their pillboxes, and laid out interlocking fields of fire. They had shuttled heavy weapons into their perimeter and now awaited the inevitable Aussie and American attack.

As MacArthur looked at the map, he could envision a joint Australian-American assault taking place along three lines, with the 126th regiment coming in on the right (at Buna), while to the left the 144th Australian infantry peeled off to attack Sanananda and, further west, the Japanese defenses in front of Gona. On November 6, MacArthur moved his headquarters from Brisbane to Port Moresby, shortening his line of communication to the front. Several days after his arrival, on November 10, and with the 126th Regiment still descending on Buna, his intelligence chief, Charles Willoughby, appeared in his door with some unsettling news. While Aussie and American commanders believed that they were about to face only one thousand malnourished and disease-ridden Japanese, Willoughby told MacArthur that his most recent estimates, based on U.S. intercepts and decryption
of Japanese command codes, told an entirely different story. There were at least four thousand soldiers and naval marines inside the Japanese perimeter, he announced, adding that the number had been confirmed by New Guinea natives.

In fact, however, Willoughby was wrong—there were not four thousand Japanese stretched out from Buna to Gona, but fifty-five hundred, including the remnants of those who had survived the treacherous trek back from Ioribaiwa. This force was complemented by reinforcements that the Japanese high command had brought in from Rabaul. There were actually over fifteen thousand Japanese in the Buna-Gona beachhead—more than three times the numbers given by Willoughby. To make matters worse, as MacArthur was to discover, Kenney’s fliers were having difficulty dropping supplies into the jungles of the New Guinea coastline facing Goodenough Bay and landing on its wire mesh runways. Kenney didn’t have enough transports to keep MacArthur’s soldiers supplied and had to rely increasingly on unreliable Papuan natives to unload his DC-3s.

Nor was the discovery of new airfields in northern Papua New Guinea of much use. Ten inches of rain fell on this northern coast every month, grounding Kenney’s bombers and frustrating Hugh Casey’s suffering engineers. Air intelligence officers regularly scrawled the words “most of the terrain waterlogged” across large swaths of their hastily drawn maps. Kenney’s pilots, having conquered the stomach-churning updrafts of New Guinea’s mountainous terrain, were often forced to return their transports fully loaded. Worse yet, Buna was itself nearly always underwater. There was some elevation along the flat coastal plain, but the combined Australian-American “New Guinea Force” would approach Buna through waist-deep swamps tangled with mangrove, nipa, and saga trees. Mounting a sustained attack would be nearly suicidal, as it was impossible to move without sinking knee-deep into a Buna bog. When the Americans and Aussies were not on the firing line, they could rest in trenches that were knee-deep in water. Here and there amid all this muck were small hillocks overgrown with knife-sharp grasses, choking vines, and creepers and filled with leeches and insects everywhere. Within days of the troops’ entering the jungle, none of the radios given to platoon radiomen worked, and the Americans’ jungle fatigues, dyed
green in Australia, disintegrated when exposed to the constant precipitation, leaching green dye into the skin. Finally, the Japanese knew how to fight in the jungle, and although they might have proved overly confident in their headlong charges at Kokoda, they were expert night fighters. The Americans, Japanese officers reassured their men, were afraid of the dark.

Into this jungle maelstrom, the 32nd Division’s commander, Major General Edwin Harding (a graduate, with George Patton, of West Point’s Class of 1909), plotted his attack with Australian Major General George Alan Vasey, a square-jawed survivor of the First World War’s brutal maw. Vasey had graduated tenth in a class of thirty at Australia’s prestigious Royal Military College, but by 1918, all of those who had graduated ahead of him were dead. Vasey knew how to fight and was optimistic, having personally led his veteran division against Japanese strongpoints on the Kokoda Trail. Harding found it difficult to share this optimism, even though MacArthur ordered that the 128th Regiment supplement the 126th for the Buna attack. Unlike Vasey, Harding was beset by nagging doubts: The 32nd Division’s two regiments, composed of farm boys from the upper Midwest, needed more training. “From February when I took over until November when we went into battle,” Harding later acknowledged, “we were always getting ready to move, on the move, or getting settled after a move. No sooner would we get a systematic training program started than orders for a move came along to interrupt it.” What’s more, Harding discovered that although many of his GIs had arrived fresh for battle (thanks to George Kenney), a large number of those who had hiked over the Owen Stanleys were without rations. An unpredicted supply bottleneck had developed along Papua New Guinea’s northeastern shore. His regiments were short of artillery, his engineers lacked equipment, and his medical teams would have to rely on kerosene burners to sterilize their equipment.