The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [9]
A part of the 32nd Division’s fate was sealed when Churchill persuaded Roosevelt to break England’s stalemate with Australia by sending Australia another U.S. Army Infantry division. The division’s ultimate fate, though, hung in the balance for months after MacArthur arrived Down Under.
The defensive strategy devised by the Australian Chiefs of Staff was to hold the “Brisbane Line,” a thousand miles of coastline between Brisbane and Melbourne, the heart of the country’s industrial power and its population center. Barbed wire was strung along the beaches in Sydney and Melbourne and a blackout was imposed on the southeast coastal cities.
Initially, MacArthur accepted, or was forced to accept, the Australian strategy. Later, though, he wrote that he never had any intention of abiding by what he considered a defeatist approach. He asserted that from the moment he set foot in Australia, he planned to take the war against Japan’s Imperial army to New Guinea.
MacArthur considered New Guinea a backwater theater. His decision to engage the Japanese Imperial army there was a strategic necessity. Japan, on the other hand, coveted New Guinea, one of the last essential pieces in its colossal Asia-Pacific land grab. Once it controlled the island, it could isolate, and perhaps invade, Australia. More important, possession of New Guinea would allow the Japanese to cut off the eight thousand-mile Allied supply line (one of the longest in military history) that ran from the West Coast of the United States to Australia via Hawaii and Fiji, thereby ending Allied influence in the South Pacific.
MacArthur’s decision to fight for New Guinea, and Admiral Ernest King’s efforts to challenge Japanese expansion in the Solomons by invading Guadalcanal, upset Japanese plans for putting a quick end to the war and suing for a favorable peace that acknowledged its numerous conquests.
But even as MacArthur prepared to send troops to New Guinea, he bitterly resented its necessity, and remained obsessed with the Philippines, vowing to return even if he were “down to one canoe paddled by Douglas MacArthur and supported by one Taylor cub [plane].”
In New Guinea, that pledge would be put to the ultimate test. MacArthur would be up against a Japanese army whose determination to hold the island would initiate one of the South Pacific’s most savage campaigns.
Chapter 2
A TRAIN HEADING WEST
THREE WEEKS AFTER MacArthur arrived in Australia, his dream of a speedy return to the Philippines was shattered. Major General Edward King, ignoring MacArthur’s orders for a counterattack against the Japanese on Bataan, surrendered to them on April 9, 1942. The capitulation was the largest in U.S. military history.
Three days before the surrender, and ten thousand miles away, the 32nd Infantry Division was loaded onto a train. The decision to move the division puzzled battalion and company commanders who had been led to believe that they were headed for the European Theater of Operations (ETO). The rumor was that the division was now bound for the Southwest Pacific.
Although many of the 32nd Division’s men could not have pointed on a world map to the area defined as the Southwest Pacific, they were familiar with Europe’s historic battlefields. Called the “Red Arrow,” the 32nd Division first distinguished itself in World War I. Because of its exploits, the French gave the 32nd the sobriquet “Les Terribles.” Its symbol, which it wore proudly as a shoulder patch, was a red arrow piercing a line. It was said that there was not a line the tenacious 32nd could not penetrate—it was the first division to pierce the German army’s Hindenburg Line, for example.
By 1940, though, the 32nd Divison’s glory was a distant memory. On October