‘[There] were just enough savvy professionals to hold together…what was, in essence, a children’s crusade…’
—Eric Bergerud, US military historian
The Americans arrived on the north coast with the bluster of a conquering army. They streamed into the Allied-controlled villages of Popondetta, Soputa and Pongani to join the final offensive. ‘You can go home now,’ they told Australian troops beyond Soputa; the Yanks were here to ‘clean things up’.
It mattered little that MacArthur’s boys were, to use the vivid military phrase, unblooded. None had seen combat; yet many boasted they’d whip the Japs, show the Aussies how it’s done, and so on. The enemy, whom they would undoubtedly lick, cowered in holes dying of starvation—so they were told. At this display of braggadocio, the weary Australians sat back and observed their new comrades with wry amusement.
Gung-ho patriotism and youthful naivety no doubt explained the US attitude. Sadly, there was little else to justify it. The Americans had not fought over the Owen Stanleys, or in the Middle East. Some had walked over the mountains unopposed, via Ghost Mountain and the Jaure Track— parallel to Kokoda—and were tired; others, flown over, were fresh and healthy. A regiment came by boat from Wanigela, on the east coast, landing at Pongani. Very few were usefully trained. During twenty months of jungle training in Queensland rainforests, one American regiment performed a single night patrol.1
Most of the Americans at Buna were national guardsmen from the Midwest, whose experience and status roughly corresponded to the Australian militia. They were the ungainly products of America’s myopic prewar defence policy, which failed to finance a proper land army; in the late 1930s, it was the size of Belgium’s. When war broke out in the Pacific, the prized US marines were sent to Guadalcanal. This fact reflected the relative unimportance ascribed to the Kokoda campaign in the eyes of the American commanders.
The first US troops to arrive were 3000 men of the 32nd Division, raised in Wisconsin and Michigan. Dressed in clean-spun jungle greens, they enjoyed superior rations and always seemed to have an ample supply of cigarettes. They tended to smoke with that peculiarly American swagger; indeed, they looked rugged. Those who walked the Jaure Track were no doubt a little frayed, but compared to the Australians they were models of good health.
In short, the Americans at Buna were good ol’ boys from the American backwoods. They marched up utterly unprepared for ‘the terrors of jungle warfare so alien to the experience of boys from the clipped green lawns and serene streets of the small-town Mid-West’.2 Their youth and inexperience troubled their commanders. ‘The soldiers,’ observed Eric Bergerud, ‘although extremely enthusiastic, were very young and very poorly trained…[There] were just enough savvy professionals to hold together…what was, in essence, a children’s crusade…’3
MacArthur anticipated a swift victory. So did Major-General Edwin Harding, the slightly bewildered American who preceded General Robert Eichelberger as commander of the US forces at Buna. With near total air supremacy, and the possession of airfields at Dobodura, Popondetta and Kokoda, the Allied forces would assuredly destroy the ‘shell of sacrifice troops’ clinging to the beachhead.4 Nor could the Japanese get reinforcements through: bargeloads had been bombed and prevented from landing in mid-November. And there was Guadalcanal, where the US marines were in the final stages of wiping out the Japanese forces. Surely Buna would swiftly collapse.
The rank and file at GHQ clung to such comforting notions like children with security blankets. MacArthur himself was openly confident that this would be a ‘mopping up’ job. In October, the Americans even entertained the idea of delaying their attack on Buna until the Australians in the mountains arrived, so they could share the spoils of victory. ‘The belief was prevalent,’ on 31 October, ‘that the Japanese had no intention of holding Buna; that he had no troops there…’5
Harding concurred: Buna would be ‘easy pickings’, he told Lieutenant-General Richard Sutherland on October 14. A ragbag mob of starving and sick Japanese, less than a battalion, supposedly defended the beachhead. Even so, Harding had a small insurance policy, just in case. On 5 November, he’d signed off an evacuation plan, ‘Emergency Withdrawal Routes’ into the Owen Stanleys, with detailed descriptions of the country. Given the massive Allied build-up and confident posturing, this seemed to smack of alarm.6
There were a few dissenting voices. Rowell had growled from his Melbourne garden, in a letter to Allen on 11 October 1942: ‘I can’t believe that the Jap will clear out of Buna unless forced out…’7 Eichelberger, too, had misgivings, chiefly about the battle readiness of the American troops. He rated them ‘barely satisfactory’ and incapable of matching the Japanese.
How well prepared were the Allies for the Buna offensive? To Blamey’s disgust, they got no help from the US navy. US battleships refused to escort the old fishing craft that routinely plied the coast around Milne Bay to Cape Sudest, carrying Allied supplies. The perils of Japanese strafing attacks forced them to drag canvas assault boats, replete with ammunition, through the surf at night. A big wave sometimes tipped the heavily laden boats, and men had to dive to retrieve the boxes of bullets. Such were the hazards of supplying a roadless front line, without naval support.
Nor were the Japanese defeated in the air. The Zeros still managed some lightning strikes. On 16 November Japanese planes strafed and sank an Allied ‘fleet’—three old luggers and a barge—then ferrying US and Australian troops from Pongani towards the Buna front.
The little flotilla happened to be carrying American top brass, in the form of General Harding and Major-General Albert Waldron, who were forced to jump overboard. Their boats were destroyed and 24 troops killed. At least 28 native carriers and Tom Fisher, an Australian war cameraman, were among the civilian deaths. Two heavy artillery pieces, weeks of rations and a huge quantity of ammunition sank or exploded. It was a disastrous loss. Harding and the other survivors swam ashore, badly shaken.
What about air power? Couldn’t Allied planes simply vaporise the bunker fields? Certainly General Kenney’s ‘kids’—the US and Australian pilots—dominated the air; the Japanese ‘danse macabre’ over Port Moresby had ended. But Allied pilots couldn’t see the enemy. Well-camouflaged manholes weren’t visible even on clear days, and the technology that produced the lurid metaphors, and loss of life, of the post-Vietnam age—‘carpet-bombing’ and ‘daisy-cutting’—wasn’t available.
A breakthrough of sorts came on 28 November, when a squadron of RAAF Wirraways was deployed as spy planes. These ‘slow, almost weaponless’8 training aircraft were able to fly very low—seeming to hover—over the Japanese positions and report detailed directions to Allied gunners. They were often shot down and forced to land—although one Wirraway actually shot down a Japanese Zero on Boxing Day, a sight applauded by ground troops.
Light Stuart tanks, too, were requisitioned from Milne Bay on 13 November, with the job of shelling and crushing the foxholes. They wouldn’t arrive until early December. In tandem, Allied artillery greatly improved. The first howitzers, several Australian 25-pounders, and heavy machine-guns, were flown up to Dobodura. But little of this formidable arsenal arrived in time for the first attack on Buna on 19 November.
Sending troops in without heavy artillery cover was madness, and in early November Blamey demanded naval support. Bombardment of the beaches from ships at sea seemed the best way to ‘loosen up’ the bunker fields. MacArthur appreciated the ‘soundness’ of the idea, but replied that the American navy would not assist them. Indeed, the commander of the Allied Naval Forces, Vice-Admiral Arthur Carpender, had been ‘unwilling to risk his ships in the shallow reef-ridden waters south-east of Buna’.9 MacArthur did not enjoy good relations with the US navy.
Blamey replied with undisguised disdain for the American admiralty: ‘I regret,’ he told MacArthur, ‘that I cannot feel very satisfied with [the US navy’s] refusal to utilize destroyers.’ He added that maintaining destroyers in safe positions when merchant vessels have to take such risks at Buna ‘does not appear convincing’.10
Australian land troops had fought over mountains where it had been ‘extremely difficult to give them the necessary ammunition and supplies to maintain them’.11 At Buna, the infantry faced a battle where defeat may mean destruction, and the attitude of the [US] navy appeared ‘to be to avoid risk’, Blamey warned.12
His requests met a wall of silence. The navy would not help; heavy artillery and tanks were delayed. And so the American infantry were to march into bunker fields equipped with rifles, a few light machine-guns, and initially no artillery support. ‘Can you imagine Nelson’s reaction to a Navy that fears to go where the enemy goes regularly?’ Blamey confided in his friend, Herring, ‘It is their job to transport the Army and to protect it.’13
It was, perhaps, one of Blamey’s finest hours.