The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [106]
The meeting broke up shortly after that and Eichelberger buttonholed Smith and asked him what his assessment was.
“It’s tough, damn tough,” Smith said. “It doesn’t pay to attack. The plan should be really basic: To edge up slowly every day. But even that’s not working. We’re not getting anywhere.”
Eichelberger was under no illusions. He could plainly see that American forces “were prisoners of geography,” and that Buna was going to be “siege warfare…the bitterest and most punishing kind.” But that was no excuse for faintheartedness. With MacArthur’s warning ringing in his ears, Eichelberger looked Smith straight in the eye. “I don’t think you’re trying hard enough.”
Back at his tent in Dobodura, Harding tried to understand Eichelberger’s attitude. His old West Point classmate was under enormous pressure. MacArthur had given him “an earful” and appointed him his executioner. Was Eichelberger simply carrying out orders? Despite trying to see both sides, it was difficult for Harding not to be bitter.
Harding had been determined to avoid what he called the “butcher’s bill run up by the generals of World War I,” and obviously he had not pressed the battle hard enough for MacArthur’s tastes. In France, the 32nd’s Red Arrow men, facing rapid-firing artillery and machine guns, had developed a reputation for bravery. But Harding knew that it had come at a huge cost to the division: In five months, the 32nd Division lost three thousand men and counted almost fourteen thousand among the wounded.
Harding refused to repeat that kind of carnage at Buna. To order headlong attacks on the Japanese positions was “Civil War tactics,” pure madness. While at Fort Benning Infantry School, Harding had been one of a group of instructors who attempted to define and implement a new set of battle tactics that put a premium on ingenuity and discouraged high casualty rates. George C. Marshall was the school’s assistant commandant at the time, and Harding had Marshall’s blessing. He and his fellow officers developed and taught flanking movements and other innovative battlefield techniques.
Harding also edited a seminal study of small-unit engagements during World War I, and enumerated a list of lessons learned. One of those was: “To assault by day an organized position, manned by good troops equipped with automatic weapons, without providing for adequate support by (artillery) fire or tanks, is folly.”
In 1937, in his position as editor of the Infantry Journal, he elaborated on this point. “Since wars began,” he opined, “this ‘do something’ obsession has driven leaders to order attacks with no prospect of success…. The enemy’s position is immensely strong, but our masters are impatient. We attack and the history of military disaster is enriched by another bloody repulse.”
In another editorial, Harding blasted senior commanders during World War I for firing junior officers whenever things did not turn out as planned. According to writer and historian Tom Doherty, “The qualities that Harding emphasized in his writings boiled down to this: A good leader possesses the courage and self-discipline to protect his organization from his own rash impulses and from the anxieties crashing down from the chain of command….” Harding, Doherty elaborates, “had expressed these convictions years ago in peacetime, but did he have the courage to act upon them at Buna, where he was caught between enemy fortifications worthy of the Western Front and a living legend who insisted on victory at any price?”
According to Doherty, many of the men who served under Harding at Buna believed the answer to this question was yes. “They were convinced,” Doherty adds, “that far from being too weak to succeed…Forrest Harding was too principled to add…‘another bloody repulse’ to history’s long roll of military disasters by sacrificing his soldiers on the altar of Douglas MacArthur’s impatience.”
Harding sat down with his diary. Eichelberger, he wrote, “showed no appreciation of what the men had been through, or the spirit shown by most of them in carrying on despite