It soon became apparent to Eichelberger that no amount of artillery or bombing was going to dislodge the Japanese from their bunkers; the only way to beat them was to go in and kill them hand to hand with bayonets, rifles, and grenades. The Americans and Australians built a large roadblock to keep the Japanese put. Then soldiers began the bloody process of reducing the position bunker by bloody bunker.
Almost to a man, the Japanese fought to the last, taking a terrible toll on the Allied soldiers. The fighting went on for more than a month while MacArthur in his briefings disingenuously described it as “a mopping up action.” It wasn’t until January 22, 1943, that the major Japanese outposts in Papua New Guinea had been cleaned out.
Also, almost as an afterthought, it became the first American army victory in the Pacific.
THE SOUTH PACIFIC IS LITTERED with small islands and island chains, upon which the Japanese army had nimbly crawled during the past decade, erecting small airstrips and turning these islets and atolls into stationary, unsinkable aircraft carriers from which to interdict an enemy’s shipping.
MacArthur’s next moves were governed by the dictum issued from the notable Hall of Fame outfielder from the turn of the century Wee Willie Keeler—“Hit ’em where they ain’t.” His decision to bypass many of these Japanese strongpoints and “leapfrog” northward toward the Philippines was controversial because it meant leaving powerful Japanese forces in the Allies’ rear. But MacArthur was confident that, following the great navy success at the Battle of Midway the previous June, the Americans could keep the sea-lanes clear and, by selectively attacking only strategic Japanese installations, cause many enemy bases to wither on the vine and starve for lack of supply.
MacArthur’s strategy was hampered as well by the navy’s refusal to provide carrier airpower to help reduce the Japanese bases (apparently out of fear of losing its flattops to land-based enemy warplanes). This infuriated MacArthur, who intoned, “In the present state of development of the art of war, no movement can safely be made of forces on land or sea without adequate air protection.”
Thus his advance across the Pacific would require Allied forces to storm an island’s beaches to seize the enemy’s air base, then use it to launch attacks on the next strategic island up the chain. The distance between the seizures was limited mainly by the radius of Allied fighters, which were necessary to protect the longer-ranged bombers that would be “softening up” Japanese defensive positions on the islands.
With a plan of action, MacArthur’s next move was to reduce Japanese forces on the north coast of New Guinea proper, which would become the gateway for offensive strategy. “Island hopping” was a term MacArthur disliked because he said it implied storming the mass of Japanese-held islands “with extravagant losses and slow progress.” Instead, he proposed selective strikes on less heavily defended outposts, leaving in his wake a chain of greatly weakened enemy bases.
The Japanese themselves soon recognized the danger, issuing a top-secret report that read, “New Guinea, especially, was the strategic point on the defensive line and if it should fall into the hands of the enemy … it would be a case of giving to the enemy the best possible route to penetrate into the Philippines.” The report went on to note the differences in terrain between northern and southern New Guinea and concluded that the strategic value of the island was “of immense importance.”15
Accordingly the Japanese, having lost Guadalcanal, decided on a last-ditch reinforcement of their positions on New Guinea. To that end, at the beginning of March 1943, nearly seven thousand soldiers from the sprawling Japanese base on the island of New Britain were loaded aboard eight troop transports, escorted by eight destroyers, with a dozen squadrons of Zero fighters providing air cover. They steamed out into the Bismarck Sea toward the town of Lae on New Guinea’s northwest coast.
The Japanese had been assured that bad weather would mask their convoy, but when General Kenney received intelligence that the convoy was on its way, he managed to scramble together more than two hundred heavy bombers to intercept them. The Japanese meteorologist turned out to get the weather wrong by a day, and as the clouds began to clear, waves of U.S. planes appeared from the south. In what became known as the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, Japanese antiaircraft gunners on the destroyers ran to their weapons, only to be startled when the big bombers came in at mast-top level, like torpedo bombers. They released their bombs into the sea in an astonishing display of skip bombing, which Kenney’s air force had perfected.
The bombs hit the water and “dapped” like stones skipping across a flat calm pond. All eight of the troop transports were sunk, as were four enemy destroyers, and sixty enemy Zeros were shot out of the sky. Only 1,200 of the 6,900 Japanese soldiers were rescued by the remaining destroyers.
This ended further Japanese attempts to reinforce New Guinea or go on the offensive, but there still remained large numbers of enemy soldiers who had shown at Buna and Gona that dislodging them would involve more than one bloodbath. Or, as General Kenney put it, “There’ll be a lot of Bunas and Gonas before this thing is finished.”
On April 18, MacArthur’s air force scored one of the greatest coups in World War II. It shot down the commander in chief of the Japanese Imperial Navy, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. He had served for a time in the Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C., and had occasion to tour the United States. Prior to Pearl Harbor, Yamamoto was against war—he had noted the Americans’ enormous industrial might—but when war was ordered, he sided with his country and planned the attack on Hawaii.
The U.S. code-breaking operation MAGIC, which in May had tipped off the navy that the Japanese would be attacking Midway, had also now intercepted a message saying that Yamamoto would be inspecting Japanese bases in the Solomons and flying from Rabaul to Bougainville “… to personally reconnoiter the bloody ground campaign there.” American code breakers sent word to MacArthur’s headquarters, giving Yamamoto’s route, his air cover, and the rendezvous point off the west coast of Bougainville.16
Despite skepticism that the message was genuine, MacArthur gave the go-ahead, and Major John W. Mitchell’s 339th Fighter Squadron received the order to intercept the admiral at his rendezvous point.
Eighteen twin-engine P-38 Lightnings were detailed for the job. They would “wave hop” to the target maintaining radio silence. But when they arrived at the rendezvous point shortly before 3 p.m. nothing was doing except a storm brewing in the southeast. Major Mitchell was about to give the order to return to base when dead ahead there appeared Yamamoto’s flight—two large transports beneath an umbrella of Japanese fighters.
American fighters rose to engage the Zeros, while others attacked the transports. One transport containing the admiral’s staff was shot down in flames almost immediately, while the other undertook violent evasive action. Twisting and zigzagging at treetop level, Yamamoto’s plane was desperately trying to escape the fire of Captain Thomas G. Lanphier, who was on his tail with all guns blazing. A wisp of black smoke on the big transport quickly became a red flame as Lanphier’s bullets tore into the skin of the Japanese aircraft. Suddenly it rolled over and crashed through the thick triple-canopy jungle, killing all aboard including Admiral Yamamoto, architect of the Pearl Harbor attack.
Washington was elated at the news, but immediately the affair was branded top secret for fear it would alert the Japanese that American cryptologists were reading their code.
AT THIS STAGE IN LATE 1943, additional troops finally began arriving in Australia from the United States, as well as a new organization to control them—the U.S. Sixth Army, commanded by Lieutenant General Walter Krueger, who had been MacArthur’s war plans chief when MacArthur was chief of staff. Later, MacArthur would say of Krueger, “I do not believe that the annals of American history have shown his superiority as an army commander.” His praise went on: “Swift and sure in attack, tenacious and determined in defense, modest and restrained in victory—I do not know what he would have been in defeat because he wa
s never defeated.”
With more than 100,000 men now under his command—including three splendid Australian infantry divisions that Winston Churchill turned loose from the Middle East—MacArthur proceeded with plans to eradicate the large Japanese presence at Lae and the rest of northern New Guinea. General Kenney put it this way: “It was no use talking about playing across the street until we got the Japs off our front lawn.”
The first step was an amphibious landing of the recently returned Ninth Australian Infantry Division—the tough, battle-hardened “Rats of Tobruk”—about ten miles east of Lae, which was garrisoned by about 10,000 Japanese troops. The next day 1,700 American paratroopers of the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment would jump on a Japanese air base at the town of Nadzab and hold it so that the Seventh Australian Infantry Division could cut off any escape route of the Japanese in Lae.
On September 4, the Australians went ashore unopposed except by enemy bombers from Rabaul that killed about one hundred army and naval personnel. For the Nadzab operation, General Kenney had assembled ninety-seven troop transport planes at Port Moresby when a horrible accident occurred. As the 503rd Parachute Infantry was loading its people into the planes, a B-24 Liberator bomber crashed on the runway, plowing through five trucks and killing sixty paratroopers and injuring a hundred others.
Still, the attack went off like clockwork and the Japanese base at Nadzab was seized. MacArthur went along to be with “my kids,” even though one of the engines quit in the plane he was riding. He told the pilot—who had suggested turning back—“I know the B-17 flies almost as well on three engines as four.”17
IN A FEW MORE DAYS JAPANESE strongholds at Salamaua and Finschhafen had fallen to Allied forces, which meant much of New Guinea’s Huon Peninsula was now in MacArthur’s hands. “Remember, gentlemen,” MacArthur told the press. “We can only advance as far as the bomber line.”18
In late December, George Marshall, returning from the Tehran Conference featuring Roosevelt, Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, passed through MacArthur’s theater and had a candid discussion with him. MacArthur was appalled to learn that the navy—in the form of its chief of operations Admiral Ernest King—was actually jealous of him. According to Marshall, MacArthur said, “King claimed the Pacific as the rightful domain of the Navy and seemed to regard the operations there almost as his own private war.” According to MacArthur, Marshall went on to say that Admiral King resented the part MacArthur had played in the Pacific war and was highly critical of MacArthur—and “encouraged Navy propaganda to that end.”
Marshall told MacArthur that the navy believed that the only way it could erase the stain of Pearl Harbor “was to have the Navy command a great victory over Japan.” MacArthur responded that “the Navy had no greater booster and supporter than [himself],” and expressed his dismay “that inter-service rivalries or personal ambitions should be allowed to interfere with the winning of the war.” To this, Marshall seemed to agree but, MacArthur noted sourly, “Having been chief of staff myself I realized how impossible it was to have professional and objective matters decided on the basis of merit and common sense.”
MacArthur then cast his eye—previously on the huge Japanese concentration at Rabaul—toward the neighboring island of New Britain. The enemy was using it as a staging base for troops and supplies for their operations both on New Guinea and in the Solomon Islands. MacArthur thought if Rabaul could be eliminated it would remove a large thorn in his side, as well as for the marines and soldiers who were then fighting on Guadalcanal. Admiral King, again worried that he might lose ships, persuaded George Marshall that an attack on Rabaul was too risky, which once more left MacArthur fuming. Instead, after Guadalcanal was secured, the navy continued “island hopping” in bloody, ghastly frontal attacks with its Marine Corps at such places as Tarawa and Kwajalein—islands that MacArthur would have bypassed.
MacArthur then drew plans to attack the Japanese in the tiny Admiralty Islands, an island group several hundred miles to the north of New Guinea that intelligence had told him was lightly defended. Rabaul might have had a magnificent harbor for the navy to gather its ships, but on the island of Manus in the Admiralties there was also a fine natural harbor. From there, with naval warships and Kenney’s warplanes, MacArthur decided he could not only neutralize, isolate, and bypass Rabaul, but also create a valuable stepping-stone for his next advancement toward the Philippines.
On February 29, 1944, nine U.S. fast destroyers and a cruiser appeared in the harbor of Los Negros, an island neighboring Manus. Aboard the destroyers were a 1,200-man reinforced squadron of the Fifth U.S. Cavalry Regiment, which was the outfit that had once come to the rescue of MacArthur’s father during the Indian campaigns in New Mexico. Aboard the cruiser was MacArthur himself, as a guest of Vice Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid. After a brief naval and air bombardment under rainy, murky skies, the cavalrymen went ashore. MacArthur went with them. With a few bullets singing in the air he waded from one of the landing craft. Later a cavalryman told his buddy about it.
“You mean General Chase, don’t you?” the buddy asked.
“No dammit! I mean General MacArthur,” insisted the first trooper. “He was right there with us. He ain’t afraid of nothing.”19
When MacArthur did step foot on land, there was little enemy opposition on the beach, which was as expected since aerial reconnaissance had shown no Japanese on Los Negros. But that quickly changed.
It turned out that a sizable contingent of four thousand Japanese inhabited Los Negros, reported by MAGIC and other sources but unbeknownst to MacArthur. Before long a battle erupted, one so ferocious that the commanders ordered the rest of the 25,000-man division brought up from its staging bases in New Guinea. MacArthur spent most of the day at the scene of battle, personally handing out medals for bravery. It took nearly two months, but by the first of May the Admiralty Islands had fallen to the Allies and an important new air base began building up in the southwestern Pacific.
Around this time, MacArthur learned that his name “was being bandied about” as a possible Republican candidate for president. He issued a statement insisting that he had no desire to do anything but whip the Japanese in the Pacific, but to no avail. Someone leaked a series of correspondence between MacArthur and a congressman named Arthur Miller from Nebraska in which the two discussed the possibility of MacArthur’s candidacy. It caused a furor in the newspapers, prompting MacArthur to issue a further clarification that ended with the statement, “I request that no action be taken that would in any way link my name with the nomination. I do not covet it nor would I accept it.”
In the meantime, MacArthur unearthed among his midst a man even more famous than himself, which was a surprising discovery, all things considered. Reports had filtered up from below that among the P-38 fighter groups flew the man who had swept the world nearly two decades earlier with the first nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic from New York to Paris. Wondering how the celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh could have found his way into his theater without him knowing the first thing about it, MacArthur sent a wire to the 475th Tactical Fighter Group summoning Lindbergh to his headquarters at Brisbane. He signed it, ominously, “MacArthur.”
When he arrived, Lindbergh first had a meeting with the air force chief George Kenney, and then with Chief of Staff Sutherland, before at last speaking with Douglas MacArthur himself. Lindbergh, the famed “Lone Eagle,” was wearing the uniform of a “technician,” indicating that he was to be treated as an officer but with no insignia of rank. How he came to be there was just the kind of tale MacArthur enjoyed.
After the war in Europe broke out, the Americans were divided, bitterly in many cases, on whether the United States should enter the contest on the side of France and England. Lindbergh, as well as a host of other notables including politicians, college presidents, and Hollywood actors and other celebrities, was against such intervention. Being so famous, Lindbergh’s eloquent speeches against provocative acts such as the Lend-Lease
program—the administration’s process of supplying Great Britain and Russia with war materials in exchange for real estate—soon earned him the enmity of President Roosevelt. After Pearl Harbor, when there was no question that America was at war, the president pettily refused to restore Lindbergh’s colonelcy in the Army Air Corps, a rank Lindbergh had given up after the president publicly questioned his loyalty.
For six months, wherever he turned to find a job useful to the fight, Lindbergh was rebuffed by Roosevelt officials who, Lindbergh would discover, delivered veiled threats of loss of government contracts if he was hired. At last he found the one man even Roosevelt would not cross: Henry Ford.
Lindbergh—who at that point probably knew as much about aviation or more than any man alive—became a senior technician at Ford’s Willow Run complex, the largest airplane manufacturer in the world, which meant in effect that he was mostly a test pilot. After a year and a half in that capacity, Lindbergh concluded he had done as much as one could in a factory setting; what was needed was to test the aircraft under conditions in which they were being utilized—that is, in combat.
Through intercessions by old friends in military aviation, the forty-two-year-old Lindbergh secured permission to go to the war in the Pacific and test-fly both single-engine Corsairs—workhorses of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps—and twin-engine P-38s—the mainstay of army fliers in the Pacific. Before long, Lindbergh had completed more than a dozen combat missions in Corsairs, flying out of Guadalcanal, Bougainville, and other islands in the Solomon chain. Afterward he secured a similar assignment in New Guinea with the renowned 475th Fighter Group (Satan’s Angels), which was conducting operations against Japanese holdouts in the far northwest of the island. Lindbergh had flown about twenty missions with the P-38s of the 475th and become a revered figure to young airmen half his age when MacArthur’s summons arrived.