An American colonel was stirring a pot over a fire beside the Dobodura airstrip when a young Australian officer found him. The Australian, Lieutenant Colonel Robertson, was the senior liaison officer to General Edmund Herring, who commanded New Guinea Force. He had come looking for the American front line and found the division commander had lost touch with it. Robertson waited a long time for Major General Edwin Harding of the 32nd Division to appear.
When Harding finally came down the track, he could give almost no detail about his own infantry. His signals officer explained why: his men had found the headquarters wireless set too heavy to carry and had thrown it into the bush some miles back. Robertson reported everything to Herring on November 30, 1942. General MacArthur’s chief of staff, Richard Sutherland, was present and listened.
Sutherland flew back over the mountains that day, and by nightfall Robert Eichelberger had been ordered to go to Buna and remove the American division commander. In the two weeks before that evening, the division had lost 492 men in battle, and the main Japanese line in front of it had not been broken anywhere. Australian commander-in-chief Thomas Blamey had been telling the supreme commander as much in person. Within the week, he would put it in writing to his prime minister.
The anger had a history. On September 17, with the Japanese still coming down the Kokoda Track toward Port Moresby, MacArthur had spoken to Prime Minister John Curtin on a secure telephone line and blamed the retreat on Australian soldiers. MacArthur said he expected to have more than 40,000 men in New Guinea within a week, adding that if they fought there would be no trouble, but if they would not fight, 100,000 would be no good. A note of the call was typed up in Canberra and marked “most secret.
” Blamey did not forget it. In the last days of November, with the Americans stalled at Buna and his own brigades bleeding in front of Gona, MacArthur offered Blamey fresh troops from the American 41st Division. Blamey turned them down. He preferred to send in the worn 21st Brigade back from the Kokoda Track because he knew they would fight.
The phrase that followed the Americans around that week was “masterly inactivity,” and nobody can say for certain whose it was. Officers closest to the fighting had been reporting in plainer language for a week already. On November 21, Major Harcourt’s company of Australian commandos was fighting beside the Americans on the coast below Cape Endaiadere. Harcourt had been given a position for the American front line that morning, but his own patrols told him it was wrong because the battalion on his right was nowhere near as far forward as reported.
His men got within 58 yards of the enemy airstrip that day and stopped there because the unit beside them had not moved at all. Two days later, an Australian gun troop landed at Dobodura to support the division. Its captain wrote that the colonel he reported to refused to accept them, and his guns waited until someone could raise the division’s artillery general by wireless. Vasey had more reason than anyone to watch the newcomers because from November 20 some of them belonged to him.
The 156th Infantry Regiment had been taken from Harding and handed to Vasey for the drive down the Sanananda Track, about 1,400 men west of the river. The 16th Brigade, down to about half its strength after the mountains, was told to hold in place and let the regiment through. Some of the Michigan men told the veterans they could go home now because they were there to clean things up. The Australians sat back and watched with amusement.
The regiment’s commander, Colonel Clarence Tomlinson, explained his plan to their liaison officer as a double envelopment that would squeeze the Japanese right out of the track junction. On the left, two of the enveloping companies vanished into the swamp for a day and a half. Their colonel placed them a thousand yards north of the Australian line. Nobody there believed it.
In the end, the lost companies fired signal flares into the sky, and their hosts took bearings on the lights with prismatic compasses. The two companies had walked in a circle and come back to within 400 yards of the brigade’s own headquarters. On November 25, a round from one of the regiment’s own 81-mm mortars fell short onto a command post in an old banana plantation where an American company commander and an Australian one were sharing a dugout. The American was hurt, and the man beside him, Captain Jack Blaney, a 28-year-old solicitor from Sydney, died of his injuries the next day.
The day after that, another of the regiment’s mortar rounds came down on a platoon of Vasey’s men and killed five of them. The regimental surgeon, Major Simon Warmenhoven, went straight into the fire to treat the survivors and stayed with them until everyone had been carried out. He was given the Distinguished Service Cross for it. On November 30, after nine days of trying, an American force cut the track behind the Japanese and dug in at a clearing about 250 yards long.
It came to be called Huggins Roadblock after the captain who took command when the first commander was killed. When another company believed it had crossed the same track nearby, its major sent the news back over the field telephone in Dutch, a language many of his Michigan men spoke, and a Dutch-speaking sergeant at regimental headquarters translated. The Australian official historian, Dudley McCarthy, set that roadblock against something his own side had done on the same track ten days before. On November 20, an Australian captain named Cattens had taken 90 tired men on a wide march through the swamp and thrown the Japanese out of their forward line in a day.
The Americans, McCarthy wrote in 1959, had needed nine days and three times the strength for a job that was closely comparable. By comparison, the Americans seemed soft. He allowed in the same passage that many of them were brave as individuals, but as units, he thought, they had neither the drive nor the skill. On December 4, 1942, Blamey sent a letter to Curtin.
The American troops, he wrote, could not be classed as attacking troops at all. They were not the equal of the Australian militia, and from the moment they met opposition they had sat down and hardly gone forward a yard. He described a weakness in their staff work and in what he called their war psychology. He reported that Eichelberger meant to relieve both regimental commanders and five of the six battalion commanders in the face of the enemy.
The Americans claimed that the division they had left behind in Australia, the 41st, was a much better one. Blamey called that wishful thinking. The letter had a purpose beyond the Americans. Blamey wanted Curtin to bring the veteran 9th Australian Division home from the Middle East, and the 32nd was his evidence.
Two American divisions, he argued, were no real replacement because their fighting qualities were so low. The day after the letter, two Australian officers went forward with the Americans on the Sanananda track as advisers. One of them, Lieutenant McDougall, was questioned afterwards by MacArthur’s intelligence chief, Charles Willoughby, who had come up to watch his countrymen attack. The Australian history calls McDougall unusually outspoken and says he was blunt about what he saw as the regiment’s lack of fighting qualities.
Willoughby, by that account, seemed to appreciate it. The same morning at Buna, five Bren carriers crewed by Australians, open-topped tracked vehicles never meant to do a tank’s work, went in at the head of an American attack along the coast. McCarthy gives two reasons for sending them. One was to break a hole in the bunker line by any means that offered, and the other was to put heart into Americans who were, in his word, bewildered.
Within half an hour, all five were stuck or abandoned. Their lieutenant, 22 years old, was dead. Then it was the militia’s turn to be watched. On December 7, two Australian militia battalions went in on the Sanananda track, most of their men in their first real action.
One lost about 230 men, the other 130. In 19 days on that track, the Americans had lost fewer men in battle than those two battalions lost in one day, and the two battalions together had been about two-thirds of the American strength. Six days later, the officers of one of them found their men going to ground and hard to move forward. On December 12, Vasey’s chief staff officer, Colonel Pollard, walked in with an American party carrying supplies to Huggins’ men.
About 20 minutes short of them, the party came under machine gun fire, turned round, and brought the supplies back. Pollard reported that it had made no real attempt to force passage. The same day, the 7th Division’s war diary weighed whether the roadblock was worth holding at all. The garrison had done nothing for days, it said, and served no purpose there.
Then the entry adds a second paragraph: the positions west of the track were under water, and the only trail to the garrison ran through knee-deep marsh. Troops were unable to lie down on ground anywhere in position. On Christmas Day, Brigadier Selwyn Porter, whose militia brigade now held that front, gave his own assessment. The men astride the track were isolated and worn down and could not attack anyone.
The rest spent their days carrying rations to them. Whenever he tried to get them forward, Porter wrote, “Their commander found an objection. ”
Some Australians put the fault higher up. Major Trevillion, an Australian liaison officer with the 32nd Division, found that the American officers took no responsibility for the welfare of their men, who in his words were treated like cattle, and that the men had a good word for no officer at all.
Eichelberger had reached much the same view in his first week and spent December relieving commanders. East of the river, at Buna itself, the Australians had arrived in strength. On December 17, Brigadier George Wootten of the 18th Brigade took command of the whole coastal sector, the Americans in it included, with Australian tanks and two veteran battalions behind him. His battalion commanders complained that the American guardsmen were slow to keep up and left pockets of Japanese behind them.
The same Australian files give the division things the complaints leave out. It was a major from Eichelberger’s staff who pointed Wootten’s men to the bend in Simemi Creek, where they got across at last. The men who walked into Buna village on December 14 were from the 127th Infantry after a sergeant named Herman Bottcher had fought his way to the beach and cut the village off, a move McCarthy called brilliant. And when the Buna Government Station fell on January 2, 1943, the troops who took it were American, too.
Nobody’s paperwork was spotless that month. On the night of December 23, two fast boats shot up the Allied supply craft off Hariko and set an ammunition barge on fire. They turned out to be torpedo boats of the United States Navy, new to the coast. Australian aircraft had lately been doing much the same to their own supply boats.
In a letter the next day, Major General Frank Berryman, the senior staff officer of New Guinea Force, told a colleague to keep the matter quiet, since it might not be true. A little later he added a line underneath: “It is true and admitted. ”
The regiment the Australians had watched on the Sanananda track went back to Port Moresby on January 22, 1943. The 126th Infantry had entered the fighting in November with 131 officers and 3,040 men.
It came out with 32 officers and 579 men. Samuel Milner, the Army’s official historian, wrote that the regiment had ceased to exist. Across its three regiments, the division had suffered 9,688 casualties out of 10,825 men sent forward, most of them from malaria and other sickness. It was rebuilt.
The 32nd went back into the line in New Guinea at the start of 1944, then fought on Leyte and on Luzon, where it was still fighting on the day Japan surrendered. By its own count, it spent 654 days in action, more than any other division in the United States Army. There is one more line in Milner’s history. It sits in a footnote to his account of the Sanananda fighting, attached to the mortar round that fell on the banana plantation command post on November 25.
Captain Jack Blamey, the footnote says, was a nephew of General Blamey. He had distinguished himself in the mountains and again on the Sanananda front. MacArthur’s headquarters awarded him the American Distinguished Service Cross after his death. The order is dated December 3, 1942.
Blamey’s letter to the Prime Minister is dated December 4. The passage the Australian official history prints from it never mentions his nephew. And neither history says what the general knew that week about whose mortar had fired the round. What the letter says, among much else, is this: “My faith in the Americans has sunk to zero.
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