‘Take Buna or don’t come back alive’
—General MacArthur to General Eichelberger, 30 November 1942
MacArthur had ‘never been so humiliated’ when he heard that American troops had dropped their weapons and fled. Harding, he said, had failed, ‘and the blame for what happened was his’.1
The supreme commander’s feelings were heightened by a series of sharply critical reports on the American soldiers’ performance. The sharpest was Larr’s, which seriously dented MacArthur’s faith in American military supremacy. Another, by Lieutenant-Colonel William Robertson, an Australian, tabled a disturbing account of the negligent and increasingly odd behaviour of Harding.
Flying into what he thought was Harding’s new HQ at Dobodura, Robertson found the area deserted—a single camp fire burned on the edge of the runway. Around 4.00 p.m. on 29 November, the American general eventually showed. He’d spent the day leisurely walking the sixteen miles from his old HQ. During this jungle stroll, he and his staff had bathed, drunk coconut milk and rested.
Harding presented a sad, shuffling figure. He seemed deeply distracted. He’d had no contact with his forward troops for days: his signals men, finding their wireless set too heavy, had abandoned it. Disconnected from his own men, Harding could offer only the sketchiest account of their infantry positions. Robertson was appalled, and duly informed his superiors.
The slightly sinister General Sutherland—MacArthur’s ‘eyes and ears’—flew into Dobodura the next day. Profoundly underwhelmed by what he saw and heard, he demanded that Harding relieve two of his most senior officers. One was Mott, a curious choice, since Mott had led the one successful American assault on Buna; Harding refused.
The bitterest pill for Harding was Blamey’s open criticism of American troops and refusal to use the US 127th Regiment on the Sanananda–Gona front. Harding was startled,2 and vigorously defended his men. It was to no avail. Sutherland had already made up his mind: Harding would have to go—the poor man had, after all, insisted on keeping incompetent officers in key posts—and he advised MacArthur accordingly.
A fascinating dialogue between Blamey and Herring rumbled along in the background of these events. Herring, a fastidious barrister who’d succeeded Rowell as commander of New Guinea Force, kept Blamey fully informed with a stream of daily, unofficial, and unusually candid, reports written in the lawyer’s dauntingly spidery hand.
Herring, an unapologetic ‘Blamey man’, obligingly echoed his boss’s contempt for the Americans. The American 32nd Division, he wrote on 29 November, ‘had still not realised that…whilst bombing, strafing, mortars and artillery may soften his resistance…the men who are left will…have to be taken out & killed in hard fighting. This I was at pains to explain to Harding this morning…The organisation of [Harding’s] HQ is worse than primitive.’3
Blamey replied that night, with momentous news: ‘…I have had a talk with General MacArthur…and he is now going to take very drastic action. Eichelberger goes over tomorrow to report to you, and has complete authority to remove Harding, all his regimental commanders and several of his battalion commanders…’4
MacArthur’s choice of General Robert Eichelberger was propitious. Eichelberger, then relaxing on a sleepy Sunday in Rockhampton, emerges as one of the more impressive figures of the campaign—intelligent, brave, unafraid to visit the front and deeply interested in the state of his troops. He lacked experience as a commander in battle, but he was tough, resolute and a great communicator, who possessed superb organisational skills. Eichelberger, in sum, was a perfect example of the redeeming power of good leadership—but the effort would nearly break him.
He got his orders at midnight, 29 November, and arrived at MacArthur’s lavish bungalow late the next day. Ushered past the supreme commander’s stony-faced staff, he observed ‘fine tropical furniture, a library, and, still more importantly, a breeze’.5 Of MacArthur’s Bataan Gang, only General Kenney ‘greeted me with a smile’.6 Stepping onto a sweeping verandah with sunny views of the hillside, he found MacArthur pacing back and forth, his corncob pipe alight, his face a rock of consternation. The supreme commander got straight to the point:
‘Bob, I’m putting you in command at Buna. Relieve Harding. I am sending you in Bob, and I want you to remove all officers who won’t fight. Relieve regimental and battalion commanders; if necessary, put sergeants in charge of battalions and corporals in charge of companies—anyone who will fight. Time is of the essence—the Japs may land reinforcements any night.’7
MacArthur did another circuit of the verandah, and then stopped short of Eichelberger: ‘Bob,’ he said, ‘take Buna or don’t come back alive.’8 Pointing to the nearby Brigadier-General Clovis Byers, he added, ‘And that goes for your chief of staff.’9
Eichelberger, who’d never led a unit in combat, ruminated on the challenge over his last decent breakfast for months—juice and bacon and eggs—after which, he recalls, MacArthur ‘put an arm around my shoulder’.10 Clearly, there were carrots as well as sticks…
MacArthur’s carrot, should Eichelberger succeed, revealed a lot about the priorities of the carrot-dangler: as well as a Distinguished Service Cross and a recommendation for high British decoration, MacArthur promised to release Eichelberger’s name to the press. Since American officers functioned under a code of strict anonymity—no one back home knew where they were or what they were doing—MacArthur alone had the power to confer immortality on them.
The gift in this case impressed the donor more than the recipient. Eichelberger felt faintly soiled by the experience; the attribution of such self-serving motives impugned his sense of dignity. He later dismissed MacArthur’s ‘ribbons and publicity’: ‘neither my soldiers nor I would have stayed a day longer [in Buna] for all the pretty ribbons of all the nations of the world’.11
That morning he flew to the front to relieve Harding as commander of the American forces. ‘When the stink of the swamp hit our nostrils,’ Eichelberger noted, ‘we knew that we…were prisoners of geography. And…we knew that we would never get out alive unless we fought our way out.’12 He was under no illusions. Buna, he later wrote, was plainly going to be ‘siege warfare…the bitterest and most punishing kind’.13 It would drive this strong-willed man to the brink of nervous collapse.
The shock of battle had etiolated the American army. Eichelberger found the men moping about, or sitting in a state of baffled impotence. Instead of a few hundred sick and starving Japanese, the Americans realised they were facing ‘large numbers of fresh, well-fed, well-armed troops in seemingly impregnable positions, against whom in almost two weeks of fighting they had failed to score even one noteworthy success’.14 Military order—leadership, rank, duty, even the salute—seemed oddly surreal, irrelevant even, in the context of this despair. Who will lead us? the men’s faces asked. Why have we been sent to fight in this godforsaken place?
When Eichelberger reached Herring’s tent at Popondetta, on 1 December, he met blank-faced officers with no idea of what had become of the American regiments. Herring himself could shed little light on the mystery. A senior liaison officer went off to find the errant General Harding, who knew nothing of his men, or their positions.
‘When I went to the front on December 2 I couldn’t find a front,’ an exasperated Eichelberger later wrote.15 A staff officer apprised him of the state of the American troops at Buna. They were ‘deplorable’. They wore long dirty beards; their clothing was in rags, and their boots worn out. Hungry and sick, the men relied on scarce rations and displayed ‘little discipline or military courtesy’.16 Many spent their days eating and sleeping in little groups along the track to Buna.
Eichelberger ordered a cease-fire. He needed a few days to reorganise. The American companies and platoons were ‘as scrambled as pied type on the floor of a printing office’. The American patrols were ‘dazed by the hazards of swamp and jungle’, and the officers demoralised by their failure to advance in appalling conditions.17
Eichelberger sent a damning assessment of the situation to MacArthur, and applied himself to the job of transforming the American army. It would take two days to unscramble the regiments. His priorities were then to fix the supply lines and restore order. The return of morale would hopefully follow.
He ensured the troops were better fed, well supplied with cigarettes, and properly armed. He promoted those who showed the right stuff—very young corporals became officers overnight, suddenly elevated to dizzy heights. Harding and other senior officers were formally sacked. Colonel Clarence Martin became commander of Warren Force; Colonel M. C. McCreary replaced Mott as leader of Urbana Force.
The state of the sick and wounded deeply affected Eichelberger. ‘The Pacific was a different war,’ he wrote. ‘In New Guinea, when the rains came, wounded men might drown before the litter-bearers found them. Many did…Out there I was convinced, as were many of my soldiers, that death was pleasanter in the Temperate Zone.’18
He slowly raised the Americans’ self-worth from the slough of despond. He gained the mutual trust of his men. Only then would a soldier be prepared to lay down his life. Honner achieved it, as did Vasey, Cullen and Potts. Kusunose, Tsukamoto, Oda and even Horii similarly inspired the Japanese troops. A fragile esprit de corps hobbled to life among the American dugouts. The broken American soldier gradually found the inner strength to fight.
Eichelberger proudly informed Herring that ‘his boys’ were ‘getting up the trees and having a go at the Japs’. Since his men had been cared for, ‘they have been a different show’. But they were a long way from mounting an effective attack.
Meanwhile, on the eastern flank, there was a hubbub of activity. An Australian cavalry battalion was quietly examining ways of breaking the deadlock.19 It came up with a suicidal plan: to use five lightly armed troop carriers—mounted with machine-guns—as tanks. The US troops would trot along behind these contraptions as they blasted a gap in the Japanese bunkers.
It was another example of ‘bewildered desperation’.20 Troop carriers were meant for troop transport, not attack: ‘carriers should not, indeed could not, be used as [tanks]’.21 This was fairly obvious. Their low sides and lack of overhead cover were dispiriting hints to the most casual observer. Nonetheless, these machines were all the cavalry had (their horses long ago went the way of the sabre and musket)—as the tanks were delayed. It was hoped the sight of armoured vehicles might rally the Americans from their torpor.
After a bit of perfunctory aerial bombing, the carriers broke cover on 5 December and drove at a slow walking pace towards the enemy bunkers. Four Australians manned each vehicle; they formed the ‘spearhead’ of the American III Battalion, which was ordered to creep along behind.
The attack was a complete fiasco, epitomised by the needless death of the young Australian jackeroo Lieutenant Terence Fergusson (whose father, Brigadier Maurice Fergusson, then commanded an Australian armoured brigade). Fergusson’s carrier drove into heavy fire from bunkers and snipers. With his driver dead, Fergusson grabbed the wheel, but the vehicle got stuck between two logs. The young man looked back for help, but the American troops were nowhere to be seen, having run away. With his carrier immobilised amid terrific fire, Fergusson called vainly to another Australian driver. A Japanese sniper then shot him through the head. Within half an hour, all five carriers were abandoned or destroyed, their men killed, burnt or badly wounded. Had the American infantry stayed and fought, the result may have been different.
The only good news for the Allies at Buna in early December was the extraordinary performance of the American staff sergeant Herman J. Bottcher, who led his platoon in smashing a path through the Japanese lines to the sea.
Bottcher had a strong motive to succeed. He was born in Germany, and didn’t enjoy American citizenship. Strongly opposed to the Nazis, he’d left his country in the early 1930s and spent a year at the University of California. He then rather spoiled his résumé by returning to Europe to fight on Franco’s side in the Spanish Civil War, which damaged his hopes of becoming an American.
Nonetheless, he was allowed to fight as one, and in 1942 found himself in Papua at war against an ally of the land of his birth. On the eve of a fresh attack on Buna village, Bottcher approached Eichelberger with an unusual request: would the general secure his American citizenship if he took Buna? Eichelberger agreed to help—anything to get the men to fight. Some were promised a medal; others media fame; but Bottcher fought for a US passport.
This takes nothing away from Bottcher’s achievement. He eschewed the futile, frontal attacks on bunker fields. The proud, would-be American beat a path through virgin jungle then outflanked and wheeled around behind the enemy. He reached the sea between Buna village and Giropa Point, in the very midst of the Japanese army and planted his one machine-gun on the beach. His platoon never lost it. When an Eichelberger staffer asked Bottcher’s men what they needed to sustain them, a GI bared his backside to Allied binoculars: ‘Pants,’ he yelled. ‘For God’s sake, General, pants!’22 It seemed Bottcher’s uniforms were rotting.
The Japanese waded towards him from the east and west, and were mown down ‘like wheat in a field’.23 Every night Bottcher’s men could hear the Japanese crawling towards them in the darkness; one night they repulsed fifty shrieking attackers. As casualties mounted, Bottcher’s Corner acquired a more fitting name, Maggot Beach, and an American newspaper shocked the nation by publishing images of the carnage. By the time reinforcements arrived, the troops’ nerves were shot through. One soldier shook uncontrollably.
Highly decorated for bravery, Bottcher became a captain and an American citizen. He died two years later in the battle for the Philippines. A little statue near Buna village commemorates his courage. ‘He was,’ wrote Eichelberger, ‘one of the best Americans I have ever known.’24
Sitting in his forward regimental post Eichelberger observed the repeated failures with rising frustration. A pattern had set in. The troops would advance a little, hear the ‘typewriter clatter’ of Japanese machine-guns, and go to ground. Any man, he promised, who ventured 50 yards down the track would be decorated. Few responded.
Blamey continued, with apparent relish, to inform Canberra of the American refusal to fight. The catastrophe horrified Colonel John Grose, an American World War I veteran who arrived in early December to lead the US 126th Regiment. Grose couldn’t believe the state of the men under his command; they had ‘simply collapsed from nervous exhaustion, crying like children and shaking from head to foot’.25
The American troops, Eichelberger concluded, were cowards, and rather melodramatically he resolved to attack Buna himself if he could find six men brave enough to join him. For a man of his rank, in late middle age, to decide to lead from the front was highly unusual—and clearly a sign of despair. Casualties were likely: Japanese snipers had an eye for any badge of rank, or gesture denoting seniority.
Eichelberger left his observation post with his staff, and shortly came upon a group of young privates loitering by the track. ‘Lads, come along with us,’ Eichelberger called.26 And they did; shortly after, he led several units against the bunkers at Buna village.
It was believed to be the most highly ranked fighting patrol in military history. All the troop leaders were officers and NCOs on Eichelberger’s staff. General Waldren was shot in the arm, and a favourite aide was badly wounded and brought in lashed to the bonnet of Eichelberger’s jeep. Yet the move achieved its intention, and inflamed American morale. Seeing their commander at the front broke the troops’ paralysing fear. Vasey’s walkabouts had a similar effect on the Sanananda front.
Even so, Eichelberger knew the Americans would take time to overcome their demons. He understood exactly what was required at Buna: soldiers with solid battle experience. He was forced to acknowledge, like Harding and MacArthur, that only the Australian army had this quality.
In this climate, with MacArthur’s incessant demands ringing in their ears, Eichelberger, Herring and the newly arrived Major-General Wootten, commander of the Australian 18th Brigade at Milne Bay, drew up their final plans for the destruction of Buna.