Battle of Buna–Gona

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Buna-Gona lasted from the 16th of November 1942 to the 22nd of January 1943. It ended with evidence that starving Japanese defenders had cannibalised their own dead. Australian and United States troops had driven Japan back to three beachheads on New Guinea's north coast: Buna, Sanananda and Gona. From these bases, Japanese forces had earlier tried to seize Port Moresby by an overland march. Now the Allies meant to throw them out for good and deny them the bases entirely. The fighting that followed was neither quick nor clean. Malaria put more men in hospital beds than Japanese bullets did. Supply lines broke down for both sides. American troops new to combat were sent against bunkers their own commanders had dismissed as flimsy. And the Japanese, cut off and starving, fought with a stubbornness the Allies had never met before. How did a campaign meant to finish off a beaten enemy become so costly and so slow?

• 2. The Road To Buna

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  On the 7th of December 1941, Japan struck Pearl Harbor. The attack coincided with strikes on Thailand, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong. Japanese forces swept through South-East Asia, the East Indies and the Central and South-West Pacific within weeks. Australia had already been shaken by the fall of Singapore. Nearly 15,000 Australian soldiers joined roughly 85,000 mostly British and Indian troops as prisoners of war there. In March 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered General Douglas MacArthur, then in the Philippines, to draw up a Pacific defence plan with Australia. Prime Minister John Curtin agreed to place Australian forces under MacArthur's command. MacArthur set up his headquarters in Melbourne that same month.

  Rabaul fell to Japan on the 23rd of January 1942 and became their forward base for the New Guinea campaigns. Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake's 17th Army ran operations across New Guinea, Guadalcanal and the Solomons. From the 16th of November 1942, General Hitoshi Imamura's 8th Area Army took overall command of both campaigns. Lieutenant General Hatazo Adachi's newly formed 18th Army then handled New Guinea alone. Australians feared a Japanese invasion of the mainland, but Imperial General Headquarters had judged one beyond their reach as early as February 1942. No invasion plans were ever drawn up. Instead, Japan chose to isolate Australia from the United States by seizing Port Moresby, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, Samoa and New Caledonia.

  Operation Mo, an amphibious plan to land troops at Port Moresby, was turned back at the Battle of the Coral Sea. It was shelved for good after the Battle of Midway. So on the 21st of July 1942, Japanese troops landed at Buna, Gona and Sanananda to march on Port Moresby overland instead. This opened the Kokoda Track campaign, led by Major General Tomitaro Horii. At Milne Bay, from the 25th of August to the 7th of September 1942, a separate Japanese landing force was defeated. It was the first Japanese land defeat of the war and it lifted Allied morale. Meanwhile, 19,000 US Marines landed at Guadalcanal on the 7th of August to seize a Japanese airfield there. That battle would run until the 9th of February 1943.

  By the 16th of September, Horii's men had reached Ioribaiwa, just 32 km from Port Moresby. They were close enough to see the town's lights at night. Unable to support both Guadalcanal and the Kokoda push, Hyakutake ordered Horii to withdraw on the 23rd of September. The retreat became a fighting rearguard action. The Australian 7th Division stayed close on the Japanese heels back over the Owen Stanley Range. The US 32nd Infantry Division, newly arrived, tried a flanking move toward Wairopi starting the 14th of October. The Japanese withdrew too fast for the plan to work as intended. Even so, it left the Americans well placed to converge on the beachheads alongside the Australians. Major General Arthur Allen was controversially removed from command of the 7th Division on the 28th of October. Major General George Vasey replaced him. At Oivi-Gorari, from the 4th to the 11th of November, the retreating Japanese suffered heavy casualties. Their orderly withdrawal collapsed into a rout. By the time the 7th Division stood 65 km from Buna-Gona, the path ahead was clear of Japanese troops. Waiting for them at the coast were Japanese positions that had been developing defences for months.

• 3. A Landscape Built To Kill

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  The three beachheads lined a 25 km stretch of New Guinea's north coast: Gona to the west, Buna to the east, and Sanananda-Giruwa in between. The stretch lay roughly 160 km from Port Moresby. A thin coastal strip separated the sea from a tidal swamp of mangroves, nipa and sago. In places, it narrowed to little more than a footpad. The few paths through the swamp were rarely wider than 12 ft. Buna's airstrip stood just 5 ft above sea level. Soputa, 7.5 mi inland, was only double that elevation, and Popondetta, 21 km inland, reached 85 m. The water table sat about 3 ft down, which made digging weapons pits and defensive positions difficult. Dry ground was covered in dense jungle, kunai grass up to 6 feet tall with sharp broad leaves, or neglected coconut plantations reclaimed by undergrowth.

  Temperatures during the battle ranged from 72 to 89 F, with humidity around 82 percent. Trapped inside stands of kunai grass, the heat could climb to 50 C. December's average rainfall reached 14.5 in, falling mostly in heavy afternoon storms. Lieutenant General Robert L. Eichelberger later wrote, "At Buna that year it rained about a hundred and seventy inches. I have found out since that we got more than our share in December and January 1942-43." Daily totals of 8 to 10 in were common, turning the few tracks into bog.

  Dengue fever, scrub typhus, tropical ulcers, dysentery and fungal infections spread through the area alongside malaria, worsened by a poor diet. Malaria remained the greatest disease threat of all. The Australian Army had met it before in the Middle East, but few militia doctors had seen it prior to this campaign. Quinine, still the main drug in use, was in unreliable supply. Atebrin only became the Australian forces' official suppressive drug in late December 1942, and its adoption still came slowly. Many officers treated strict anti-malaria discipline as a medical issue rather than an order worth enforcing. Soldiers often wore shorts and rolled sleeves against the heat, while mosquito nets and repellent ran short, and the repellent supplied was considered weak. The historian Bergerud found that 85 to 95 percent of Allied soldiers in the area carried malaria during the battle. For every one Allied battle casualty, 4.8 men were hospitalised with sickness, three-quarters of it malaria. Eichelberger once ordered the temperature taken of an entire company near the front. Every man in it was running a fever. Many stayed in the line anyway, with fevers as high as 104 F.

• 4. Fighting On Empty Stomachs

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  Air drops to the advancing Allied troops lost or broke up to 50 percent of their cargo. From nearly the start of the battle, Allied forces faced critical shortages of ammunition and rations. Once troops reached the Japanese positions, landing strips were built to replace the air drops. Poor weather and a shortage of transport aircraft still kept supply unreliable. A sea route to nearby Oro Bay was surveyed as a port. The first large vessel delivered supplies there on the night of the 11th to the 12th of December. Regular convoys under Operation Lilliput followed, greatly increasing the tonnage reaching the front. Much of it, though, was absorbed by the growing size of the force itself. Supply was never enough to stop being what one account called "an extraordinarily difficult problem."

  The Japanese fighting along the Kokoda Track faced the same terrain and climate but had no real air supply of their own. When Gona fell on the 8th of December, captured stocks of rice suggested the garrison had started the battle well provisioned. Ships from Rabaul had supplied the Japanese positions, but Allied air power over the beachheads made landing troops and supplies by destroyer only partly successful. Some troops and equipment were landed instead near the mouth of the Mambare River and barged to the beachheads from there. Small quantities came ashore by submarine. On the night of the 25th of December, a Japanese submarine unloaded supplies and ammunition at Buna Government Station. It was the last resupply the Japanese ever received. The normal Japanese rice ration was 28 oz, roughly 600 mL, and rice made up the bulk of their diet. By the end of December, each man was down to about 360 mL of rice a day. In early January, that fell again to 40 to 80 mL. For five days, from the 8th to the 12th of January, there was no food at all. That shortage set the stage for the desperate defence that followed on the Sanananda track.

• 5. Dug In And Unyielding

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  Naval units, including the 5th Special Landing Party, held the Buna-Gona positions alongside army troops. Survivors streaming down from the Kokoda Track gathered near the mouth of the Kumusi River and linked with fresh reinforcements landed there in early December. Sources put Japanese strength at the start of the battle at 5,500. That rose to 6,500 after reinforcements landed on the night of the 18th of November. The historian Milner noted that no precise figure could be given for Japanese strength at the beachhead in mid-November. Counting troops operating near the Kumusi and Mambare Rivers, total numbers deployed ranged from 11,000 to 12,000. Buna itself, as far as the Girua River, was held by 2,000 to 2,500 defenders. Gona held 800 to 900. In front of Sanananda, Japanese numbers ranged from 4,000 to 5,500, including men in hospital, with 1,700 to 1,800 holding the track itself.

  Horii, who had led the march across the Kokoda Track, drowned at sea on the 19th of November. He was rafting down the Kumusi River during the retreat. Colonel Yosuke Yokoyama briefly took over the South Seas Force, before Major General Kensaku Oda assumed command. Major General Tsuyuo Yamagata commanded the 21st Independent Mixed Brigade. He took charge of all other 18th Army units in the area once he reached Gona on the 6th of December.

  The defences at Buna, Gona and the Sanananda track junction had been built up long before the Allies arrived. They ranked among the strongest defences the Allies met anywhere in the war. Hundreds of bunkers and machine gun positions were dug in depth, each arranged to support the others. When one position fell, defenders could shift to alternates and confound the attackers all over again. That density of bunkers is what awaited Allied battalions closing in from three directions at once.

• 6. MacArthur's Impatience

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  Richard K. Sutherland, MacArthur's chief of staff, had dismissed the Japanese coastal defences as "hasty field entrenchments" before the Allies ever reached the coast. That estimate proved badly wrong. Maps of the area were inaccurate and lacked detail, and aerial photographs were rarely available to commanders in the field. Allied command had failed to arrange supply of artillery or tanks, wrongly believing air support alone could do their job. Field commanders could not deliver fire support strong enough to suppress Japanese bunkers before infantry closed on them. MacArthur never once visited the front during the campaign and had little grasp of what his troops faced there. Scanty and inaccurate intelligence convinced MacArthur that Buna could be taken easily. He pressed his commanders for a fast result anyway. His urgency was aimed more at securing his own command politically than at any real strategic need. Troops were repeatedly rushed into attacks before they were ready, which only drove up casualties and stretched the campaign out longer.

  On the 2nd of December, Lieutenant General Robert Eichelberger inspected the front. He then relieved Major General Harding of command of the 32nd Division, replacing him with Brigadier General Waldron. He also removed most of the division's regimental and battalion commanders. Eichelberger walked the front lines wearing the three stars on his collar, ignoring the usual practice of hiding rank insignia from the enemy. He and his staff came under fire regularly, once from as close as 15 yd. He stayed with his forward troops anyway, to press them on. Waldron himself was wounded on the 5th of December and replaced by Brigadier General Byers. Time magazine reported in 1945 that some of the 32nd's officers privately called Eichelberger ruthless and Prussian. His troops, it said, nicknamed their division cemetery "Eichelberger Square."

  On the 5th of December, Staff Sergeant Herman Bottcher led 18 men of H Company, 126th Infantry. They drove through to the sea at Buna village, cutting the Japanese there off from resupply. He held that position under attack for seven days and was wounded twice before being relieved. War correspondent George Johnston wrote in Time magazine that, "by a conservative count," Bottcher and his men had killed more than 120 Japanese soldiers. Bottcher received a battlefield commission to captain and the first of two Distinguished Service Crosses. A plaque was later placed at the entrance to Buna Village to mark his stand.

  Tanks finally arrived on the 18th of December, when the Australian 2/9th Battalion attacked with seven M3 Stuarts in support and an eighth held in reserve. Eichelberger later called it "a spectacular and dramatic assault, and a brave one." He described Australian troops advancing behind the tanks with "blazing Tommy-guns swinging before them," while Japanese positions "burst into flame." By the 2nd of January 1943, the Buna area as far as the Girua River had been cleared. The 2/12th Battalion alone had lost twelve officers and 179 other ranks in the final two days of that fighting.

• 7. The Last Stand At Sanananda

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  On the 12th of January, Major General George Vasey wrote an appreciation of the fighting after an attack by the 18th Brigade failed that day. He warned that attacking the Japanese pillboxes with infantry alone was "repeating the costly mistakes of 1915-17." Tanks, he noted, could only work along the main Sanananda track. There, the Japanese already had anti-tank guns capable of knocking out an M3 light tank. Because of thick undergrowth, Vasey wrote, the pillboxes were spotted only at very short range. That was too close to call in artillery without first pulling back Allied troops. Any ground given up that way, he added, was quickly reoccupied by the Japanese.

  Two nights after that memo, on the 12th of January, the Japanese began withdrawing. They had held these positions since the 20th of November. Allied troops occupied the ground by the evening of the 14th. The 18th Brigade pushed on to Cape Killerton and then Sanananda. It linked up with the American 32nd Division at Giruwa on the 21st of January. The battle was declared over on the 22nd of January, though many Japanese stragglers still moved through the area afterward. About 1,200 sick and wounded had already been evacuated by sea between the 13th and the 20th of January. On the 20th, Yamagata ordered a full evacuation, and the following night large sections of the remaining Japanese force slipped away. Between 1,000 and 1,900 men escaped overland toward the Japanese base around Salamaua and Lae.

• 8. The Reckoning

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  Between the 25th of November and the 23rd of December, the 7th Division received 4,273 replacement troops. That covered only part of the 5,905 losses it suffered from all causes in the same period. Vasey's force ended up about 1,632 men weaker than when the fighting began. Losses across the whole battle came at a higher rate than those suffered earlier at Guadalcanal.

  The Japanese garrison left behind, cut off from any escape, chose to fight to the death almost to the last man. Their resolve had been unprecedented, a level of resistance the Allies had not previously encountered anywhere in the Pacific War.

  For the first time in the war, the American public was confronted with images of dead American troops. The Allies took from Buna-Gona a set of hard lessons about jungle warfare, valuable but costly to learn. The desperate, no-surrender defence the Japanese mounted here would recur again and again as the Pacific War ground on toward its final battles.