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Once he was done writing, Harding went to Eichelberger’s tent to bury the hatchet and to discuss a new plan of attack. Eichelberger only half listened and then interrupted Harding to object once again to what he had discovered at the front. Harding guessed at Eichelberger’s intent.

“You were probably sent here to get heads,” Harding said. “Maybe mine is one of them.”

“You are right,” Eichelberger answered briskly.

“I take it I am to return to Moresby.”

“Yes,” Eichelberger replied.

Then Harding stood up and stepped out into the night.

The next morning, after a night’s downpour, Eichelberger woke to a stream running through his tent. The water was thigh deep and his personal possessions were floating away. If he was irritated by the previous day’s events, he was really aggravated now. Having dismissed Harding, he wasted no time in instructing his staff to relieve Harding’s top commanders, including Mott.

Then, over breakfast, Eichelberger apologized to Harding, insisting that he had no choice in the matter. Harding, ever the gentleman, accepted his friend’s word. Later he excused Eichelberger in his diary, writing, “It was probably either his head or mine.”

Harding’s staff was not so forgiving. It was a “dirty deal,” one of them insisted. Harding was being scapegoated. Weeks before, the general had wanted to cut off the Japs as they retreated from Kokoda to the coast. The Red Arrow men might have wiped out Horii’s army, but Blamey had insisted that the Australians be in on the kill, and MacArthur agreed. Consequently, Harding lost three pivotal weeks. In the meantime, the Japanese were able to land reinforcements.

Word of Harding’s dismissal made the rounds. While his staff collected his belongings, he paid a last visit to a nearby portable hospital. Stretcher bearers were bringing in wounded soldiers. Harding, visibly moved, apologized to the men for letting them down. An injured soldier overheard. “Hell, no, General,” he said. “We let you down!”

Later that day, Harding left Dobodura for Port Moresby. Buna was now Eichelberger’s alone to try to take.

The problem, which Harding tried to articulate, was that Buna, as Eichelberger would soon discover, was a “Leavenworth Nightmare.” The U.S. Army Command and General Staff School in Leavenworth, Kansas, did not teach solutions to such dismal tactical pictures. The Japanese defensive position was superb. They commanded the high ground up and down the coast. The Americans were relegated to the blackwater creeks and swamps, thick with viciously spiked nipa and sago palms that made the coordination of advances impossible. Companies were scattered all over the place. Classic military maneuvers like the double envelopment, where an enemy’s flanks are attacked simultaneously in a kind of pinching motion, were unworkable. Fronts, at least in the conventional sense, did not exist.

While Eichelberger set out to reorder his units, which had become “scrambled like eggs,” his new officers struggled to come to grips with the reality of their commands. One complained about a “lack of almost everything with which to operate.”

Eichelberger also decided to move his command post closer to the front. While this was going on, Stutterin’ Smith sensed that the Japanese were growing weak. Acting on a hunch, he sent out small patrols to harass the Japanese positions. They were “colonial tactics,” according to Smith, designed to keep pressure on the enemy and gather intelligence, while Eichelberger figured out the division’s next move.

Smith’s hunch proved correct: Up and down the eleven-mile front, Japanese soldiers were suffering. Sergeant Phil Ishio, a Japanese-American from Salt Lake City who worked as a translator with I Corps, had just translated some of the diaries that Smith’s men discovered when they raided the Japanese shacks on November 30.

The Japanese were short on food and medical supplies. Unlike American soldiers, who were discouraged from keeping diaries for fear that they might end