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

by John C. McManus

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.