‘[My] faith in the [Australian] militia is growing, but my faith in the Americans has sunk to zero’
—General Blamey to Prime Minister Curtin, 4 December 1942
A powerful defensive shield locked up the coast at Buna—contrary to reports from Allied intelligence. The battleground, two to three miles of coastal jungle, swamp and coconut groves, ran from Cape Endaiadere in the east to Buna Government Station in the west. The whole area bristled with brilliantly concealed enemy machine-guns and snipers.
A labyrinthine bunker field fortified the Duropa Plantation at Cape Endaiadere, and defended the two runways, New Strip and Old Strip. To the west, scores of foxholes defended the Japanese HQ at Buna Government Station, which comprised a few dilapidated beach shacks situated on a peninsula, just west of Musita Island. Immediately south of the HQ were the so-called Government Gardens—a rough clearing of palm groves—and further inland, a heavily bunkered area known as the Triangle.
Two creeks blocked the Allied advance at either extremity: the swampy Simemi Creek, running between the airstrips to the east; and Entrance Creek, flowing into the Musita lagoon in the west.
The Americans planned to attack from either end of this heavily defended area—and slowly squeeze the Japanese in a vice: Warren Force would attack from the east and clear the airstrips; while Urbana Force would overrun Buna village and the Government Station, from the south-west. The American units were then to unite in a single spearhead, and drive the Japanese into the sea.
The Japanese were clearly outnumbered at Buna. Their commander, Colonel Yamamoto, led two infantry regiments totalling about a thousand men. Well-armed and reinforced, they were veterans of the occupation of Sumatra, experienced jungle fighters and probably the most capable, and resilient, enemy force left on the coast. Nor were they starving.
Amid their ranks were survivors of the Sasebo 5 Special Naval Landing Party, responsible for atrocities at Gona and Milne Bay. This reinforced unit would yield to nothing in the pursuit of victory—as reflected in one soldier’s diary during the Buna campaign:
7 Dec: One cigarette was shared by five men this week.
8 Dec: Celebrated the first anniversary of the Greater East Asia War. Received three packets of cigarettes…
9 Dec: Our position was bombed and heavily damaged. Company Comdr was killed and the ptn leader wounded.
14 Dec: Suffering from malaria; sent to the rear for treatment.
24 Dec: I have not fully recovered from malaria, but will fight to the very end.1
There were perhaps another thousand or so auxiliaries and support troops. Yet American intelligence claimed only 300 starving Japanese occupied the bunkers east of Giruwa River. When Eichelberger arrived he was shocked by the Allies’ poor information on the enemy: ‘there were about 3000 men there’, he grieved.2
On 19 November, the first American battalion3 marched up to the jump-off point, ‘joking and laughing, and sure of an easy victory’.4
About a mile south of Cape Endaiadere they walked into a thicket of Japanese pillboxes. Machine-guns crackled out of the very vegetation. It seemed they were ‘literally surrounded by blazing weapons’.5 They could not see who was firing, ‘but it was dangerous to show even a finger from behind one’s cover’, recalled Major David Parker.6 The forward troops were slaughtered, and the badly shaken survivors ran back.
Worse befell the 128th Regiment’s III Battalion, which moved along the Simemi Creek, lined by a ‘scarecrow growth’ of grey foliage, into a bog of oozing swamp and low grass. In the words of Colonel Miller, they were ‘stopped cold’7 in swamp up to their chests, by Japanese machine-guns.
Day after day, the pillboxes cut down the Americans. Within ten days, by 1 December, 492 US troops had been killed or wounded. ‘Many others were sick with malaria and dysentery…They had no flame throwers or tanks and the Japanese bunkers seemed to be proof against bombardment by artillery and aircraft.’8 Many troops simply gave up, and loitered in a daze in the grass.
The initiation shocked the Americans, and the nightmare continued for weeks. In one attack on the Urbana front, hundreds of troops found themselves wading through swampland towards the Japanese bunkers. Their rifles were wet and clogged, their supply lines ‘neck-deep in mud and water’.9 When they reached the opposite banks they were supposed to climb out of the swamp and charge.
The men lived for three days and nights in that swamp; they complained they could not attack. It did not help that a Major Herbert M. Smith and a Lieutenant-Colonel Herbert A. Smith led the two companies; the Smiths confused US signallers.10 In any case, General Harding mistook the ‘neck-deep’ complaint for ‘knee-deep’ and ordered the Smiths to charge.11
Heavy artillery, including Australian 25-pounders, had at last arrived, and supported the two Smiths as they prepared their men for the assault. In the air, no bombers were available, but twelve fighters were expected. Only four showed up, promptly strafed Lieutenant-Colonel Smith’s staff in error, and flew off, leaving the Japanese untouched.
The Smiths pressed on without air support. Herbert A. Smith’s men feinted half-heartedly in the Japanese direction, and beat a hasty withdrawal. The troops threw away their weapons and ‘fell back into the swamp’.12 Another unit ‘dug holes and lay in them with swamp water seeping over them’.13
Notwithstanding the Smiths’ brave leadership, Urbana Force sat down and refused to fight. It was not surprising: they lacked experienced leadership and their weapons were drenched, ‘their mortars fell short because the [propelling charges] were wet. Machine-guns jammed…Tommy guns were full of muck and dirt.’14
General Harding angrily rejected the two Smiths’ explanation for the failure. He was a bundle of nerves after his near death at sea, and cut a ‘pathetic figure’.15 His HQ was a shambles, and his men, in Vasey’s disdainful phrase, were ‘milling around’.16
Yet Harding did his best in a dreadful situation. Most of his food and ammunition were sunk, and his men lived hand-to-mouth on emergency rations. Soon nearly half his forces would be recommended for transfer to Australian commanders—a humiliation, in American eyes. At least one battalion was earmarked to go to General Vasey, at Sanananda, which deeply rankled. In the end the Australians declined the American troops—preferring the veterans of the Kokoda Track. Blamey simply refused to believe the Americans would fight. For the Americans, this was a double humiliation.
In the Papuan evenings MacArthur used to stand on the wide verandah at Government House puffing on his corncob pipe, or cigarette holder, and enjoying the gentle breeze that issued up the valley and broke the wretched heat. He had commandeered the large bungalow—the former Australian Governor’s residence in Port Moresby—for his New Guinea HQ, and the Bataan Gang moved there on 5 November. He adapted his unorthodox dress sense to fit the occasion. On balmy nights he could be seen striding about in his black satin dressing gown emblazoned with white Japanese characters on the back.
On one particular night—in late November—he looked down on the twinkling lights of the township, deeply preoccupied. The early reversals had made a disquieting impression on the supreme commander. He was fighting a very different enemy from the one he’d supposed. No motley collection of skeletal men, the reinforced Japanese were determined to fight for every inch of Papuan sand. They would never surrender—not until the last Japanese soldier had spilled his blood for the Emperor. How long would it take to dislodge them? What were the consequences for the Allied advance north? Why wouldn’t the Americans fight? These were likely MacArthur’s thoughts, as he contemplated the consequences of a long war of attrition.
His behaviour became erratic; a spiralling sense of panic seemed to animate his orders. The Japanese resistance threatened the very trajectory of his master plan: the reconquest of the Philippines. On the 20th he burst into Blamey’s offices and demanded that the Allies attack the next day. ‘ALL COLUMNS WILL BE DRIVEN THROUGH TO OBJECTIVES REGARDLESS OF LOSSES.’17 He dispatched the same order to his generals on the 21st: ‘TAKE BUNA TODAY AT ALL COSTS. MACARTHUR.’
It was the last straw for Harding, who barely knew the location of his men. This was the day earmarked for an all-out infantry assault on the Buna coast. It failed dismally, as did several attacks in coming weeks. The Americans simply sat down, or loitered near the front, as confirmed in the devastating Larr Report by the eponymous US colonel sent to observe progress. Harding was personally battered by these experiences, and he subsequently became dangerously confused and inconsistent.
The frontal attacks would continue, and the casualty rate at Buna soar. All columns were indeed driven through, regardless of losses. It mattered little that High Command tacitly acknowledged the failure of these tactics, insofar as they expedited the delivery of light tanks to the Buna front. Lives were being expended for little or no gain.
Nor did it help that Australian troops seemed willing to fight, which underlined the American failure. MacArthur took this personally; he set great store by the American soldier—marine or national guardsman.
The Americans’ inadequacy at Buna came into startling focus when an Australian independent company sent in 50 men under Major Harcourt on 21 November. Americans were ordered to support Harcourt in the capture of Buna airstrip. The Australians crashed through the Japanese bunkers, machine-gunning snipers, who then fell to earth or dangled from the branches. They got within 58 yards of the first Buna strip. But the Americans refused to advance, leaving Harcourt’s men stranded; and they were forced back. As so often in the Pacific War, extraordinary individual bravery shone out. One case was Private Stanley Martin, a stockman of Victoria River Downs, who continued fighting after being shot in the arm, the leg and stomach. He withdrew only after receiving direct orders to do so.
MacArthur and his staff were not allowed to forget their earlier contemptuous dismissal of the Australian troops. It was payback time after weeks of American jokes at the diggers’ expense. ‘The jokes of the American officers…making fun of the Australian army were told all over Australia,’ said one soldier. ‘Now it was our turn to rub salt into the wound.’18
The salt stung. MacArthur was extremely sensitive to charges of American cowardice. When he requested the US 41st Division, then based in Brisbane, Blamey replied that he would rather send in more Australians. He had the 21st Brigade in mind, then recovering in Port Moresby, ‘as he knew they would fight’. (This was the time when these men—the Kokoda veterans—were sent to reinforce Gona.)
Blamey’s rejection of the 41st indicted the quality and command of the American division, none of whom had fought on the Kokoda Track. That he chose a battered and demoralised Australian unit reveals the seriousness of the American problem. ‘I think it was a bitter pill for General MacArthur to swallow, but he agreed,’ wrote General Kenney.19 MacArthur’s secretary observed his boss ‘smarting under his own doubt [while] Blamey sat smiling smugly…’20 MacArthur grudgingly acknowledged that the Australians were battle-ready in a way the Americans were not.
Blamey reported the American failures in a series of blistering cables smothered in schadenfreude. He told the Australian Government on the 30th: ‘The Buna area has been assigned to the Americans. We have all been terribly disappointed and…General MacArthur is equally so at the lack of force and drive shown by the 32nd American Division. They must outnumber the Japs by at least five to one on the Buna front but to date have made no progress…’21 (In fact they outnumbered the Japanese at Buna by about three to one.)
The American troops, he told Curtin privately on 4 December, were ‘definitely not equal to the Australian militia, and from the moment they met opposition [they] sat down and have hardly gone forward a yard’.22
‘I am afraid that the bulk of fighting will fall on our troops in spite of the greatly larger numbers of the 32nd US division,’ Blamey warned the Prime Minister. Nor, he believed, would the American 32nd Division ‘attain any high standard of training or war spirit for many months to come…my faith in the [Australian] militia is growing, but my faith in the Americans has sunk to zero’.23
In this withering frame of mind, Blamey demanded Australian reinforcements: the immediate return of the 9th Division from the Middle East, the delivery of Australian tanks and the dispatch of the 30th Militia Brigade to Sanananda. And he insisted that Australian officers command some American units, as General Wootten—of Milne Bay fame—would shortly do at Buna.
Blamey’s belittlement of the Americans was of a pattern with his earlier dismissal of the Australians: when things went badly, the infantry were to blame. And there were, of course, arch political reasons for this sudden big-noting of his countrymen.
A faint harbinger of hope, a grim reprieve, boosted American morale. On 30 November, Colonel John Mott led a midnight attack on Buna village. A single file of 300 troops, each gripping the shoulder of the man in front, moved into the swamplands south of the objective. It was a moonless night. A signal wire guided them to the jump-off point. Japanese flares illuminated the land, and then a rising tide flooded the swamp. These delayed the attack, and the Americans sat in the brackish water until 4 a.m., when the order came to charge.
‘Machine-gun tracers lit the entire area, and our own rifle fire made a solid sheet of flame,’ recalled Lieutenant Robert Odell. ‘Everywhere men cursed, shouted or screamed…Brave men led and others followed. Cowards crouched in the grass literally frightened out of their skins.’24
Mott’s troops captured the strip of land in front of Buna village. During the mop-up they burst into a hut and shot dead six Japanese officers lying in their bunks. Inside the hut they found exotica from China, Java and the Philippines—watercolour prints, silks, and painted lacquer boxes—the booty of imperial conquest.25 The Americans mistook fourteen rolls of thin Japanese writing paper for toilet paper, which they’d lacked for weeks, and gratefully pilfered it. They gathered up a signal box, military documents, medical gear and food, torched the huts and blew up the bunker field.
What of the Japanese during the battle for Buna? How did they react? Their officers had been primed for the fist of god; they got untrained national guardsmen from Michigan.
An intelligence appreciation issued by General Yamagata in late November warned that the Allies had penetrated Buna, Giruwa and Gona and were ‘persistently carrying out small attacks’. The Allied air force had established air superiority, and bombed and strafed the Japanese lines daily. ‘They seem to be making a determined effort to cause our troops to retire.’ He presumed that Allied supply lines were breaking, and that the troops were exhausted. His information was largely derived from interrogation of Allied prisoners of war.26
One private, Nakajima of the Moto Butai, observed: ‘Enemy frequently use thick smoke screen to cover the front line. Enemy infantry is lacking in attacking spirit.’27
The American troops ‘believe in certain victory; they have a strong sense of self-interest; this love of pleasure is strong,’ noted a Japanese tactical manual found at Buna. It added that American troops were ‘most inferior’.28 The author, it seems, had not yet faced the US marines. Another Japanese report concluded that the Americans were boastful, but apt to carry out their boasts.
The Australian soldier got a slightly better review. He will ‘not reveal basic plans when taken prisoner’—a nod, perhaps, at the Australian soldier’s resilience under interrogation. In other respects, the Japanese were rather wide of the mark. Under ‘Characteristics and training of the Australian soldiers’ we learn that he was, on average, twenty years old, typically middle class, kept his rifle’s safety catch on at twenty yards, and his rations were mostly ‘dry, buttered bread’.
A diary said to belong to First Lieutenant Suganuma revealed the mood in the bunkers during the Allied ‘softening up’ process. He wrote with that strange mixture of defiance and uncritical resignation that pervaded many officers’ diaries; there is a claustrophobic sense of inevitable death, of ‘no escape’ and ‘do or die’. ‘8 Dec 42:…at 0430 each group in bomb shelters bowed towards the Imperial Palace. Bn Comdr lectured us on the meaning of the Great East Asia War…’
Suganuma noted the scarcity of coconuts, which had been used to reinforce the bunker walls: ‘It is said that a bullet does not penetrate coconut wood.’ Yet coconuts were ‘about the only local source of food’, he added resignedly. Coconuts made up for the deficiency of sugar in his diet, he wrote. As so often in the Japanese army, military exigencies overrode human need.
At dawn on the 11th Suganuma went to prepare breakfast. He found his platoon’s mess gear destroyed: ‘At 0600…we were bombed and strafed by enemy planes. Well, today we can’t eat…Everyone is greatly depressed.’
He recorded the shape of the moon—‘brow-shaped’—and looked forward to a new moon in a few days. Japanese soldiers often alluded to the natural world—the sea, the sky and the lunar phases—in little pithy phrases amidst the slow-drip register of their destruction.
On the night of the 12th, ‘it rained heavily and I was drenched…There was no let up by the mortar fire and airplanes. We entered our trenches dripping wet.’ The Allied bombs missed his bunker ‘due to our concealed position in a coconut grove…’
Three days later Allied planes dropped propaganda leaflets, urging Suganuma to surrender. This provoked a typical officer’s response: ‘Such impertinence! If and when our infantry arrives we will annihilate the enemy.’29
Reinforcements did land, full of optimism. For example, men of the Seibu 34 Butai stepped ashore at Basabua on 21 November, believing that operations at Buna had been highly successful. They found gaunt-eyed, hollow-cheeked soldiers who pleaded for food. The fresh troops were sent to Buna, but most didn’t make it, lost their leaders and became ‘completely disorganised’. They burnt the unit standard to prevent its capture.