‘Sensual, slothful and of doubtful moral character…[but] a tough commander likely to shine like a power light in an emergency. The best of the local bunch’
—General MacArthur on General Blamey
The Second Australian Imperial Force was coming home. The ‘two-army’ system was about to collide, geographically and culturally. Yet the lines of command were confused and the senior officers muddled. A whiff of incompetence hung over High Command in Australia. The nation urgently needed a single, supreme commander with overarching powers to direct the land war. Instead, it had a muddle of hyphenated generals clamouring for a role.
This glaring deficiency was revealed in January 1942, when the Australian army’s top echelon decided to reshuffle itself. Like butchers advancing on a lush side of beef, a gallimaufry of elderly generals and brigadiers carved the nation into regional zones of command, and appointed themselves regional commanders. Lieutenant-General Mackay claimed the east coast; the incompetent Morris was handed New Guinea.
When Australia required a leader with full executive control, it got the elevation of uninspiring old men rewarded for long service, unpaid favours and old courtesies. Something more than war by committee was needed to match the Japanese, as Curtin saw. With its peculiar skill at articulating the truth in a crisis, the press echoed the Prime Minister’s view, and condemned the reshuffle. ‘We have taken a step back towards disunity, more muddle and red-tape…the latest move is completely retrograde,’ blared The Sunday Telegraph.1
The Sydney Morning Herald published a monumental denunciation of the nation’s rudderless armed services:
We have then a picture of Australia facing the near approach of a remorseless enemy, frantically striving to make up lost time in the last hours given to arm herself—facing the situation with neither a single army nor a single commander; but with at least two separate and basically distinct organizations of incompletely trained soldiers; a sharply divided command, and, as supreme directing authority, a committee or board, partly departmental and almost wholly lacking practical knowledge of modern warfare.2
The remedy, concluded a pungent editorial, was to appoint a commander-in-chief without delay and invest him with complete powers. The paper recommended General Sir Thomas Blamey, deemed the Australian soldier best suited to unite the militia and the AIF in ‘a homogeneity of command’.3
Curtin had earlier reached the same conclusion. The day after the destruction of Darwin, he cabled Blamey in the Middle East and ordered him to return to Australia ‘as speedily as possible’.4 The Advisory War Council, on 11 March, confirmed Blamey’s appointment as Allied Commander, Land Forces.
Blamey returned from the Middle East that month to a generally favourable press. He was cheerful, and gung-ho, though he clearly disapproved of the Australian attitude to the war. They were lazy and complacent. He was shocked by the indiscipline of the home guard, and warned the nation: ‘We have to be prepared for fighting in Australia…We must be ready to hit the enemy hard whenever we can…Australia has a rough time ahead, but I believe the people realise now that this is total war.’5
Who was this grenade-shaped Australian appointed to lead the Allied Land Forces? Born near Wagga Wagga on 24January 1884, Blamey was a gruff, stocky, often tactless man with huge ambition, a sharp intellect, a ruthless and somewhat craven political mind, and deep-set, wandering eyes. He admired orchids and drank whisky.
Throughout his life Blamey displayed an unusual talent for making enemies. Curtin would later describe him as a great hater.6 Blamey was once heard to say, ‘You know, a Commander-in-Chief must be prepared to have breakfast with his brother and shoot him before lunch.’7 In 1910, as a 26year-old instructor at an officers’ training course, he so irritated the trainees—many of whom were older than he—that one night they ‘raided Blamey’s tent and deposited him, bed and all, into a horse trough’.8
The first Australian to graduate from Britain’s famous Staff College at Quetta in India, in 1913, Blamey was an ‘astute, first class’9 staff officer under General Monash at Gallipoli. His unusual ability promised rapid, high promotion.
He seemed cool under fire—especially when the risks were calculable. Those working with him qualified this impression. He avoided returning to Gallipoli for the big attacks on Lone Pine and the Nek, claimed his assistant, Major Gellibrand, by delaying a minor operation for haemorrhoids. He had them removed after the troops had left. In Greece during World War II, when he refused to lie down during a bombing raid, his usually admiring adjutant, Norman Carlyon, observed, ‘I…thought his coolness was exaggerated.’10 When in serious danger—during the Australian withdrawal from Greece, for example—Blamey was prone to panic.11 Blamey himself decided a front-line role was not for him. He never led a unit in combat, though he reportedly shot a Turk with his revolver.
Between the wars he served, with a less than fragrant record, as Victorian police commissioner. In this capacity, he was inscrutable and, frankly, creepy. In the 1920s he was rumoured to command the League of National Security, a secret military wing of the white establishment, also known as the White Army. He was thought to have privately favoured the setting up of a military dictatorship during the Japanese crisis. Not surprisingly, he was a ferocious anti-communist and a loud hater of the ‘yellow races’. At the time, such opinions were common among the educated Australian establishment as well as the working class. Left-wing intellectuals inevitably damned him as a proto-fascist.
Blamey cared little. He detested the media and, in time, the feeling was generally reciprocated. He withdrew the press accreditation of war correspondents he didn’t like. ‘Blamey would never hear a word spoken against him,’ wrote Carlyon.12
Those for whom he worked roundly admired his ability as a superb staff officer and a brilliant army administrator. This he clearly showed as Commander-in-Chief of the Australian Military Forces between the wars. He organised the field troops into coherent units. ‘The efficiency of field formations went up by leaps and bounds…the value of his services to the nation in this capacity is beyond question,’ remarked the military historian Colonel E. G. Keogh.13
At the outbreak of World War II, Blamey was sent to the Middle East to command the Second Australian Imperial Force, whom he led with exceptional mental toughness. He steadfastly refused British pressure to hand Churchill’s armies a leavening of Australian troops, for which he earned the label ‘most hated man in all the Middle East’ by his British counterparts. He thus preserved the unity of the Australian army, and his role in their safe return to Australia won lavish praise from Curtin.
Perhaps Blamey’s finest hour was his insistence on the relief of the Rats of Tobruk: ‘Gentleman,’ he told General Auchinleck and other British officers who’d resisted their relief, ‘if I were a French or an American making this demand what would you say about it?’ ‘But you’re not,’ replied Auchinleck. ‘That is where you’re wrong,’ said Blamey. ‘Australia is an independent nation. She came into the war under certain definite agreements. Now, gentlemen, in the name of my Government, I demand the relief of those troops.’14
Blamey was a politician’s commander, with a chilling appreciation of the oleaginous nature of political power. British Air Marshal Arthur Tedder described him as ‘really a rather unpleasant political soldier’.15
This had its advantages—Blamey was the only person in the military who could stand up to the politicians, because he understood the nature of the political game. He was also dealing with inexperienced Labor men who rose through the trade unions and suddenly found themselves running a war.16 It put him in an enviably powerful position, which upset many Labor MPs.
On the downside, his political antennae seemed not to pick up signals from the army. Blamey excelled at protecting his own hide and nuzzling up to those more powerful than he. He was a great schmoozer among those who mattered. But he failed to get on with many of his field commanders—with disastrous consequences. He engaged in titanic struggles with senior officers. He would rudely forget, or simply fail to find out, the names and achievements of key officers. Shamefully he failed to recognise Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Honner, an undisputed hero of the New Guinea campaign, when Honner returned to Port Moresby after leading the 39th on the Kokoda Track.
There were suggestions that a ‘cabal’ of officers had tried to remove him in the Middle East, one of whom Blamey violently smacked in the face at a dinner in Benghazi, according to Lieutenant-General Sydney Rowell.*
He was exceedingly ruthless in the application of power, which seems to have stemmed from a rather disturbing psychological source. He confided in Lieutenant-General John Lavarack that he had a bad inferiority complex, which ‘had been his constant companion in life…’17
There were endless ‘Blamey stories’, of course—of graft and corruption and self-indulgence. Scrupulous officers disapproved of a man who used his influence to secure pleasures unavailable to others. Blamey insisted on his wife joining him in the Middle East, a perk no other officer enjoyed. He wrote to his brother: ‘Those who control our destinies at Home seem to have a great objection to sending out our womenfolk.’18 He was accused of fixing his younger son’s early evacuation from Greece. Perhaps this was unfair: his elder son was killed in an air accident in 1932, three years before the death of his first wife, who suffered a long illness. Blamey showed little outward emotion at these losses, according to colleagues; one can only surmise that he internalised deep personal trauma.
Indeed, Blamey was a complex man, often misunderstood, and a ripe target for poppy loppers. He was certainly Australia’s most accomplished soldier—becoming the nation’s first, and only, field marshal before his death, in 1951. But we need to delve a little deeper to understand his actions during Japan’s southward thrust towards Australia.
Blamey began his working life nurturing an unattainable purity of purpose. The nineteen-year-old had designs on a clerical career, and wrote intensely personal religious poems. One began: ‘O Lord lead thou me on/I grope and struggle in my darkness Lord’.19
He told his brother in 1905, ‘I would be a minister whose power would be felt and whose sagacity and sympathy would be Christlike, such is my ambition.’20 Blamey’s ambitions were never modest.
A self-flagellatory asceticism animated this religious zeal. He confided in his brother that he hadn’t ‘given a real thought to a girl for eighteen months. What’s more I don’t want to’21—surely an unusually punishing regime for a nineteen-year-old.*
Out of the shell of this trainee priest crept a ruthless self-promoter and political operator. The monastic young Blamey metamorphosed from a soldier of Christ into a Christian soldier. His decision to join the army was less a change of heart than a psychological extrapolation. The Christian church and the army were thoroughly reconcilable in 1942. Both demanded order and obedience; both relied on a strict moral hierarchy; both were fighting the same enemy. Notwithstanding Stalin’s awkward alliance with the West, World War II is often crudely seen as a neat delineation of the forces of good and evil. The idea of ‘Christian soldiers’ was not only plausible but also thoroughly commendable for men such as Blamey. And military service conveniently offered more money and earthly power than the church.
There was an all too human side to Blamey. Throughout his life he nourished an insatiable appetite for pleasure. This was evident in his relations with women. Younger, pretty women easily smote the 58-year-old general. Carlyon, Blamey’s most intimate observer, divulged, ‘Blamey was attracted by young and pretty women. When opportunity arose, he had no inhibitions, enjoyed himself to the full—and then moved on.’22
Lex McAulay commented: ‘Like Bill Clinton he had weaknesses of the flesh—in those days it was far more a bad thing. He didn’t personify what the Australian soldier wanted in a leader.’23
This had moments of high farce. He unwisely visited at least one prostitute while commissioner for police in Victoria in the 1920s—and was famously identified by the badge he left in the bordello—and pursued ‘short-lived intimacies with accommodating women’24 in Egypt and Palestine.
Avowed prudes found fault in Blamey’s enthusiasm for a belly dancer in Cairo. The poet and war correspondent Kenneth Slessor wrote of Blamey ‘jazzing fatuously with a blowsy Egyptian girl…surrounded by junior officers sitting at tables’.25 Slessor later lost his press accreditation, though not for his views on the general’s enthusiasm for belly dancing.
Blamey’s love of whisky, orchids and beautiful women—not always in that order—supported MacArthur’s view of him as ‘sensual, slothful and of doubtful moral character’. Another American officer dismissed him as a ‘non-professional Australian drunk’.26 These were harsh words. But MacArthur also happened to think Blamey ‘a tough commander likely to shine like a power light in an emergency. The best of the local bunch.’27 Curtin agreed. When challenged about Blamey’s disreputable past, the Prime Minister robustly defended him: ‘I hired a soldier, not a Sunday school teacher.’28
How good a soldier he was depends on whose opinion one seeks. ‘Blamey men’, such as Lieutenant-General Ned Herring, found little to criticise. But most of the military–political establishment (and even Blamey, in the end) disapproved of his dual role in 1942—as commander of the Australian Military Forces and commander, Allied Land Forces. It led to conflicts of interest and placed Blamey under huge pressure (though he seemed to wear it lightly).
Of the quality of his command, Blamey found his most damning critic in Chester Wilmot, the ABC’s war correspondent. Wilmot never got on with Blamey. But the reporter cannot be dismissed as grudging, politically motivated or ignorant. He possessed a brilliant insight into the military aspects of the campaign. His unofficial reports were highly regarded by the army’s top echelons, notably Major-General Sydney Rowell, Blamey’s sworn enemy.
In the Middle East, Wilmot wrote of the ‘widespread lack of faith in Blamey…In two years I have heard him denounced in the strongest possible terms…in private conversations by senior officers, who had no interest in supplanting him, by junior officers and by ordinary Diggers.’29
Blamey should in the end be judged by his own standards. And what were those? In 1935 he wrote the closest thing to a personal manifesto. ‘My philosophy,’ he said, ‘is to do that thoroughly which I have to do; to be just and fair always…it would be a great grief to me to know I had done an injustice to any man. I think above all I am one of those who do not care much what others think so long as I know what I think. And what I expect of my men I expect of myself.’30
Few would disagree with Blamey’s assessment that he did not care what others thought of him—as historian David Horner has observed. But to what extent would Blamey honour these intentions? What of his actions?
On 18 March, an announcement upstaged Blamey’s appointment as commander, Allied Land Forces, and provoked a national celebration. General Douglas MacArthur, one of America’s most famous soldiers, was named supreme commander of all Allied Forces in the South-West Pacific Area.
‘St George, having killed his dragon, could not have been hailed more fervently…than this distinguished military leader who had come to extinguish the Rising Sun,’ wrote Hasluck.31 Politicians drooled over this dashingly handsome, four-star American hero in his well-pressed uniform. Women were ecstatic. Forde, the Minister for the Army, spoke admiringly of this ‘well-proportioned man’ who ‘kept in the very best physical form’. He had an aquiline nose and a tall, trim frame that conveyed a ‘sensuous, fine, almost feline quality’.32
One man was less than ecstatic. Blamey heard the news while travelling across Australia by train from Perth, and was deeply apprehensive about his new American superior officer.
MacArthur stepped off the train at Melbourne’s Spencer Street Station at 9.30 a.m. on 21 March, like ‘a grand entry in opera’.33 John Curtin’s first words, as he stretched out his hand, were, ‘Hello, Doug’. The greeting cut through the pomp and circumstance, and the pair settled down to a fruitful working relationship of great mutual respect. They had a lot in common: both were at the pinnacles of their careers, both were immensely hardworking, austere men.
The Australian War Cabinet rejoiced at MacArthur’s ‘inspiration’; the local press were ‘jubilant’. The popular headlines pealed through the land: ‘MacArthur! MacArthur! MacArthur!’34 The Bulletin exceeded its jingoistic norms: ‘In sending their national hero to Australia, [the Americans] have charged themselves with the responsibility of saving it as a free white English-speaking nation, as far as it lies within their power, for it is not in the nature of that great people to let MacArthur down.’35
For Curtin, it seemed a dazzling reward for his long cultivation of the USA. With MacArthur in Australia, the Prime Minister’s vision of an American military alliance seemed to have materialised in the most sensational manner conceivable.
‘You have come to Australia to lead a crusade,’ Curtin told MacArthur on 15 April, when assigning his command, ‘the result of which means everything to the future of the world and mankind…You are being placed in Supreme Command of [Australia’s] Navy, Army and Air Force, so that with those of your great nation, they may be welded into a homogenous force…Your directive…instructs you to prepare to take the offensive.’36
MacArthur’s character provoked extreme responses. In some he summoned the deepest loyalty and admiration; others responded with infrangible hostility.
Major-General George Brett, who served under MacArthur in Australia, wrote of ‘a brilliant, temperamental egoist; a handsome man, who can be as charming as anyone who ever lived, or harshly indifferent to the needs and desires of those around…Everything about MacArthur is on the grand scale; his virtues and triumphs and shortcomings…’37
Colonel G. H. Wilkinson took a different line, writing of MacArthur in 1943: ‘He is shrewd, selfish, proud, remote, highly strung and vastly vain. He has imagination, self-confidence, physical courage and charm, but no humour about himself, no regard for truth, and is unaware of these defects. He mistakes his emotions and ambitions for principles. With moral depth he would be a great man: as it is he is a near-miss, which may be worse than a mile.’38
His strengths overawed many of these weaknesses. One of America’s most decorated soldiers, MacArthur ended the Great War as a divisional commander on the Western Front, aged 38. He subsequently held a string of top jobs—superintendent of West Point, America’s top military academy (1921), Chief of Staff of the US Army (1930) and later military adviser to the Philippine Government.*
MacArthur was more than a highly successful career soldier; he was the supreme innovator and military strategist, who ‘laid the foundation for the development of an American armoured force’.39 In time he would become, with Eisenhower, the most popular soldier in American history, the man credited—justly or not—with rolling back the Japanese Empire.
There were caveats. MacArthur persistently sought scapegoats for his own mistakes. He blamed others for the Philippine catastrophe when the responsibility was mostly his. He unfairly condemned Australian commanders and troops on the Kokoda Track, a travesty of the truth.
‘I came through and I shall return,’ MacArthur told the Australian people. He meant he would return to the Philippines—and gave an heroic account of his flight from Corregidor. The American President, he declared, had ordered him to ‘break through the Jap line’ and proceed to Australia ‘for the purpose of organising American offence against Japan’. Not for the first time would MacArthur describe the largely Australian offensive in New Guinea as American.
Indeed, his notion of truth was elastic even by today’s lurid standards of spin. In Papua and New Guinea MacArthur approved the dispatch of a regiment of lies in the form of doctored communiqués that invariably presented him in the best possible light. These were known by the troops, with smiling contempt, as ‘Doug’s Communiqués’.
A depressing example was the communiqué that announced, on 8 January 1943, victory in Papua—Washington was impatient for good news. In fact, the war ground on for a bloody fortnight, with a huge casualty rate. Such cavalier disregard for the truth inspired the popular lampoon that circulated throughout the Allied armies:
Here, too, is told the saga bold
of virile deathless youth
In stories seldom tarnished with
the plain unvarnished truth.
It’s quite a rag, it waves the flag,
Its motif is the fray,
And modesty is plain to see in
Doug’s Communiqué…
‘My battleships bombard the Nips from
Maine to Singapore;
My subs have sunk a million tons;
They’ll sink a billion more.
My aircraft bombed Berlin that night.’
In Italy they say ‘Our turn’s tonight, because it’s right in
Doug’s Communiqué…
And while possibly a rumour now,
someday it will be fact
That the Lord will hear a deep voice say
‘Move over God—it’s Mac’.
So bet your shoes that all the news
That last great Judgement Day
Will go to press in nothing less than
DOUG’S COMMUNIQUÉ!
MacArthur, like Blamey, was accused of cowardice. He was said to have ‘turned on his heels’ when serving on the Western Front.* He earned the nickname ‘Dugout Doug’ for the prolonged periods he apparently spent in bomb shelters in Corregidor. And he was heavily criticised for his flight from the Philippines on 12 March 1942 before its surrender to the Japanese. In this, he had little choice; Roosevelt personally ordered MacArthur to flee (or, in MacArthur’s phrase, ‘break through’) to Australia. He was too important. Less forgiveably, MacArthur visited his doomed troops at Bataan just once before their capture—and the Bataan Death March that followed.** And he had an irritating way of implying that he led from the front in New Guinea and elsewhere—notoriously at Buna, when in fact he was 120 miles away from combat.
Curtin gave his two commanders complete freedom to conduct the war as they saw fit, with an assurance that ‘neither governments nor politicians’ would interfere.40 The generals were constrained only by their resources; these were not promising.
To his horror MacArthur discovered, on the train from Darwin to Adelaide, that just 25,000 US troops—mostly national guardsmen—were then in Australia. The news ‘literally stunned’ him: ‘He turned deadly white, his knees buckled, his lips twitched,’ observed one witness.41
‘I have never seen him so affected. He was…heartbroken,’ said an officer who’d known him for twenty years. The single division of US troops was not enough to defend the country, much less propel a counterattack. After a long silence, MacArthur whispered miserably, ‘God have mercy on us.’42 He spent the whole night pacing the train.
News of the dispatch of a second US division contingent on some Australian troops remaining in the Middle East cheered him up, and he arrived in Melbourne to declare: ‘My faith in our ultimate victory is invincible…There can be no compromise. We shall win or we shall die, and to this end I pledge you the full resources of all the mighty power of my country and all the blood of my countrymen.’43
But his presence did not galvanise US support for Australia as Curtin hoped. The future allocation of US support—338 bombers, two infantry divisions, one artillery brigade and two anti-aircraft brigades—was not enough to defend Australia; in any case, their 95,000 officers and men would not be available for combat until late in 1942.
Curtin realised that MacArthur, a Republican, was outside the Washington loop. Roosevelt looked coldly on him; Generals Marshall and Eisenhower were never fans; and Admiral King would later refuse MacArthur’s pleas for naval support. Indeed, it was left to Curtin to plead with Roosevelt for more troops, a plea that largely fell on deaf ears. He tried force of numbers—607,000 of 1,529,000 Australian men aged between eighteen and 45 had enlisted. He wrote to the US President, ‘We have two of your splendid American Army divisions in Australia…We are deeply grateful…but I would respectfully point out, Mr President, that Australia’s capacity to help herself has been limited by the fact that 48,000 men are still serving overseas [in the Middle East] and our casualties in dead, missing and prisoners of war total…an aggregate of 85,000.’44
Roosevelt bluntly refused—‘Germany First’ came first. Shipping commitments made it impossible to move more troops to Australia ‘now or in the immediate future…’45 An early and decisive defeat of Germany, Roosevelt said, must come before an ‘all-out’ effort in the Pacific. The limits of MacArthur’s powers came hurtling into focus: he would have no naval support and no marines in the battle for Papua.
Of the Japanese commanders in the South-West Pacific Area, little is known publicly. Most did not survive the war, doomed to commit suicide as the Allies thwarted and then destroyed their armies. Some had fleeting roles in the battles to come, and emerge as blurred figures with little control over the terrible events that convulsed them.
While many were publicly disgraced for shaming Japan, or abandoning their troops, some are still remembered in little, awed ceremonies held in the Japanese provinces: the front-line commanders in Papua—Horii, Kusunose, Oda, Tsukamoto, for example—are seen today by some Japanese veterans and their families as warriors and heroes.
These men, whose characters emerge in the coming actions, were answerable to High Command in Rabaul, personified by the imposing figure of Lieutenant-General Hyakutake Harukichi, who gave the order for the invasion of Papua. He would later be sent to Guadalcanal, and the command of the troops in Papua transferred to General Adachi Hatazo, commander of the Eighteenth Army.
Hyakutake’s impulsive personality sowed the seeds of the coming Japanese debacle. He rose to his new command in April 1942, when His Imperial Majesty the Emperor Hirohito summoned him to the palace in Tokyo. The Emperor was pleased to bestow upon the bowing Hyakutake a promotion: commander of the Seventeenth Army, of which the Nankai Shitai was to form part.
Hyakutake swiftly exercised his new powers; he delivered his first message to the troops that month. With hindsight, his rhetoric carries a deep pathos, given the disastrous military adventure he was about to launch:
I have now been appointed commander of the 17th Army by his Imperial Majesty the Emperor and, with the co-operation of all of you, I am about to carry out the important duty of completing one stage in the War of Greater East Asia…
All of you, like myself, will be deeply impressed by this honour. You will make practical use of the personal experience gained in many successive victories and, girding your loins, you will assume a new resolve. You will promote still further your military discipline and perfect your training. Using outstanding initiative to overcome every hardship, you will display the true worth of a god-sent army and god-sent soldiers…
Hyakutake Harukichi
Commander, 17th Army46
On 2 May he ordered Major-General Horii to prepare the Nankai Shitai for the invasion of Papua. Hyakutake was initially sceptical about sending troops over the Owen Stanley Range to attack Port Moresby, a view Horii shared. To quell these doubts, Hyakutake ordered Yokoyama’s Advance Force Unit to land at Gona on a reconnaissance mission. Their job was not to invade, but merely to see whether an attack on Port Moresby over the mountains were possible.
Then Hyakutake suddenly threw caution aside. An envoy purporting to represent the Emperor arrived from Staff HQ in Tokyo. This man was Lieutenant-Colonel Masanobu Tsuji, who flew into Rabaul on 15 July 1942. He bore a dramatic piece of news. He told Hyakutake that the Emperor was very eager to occupy Port Moresby, as soon as possible.
This was a lie, but Hyakutake believed Masanobu, and decided to change Yokoyama’s reconnaissance mission into an actual invasion—which went ahead at Gona on 21 July 1942. Hyakutake learned the truth four days later, when his Seventeenth Army HQ received a telegram from the Deputy Chief of Staff for Military Operations, Colonel Takushiro, in Tokyo. It said that Army HQ in Tokyo were awaiting the result of the ‘research’ mission. The result never came; the invasion had begun.
So the invasion of Papua was ordered on the strength of a lie, believed by a man who placed the Emperor’s pleasure ahead of the lives of 13,000 troops.47 Masanobu lied to Hyakutake, it appears, to hasten the southerly advance of the Empire. That he was not punished suggests he had the backing of Army HQ in Tokyo, which often presumed to speak for the Emperor without the latter’s knowledge.
Already the catastrophic consequences of Hyakutake being misled were becoming visible: the Nankai Shitai had little time to prepare their supplies. They were consigned to the jungles with scarce resources—just two weeks’ rations.