MacArthur's Papua New Guinea Offensive, 1942–1943

By Jon Diamond

“A compelling chronicle of the Battle of Papua New Guinea with rarely viewed images from World War II . . . an excellent book.” —Naval Historical Foundation

The Japanese seizure of Rabaul on New Britain in January 1942 directly threatened Northern Australia and, as a result, General Douglas MacArthur took command of the Southwest Pacific Area. In July 1942, the Japanese attacked south across the Owen Stanley mountain range.

Thanks to the hasty deployment of Australian militiamen and veteran Imperial Force troops the Japanese were halted at Ioribaiwa Ridge just 27 miles from Port Moresby.

MacArthur’s priority was to regain Northeast New Guinea and New Britain. The capture of airfields at Buna and reoccupation of Gona and Sanananda Point were prerequisites. The Allied offensive opened on 16 November 1942 with Australian infantrymen and light tanks alongside the US 32nd Infantry Division.

Overcoming the Japanese and the inhospitable terrain in tropical conditions proved the toughest of challenges. It remains an achievement of the highest order that the campaign ended successfully on 22 January 1943. This account with its clear text and superb imagery is a worthy tribute to those who fought and, all too often, died there.

“Covers a seriously neglected key campaign of WWII. Most Highly Recommended.” —Firetrench

“A fascinating look at real jungle warfare and the images only accentuate how miserable troops must have been during the fighting.” —ModelingMadness.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526757418

Jon Diamond

Jon Diamond MD is a kidney specialist in the USA with a deep interest in the Second World War. He is a keen collector of photographs. His Stilwell and the Chindits, War in the South Pacific, Invasion of Sicily, Invasion of the Italian Mainland: Salerno to Gustav Line, 1943-1944, Onto Rome 1944; Anzio and Victory at Cassino and Beyond Rome to the Alps; Across the Arno and Gothic Line, 1944-1945 and Op Plunder The Rhine River Crossing are all published by Pen and Sword in the Images of War series.

Book preview

Chapter One

Overview of the South-West Pacific Area in 1942 and the Strategic Importance of Papua

After the carrier attack by the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on 7 December 1941, both the IJN and Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) conducted offensive operations across Asia and the Pacific spanning 7,000 miles from Singapore to Midway Island ( see Map 1 , p. 8 ). The success of Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s aerial assault on the anchorage of the United States Navy’s (USN) Pacific Fleet and army installations that morning assured a transient naval supremacy for the IJN in the Pacific Ocean. Malaya and Singapore were early targets in the IJA’s major southern thrust along with additional supporting operations to seize the Philippine Archipelago, the Netherlands East Indies (NEI), Hong Kong and parts of British Borneo. Guam was occupied easily by 8 December and Wake Island fell on 23 December.

Further reinforcing Imperial Japan’s hegemony over the Pacific Ocean was the sinking in the South China Sea of HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse on 10 December by land-based Mitsubishi G4M Betty and Mitsubishi G3M Nell medium horizontal and torpedo-bearing bombers. These Royal Navy (RN) capital ships were dispatched by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill as a deterrent to Japanese expansion. Malaya and Singapore fell to Lieutenant-General Tomoyuki Yamashita’s numerically inferior Japanese 25th Army on 15 February 1942. This cataclysmic event occurred after only seventy days of resistance by Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival’s British and Commonwealth forces to the IJA juggernaut streaming though the jungles and roads of the Malay Peninsula and across the Straits of Johore to Singapore Island.

Prior to Malaya’s capture, the Japanese first aerially attacked Rabaul on northern New Britain Island on 21 January 1942, with over a hundred Japanese fighters and bombers attacking the main Australian air base in the Bismarck Archipelago to New Guinea’s north-east. On the night of 22–23 January, Major-General Tomitaro Horii’s 5,300-strong South Seas Detachment steamed into Rabaul’s Simpson Harbour. The Australian defenders withdrew after mounting some initial stout resistance to the amphibious invasion. As the Japanese overran northern New Britain in the ensuing days, most of the Australians were brutally massacred or died as prisoners. Rabaul would become the HQ for the Japanese Eighth Area Army with its five airfields and harbour, the latter transformed in the South Pacific’s main IJN fleet anchorage. All that remained to separate Australia’s Northern Territories across the Arafura Sea from the Japanese south-west Pacific offensive were a few Australian garrison troops and sappers at Port Moresby on Papua New Guinea’s southern coast.

Map1. Strategic overview of the Pacic War, 1941–1942. After the IJN attack on Pearl Harbor, Malaya was invaded in December 1941 and was soon conquered by the IJA 25th Army. Singapore fell on 15 February 1942. The Philippine Islands were also invaded in December 1941. Filipino-American forces surrendered after their resistance on Luzon’s Bataan Peninsula in April 1942. Other American possessions, such as Guam in the Marianas and Wake Island, were captured in the Japanese juggernaut in December. The Dutch (Netherlands) East Indies also fell to Imperial Japanese forces in their drive towards the South-West Pacific and Indian Ocean. New Britain Island in the Bismarck Archipelago was invaded in January 1942 with the Australian forces there having retreated or being captured. Rabaul, at New Britain’s north-eastern tip, became the main bastion for the IJA and IJN in the south- western Pacific, with its superb Simpson Harbour and numerous airfields. Japanese outposts were established in North-West New Guinea and along the northern coast of Papua. Port Moresby on the southern Papuan coast and north-west Australia were now threatened. The massive extent of the Japanese conquest and ultimate ambitions of Imperial Japan at its high-water mark throughout the first half of 1942 was startling. In early June 1942, the US Navy won a decisive carrier-based aircraft victory over the IJN at the Battle of Midway, thereby eliminating a potential threat to the Hawaiian Islands. (Meridian Mapping)

Since US Army and Navy planners believed that the Philippine Islands were not defensible if the Japanese mounted a full-scale attack, military preparations were wholly incomplete before General Douglas A. MacArthur’s arrival in 1935 to command the archipelago’s Filipino-American forces. Over the next six years, the build-up of forces under his leadership was both tardy and unfinished when the Japanese struck the Philippines. MacArthur’s air strength was destroyed mostly on the ground at Clark Field near Manila by Formosa-based Japanese bombers within hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor and its remnants quickly succumbed to the enemy’s air superiority. Although the Japanese expected a quick victory in the Philippines, largely due to their air and naval dominance, MacArthur’s Filipino-American troops retreated into the Bataan Peninsula and held out there until 9 April. It was not until 6 May that the neighbouring island fortress of Corregidor in Manila Bay capitulated following a Japanese invasion.

In early January 1942, Field Marshal Sir Archibald Wavell was appointed supreme commander of the cumbersome new combined American, British, Dutch and Australian Command (ABDACOM), headquartered on Java, after Churchill designated him C-in-C Far East on 30 December 1941. This command was ludicrous in its expansiveness as it encompassed all Allied forces in Burma, Singapore, Malaya, the Netherland East Indies (NEI), the Philippines (of which Wavell never assumed control) and North-West Australia. Fortunately, the onerous ABDACOM was disbanded on 22 February. However, by that time Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya, the NEI, and Rabaul as well as many other Allied possessions were already lost.

The Japanese High Command planned that once Malaya and Singapore were captured, resource-rich southern Sumatra and the NEI were to be seized. The vast natural resources there were needed to supply Japan’s decade-long war effort on the Asian mainland fighting the Chinese. Before Singapore’s surrender, Japanese units started the conquest of the NEI despite the fact that the local Dutch government had more than 100,000 men available. Unfortunately, this large force was spread out piecemeal across the major islands of the massive archipelago. The ABDACOM air force and naval detachment, the latter under American Admiral Thomas Hart, was defeated in the Battle of the Java Sea. Tarakan Island fell on 10 January, followed by the capture of Borneo and Sumatra. Java ended its resistance on 8 March. After the loss of the NEI, American General George Brett, who had been Wavell’s chief deputy in the ABDACOM, was appointed the commander of all US forces in Australia.

Southern Burma was invaded in April 1942 with the intent, after defeating the British and Indian forces there, to sever the Burma Road to deprive Chiang Kai-shek and his army of the supply lifeline through the port of Rangoon. The IJA fielded only eleven of its fifty-one divisions during these offensive operations in southern Asia, reserving the majority for home defence, the protracted offensives on the Chinese mainland, and to maintain a force in Manchuria to deter any possible Soviet move there. Still, Imperial Japan’s high-water mark had not yet been reached.

Japanese planners were confronted with a dilemma borne out of their string of rapid conquests, namely, should there be a further expansion south-eastward, seizing other Pacific island groups in order to cut the long supply lines from the United States to Australia and New Zealand, in effect isolating the Antipodes. Successive Japanese occupation of the Solomon Islands chain, the New Hebrides group, New Caledonia and the Fiji Islands would interdict sea-lane traffic from Pearl Harbor to Australia’s eastern coast cities of Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. Further seizure of the Tonga Islands, to the east of the Fiji Islands and south of Samoa would, in effect, interfere with Allied shipping from the American West Coast and through the Panama Canal to New Zealand. However, the IJA decided to move southward from the NEI in mid- January 1942, first to New Britain with Rabaul’s seizure and from there to occupy key positions in North-East New Guinea. By so doing, the Japanese High Command left the South Pacific supply routes open to Australia by postponing the establishment of further bases in the south-eastern Pacific. Thus, Australia and New Zealand were not isolated from Allied convoys and would become Australian-American staging areas for a counter-offensive. This Japanese strategic omission was later rectified with seizure and occupation of Bougainville, the New Georgia group of islands, as well as Guadalcanal and Tulagi along the Solomon Islands chain (see Map 2, p. 11).

Darwin, a port and administrative seat in Australia’s North-West Territories, was now under direct threat after Japanese established bases along the northern coast of North-East New Guinea and, soon, Papua. The Australian Government, with most of its army in the Middle East, could only spare modest reinforcements for Darwin’s garrison, which was initially bombed by the Japanese on 19 February, just four days after Singapore’s surrender with a large contingent of AIF troops, which figured largely in Australia’s pre-war defence planning. In early March, Port Moresby had only the 30th Infantry Brigade, a field artillery regiment and coastal AAA units, totalling between 6,000–7,000 men. On 21 February, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered MacArthur to prepare to leave Corregidor for the southern Philippine island of Mindanao and then proceed to Australia. On 11 March, MacArthur and his retinue left Corregidor in four patrol torpedo (PT) boats and arrived at Mindanao. Battle-worn B-17 Flying Fortresses transported MacArthur’s entourage to Batchelor Field, south of Darwin, on 17 March.

Australian Prime Minister John Curtain wanted his AIF divisions returned from the Middle East for home defence. Two brigades of the AIF 6th Division were transferred to Ceylon while the division’s remaining brigade and the AIF 7th Division was returned to Australia, the leading elements arriving in mid-March. With the AIF 9th Division remaining in the Middle East, Curtin was mollified by the ‘green’ US 32nd and 41st Infantry Divisions, both National Guard units, being hastily deployed to Australia’s defence in April and May 1942.

Map2. The Solomon Islands and Bismarck Archipelago in the South and south-western Pacic theatres of operation, 1942–1943. In order to gain control over the sea-lanes in the south-eastern Pacific area so that the Antipodes could be isolated, the IJN occupied the islet of Tulagi off Florida Island in the southern Solomon Islands chain in early May 1942 and established a sea-plane base there. Soon thereafter, Japanese engineers and labourers began construction of an airfield along Lunga Plain on the larger island of Guadalcanal, to be renamed by the USMC as Henderson Field. The Japanese expanded their presence from North-East New Guinea’s Huon Peninsula’s locales of Lae and Finschhafen by establishing bases along Papua’s northern coast, notably at Buna during the late spring of 1942. With the exceptions of Japan’s lost or stalemated battles at the Coral Sea (May 1942), Midway (June 1942), Milne Bay (August-September 1942), the over-land Buna-to-Port Moresby assault along the Kokoda Trail (July-September 1942), and the failure to quickly defeat an isolated US 1st Marine Division (Reinforced) after the Allied naval presence in Guadalcanal’s offshore waters was reeling (August 1942), almost all of Imperial Japan’s initial strategic goals were achieved. On closer inspection, the dual set of Japanese campaigns in Papua and on Guadalcanal across the Solomon Sea were to detract strength from one another posing both tactical and strategic dilemmas, which Imperial Japan never overcame. On the other hand, the Allies designated the Papua and North-East New Guinea campaigns to be under General Douglas MacArthur’s SWPA theatre. The series of USMC and US Army amphibious assaults in the New Georgia Island group (July 1943) and at Bougainville (November 1943) up the Solomon Island chain after the victory on Guadalcanal in the South Pacific theatre was led by Vice-Admiral William Halsey. In effect, both of these Allied campaigns created a double envelopment of Rabaul. However, Rabaul was not to be directly invaded but rather neutralised after Japan’s loss of air superiority enabled Operation Cartwheel’s, ever-increasing number of Allied land and carrier-based air attacks to isolate the enemy’s New Britain bastion. (Meridian Mapping)

Japanese staging moves to take New Guinea began on 8–11 March, when IJA and IJN elements landed at Salamaua, Lae and Finschhafen on the Huon Peninsula in North-East New Guinea (see Map 3, p. 13). By April 1942, Allied air attacks were causing extensive damage to Japanese air capacity and naval movements in the Solomon Sea, so between 1–20 April, Special Naval Landing Force (SNLF) troops were also landed at multiple sites along the northern coast of both North-East and Netherlands New Guinea to assist in airfield construction. Strategically, the Pacific War was to be determined by either capturing enemy airfields or nearby suitable terrain to construct new ones to control the sea-lanes as well as to support future amphibious landings for expansion.

The Japanese planned to isolate Australia’s Northern Territories, along with Darwin and its harbour, by occupying Port Moresby on