Island Infernos: The US Army's Pacific War Odyssey, 1944

by John C. McManus

They and their living comrades were part of a fighting force that dwarfed the Marine Corps, which, at peak strength, mobilized six divisions and, in the full expanse of the war, carried out fifteen amphibious combat landings, compared with many dozens more by the Army.

Well-behaved soldiers received furloughs into Rockhampton, a midsize city of thirty-five thousand people.

“Everything seemed to be twenty years behind the times,” one GI recalled. The luckiest traveled to the big cities of Melbourne and Sydney, where dates with attractive Australian women could easily be had, and a party seemingly beckoned around every corner; some even ventured to Tasmania,

For Americans used to a chilly yuletide season, the Southern Hemisphere’s summer weather at Christmastime seemed bizarre and incongruous.

little more home-like in that dismal area,” according to the unit history. After bingeing on the

The most common item they found was the Yosegaki Hinomaru or “Good Luck Flag” worn into battle by many Japanese, generally around their waists, in pockets, or inside their helmets. Made out of delicate fibers, the flags were signed, and usually inscribed with well wishes, by the soldiers’ families, friends, and neighbors. Part talisman, part heirloom, and part patriotic symbol, the Yosegaki Hinomaru was a sacred item to the average Japanese serviceman. To the Americans, very few of whom had any idea of, or all that much respect for, the cultural or personal significance of the flags, their small size and fascinating images simply made for easily plundered and traded souvenirs.

The American dead were handled delicately, and with some level of reverence, either by their own divisional comrades or specially trained graves registration troops attached to the 7th for the battle.

Like their former enemies, they, too, were sprayed with sodium arsenite and then prepared for burial. “Transfer and interment of remains was accomplished with due honors,” an administrative Army report stated. “Each body was wrapped in a blanket and covered with an American flag for ...

The losses were considerable, though not comparable with the bloody Gilberts operations. The capture of the southern half of Kwajalein Atoll cost the Army 177 dead and 1,037 wounded, of whom about 400 did not require evacuation.

The Marines lost 313 dead, 502 wounded, and another 73 missing presumed dead. The 7th Division killed 4,938 enemy servicemen at Kwajalein and its neighboring islands while capturing 206 prisoners, only 79 of whom were ethnic Japanese.

In the bigger picture, control of the Marshalls yielded significant strategic results. In addition to shattering a Japanese outpost line and clearing the way for devastating US Navy carrier strikes against Japanese naval forces at Truk in the Carolines, the American victories in the Marshalls netted them a slew of useful bases from which to continue Admiral Nimitz’s Central Pacific drive. As he had anticipated, the capture of the Marshalls accelerated the war’s timetable by several months, making major summertime operations in the Marianas—the fulcrum of Japanese Central Pacific defenses—not only possible but likely. Moreover, American planes now threatened the major Japanese naval base at Truk and threatened the flank of their South Pacific bases in the Solomons and, to some extent, even New Guinea. Flintlock reinforced the notion among the Joint Chiefs that Nimitz’s island-hopping campaign offered the most attractive means of defeating Japan.

On the tactical side, the Americans learned much about preinvasion bombardments, joint service operations, the coordination of firepower, and the best techniques to prevail in close combat against the Japanese.9

enthusiastic, thoughtful, stubborn, a hard driver.” In Hawaii a year earlier, he had been arrested for hit-and-run and drunk driving but was released for lack of sufficient evidence, in part because he seldom drank to excess. The incident might have ended his career in a later era.

Holland Smith believed passionately in lightning-quick operations, even at the expense of incurring high casualties. In his view, and that of many Marine and naval officers, the longer a battle dragged on, the more vulnerable ships became to enemy air and sea attacks. Though Army officers did not necessarily disagree in concept, they often did in practice, since they tended to favor a more deliberate pace if that might save lives (and allow time to employ supporting firepower, a key tenet of all Army training). Back in November 1943 at Makin, Smith had grown impatient with what he viewed as the 27th Infantry Division’s unreasonably slow pace and poor leadership.

“This is my battle,” he told Smith. “You may put some staff officers ashore as observers. If I find they have tried to issue any orders, I’ll have them arrested.” It was a remarkable, and borderline insubordinate, way for a division commander to address his nominal superior, but it indicated Smith’s inability to win the allegiance of his Army subordinates, mainly due to his heavy-handed, chauvinistic contempt for the Army’s fighting ability. The Corps could hardly have selected an officer less suited in outlook and temperament to conduct joint service operations. Smith loved the Marine Corps to the exclusion of all other military mistresses.

His rightful pride in the Corps seemed to stem, at least in part, from a dysfunctional disdain for the other services, especially the Army. More than anything else, he was animated by a constant need to preserve the existence of the Corps and its unique traditions.

To Holland Smith, military operations were measured in the speed of their completion, not the larger strategic results they accrued or the damage inflicted upon the enemy in comparison to losses on the American side.

But in the Marshalls, the tensions among the generals revealed deeper problems, mainly between Smith and his Army colleagues more than between the Army and Marine Corps institutionally—issues that would eventually boil into a serious public breach and intrude upon the health of military operations on a larger battlefield.

MacArthur’s SWPA forces had advanced about 350 miles, securing only one-third of New Guinea’s long north coast. At this rate, it might take him three more years to navigate the world’s second-largest island and put himself in a position to return to the Philippines, an objective that was not only a strategic aim for MacArthur but something of a personal obsession. In the meantime, Nimitz’s forces, by seizing the Gilberts and the Marshalls, had leaped some 2,000 miles forward in the general direction of the Japanese home islands, outshining the less glamorous, plodding SWPA advance. At this pace, the Joint Chiefs might well elect to consign SWPA to nothing more than dead-end flank protection in favor of affording full support to Nimitz in the Central Pacific.

“Cumulative evidence does not support air observer reports that the islands have been evacuated,” he wrote in a late-February intelligence summary.

An avid military historian and extremist right in his personal politics, Willoughby had escaped from the Philippines with MacArthur. “He was basically a historian rather than an intelligence officer,” judged Kenney, who considered Willoughby a friend and thought highly of him as an analyst. Jealous of any perceived slight by colleagues or encroachment on his intelligence bailiwick, an administrative empire builder par excellence, Willoughby was obsequiously loyal to MacArthur, who tended to favor sycophancy over effectiveness from staff members. For all of Willoughby’s undeniable intellectual heft and curiosity, he had a disquieting propensity to misread enemy intentions and capabilities.

Japanese were killed in these minor encounters.” Though strategically doomed, the Japanese gave no thought to any organized surrender, a pattern that had begun at such places as Buna and Guadalcanal and one that would hold for much of the rest of the war. They were rather like the shards of a shattered window or mirror—sharp enough and dangerous enough to require an exacting, occasionally exhausting cleanup. MacArthur’s headquarters had already invented the trivial and patronizing term “mop up” for this harrowing process.

They figured out a way to shoot their 60-millimeter mortars without using the baseplate, enhancing their mobile firepower. To smooth the reloading process, they taped clips of ammunition in place on their rifles “so all you had to do was flip around the clip and slap it in. These things were not in field manuals, but the GIs devised them very quickly, and they worked very well.” An 8th Cavalry post-battle report curtly noted that patrolling on Manus “for the most part necessitated digging the Jap out of his hole.” The improvisations of the troopers, their patrolling techniques, the rhythm of their operations, and even the conditions in which they operated were strikingly similar to what many of their sons would experience in Vietnam over two decades later.

General Krueger indicated, the 1st Cavalry Division troopers gradually killed off the Japanese in many hundreds of small-unit patrol engagements fought over the course of several exhausting weeks, often in torrential rain and mud.

The solidification of these bases made a prospective invasion of neighboring New Ireland unnecessary and continued the steady strangulation of the Japanese garrison at Rabaul. In a larger sense, victory in the Admiralties accelerated MacArthur’s timetable for his next New Guinea invasion by six weeks, and provided him with a counterweight to Nimitz’s triumph in the Marshalls. This, in turn, forced the Joint Chiefs to maintain SWPA’s strategic relevance and kept MacArthur’s Philippine dreams alive. At an intelligence level, the operation validated the accuracy of the Ultra material upon which Willoughby’s estimates had been based, building MacArthur’s confidence in this remarkable source of information on Japanese plans and forces.

No one really wanted the whole island of Bougainville, and with good reason. Most of it consisted of little more than scum-crusted swamps and suffocating, mountainous rain forest.

Melanesians who lived mainly in small coastal villages of about one hundred people, the island had been listlessly batoned among a series of imperial powers during the early twentieth century until the Japanese invaded in early 1942 to establish small air and sea bases adjacent to Bougainville’s harbors, primarily along the east coast. They made no attempt—and certainly did not have the resources—to control the whole island. Like latter-year Portuguese colonial settlers, the Americans decided to follow much the same coastal pattern. They knew it made no sense to invest blood and treasure to seize the whole useless landscape or even to attempt to seize the Japanese bases.

For the Americans, the value of Bougainville lay only in its proximity to Rabaul a couple hundred miles to the west. With secure air bases on Bougainville, American planes could bomb Rabaul at will and, in effect, complete the strangulation of the once mighty Japanese South Pacific bastion.

By January 1944, this process was well under way. Within the horseshoe-shaped beachhead perimeter spanning some twenty-three thousand yards of low hills, jungle, and coastline, Navy Seabees and Army engineers had constructed three operational airfields.

The dreary monotony of steady, taxing manual work, with little accompanying action, prompted the troops to dub Bougainville the “Bore War.”

The job of sustaining this formidable garrison, in a place with no intrinsic infrastructure, stretched XIV Corps logisticians to the limit.

The good life on Bougainville indicated that it had become a strategic backwater, no longer of much importance to either side, with a kind of unspoken truce in lieu of any further major operations. The defeat of Hyakutake not only meant that Rabaul was doomed; it also signaled that the Americans were moving on from the Solomons to points closer to Japan—MacArthur in northern New Guinea and Nimitz in the Central Pacific.

Now, as the Americans grew in all-around military strength and advanced beyond the Solomons, closer to the Philippines and the key island chains of the Central Pacific, the Australians were consigned to strategic backfill duty, particularly on Bougainville. The war had pivoted into a new phase of American dominance. MacArthur was about to make his boldest move.

In an anonymous swamp near Sio, New Guinea, exhausted, half-starved Japanese soldiers of the Imperial Army’s 20th Division retreated west, fleeing from their Australian and American adversaries, who had maintained a steady advance in the wake of the successful Saidor invasion. The Japanese abandoned anything that might slow them down, including a heavy steel box they distractedly flung into a muddy pit, half-submerged in a layer of noxious water, an unappealing place they mistakenly believed no enemy would ever investigate. The box was packed with Imperial Japanese Army code books and accompanying material, all of which was too soggy from New Guinea’s monsoon rains to burn. The responsible signals officer had carelessly abandoned this precious intelligence raw material. Even worse, he had torn the covers off each code book and disingenuously forwarded them with inscribed certificates of destruction to his superiors, deliberately deceiving them about his failure to destroy the books. If Americans remember with infamy Benedict Arnold, who betrayed his country for ego, then this sloppy and deceptive Japanese signals officer is fortunate he remains anonymous to history, lest his memory endure in similar fashion among his countrymen. The damage he did to his nation’s cause far exceeded whatever strife Arnold’s betrayal may have created for the American revolutionaries.

Instead of walking right into Adachi’s trap at Hansa Bay, why not outflank him by landing a couple hundred miles to the west at Hollandia?

Fellers told MacArthur biographer D. Clayton James that the sheer vastness of New Guinea’s geography and the remaining distance to the Philippines prompted him to think of a Hollandia landing. “As I studied the operations plans to take us all the way to the Philippines, I figured we’d never get there. They took so long. I started searching to make longer hops than had been scheduled. I decided that we’d have to skip an awful lot of intermediate stations that were already planned. The search for longer hops led us to Hollandia.”

More important, MacArthur bought into the Hollandia idea and embraced it.2 Regardless of the true origins of the Hollandia plan, there is no doubt that, by the first week of March, MacArthur had abandoned his Hansa Bay invasion concept and decided to launch an ambitious amphibious leapfrog to Hollandia, something that never would have happened if not for Central Bureau’s success in cracking the Japanese codes.

The opportunity to hit this soft underbelly, outflank Adachi’s entrenched divisions, sever their communication and supply lines, thus consigning them to the deadly decay of the New Guinea wilds, and accelerate the Philippines timetable was irresistible for MacArthur. While studiously avoiding any reference to Ultra, he radioed his intentions to General Marshall on March 5. “Recent seizure of a foothold in the Admiralties which will shortly be followed by complete occupation presents an immediate opportunity for rapid exploitation along the north coast of New Guinea.

On March 12, the Joint Chiefs responded with a multipoint directive for MacArthur and Nimitz, confirming the perpetuation of the two-pronged Pacific advance, MacArthur across northern New Guinea in the general direction of Mindanao or Luzon, and Nimitz across the Central Pacific.

cannibalism or struggled to stave off insanity. “I didn’t really have a future while I was trudging along in those mountains,” said Private Masatsugu Ogawa, a rare survivor who lived to tell about the experience. His unit went into New Guinea with 7,000 men. Only 67 ever made it out. “There was no tomorrow, no next day. I sensed that the extremes of existence could be reduced to the human stomach. Lack of protein, in particular, fostered a kind of madness in us. We ate anything. Flying insects, worms in rotten palm trees.

More important, they steadily turned the Hollandia area into a viable base. In a five-week period, they achieved significant results. They built three operational airfields near Lake Sentani, fed by seventy miles of two- and four-lane road that allowed for the movement of supplies and vehicles to the airfields and headquarters complexes around the lake.

At its full apex, Hollandia could accommodate 140,000 troops, short of the 200,000 that SWPA planners had hoped for but remarkable nonetheless. By August, Hollandia was handling the largest amount of cargo tonnage of any Allied base in New Guinea. “Where once I had seen only a few native villages and an expanse of primeval forest, a city of one hundred and forty thousand men took occupancy,” Eichelberger wrote proudly.

Krueger was considerably less impressed. He blamed Eichelberger for what he saw as a disorganized unloading situation, chaotic crowding of supplies on the beaches, the slow pace of construction, and inexcusable looting by the troops.

one fell swoop, SWPA forces advanced farther than they had during all of 1943, accelerating MacArthur’s timetable for a potential return to the Philippines (not to mention a prelude to operations in westernmost Dutch New Guinea). The Allies had, in essence, destroyed Japanese land-based aerial capacity in the South Pacific, and with few aircraft losses and almost no damage to their own shipping.

The Imperial Army lost 3,300 killed, another 611 captured, and untold thousands consigned to the nightmarish desperation of jungle wandering. The Americans lost 152 dead and 1,057 wounded, many to friendly fire and other mishaps. Reckless cut off some 55,000 Japanese soldiers in the Hansa Bay/Wewak area whose only options now were either to waste away in place or brave the jungle to fight their way west in hopes of achieving a costly breakout. Tadji provided a useful airfield and the Aitape beachhead an obstacle—hard-pressed as events would unfold—to prevent their escape.

Thanks to Eichelberger’s actions, imperfect though they probably were, Hollandia developed into a key base for the rest of the war. The only disappointment stemmed from the invaders’ discovery that the Lake Sentani airfields, owing to soil and water table issues, could not support heavy bombers.

The inability to base bombers at Hollandia meant that MacArthur could not follow through on his promise to provide heavy bomber support for Nimitz’s Mariana operations. On balance, Hollandia was MacArthur’s finest operational moment in World War II. Though it was hardly the gutsy gamble portrayed by Willoughby and the SWPA commander himself, it did serve as a textbook example of operational imagination and efficient interservice coordination, as well as how to acquire and exploit actionable intelligence.

For General MacArthur, the Philippines now beckoned like the Emerald City of Oz. But no matter how much he yearned to be done with New Guinea, alas, New Guinea was nowhere near done with him. Though the success of Operation Reckless sped up his Philippines timetable, it did not ameliorate the necessity for subsequent operations both east and west of his growing Hollandia and Aitape bases. What was more, the myriad challenges of operating on the sprawling tropical island, and its many islet adjuncts, remained considerable. Devoid of any infrastructure, engineers and Seabees had to build from scratch every mile of road, every square foot of airfield or warehouse or building or dock, all the while making liberal use of local coral, sand, gravel, and lumber.

Even the most successful flanking maneuvers carry a sniff of danger. A bypassed or surrounded enemy can strike back hard, if only out of utter desperation. The Germans had found this out at the Battle of Arras in 1940; the Soviets during innumerable battles against encircled German formations on the Eastern Front; the Western Allies during the last stages of the Normandy breakout. At Hollandia, MacArthur had driven a powerful wedge between increasingly marginalized Japanese ground forces in New Guinea. To the SWPA commander, the godforsaken giant island—the focus of nearly all his military operations for two years—now represented only a gateway to the Philippines and he was impatient to leave it behind in his personal rearview mirror. He was now focused on seizing key objectives in western New Guinea to maintain his momentum; the eastern flank around Aitape represented to him little more than a strategic afterthought, a guarded back door to keep out nuisance bandits. The Japanese had other ideas.

To Adachi, there was no question of sitting still and waiting for a slow jungle death. Honor and pride demanded action. “I cannot find any method which will solve this situation strategically or technically,” he wrote in a circular to his soldiers. “Therefore, I intend to overcome this by relying on our Japanese Bushido.