OWEN STANLEYS

 “The Green War”
William Manchester, American Caesar, Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1978, 297-304


    Other approaches to Port Moresby having failed, the Japanese now attempted the incredible, an offensive over the Owen Stanleys. At first the small rear guard of the digger militiamen, who remained in the range until August 8, assumed that the enemy soldiers climbing towards them were merely patrolling. To their astonishment, massed infantrymen, manhandling mortars, machine-guns, and fieldpieces, crept slowly up the slimy, zigzagging, hundred-mile Kokoda Trail. In four weeks Major General Tomitaro Horii’s fourteen thousand men had crossed the raging Kumusi River at Wairopi and struggled through thirteen-thousand-foot Kokoda Pass. Five jungle-trained battalions leapfrogged one another into Isurava village, fifty-five miles from their starting point, and pushed down the precipitous southern slopes toward Imita Ridge and Ioribaiwa, twenty miles from the bluffs around Port Moresby. How many men succumbed in this heroic endeavor will never be known. Many perished in the Kumusi, and others disappeared in quicksand or plunged into gorges. In places the winding trail, a foot wide at most, simply disappeared. It took an hour to cut through a few yards of vegetation. The first man in a file would hack away with a machete until he collapsed of exhaustion; then the second man would pick up the machete and continue, and so on. In that climate the life expectancy of the men who lost consciousness and were left behind was often measured in minutes.

    MacArthur had sent two of his best brigadiers, Pat Casey and Harold George, to survey the Papuan terrain. They returned to Brisbane shaken. Until now they had assumed that Bataan and Samar were covered with the densest jungle in the world, but New Guinea was unbelievable. They told the General that they didn’t see how human beings could live there, let alone fight there. From the air, whence they had first seen it, Papua’s most striking feature had been the razorback mountain range, stretching down the peninsula like the dorsal vertebrae of some prehistoric monster, its peaks obscured by dark clouds swollen with rain. It wasn’t until they had landed and ventured into the rain forest on steep, slippery, root-tangled trails that the full horror of life there had struck them. Blades of grass seven feet high that could lay a man’s hand open as quickly as a scalpel. The jungle was studded with mangrove swamps and thick clumps of bamboo and palms. Often the trail was covered with waist-deep slop. The air reeked with vile odors—the stench of rotting undergrowth and of stink lilies. Little light penetrated the thick matted screens of liana vines overhead, but when the rain stopped and the sun appeared, vast suffocating waves of steam rose from the dank marshes.

    This was the setting of the green war: the green of slime and vegetation, the green of gangrene and dysentery, and the green-clad enemy, whose officers smeared yellow-green, bioluminescent organisms on their hands so they could read maps at night. The diggers, and the GIs who were now joining them, called themselves “swamp rats.” The hideous tropical ulcers that formed on their feet, arms, bellies, chests, and armpits were known as “jungle rot.” Waving away the clouds of flies and mosquitoes that swarmed over mess gear was called “the New Guinea salute.” Bugs were everywhere: biting ants, fleas, chiggers, poisonous spiders, and brilliantly colored, enormous insects that would land on a sleeping man and, like vampires, suck his bodily fluids. Twisted vines swarmed with vividly colored birds and great winged creatures with teeth, like gigantic rats. Pythons and crocodiles lurked in the bogs and sloughs, waiting for a man to stumble from the mucky trail. At night a soldier would rip away blood-glutted leeches from his genitals and rectum. Bug bites, when scratched, turned into festering sores. Since native bearers were reluctant to help him, especially near the front line, the average soldier had to carry as much as a hundred pounds on his back, and he nearly always ran a fever. It was a rare infantryman who wasn’t affected with yaws, scrub typhus, blackwater fever, ringworm, malaria, amoebic dysentery, or bacillary dysentery. For every man suffering from a gunshot wound, five were laid low with illness, and that is not a true measure of the sickness, because no one was hospitalized unless his fever rose above 102 degrees.

    MacArthur heard all this while treading back and forth in his Brisbane office. Then he stopped, turned to Sutherland and Dick Marshall, and said in a  ow, trembling voice, “We’ll defend Australia in New Guinea.” He called an off-the-record press conference to provide war correspondents with background for their future dispatches. Gavin M. Long tells how “the thirty or more war correspondents and officers rose as the General made an impressive entry—bare-headed, grave, distinguished looking, immaculate. His right arm was raised in salute. There was no other introduction. Pacing to and fro…MacArthur immediately began to declaim his statement of the military situation. His phrasing was perfect, his speech clear and unhalting, except for pauses for dramatic emphasis; the correspondents took notes, but there was no interruption of any kind. The conference room had become a stage, MacArthur the virtuoso, the other officers the ‘extras’ in the cast, and the correspondents the audience. It was a dramatic occasion.” George H. Johnston, an Australian journalist, recalls that the General held them spellbound for two hours, never groping for a word and displaying “the histrionic ability of Sir Henry Irving.” He told them that Australia would be saved in Papua, and only in Papua. He said: “We must attack, attack, attack!” The meeting over, Long writes, “the General raised his right arm in salute and strode from the room followed by one or two staff officers. The conference was over. One man alone had spoken—the Supreme Commander. There was no questioning, no opportunity to clarify the meaning of the statement. It had come directly from the lips of General Douglas MacArthur, and as such it was, evidently, beyond question.”

    Sir Thomas Blaney, the cheerful, ruddy, stubby Australian who commanded MacArthur’s ground forces, was one of the few officers who didn’t believe that the Japanese would throw the Allies out of New Guinea. Most of MacArthur’s staff, by contrast, was shocked. They hadn’t anticipated this decision, which, he said, was one of the reasons he made it; if they hadn’t expected it, neither would the Japanese. And in fact the enemy was caught off balance. After the war Captain Toshikazu Ohmae of the Imperial Japanese Navy, who had been the senior staff officer of the Southeast Asia Fleet at Rabaul, told an interrogator: “The Japanese did not think that General MacArthur would establish himself in New Guinea and defend Australia from that position. They also did not believe that he would be able to use New Guinea as a base of offensive operations against them. The Japanese felt that General MacArthur could not establish himself in Port Moresby because he did not have sufficient forces to maintain himself there.”

    His forces were certainly meager, but he was convinced that if the Nipponese established a single beachhead in Australia, the continent would be lost; a foe gallant enough to cross the Owen Stanleys would quickly sweep across the plains down under, and at the time MacArthur lacked the reserves to envelop them. If, as he later wrote, the jungle was “as tough and tenacious an enemy as the Japanese,” it was the enemy’s enemy, too. Better a bloody, head-on, grinding collision on Papua, he reasoned, than a battle of maneuver when he had no troops to spare for maneuvering. At the same time, Guadalcanal was on his mind. The issue there was very much in doubt. He believed his drive in New Guinea would relieve some of the pressure on that beleaguered island. In fact, as we know from other postwar interrogations, once he swung over to the attack the Japanese decided to give Guadalcanal priority; Horii was told that the capture of Port Moresby would be delayed until the marines had been driven into the sea. Nevertheless, the General’s overruling of his staff was as courageous as it was shrewd. In George Kenney’s words, “MacArthur without fear of criticism might have decided to remain on the defensive until sufficient forces could be made available…With insufficient naval forces to insure his supply line to New Guinea, with a vastly outnumbered air force, and with the apprehension of the people of Australia in regard to invasion of that continent by the enemy, a lesser general might even have considered the abandonment of Port Moresby, his only base in New Guinea.”

    …One of the first American soldiers to learn that MacArthur was about to send them to New Guinea was E.J. Kahn, Jr. The general addressed the troops, disdaining a Signal Corps microphone and speaking to them directly. As Kahn recalls, “His speech was extemporaneous, but it was full of the rich, labyrinthine sentences that distinguish his prose. His main point, though, was crisply and pointedly made. He said we’d soon be in action. ‘And I want each of you to kill me a Jap,’ he added. Up to that moment few of us had guessed that we’d shortly be in a position to comply with such a request. Less than a month later our first detachments were on the way to New Guinea.”

    It was now mid-September [1942]. To the east, the marines were struggling to hold their defensive perimeter around Guadalcanal’s Henderson Field. MacArthur expected just as cruel a fight to retain Moresby; Horii’s men were so close to the port that at night they could see its searchlights crossing the sky above it. But on Thursday, September 17, the day that the Australians ferociously hurled back the enemy’s final lunge southwest of Ioribaiwa, Horii issued his last rice rations to his feverish, emaciated troops. Three days later he told them he had decided to withdraw back across the mountains. (“No pen or words can depict adequately the magnitude of the hardships suffered,” he said. “From the bottom of our hearts we appreciate these sacrifices and deeply sympathize with the great numbers killed and wounded.”) Four days after that he disengaged north of the Imita Ridge and began leapfrogging his battalions backward.

    The terrain was just as merciless going the other way, with the additional handicap that the worst of what Australians call “the wet”—the rainy season—was upon them. On October 1 MacArthur ordered his field commanders to push the disease-ridden enemy back across the Kumusi, but it wasn’t really necessary; the Japanese retreat had become a rout. So eager were they to fall back on Buna and Gona, where they knew godowns bursting with rice awaited them, that they trampled one another underfoot. Before the campaign ended they had lost over ten thousand men, including Horii, who had drowned in the swollen river.