The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [124]
Dear Bob:
Time is fleeting and our dangers increase with its passage. However admirable individual acts of courage may be however spendid and electrical your presence has proven; remember that your mission is to take Buna. All other things are merely subsidiary to this. No alchemy is going to produce this for you; it can only be done in battle and sooner or later this battle must be engaged. Hasten your preparations, and when you are ready—strike, for as I have said, time is working desperately against us.
Cordially, MacArthur
The following morning, the troops of the 127th stormed Buna Village. Expecting to have to wrest the village at bayonet point, the men were surprised when they entered unopposed. Suspecting a trap, they scoured the area for enemy soldiers. The Japanese were gone. After clinging to the village for three weeks, the enemy had vacated without a fight, as they had done three months earlier at Ioribaiwa Ridge.
The men of the 127th were shocked by what they discovered: a blighted landscape of scarred and beheaded trees, shell holes filled with water and mud and excrement, unburied bodies, the ruins of native huts, discarded clothing and ration cans, abandoned guns, very little food, and only basic medical supplies. But the Japanese bunkers stood intact even after direct mortar and artillery hits.
Two days later, Eichelberger’s troops registered another mini-victory. Colonel White Smith’s 2nd Battalion, 128th U.S. Infantry, down to only 350 effectives, stormed and took the Coconut Grove, the second major Japanese position west of Entrance Creek.
MacArthur’s headquarters wasted no time trumpeting the news, and on December 15, the lead headline of the New York Times blared, “ALLIES TAKE BUNA IN NEW GUINEA.”
It was typical MacArthur-esque hyperbole. What the front-page story omitted was that Buna Government Station east of Entrance Creek, the Allies’ main objective, was still firmly in Japanese hands. It also failed to mention was that the Japanese possessed a large chunk of land—the Warren Front—east of the Government Station, and another one west of the Girua River at Sanananda.
Despite the triumphant New York Times headline, the reality was that the war in New Guinea had already dragged on much longer than the Americans or the Australians thought it would. There had been successes—Buna Village and Gona—but in the big picture they were minor victories. Early on, the plan had been to envelop the eleven-mile-long front as if a giant hand were closing inexorably around the Japanese. The Americans would come up the coast while the Australians moved down. A combined American-Australian army would move north via the Sanananda track, while an entirely American force would attack the Triangle.
A week and a half before the capture of Buna Village, after the failure of his December 5 assault on the Warren Front, Eichelberger realized that this plan would not work—at least not east of the Girua River. Japanese positions were just too strong, and the terrain was dismal.
The Americans, Eichelberger decided, would soften up the Japanese positions by infiltration and aggressive patrolling, the kind of mobile, small-unit maneuver tactics that General Forrest Harding had pioneered at the Infantry School at Fort Benning.
Eichelberger’s plan was for reconnaissance platoons to identify enemy positions. He would then use artillery, especially the 105 mm howitzer—code named “Dusty”—with its high angle of fire and delayed fuses, to pound those positions into submission. Following bombardment, patrols would knock out the bunkers one by one, with rifles, grenades, grenade launchers, and mortars. If that failed, Eichelberger resolved to let starvation take its toll.
In the abstract, the plan seemed sound. The reality, though, was much more complicated. The terrain made even