MacArthur, given the precious toe-hold taken by the enemy at Port Moresby, was convinced that the war should be brought north. In this he was supported by the Australian Government. When the two precious veteran Australian divisions finished reforming in Queensland, both were sent to New Guinea to face Japan’s last ferocious assault. They were joined by an American division and a growing Allied air force. The United States and Australia had, in fact, reacted to the Japanese threat with startling speed and keen purpose. Japan’s military honeymoon proved very short.
By summer 1942 the Japanese Army, in contrast to its stance six months before, believed that New Guinea must be secured. In early summer an elite Japanese regiment, usually called South Seas Detachment, began an overland assault from Buna on the north coast of New Guinea toward Port Moresby on the south. Between the attackers and their target lay the Owen Stanley Mountains. After some bad moments the Australian defence stiffened. By September the Japanese force was facing malnutrition. A Japanese amphibious attack at nearby Milne Bay in late August failed badly and constituted Japan’s first major land defeat of the war. In September Tokyo decided that South Seas Detachment must retreat to the north coast. In hot pursuit, the Australians mauled the Japanese in November. The retreat, however, led the armies to one of the worst battlefields on earth at and near Buna.
Before South Seas Detachment headed over the Owen Stanley Mountains, the US Navy decided to take advantage of the Midway victory and ordered one of the most audacious and successful amphibious campaigns in history – the invasion of Guadalcanal. Prior to its launch, the Navy’s newly made construction branch, the ‘Seabees’, created vital bases in the New Hebrides Islands. Soon American intelligence learned that Japan was building an airfield on Guadalcanal and a frantic pace overtook preparations. On 7 August 1942 an Allied task force, including three aircraft carriers, escorted 12,000 men ashore on Guadalcanal and the small island of Tulagi. Marines pushed away some Japanese-led construction workers on Guadalcanal and occupied the nearly completed airfield. The small Japanese garrison at Tulagi, foreshadowing the extraordinary brutality that characterised the Pacific War, fought to the last man.
As it slowly became clear that the American force represented a major operation and not a raid, Yamamoto and others surveyed their situation with growing concern. The Australians and Americans were building up in New Guinea and northern Australia. With the Marines in the Solomon Islands, a two-pronged thrust was aimed at Rabaul. If the Allies could get by Rabaul, there was nothing to stop a thrust into the Indies. What appeared to outsiders as two separate campaigns – New Guinea and the Solomons – was seen as a single blow by Japan that threatened to unhinge its entire position. The threat was clear, but the response was slow and unco-ordinated.
The soldiers and airmen who entered the South Pacific encountered some of the world’s most malignant terrain. There were no roads, no real towns, no sanitary facilities, no electricity, no supply of fresh food and no European women. The indigenous population served both sides as porters, and some assisted the famous Australian coast watchers. For the most part, however, the civilians were bewildered onlookers to events they did not understand and in which they had no obvious stake.
What did exist was a miserably hot and humid climate that generated a medical nightmare for interlopers. Malaria was rampant and caused more casualties than battle. Tropical diseases of all types posed baffling problems. Dysentery was a constant danger because of poor sanitation. ‘Rot’, a tropical relative to the Great War’s ‘trench foot’, threatened to turn the smallest cut into a serious infection. Combat units did a good job maintaining morale under these daunting conditions, but stress was undeniable. (The rate of psychological breakdown among US forces was much worse in the South Pacific than any other theatre in the Second World War.)
Situated directly on the equator, the South Pacific was above all home of what an earlier generation called ‘the jungle’. American soldier Robert Kennington described it:
‘Jungle was really rough. We were hit by the heat, mosquitos, leeches and a little bit of everything else. Guadalcanal was about 96 miles long by 35 miles wide. Except along the beach and the top of the ridges there was nothing but jungle. The jungle had big trees that grew about 100 feet high. Vines grew out of them and dropped to the ground. Some vines grew as wide as your leg. We called them “Wait A Minute Vines”. They had big hooks on them like a rooster spur. When you tried to get through on patrol and ran into one of those vines you either stopped or you were cut up. When tangled you backed out. You learned not to try to bull through them because those hooks were like a razor. I still have scars from them. In the afternoon you’d really notice a kind of dead smell. Probably from all the decaying matter. Mosquitos were so thick you could wipe them off your arm in handfuls. You wade through the rivers and you’d come out with leeches you didn’t even know were there until you felt a sting. You’d look down and there was this creature on your leg full of blood.’2
If anything, New Guinea was more daunting than the Solomons. The Australian and Japanese soldiers that crossed the Kokoda Trail traversed an area with trees so tall that the sky was dim at noon. On the coast, combat soldiers confronted the horrid New Guinea mangrove swamp. In 1942 an Australian coast watcher forwarded a description of where the Mambare River reaches the sea. This point was a few miles north of the miserable battlefield near the pitiful settlement of Buna:
‘The Mambare debouches into the sea between low, muddy banks along which nipa palms stand crowded knee-deep in the water. Behind the nipa palms, mangroves grow, their foliage a darker green dado above the nipa fronds. Here and there a creek mouth shows, the creek a tunnel in the mangroves with dark tree trunks for sides, supported on a maze of gnarled, twisted, obscene roots standing in the oozy mud. Branches and leaves are overhead, through which the sun never penetrates to the black water, the haunt of coldly evil crocodiles.’3
Mobility through the jungle was severely limited. Most movement took place along paths made by native peoples or animals. As the Japanese found out to their grief, moving through the jungle itself made co-ordinated operations almost impossible and utterly exhausted troops prior to battle. Consequently, ‘control’ was a very abstract term in the South Pacific. One side or the other would seek to control strategic points – almost always airfields. The bulk of the terrain, however, was unoccupied. In this bleak environment, if an objective could be isolated through gaining air dominance and thus control of the sea lanes, it would be put under siege. If besieged, the defenders became immediately a wasting asset. If the attackers wanted the position occupied, starvation of the defending garrison soon became one of their most potent weapons. The Allies soon learned that it was better to bypass the defenders, rendering them irrelevant as military forces.
Although the campaign lasted nearly two years, the Japanese lost the war in the South Pacific in the first six months. I have already noted the imperial retreat up the Kokoda Trail. This was followed by a miserable siege of some 8,000 Japanese soldiers, sailors and engineers near the village of Buna. An American division involved was effectively finished as a fighting force by January 1943 when the Japanese garrison finally perished. Even experienced Australian troops found the area a nightmare and suffered more casualties in that zone than anywhere else in the Pacific.
Guadalcanal was an equal disaster for Tokyo; there (and at Buna) the Japanese command structure showed serious defects. The US Navy had gained rough equality in terms of strength in carriers, but remained inferior in all other warship types. If they stretched their range, Zeros could escort bombers from Rabaul to Guadalcanal. Had Tokyo ordered Yamamoto to hit Guadalcanal with everything available, including major ground reinforcements, it is very possible that Japan could have isolated the Marine garrison and destroyed it. Such a move would have been risky with the American carriers still about, but an American defeat might well have caused Pentagon believers in ‘Europe First’ to shut down offensive operations in the Pacific for an extended period – exactly what