The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [31]
Milne Bay was a vital piece of real estate. In Allied hands, it would allow them to guard the Coral Sea and Port Moresby against seaborne attacks from the east. It would also enable Allied pilots to hit Japanese bases in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands without having to fly over the Owen Stanley Mountains.
Although Japan’s strategists in Rabaul chose an elite naval landing force to lead the invasion of Milne Bay, and followed up with reinforcements, by the end of August it was obvious that Milne Bay was a losing effort. On the nights of September 4 and 5, Japanese troops were evacuated.
Having secured Milne Bay, MacArthur could now turn all his attention to the Kokoda. What he saw there in mid-September 1942 alarmed him. Surely he had ordered enough fighting men to the front. Why then could the Australians not hold back Horii’s army? Chafing at MacArthur’s insinuation that the Australians were not fighting, Lieutenant General Sydney Rowell, head of New Guinea Force, a position that put him in command of all Australian and American troops, tried to set the record straight. His men were exhausted, sick with dysentery and fever and, despite the reinforcements, outnumbered.
The Japanese were hardly better off. One of Horii’s section leaders kept a diary of the campaign. On September 9, he wrote, “We are in the jungle area…. The jungle was beyond description. Thirsty for water, stomach empty. The pack on the back is heavy…. My neck and back hurt when I wipe them with a cloth…the sweat still pours out and falls down like crystals…the sun of the southern country has no mercy…. The soldiers grit their teeth and continue advancing quiet as mummies…. ‘Water, water,’ all the soldiers are muttering to themselves…. We reach for the canteens on our hip from force of habit, but there isn’t a drop of water in them. Even yet, the men still believe in miracles…. The men sleep while they walk and sometimes bump into trees…planes fly above the jungle and repeatedly attack.”
When later in the day the Japanese troops spot a stream tumbling through a valley, the section leader writes again. “Water! Water! The soldiers forgot their fatigue and ran. The water we were longing for was now flowing in front of us…Indeed there is a blessing from above! They bent down and put their mouths to the stream…. That water was not just plain water. It was the water of life and the source of energy. It was a gift from heaven for soldiers.”
Seemingly indifferent to the suffering of his men, General Horii initiated a series of savage attacks over the course of the next few days and on September 17, his troops ascended Ioribaiwa Ridge and celebrated with loud, triumphant shouts of “Banzai!” and tears of joy. Three weeks after landing at Basabua, Port Moresby was within their grasp. The Japanese had done exactly what Allied General Headquarters had said they would not, could not, do.
Chapter 5
CANNIBAL ISLAND
BEFORE THE NANKAI SHITAI clambered up Ioribaiwa Ridge, General MacArthur was confident that the reinforced Australians would be capable of halting Horii’s progress on the Kokoda track, and made plans for an offensive on “three axes.”
On the first axis, the Australians would engage Horii’s army in a “frontal action” on the Kokoda. The third consisted of “large-scale infiltrations from Milne Bay along the north coast of Papua.” But it was the second axis that was so bewildering. This one called for an American flanking movement that would penetrate and cross the Owen Stanley Mountains. In other words, MacArthur proposed to send a large group of American soldiers over the very mountains that a month earlier he believed would prevent the Japanese from reaching Port Moresby. The basic blueprint was for American troops to duck in behind the Japanese line on the Kokoda track, catching the enemy army by surprise. Then the combined American and Australian