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.”
