• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 733 0

wet and hungry, they were still feeling cocky—they would show the Australians how to fight! The exhausted Australians, whom they had been sent in to relieve, could have been offended by their brazenness; instead, they merely smiled knowingly. Dudley McCarthy, an Australian historian who witnessed the arrival of the Americans, wrote that, “…the Australians were content to sit back for a while and watch the Americans. There was a very real interest in their observation and a certain sardonic but concealed amusement. The Americans had told some of them that they ‘could go home now’ as they (the Americans) ‘were here to clean things up.’”

The following day Tomlinson and Captain Boice scouted the front, and that evening met with the 126th’s battalion commanders to discuss plans for the next morning’s attack. Their only map was a vague, sub-par, one-inch-to-one-mile sheet, which did not contain descriptions of the terrain ahead, so the advance was going to require a good amount of guesswork. Tomlinson and Boice were certain of one thing, though: The fighting was not going to be easy. Heavy jungle and swamp lay at the junction of the Soputa-Buna and Soputa-Sanananda tracks west of the Girua River, and the Japanese were dug in and waiting.

Chapter 13

A POOR MAN’S WAR

WITH NO SHORTAGE OF bad news coming from the front, MacArthur’s publicity team in Port Moresby was busy creating a message that had almost no basis in reality. The same day the 126th arrived at Soputa, MacArthur’s communiqué read, “Our ground forces have rapidly closed in now and pinned the enemy down on the narrow coastal strip from Buna to Gona. We are fighting on the outskirts of both places.”

As if convinced by his own PR, MacArthur issued orders calling for a full-scale advance on the Buna-Sanananda-Gona Front early the following morning. “All columns,” he said, were to be “driven through to objectives regardless of losses.” The message that General Harding received from MacArthur read: “Take Buna Today At All Costs. MacArthur.”

Harding could not believe his eyes. His 128th was up against thousands of Japanese troops, blistering fire, log bunkers, and a huge swamp that limited his army’s mobility. His 126th had been stolen from him. He had no artillery and he was dealing with a supply crisis. His luggers and trawlers had been sunk off Hariko, and the Dobodura airstrip was not yet fully functional. He was operating on what he called a “hand-to-mouth, catch-as-catch-can basis.” It was not the way to run a war, much less win it.

As if the terrain was not tough enough, equipment failures made his problems worse. Radios used by mortar platoons to coordinate firing did not work. Because of their short fuses, the few 81 mm mortars that made it to the front had almost no effect on the Japanese bunkers because they blew up on impact. Harding was also to have received a number of tanks, but Murphy’s Law prevailed—when the tanks were loaded onto barges at Oro Bay, the barges sank. Harding had no options but to take the bunkers out “by hand.”

Harding was also deeply concerned about casualties. In just three days of fighting, he had lost sixty-three men, and in one day of fighting alone, a single battalion suffered forty-one killed and wounded. Now MacArthur wanted him to take Buna regardless of the costs. Harding knew that if he followed orders he would be sentencing hundreds of Red Arrow soldiers to a certain death. “I know as well as anybody that you can’t win battles without getting a lot of people hurt,” Harding wrote in his diary. “But I also know…that infantry can’t break through an automatic weapons defense without first knocking out the automatic weapons. Anyone who knows his World War stuff knows that.” What Harding did next was to tell his officers that they were to push the offensive only as long as the progress they made justified the losses. Progress in the jungle, though, was tough to calculate. Was it a hundred feet, two hundred? Harding let his officers be the judges. He would accept the responsibility for defying MacArthur’s orders.

After