The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [138]
Correspondents who had witnessed firsthand the brutality of the campaign were outraged by MacArthur’s claim. It was a piece of fiction, a brazen lie. When some refused to wire the text to their editors, MacArthur’s headquarters threatened to expel them from the SWPA.
Eichelberger was flabbergasted by MacArthur’s claim. Was this the same MacArthur who had told General Harding to “Take Buna Today At All Costs”? Was this the same commander in chief who told him to “take Buna or don’t come back alive”? Eleven years later, in a letter to Samuel Milner, the army’s official historian, Eichelberger wrote, “The statement to the correspondents in Brisbane after Buna that ‘losses were small because there was no hurry’ was one of the great surprises of my life. As you know, our Allied losses were heavy and as a commander in the field, I had been told many times of the necessity for speed.”
Eichelberger was justifiably bitter. Demonized by his men, he bore the brunt of MacArthur’s sense of urgency. He would later write, “The great hero went home without seeing Buna before, during or after the fight while permitting press articles from his GHQ to say he was leading his troops in battle. MacArthur…just stayed over at Moresby 40 minutes away and walked the floor. I know this to be a fact.” Though MacArthur had never bothered to visit the front “to see first hand the difficulties our troops were up against,” he continually hounded Eichelberger “to push on to victory.”
Victory at Buna and Sanananda came at a huge cost. Eichelberger wrote in his book, Our Jungle Road to Tokyo, “Buna was…bought at a substantial price in death, wounds, disease, despair, and human suffering. No one who fought there, however hard he tries, will ever forget it.” Fatalities, he continued, “closely approach, percentage-wise, the heaviest losses in our own Civil War battles.” Historian Stanley Falk agreed. “The Papuan campaign,” he wrote, “was one of the costliest Allied victories of the Pacific war in terms of casualties per troops committed.”
The combined victory at Buna, Sanananda, and Gona, though costly, was psychologically and strategically momentous. Together with the fall of Guadalcanal, it destroyed the myth of Japanese invincibility. Strategically, it broke Japan’s hold on New Guinea, ensuring the security of the Australian continent and the American supply line to the Pacific.
Buna-Sanananda was not the 32nd Division’s only campaign. In December 1943, it returned to battle in New Guinea at Saidor, followed by invasions of Aitape on the New Guinea’s far north coast, and Morotai, near the island of Halmahera, between New Guinea and the Philippine island of Mindanao. Later, it participated in the liberation of the Philippines at Leyte and Luzon.
Although the division’s battles were overshadowed by the likes of Tarawa, Saipan, and Iwo Jima, Eichelberger managed to put the Red Arrow men’s contributions into perspective:
“Some of the Pacific history has been written, but little of it has been concerned with the men I commanded—the ordinary, muddy, malarial, embattled, and weighed-down-by-too-heavy-packs GIs. They waded through the surf, they struggled through the swamp mud…they cut tracks which ultimately became roads leading to the airfields they constructed. They were the true artisans of the island-hopping campaign in the Pacific which led ultimately to the Philippines and Tokyo. They called it—The Hard Way Back.”
It was, in fact, the 32nd Division to which General Yamashita surrendered near Kiangan on September 2, 1945. By the war’s end the 32nd Division had been in combat for 654 days.
As costly as its other campaigns were, none could compare with Buna and Sanananda, where the division’s casualties pushed 90 percent. Out of the nearly eleven thousand troops in the division’s three combat teams, there were 9,688 casualties. According to Samuel Milner, the division’s 126th Infantry Regiment “had ceased to exist.” Of the 131 officers and 3,040 enlisted men who went into battle in mid-November, only thirty-two officers