The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur (29 page)

Back in Rabaul, Japanese commanders exploited the Kokoda victory by sending Major General Tomitaro Horii with a group of eight thousand reinforcements from the South Seas Detachment to northern New Guinea to give heft to the Japanese descent on Port Moresby. On August 17, the first two battalions of these reinforcements arrived in Buna, along with a naval landing force, anti-aircraft batteries, and a construction battalion to expand the Buna landing strip. Supplies and reinforcements shuttled into Buna—medical personnel, tons of gasoline, a water purification unit, a bridge-building detachment, and an engineer battalion. By August 21, when the airstrip expansion was discovered by one of Kenney’s reconnaissance planes, Horii had more than eight thousand troops at Buna, along with another thirty-five hundred naval construction personnel. The Japanese beachhead was large and defended in depth. It included (from southeast to northwest), the Duropa Plantation, Buna Government Station, the village of Buna, as well as
separate Japanese positions a short distance up the coast at Sanananda Point and, further on, units defending the village of Gona. In Brisbane, MacArthur’s chief of intelligence, Charles Willoughby, studied reports of the Japanese build-up and concluded that the Japanese trek up the narrow and harrowing Kokoda Trail was a feint. He scoffed at reports that Horii would send his eight thousand soldiers through the Owen Stanleys to reinforce the Yokoyama Force. It was too difficult, he said. It couldn’t be done.

In Washington, Ernie King came to the opposite conclusion. Alarmed by the build-up at Buna, King sent a message to Marshall questioning whether MacArthur was “taking all measures in his power to deny the threat of Japanese penetration toward Port Moresby.” King was worried that the sudden Japanese move would endanger the gathering offensive in the southern Solomons. He asked Marshall to obtain MacArthur’s “views as to the present situation in New Guinea, and his plan to deny further advance by the Japanese.” Marshall cabled MacArthur, though without mentioning King’s over-the-shoulder kibitzing. Sitting in Brisbane, MacArthur patiently responded that he was dealing with the threat, but signaled his exasperation at being asked. In fact, Marshall had little need for worry; MacArthur had already dismissed Willoughby’s conclusions about what the enemy
couldn’t
do, and had dispatched the 7th Australian Infantry Division north, up the Kokoda Trail, to take on the Japanese. He then upped the ante, sending the 18th Australian Brigade to Milne Bay, while ordering the 21st and 25th Brigades to Port Moresby. The Australians, he said, were to retake Kokoda, hold the crest of the Owen Stanleys, attack Buna, and reinforce Milne Bay. By August 19, an Australian infantry brigade was moving up the Kokoda Trail to reinforce the Maroubra Force, the Port Moresby garrison was increased to twenty-two thousand men, and the 18th Brigade was on its way to Milne Bay.

Fortunately for MacArthur, his reinforcement of Milne Bay, on New Guinea’s extreme southeastern tip, came just in time. While the large bay (twenty miles long and five to ten miles wide and bracketed by towering 4,000-foot mountains) featured a natural port and three valuable airstrips, it was hardly a fortress. The dock consisted of two barges placed side by side, and the airstrips, carpeted by Hugh Casey’s engineers with
hastily laid steel matting, had to be scraped daily to remove mud and water. The engineers had also fashioned a network of roads to serve the airfields, but of the most rudimentary sort—scoured from the jungle, they were constructed of coconut logs and coral.

Prying Milne Bay out of MacArthur’s grasp would be a prize for the Japanese, as it was an essential base from which they could send their navy southward and deploy bombers to cover both northern Australia and the Solomons. On August 20, Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa dispatched a landing force and a navy pioneer unit (some seventeen hundred troops in all) from Rabaul in barges to capture the port. It was Mikawa’s intention to surprise MacArthur’s garrison and overwhelm it, but when the barges of the first echelon of the detachment put in at Goodenough Island (sixty-five miles northwest of Milne Bay) on August 25, they were spotted by a group of Kenney’s P-40s. The barges were strafed and left stranded. A second echelon of troops followed, however, and landed on the bay’s north shore, where they were attacked by American B-25s. The Japanese went forward, despite the attacks and, by the twenty-eighth, were engaged in a bitter slugfest with the Australian 7th Brigade for control of the port’s airstrips.

The fight raged through the jungle abutting Milne Bay’s Airstrip 3, which was defended by two battalions of Diggers that were supported by an American anti-aircraft battery and two companies of the 43rd U.S. Engineers. But it was the Australians who did most of the fighting, laying out a defensive line in front of the airstrip. The line forced the Japanese into a costly frontal assault; they had to use two tanks that the assault parties had wrestled ashore. The Japanese reinforced their lodgment on August 29, bringing 770 infantrymen ashore in barges. The next day, the Japanese launched another attack on the airstrip but were repulsed after a difficult fight, leaving behind 160 bodies. The Australians then cleared the north shore of Milne Bay, a thankless and bloody task that cost 45 Aussie casualties.

The battle went on for ten days, but by early September, the Japanese force was in retreat. On September 5, some 1,300 of the original 1,900 Japanese were evacuated to Rabaul. The Australians had lost 123 killed and nearly 200 wounded. The victory was the result of Australian tenacity, Kenney’s air force, and poor Japanese planning. While the Japanese
fought tenaciously, by September 5 none of their remaining troops could mount an offensive, with nearly all of them suffering from trench foot and tropical diseases. In the end, the Japanese commander turned down an offer of reinforcements from Rabaul, a promised detachment of 1,000 soldiers that might have turned the tide. The reinforcements would be wasted, he said, as his troops were in no condition to fight. By the morning of September 6, the Japanese had been turned back—the first victory for MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific command.

But while the Japanese were retreating at Milne Bay, they were advancing south on the Kokoda Trail. Heavily outnumbered by Major General Tomitaro Horii’s 144th Infantry Regiment, the Australians south of Kokoda retreated back along the track to a series of strong points, which were successively defended before being abandoned: from Isurava to Alola, then south again to Eora Creek and Templeton’s Crossing. Within days of Horii’s onslaught, only a few villages stood between the Japanese and Port Moresby. It wasn’t much of a contest—the Japanese had put in five battalions of battle-hardened troops, reinforced by the 55th Mountain Artillery, in a face-off against three understrength Aussie battalions. So far, the battle for control of the Kokoda Trail had been a numbers game, with the Australians continually outnumbered and outflanked. By September 6, the Australians were at Efogi, thirty-seven miles and thirty-eight hundred feet above Port Moresby. The next day, Australian Lieutenant General Sydney Rowell told MacArthur that he needed more troops. On September 9, MacArthur dispatched the 16th Australian Infantry Brigade to Port Moresby and sent the 25th Infantry Brigade north to Kokoda.

But MacArthur remained unconvinced that simply sending more Australians up the Kokoda Trail would turn back the Japanese. Faced with his first military crisis since Corregidor, he searched for a more elegant solution. After sending Rowell more soldiers and spending a night peering at his maps in Brisbane, MacArthur decided that the best way to pry the Japanese out of their positions overlooking Port Moresby was through a wide flanking move near Wairopi, along the little-used track that ran parallel to the Kokoda Trail. This wasn’t a particularly creative tactical move; nor was MacArthur at all certain it would work. The parallel track was uncharted and even more treacherous than the one being
used by the Japanese. Moreover, MacArthur was giving responsibility for the flanking move to the green 126th Regiment of the U.S. 32nd Division, whose training had just been completed. Despite these drawbacks, MacArthur thought he had little choice—by September 16, the men in Horii’s veteran Japanese column had pushed on to Ioribaiwa, within sight of their goal. At night, looking down the thin trail, Horii’s men could see the lights of Port Moresby glittering in the distance.

MacArthur’s plan to flank Horii’s detachment above New Guinea’s Port Moresby reflected his conviction that the Japanese would have to be annihilated to be defeated, as they had been during the Battle of the Pockets in Bataan. But MacArthur didn’t face as much of a crisis as he supposed. Although the Japanese were overrunning the Australian defenses on the Kokoda Trail, their regiments were being depleted by disease and lack of supplies. By late August, Horii’s troops were subsisting on less than a cupful of rice a day having already plucked clean the melons, sugar cane, and vegetables from the New Guinea natives’ subsistence gardens. By early September, the Japanese were starving. What’s more, as MacArthur later learned, Horii had been ordered to halt his offensive, even as his soldiers were within sight of their goal. The decision was made back at Rabaul by Lieutenant General Haruyoshi Hyakutake, who believed that Horii’s advance would falter unless Milne Bay were captured. Tokyo agreed with Hyakutake’s assessment, and so on September 20, Horii called together his commanders and ordered them to dig in at Ioribaiwa. In truth, the crisis facing Horii was the least of Tokyo’s problems. Back on August 7, as Horii was fighting his way south to Port Moresby, eleven thousand U.S. Marines had landed on Guadalcanal, in
the Solomon Islands. The Marines seized a Japanese airfield, sending its defenders into the island’s thick jungle. The landing upended Tokyo’s plans to cut the American lifeline to Australia and unnerved both Hyakutake and the Tokyo high command.

The Guadalcanal landing was carried out as part of Task One of the three-part plan agreed to by the Joint Chiefs back in July and was to be followed by MacArthur’s conquest of northeastern New Guinea. In fact, Guadalcanal was “step one” of Task One—a step to be conducted by the Marines based on the island of New Caledonia (a deep anchorage southeast of the Solomon Islands) and commanded by Admiral Robert Ghormley. They envisioned that conquering “the canal” would be followed by a slow, and bloody, island-by-island ascent up the Solomon’s ladder. The Japanese response was immediate. The First Battle of Savo Island, on the night of August 8, forced Admiral Jack Fletcher to pull his outgunned ships out of the Solomon Sea. His losses were daunting: Three American and one Australian cruiser were sunk, and one American and two Australian destroyers damaged. Fletcher’s withdrawal isolated the Marines on Guadalcanal, who held a weak battle line that had just gotten weaker. The heavy equipment they needed was aboard Fletcher’s fleeing ships. The Marines of Major General Alexander Archer Vandegrift’s 1st Marine Division held a thin beachhead that was only ninety-six hundred yards long and anchored by rifle companies denuded of shovels, pickaxes, and mines, all of which would have secured their position. Guadalcanal would not be “another Bataan,” Vandegrift vowed, but the Marines had their doubts; their lines were undermanned and overstretched, and now, the navy, whose offshore guns they had counted on for support, was nowhere to be seen. The Marines clung to their beachhead, but it wouldn’t take much to push them off.

It seemed that way also to the Japanese. Taking advantage of Fletcher’s withdrawal, Admiral Gunichi Mikawa sent elements of Hyakutake’s Seventeenth Army south into the Solomons. On August 19, just under 1,000 soldiers of the Japanese relief unit commanded by Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki were landed by destroyer at Guadalcanal’s Taivu Point. They marched overland to retake the island’s airstrip, which had been renamed Henderson Field by the Marines. In the early morning hours of August 21, the Japanese attacked in waves across Alligator
Creek (which anchored Vandegrift’s right wing) but were cut to pieces, losing over 900 men of their initial force. Realizing his mistake and horrified by his losses, the Japanese commander committed ritual suicide. Back in Rabaul, Mikawa remained unbowed; he ordered three more detachments of the Seventeenth Army into the Solomons, with his soldiers crammed aboard towed barges protected by three Japanese aircraft carriers and thirty destroyers and cruisers. Fletcher responded, sending his own carriers and a screen of cruisers and destroyers back north to meet Mikawa’s force. On August 24 the two sides met in the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, an indecisive night action that convinced Mikawa that he couldn’t reinforce his garrison on Guadalcanal without better protection. Wisely, he abandoned the plan to land his troops by barge, telling his subordinates that in the future, they would be landed on Guadalcanal from destroyers. The strategy worked, with 5,000 Japanese soldiers coming ashore via “the Tokyo Express” by early September. But there was a drawback to the strategy, as each destroyer could carry only 150 men and thirty to forty tons of supplies. Mikawa was faced with a choice: He could flood Guadalcanal with soldiers, or he could flood it with food, but he couldn’t do both. The result was that while the Japanese force grew larger, it also grew weaker.

The Marines on Guadalcanal, meanwhile, were fighting for their lives. Clinging to their thin shelf and lacking sustained air protection, Vandegrift’s men fended off nightly attacks. The situation had improved only marginally by the second week of September, after sixty-four American fighter aircraft were delivered to Henderson Field. Like a pair of snarling dogs, snapping and withdrawing and then circling for advantage, the Japanese and Americans lunged at each other through weeks of exhausting combat. The Americans controlled the sky during the day, but the Japanese owned the seas at night, sending convoy after convoy to reinforce their Guadalcanal garrison. Meanwhile, the Japanese and American navies clawed at each other in successive battles along Iron Bottom Sound—so named because it was coated with the skeletal remains of American and Japanese battlewagons. Vandegrift’s Marines held on, but barely. Along Alligator Creek, his men were surviving on sodden rice and dehydrated potatoes. The real problem facing them was that the Japanese navy was starting to turn the tide in the Solomons.
One of the biggest blows came on September 15, when a lone Japanese submarine torpedoed the aircraft carrier
Wasp
, sending it to the bottom, and severely damaged the battleship
North Carolina
.

Several days later, Ghormley wrote out a memo for his staff questioning whether Vandegrift’s Marines could survive. When Vandegrift saw the memo at his headquarters on Guadalcanal, the blood drained from his face. He turned to Richmond Kelly Turner, the rough-hewn admiral who commanded Ghormley’s amphibious operations. With little time for pessimists, Turner dismissed Ghormley’s memo, saying that he would land the 7th Marine Regiment at Taivu Point, where the regiment could set up a second defensive perimeter. In effect, Turner wanted to up the ante.

It was just this kind of move that the Japanese were desperate to stop. On the night of September 12, before the 7th Marines arrived, the Japanese launched a frenzied attack on Henderson Field. The assault focused on a low ridgeline against dug-in Marines. The Battle of Bloody Ridge would go down in the history of the U.S. Marine Corps as one of its fiercest fights; over a period of two days, the Japanese came at the Marines, retreated, and then came on again. During a last desperate attack, Marines rolled hand grenades into Japanese formations. By the morning of September 15, the Japanese were in full retreat. Left behind, along the slopes of the ridge, was a carpet of corpses. In Rabaul, Mikawa learned of the debacle and made a crucial decision. Like Turner, he decided to up the ante by pouring in more men. But to do that, he would have to end his resupply of Horii on New Guinea. So, during the third week of September, Mikawa ordered Horii’s force back to Buna: The Japanese, he said, would focus on Guadalcanal.

N
o one was more worried about the Marines on Guadalcanal than George Marshall, who was increasingly distressed by reports that the Japanese were sweeping the Solomons of American ships. But if Marshall was anxious, Ernie King was nearly frantic, telling Marshall that Guadalcanal might be lost unless he could get fifteen air groups to Ghormley. Marine commanders in the Pacific were even more outspoken, particularly when told that the JCS was withholding air assets from the Pacific because of concern about the coming landings in
North Africa. As one later historian noted, the Marines had “no time for the subtleties of global strategy” and blamed “MacArthur, Arnold and Marshall” for Vandegrift’s plight. While he was one of the targets of the criticism, Marshall sympathized with the Marines: Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to postpone an invasion of Europe in favor of, as Marshall phrased it, “nipping at the heels” of the Germans in North Africa meant that supplies that would help the Marines in the Solomons would end up in Morocco. The United States was shipping assets across the Atlantic for soldiers who were
preparing
to fight, while Marines who were actually killing the enemy were getting much less. It didn’t make sense. Could the Marines hang on? Marshall decided to find out. On the day that the
Wasp
went to the bottom of the South Pacific, he directed Army Air Forces chief Hap Arnold to visit Nimitz, Ghormley, and MacArthur to see what could be done to salvage the Solomon offensive. Marshall uncharacteristically lectured the fiery Arnold about the visit. “Don’t get mad,” Marshall advised, and added that Arnold should “let the other fellow tell his story first.”

The usually pugnacious Arnold did just this—though barely. He heard from Nimitz in Hawaii the surprisingly optimistic view that Guadalcanal could be held, before flying to New Caledonia. There, Ghormley’s staff greeted him “with blood in their eyes.” Seated behind his desk overlooking the harbor at Noumea, Ghormley and his senior advisors (what Arnold disparagingly described as a bunch of navy commanders “in their snug offices”) made it clear that they didn’t welcome Arnold’s visit. The exhausted and opinionated Ghormley greeted Arnold with a growl: This was
his
command, he announced, and he didn’t need any help in running it. Arnold nodded, held his temper, and listened patiently as Ghormley detailed his problems. When the admiral finished, Arnold asked a series of questions, which ended with a nod out the window toward Noumea harbor. Arnold had noticed, he said, that there were more than eighty ships at anchor in the port, but it didn’t appear that any of them had been unloaded. “What’s the problem?” Arnold asked. Ghormley’s staff chimed in, telling Arnold that they didn’t know exactly what was on the ships (which, as Arnold noted, wasn’t an answer), while Ghormley added that he hadn’t left his office “in over a month.” Arnold thought about this for only a moment. “Maybe you
should,” he said. General Alexander Patch, Ghormley’s outspoken army ground commander, was not nearly so reticent. As Arnold walked from Ghormley’s office, Patch told him that the reason the navy was so short of everything was because they had underestimated what they needed. The problem wasn’t poor planning; it was
no
planning.

After spending two days in New Caledonia, Arnold flew on to Australia, where he was forced to land west of Brisbane because his B-24 was too big for any of Brisbane’s airfields. He was welcomed by Major General George Kenney, then put aboard a dilapidated Lockheed Hudson for the short flight to MacArthur’s headquarters. It was an uncomfortable ride, but Kenney didn’t apologize: They were short of aircraft, he said, and so they had to make do with what they had. As Arnold sat on a coil of rope for the thirty-minute flight, Kenney gave him a rundown on what it was like to work for MacArthur. To hear Kenney talk of it, he was having the time of his life. “We’re going to win it out here,” he said, “and I’m going to get along with General MacArthur.”

In Brisbane, Arnold and MacArthur greeted each other like old friends (despite their previous spat when MacArthur was the army chief and Arnold flew a group of bombers to Alaska—and back), and MacArthur briefed the air chief on the situation. This was MacArthur at his best—or worst: During a two-hour monologue, the Southwest Pacific commander paced up and down his office (his signature corncob pipe poking at the air), painting a grim picture of America’s prospects for victory. The Japanese could easily take New Guinea, he said, after which they would “control the Pacific for a hundred years.” They had “a better coordinated team than the Germans,” he said. America’s “cordon defense system across the Pacific,” MacArthur added, “is as old and out of date as a horse and buggy.” The only part of this that Arnold agreed with was MacArthur’s opinion of the invasion of North Africa (“a waste of effort”) and his appreciation for Kenney. MacArthur’s final note betrayed his mistrust of King, Nimitz, and his own navy commander—Arthur Shuyler “Chips” Carpender, the latest in a series of revolving-door commanders the navy had sent to Brisbane. The navy, MacArthur averred, “couldn’t stop the Japanese.”

A few hours later, Arnold scrawled his reflections on MacArthur into his diary. The Southwest Pacific commander hadn’t recovered from his
defeat in the Philippines and was darkly pessimistic, Arnold wrote. This was not the outspoken and self-confident officer who had once done battle with Franklin Roosevelt. MacArthur “gives the impression of a brilliant mind—obsessed by a plan he can’t carry out—dramatic to the extreme—much more nervous than when I formerly knew him. Hands twitch and tremble—shell shocked.” Surprisingly, Arnold’s judgment would not have been resented by MacArthur or contradicted by his staff. The Philippine surrender still gnawed at the general, who was haunted by reports of the Bataan Death March. Evidence for this comes from staff aide Paul Rogers, who, shortly before Arnold’s visit, documented a sobering conversation MacArthur had with Richard Sutherland. Emerging from his office one afternoon in Brisbane, MacArthur stopped by Sutherland’s desk to share his feelings. “Dick,” he said plaintively, “I know the troops don’t like me. It wasn’t always that way. Back in France I was a combat officer out in front of my men. Now I’m an old man. My legs are like toothpicks. I can’t operate anymore.” The startling admission explains much about MacArthur’s tentativeness in his meetings with Arnold—and the trembling hands. The problem wasn’t stamina; it was confidence.