The busiest piece of ground in the Solomon Islands in late 1944 had no wharves at all. Cape Torokina, a low spit of sand and swamp at the head of Empress Augusta Bay on Bougainville’s west coast, received everything by barge, with rain falling almost daily. Behind the beach, the land climbed through swamp and jungle toward Mount Bagana. When Australian ships arrived in October 1944, their crews saw what looked like an American city.
Puruata Island, just offshore, carried so much stores it appeared ready to sink. Three airstrips were working inland. There were sawmills, a cemetery, a hospital with bomb shelters, and drainage ditches cut through what had been marsh a year earlier. The incoming troops had been told the area was quiet.
What they found ashore was an army packing up. The U. S. XIV Corps was heading for the Philippines and taking most of its equipment with it.
The Australian official history described the American comforts as lavish, while Australian equipment it called economical. The Australians acquired some of it, including about 10,000 of 35,000 cubic feet of refrigeration space under lend-lease. They also bought an ice cream factory and a soft drink factory. For a few weeks, two armies shared one perimeter with an exchange rate running between them.
One early unit order instructed men to keep buying or borrowing from allies to an absolute minimum. Officers also noticed a difference at the front line. American troops struck them as men enduring the place, putting off shaving and washing until they rotated back to base showers and mess huts. The Australians shaved and bathed daily, built kitchens from bush timber, and took that difference as proof they were the harder army.
For more than a year, an American corps had occupied this beach. At its peak, 62,000 men were assigned or attached to it. The perimeter ran 22,500 yards on its inland side. In all that time, there had been almost no contact with the Japanese army, which remained in the hills a few miles away.
A diarist at Torokina set those two facts side by side in February 1945: a year of quiet, and in it much shipping, large air forces, and a lavishly equipped base. That quiet had cost a great deal to create. American Marines came ashore at Cape Torokina on the 1st of November 1943, but they did not come to take the whole island. A large Japanese garrison held Bougainville, mostly far to the south, and nobody intended to fight for all of it.
The Marines wanted a patch of coast big enough for airfields in the one stretch where the Japanese were thin, close enough to Rabaul to put fighters over it. Major General Oscar Griswold took command of the beachhead on the 15th of December 1943 and recorded what he had inherited. Puruata was overloaded, every beach was congested, and nobody had planned a long-range supply road system. Ammunition dumps, gasoline dumps, hospital areas, refrigeration, sawmills, drainage: all of it, he wrote, was non-existent and not even visualized.
He built it out of the jungle in 90 days. The swamp drained, and volcanic ash made a good road surface until the daily rain washed it away, making road maintenance the hardest single job in the area. By the 1st of March 1944, there were 43 miles of two-way road and 36 miles of one-way. Eight CB battalions and a New Zealand engineer brigade worked on the strips.
The fighter strip at Torokina opened on the 9th of December. Piva Uncle was finished on the 30th, and Piva Yoke opened on the 9th of January 1944. Those strips were the entire point of the enterprise. By mid-December, the air commander in the Solomons had about 199 fighters, 200 light and medium bombers, and 99 heavy bombers operating, roughly twice what the Japanese held in the whole southeast area.
Rabaul had come inside fighter range of a field that had not existed six weeks before. The Japanese 17th Army reached the same conclusion about those strips. In March 1944, it came down out of the hills to take them. General Hyakutake put Allied strength inside the perimeter at about 30,000, of whom he supposed 10,000 were aircraft ground crews.
He was too low by half. He sent General Kanda’s 6th Division and elements of the 17th Division against the high ground commanding the airfields, supported by an artillery group of heavy howitzers. The guns had come along the coast by barge on moonless nights to avoid American aircraft and patrol boats, then were hauled inland to the ridges by men and pack horses. Their ammunition allotment for the whole operation was 300 rounds per gun, one fifth of it set aside to support the infantry.
The attack opened against Hill 700 on the 9th of March, and it opened well. Japanese infantry broke into the line of the 145th Infantry on the crest and held part of it. American engineers came forward with Bangalore torpedoes to destroy captured pillboxes, and four died when their own torpedo went off. A Japanese-speaking soldier brought a loudspeaker up to ask for a surrender, and a mortar bomb knocked it out.
What settled Hill 700 was not on the hill. It sat behind the hill on Griswold’s roads and arrived as fire. Between the 8th and the 13th of March, American artillery fired over 20,000 rounds of 105mm in defense of that one feature, with mortars and 75mm guns adding a comparable weight. Over those six days, the 37th Division lost five officers and 73 enlisted men killed.
The Japanese climbed into it anyway and came forward over the piled dead of their own units, unable to shift the Americans or hold what they had taken. To the east, Colonel Muda’s men did the same on Hill 260. There the Americans made no attempt at economy: more than 10,000 rounds of 105mm fell on that knob, about a tenth of it inside a single morning, with as many 4. 2-inch mortar bombs alongside.
By the 14th of March, it was a bare slope with no jungle left. A tall tree the Japanese had been using as an observation post fell on the evening of the 17th. The Americans counted 560 enemy dead there and paid 98 killed, 24 missing, and 581 wounded for it. The Japanese withdrawal began on the 27th of March.
The American account calls it orderly and notes that wounded men and heavy equipment were abandoned along the way. In the whole offensive, the Japanese lost over 5,000 killed and more than 3,000 wounded. The XIV Corps lost 263 dead. It was the last Japanese offensive effort in the Solomons.
For the rest of 1944, the 17th Army stayed in the hills growing its own food while the Americans pushed out only far enough to enlarge the perimeter they already held. That was nine months before the first relieving battalion took over a yard of that wire. The handover was arranged far from Bougainville. By late 1944, six and a third of MacArthur’s 18 divisions were tied up guarding base perimeters at Torokina, Aitape, and in New Britain, and the Philippines needed them.
Headquarters proposed that Australia replace the American formations one for one. Sir Thomas Blamey, commanding the Australian military forces, answered that such large forces were excessive, and the relief shrank to a corps of one division and two brigade groups for the Solomons. Blamey had already told the Advisory War Council in September that Torokina had been an inactive area and that the Australian forces would not perhaps be quite so passive. They were not supplied to be anything else.
Lieutenant General Stanley Savige, given the job in August and spending the months since working out how to fight an island with the troops he could feed, asked for three field artillery regiments, a medium regiment, and a mountain battery. He got two field regiments and the battery. Headquarters turned down his requests for a machine gun battalion and a pioneer battalion. He asked for one landing craft company for operational tasks, since every ship in the bay still had to be worked by barge, and got the 42nd, which in December held 12 craft against an establishment of more than 60.
By February it had 29. Twelve of those came from the American Navy, and five were a gift from a British admiral whose squadron happened to call at Torokina on its way north. At Christmas 1944, the corps held three days of reserve rations. Army headquarters asked the War Office in London for a heavy lift ship to bring 130 small craft forward from Cairns.
Blamey signalled Berryman at Hollandia to press for a landing ship dock, or failing that, two Liberty ships. Curtin put the request to MacArthur’s staff himself in late February. A month later, nothing had come back, and 47 more craft were ordered north under their own power, some of them wooden vessels 125 feet long crossing open sea because the ships to carry them were not going to arrive. On the 18th of May 1945, Blamey put the whole argument on paper for the Australian War Cabinet in an appreciation marked top secret.
He set out his principle first: to contain an enemy he could not destroy at acceptable cost by using a much smaller force. Then he described what he thought of sitting inside a perimeter for months while naval and air support was assembled. It was, he wrote, a colossal waste of manpower, material, and money. He had a second charge, and it was the stronger one.
MacArthur had said at Morotai that Japanese forces bypassed in Australian territory were strategically impotent. Blamey pointed out that holding them had still taken six American divisions and a regimental combat team, and now took substantial Australian ones. A force costing that much to contain could not be called impotent. He was right about that, and his troops proved it the hard way.
Australian intelligence staffs rejected the American finding that the Japanese on Bougainville had eaten through their rations and lost cohesion. Captured papers showed 750 tons of food held in April and 250 more brought in by submarine, issued only to troops in contact while men in rear areas starved. By November 1944, a farming program was feeding the island. The Australians concluded they faced a well-disciplined force that had disbanded its weakest units to keep the rest at strength.
They were correct. How large that force had been in March 1944 is still not settled. The XIV Corps intelligence staff compiled a study straight after the fighting from prisoner interrogations and captured papers, putting the attacking force at just over 15,000. Kanda, answering questions in 1949 from memory, gave 19,000, adding sailors on top of that and possibly sweeping in rear areas.
One American regimental commander later warned that the wounded return from Hill 260 ran high because medical officers had marked exhaustion cases as wounded with what he called unreasonable freedom. The question that diary entry raises has an answer. The year of quiet the Australians inherited was quiet because of what had happened in front of the wire in March. The Japanese Sixth Division went up those hills as an attacking formation and came down as a starving one, broken by guns firing off roads built for that purpose, from strips that had been in the Rabaul campaign since the middle of December.
The tonnage stacked on Puruata was not sitting there. It had already been spent before any Australian saw it. What the Australians then spent was men. Between July 1944 and the end of the war in the Solomons, 515 of them were killed in action or died of wounds.
Another 1,577 came off the island wounded. Griswold had explained the roads in advance. In December 1943, with the Japanese quiet and his staff buried in unloading problems, he wrote that his difficulties were logistical rather than tactical, and that a finished road net would give him the benefits of interior lines if and when the Japanese attacked in strength. They attacked in strength eleven weeks later.
By then, the Americans had built about 50 miles of good road inside the perimeter. When Savige took the place over, he decided to maintain roughly half of it and put his engineers onto the jeep tracks going forward toward the fighting. The rest of the American road net went back to jungle.
The official history notes without further comment that notable economies were achieved.