Papua: A Lesson In Seapower

What happens when an overseas campaign is waged without sea- power against a foe weak in naval strength? From one of the toughest struggles of World War II the answer emerges in simple terms: Without seapower a campaign will cost excessively and may fail readily. The campaign which furnishes this answer was fought for possession of Papua, the mountain-spined tail of New Guinea. From July, 1942, when the Japanese first hiked into the north-coast village of Buna until June, 1943, when the Allies carried the lighting beyond Papua, opponents battled without naval forces which both desperately needed and wanted. We won only through long and bloody jungle fighting and an incredibly expensive air effort. For months the fate of Australia depended on Mac- Arthur’s soldiers and airmen. That this contest occurred in a remote area between relatively small forces does not diminish its significance. Similar situations could happen anywhere on any scale whenever seapower is absent.

In the war’s opening months the geography of Papua had saved Australia from invasion. The Japanese stormed down through the East Indies, swung east to seize New Britain —then paused. Papua stood like a giant’s shield in their path to northern Australia. True, the peninsula owned few defenders, and, true again, a blue water passage ran around the tail; but 100 miles of jungles and mountains lay in the way of an overland advance while any run by sea “around the corner” (as Admiral Nimitz put it) would expose the supply line to flank attack.

Tojo looked at the chart of the Southwest Pacific and decided that though his war plan called for invasion of Australia, he must first take Papua as a springboard. In March, 1942, he won the first round by landing troops at Lae and Salamaua on the northern root of the Papuan peninsula. An American carrier raid across the 13,000-foot summits of the Owen-Stanley Mountains sank three invasion ships but failed to halt the occupation- Japanese transports with strong naval support next headed “around the corner” for Port Moresby on the south coast of Papua. Our few land-based bombers never found the enemy and Port Moresby looked like another Singapore. But seapower in the form of two American carriers, Lexington and Yorktown, hit from the flank and in one 24-hour period at the Battle of the Coral Sea drove off the foe.

Unfortunately that ended naval campaigning in Papuan waters and a subsequent request from General MacArthur for two carriers and some old battleships couldn’t be granted. The carriers were needed first at Midway and then in the Solomons, while the old battleships were too poorly compartmented for cruising in submarine waters with inadequate escort. If MacArthur wanted to hold the New Guinea line, he must do so without seapower.

The Japanese Imperial General Staff likewise grunted a negative to requests for carriers in Papuan waters. Four of Admiral Yamamoto’s flattops had gone down at Midway and the rest of the fleet was needed to counter an expected American offensive elsewhere. If the Japanese Seventeenth Army wanted Papua, the Japanese Seventeenth Army would have to go get it. Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake reasoned it could be done by a pincer offensive. Troops landing on the north coast would march across the hump to hit Port Moresby from the rear. At the same time, given a few transports and escorts, a hippity-hop water advance would stage through Milne Bay at the Papuan tail.

On July 20 three transports hove to off Gona, a port midway on the north coast. Old light cruisers Tenryu and Tatsuta and two destroyers formed a protective ring around the transports while 1,500 soldiers streamed ashore. Within two days they had captured nearby Buna airfield and wheeled inland for the transmontane trek. Further reinforcements swelled the ranks to 11,000 men, all under Major General Tomitaro Horii.

General MacArthur had anticipated this thrust but, aside from an air raid which set one transport afire, could do nothing. Under his command operated a handful of cruisers and destroyers which did not sail north of Papua because of two dangers. Japanese bombers comprised the first danger. Without carrier decks, American fighter cover, hopping either across the mountains from Moresby or up the tail from Milne Bay, would have little gas or time to protect any task force. The second menace consisted of uncharted reefs. Some of the Admiralty charts still contained such diverting notations as “Reefs seen by D’Entrecasteau.” Nobody verified these visions by the late 18th century explorer, but everybody knew there were plenty of reefs nobody had seen. Naval officers on MacArthur’s staff couldn’t see risking cruisers and destroyers in such waters.

On the map Horii’s job looked easy, a mere hundred-mile hike along the Kokoda Trail. Actually, it was no more suited for heavily-loaded soldiers than the Alps were for Hannibal’s elephants. Matted jungle, jagged cliffs, starvation, disease, and angry Australian rear guards whittled at his force for six weeks. Leaving a trail of corpses and equipment, the stubborn general finally got to within 32 miles of Moresby on September 14. There, Australian infantry pounced and sent him lurching back over his tracks. Horii drowned in a swollen mountain stream during the retreat, but if he had lived he would have agreed that traveling by sea beats traveling by jungle.

The seaward claw of the Moresby pincer had no better success. Tenryu, Tatsuta, three destroyers, two sub chasers and two transports pried into the cleft of the lizard’s tail at Milne Bay on the night of August 25-26. Invasion barges smashed naval “opposition” —two Australian armed auxiliaries—while 1,200 Japanese “Special Naval Landing Force” hit the beach with orders to “kill without remorse.” Unfortunately for them a lively Allied airfield was protected by 8,500 defenders who didn’t need orders to kill without regret. At daybreak Kittyhawk fighters snarled aloft and joined Flying Forts, damaging one transport and driving the other to sea with cargo still on board.

The Emperor’s warriors fared badly in the sopping malarial jungle surrounding Milne Bay. Admiral Mikawa, naval commander at Rabaul, wanted to help, but the American landing on Guadalcanal in August had tied up his naval resources. He did engineer one night landing which added 669 hungry men and no supplies to the invasion force. Attacks against the airfield failed, and on September 2, the Milne Bay commander radioed: “Situation most desperate. Everyone resolved to fight bravely to the last.” Two nights later destroyers evacuated 1,400 sick and dispirited men. Subsequently, the Japanese worked off their resentment with hit and run naval bombardments which ceased after a small Allied cruiser-destroyer group attempted interception.

The pincer movement had failed because the Japanese lacked control of the sea lanes. Certainly, they got their men into the mountains of Papua and onto the beaches at Milne Bay but, as in a football game, ground near the goal is the toughest to take. If they had been able to run convoys with impunity, they need never have made mountain goats of Horii and his men, nor been overpowered at Milne Bay by an enemy also lacking seapower. As for the Allies, ability to operate ships north of Papua would have prevented the Milne Bay invasion altogether.

The repulse did not extinguish Japanese hope for conquest of Papua. As soon as the pestiferous American Marines were shoved northern Papua. They selected Buna as their key position. The village owned an airfield impervious to amphibious assault because of reefs which extended 25 miles to sea and accessible from inland only along four native footpaths hemmed by swamps and obstructed by creeks. To hang on to this bit of real estate the Japanese had 1,800 troops manning machine guns, artillery, and anti-aircraft batteries and 400 laborers building coconut-log pillboxes. A few miles to the northwest 3,000 survivors of the Kokoda Trail retreat garrisoned the harbor settlements of Gona and Sanananda.

General MacArthur now faced three questions. First, was it necessary to take Buna? Logically he should establish airfields and port facilities south of Buna, then bypass the enemy with a landing to the north, thus initiating the leap-frog technique so popular later on. But such logic required pulverization of Buna, Lae, and Salamaua by naval bombardment together with the introduction of thousands of soldiers and tons of equipment into any nip-off landing north of Buna. Otherwise, the enemy might still use the Buna airstrip; and Buna troops, moving north along the coast in coordination with comrades coming down from Lae and Salamaua, could pinch the Allied intermediate landing. MacArthur did not own the naval guns to accomplish the bombardment, the alphabetical galaxy of LCIs, LSTs, LSMs and other landing craft capable of inshore navigation, the troops and gear required to make an interdiction landing or the close- cover carrier planes to protect the troop ships. So he would have to carry his troops over the mountains by plane and ferry them surreptitiously in small coasters. Meanwhile, Buna Japanese and the Buna airstrip would remain like an abscess ready to infect the whole north Papuan coast. The answer then, Buna must be captured.

The next question: Could he take Buna? Including Australians, about two divisions of troops were available, outnumbering the Japs considerably. The difficulty was bringing these troops into rifle shot of the enemy. Again, a balanced naval force of carriers, cruisers, destroyers, and amphibs could turn the trick. Wishful thinking. Actually his troop carriers were vulnerable merchantmen, tiny coastal vessels, native canoes, and airplanes. He had a precedent—Hitler’s flying legions had wrested Crete from the Allies. But there were differences; the Germans had owned far more air resources than MacArthur. On the other hand his lack of air power would be compensated by the enemy’s lack of sea- power. Touch and go, but possible provided the Japanese Navy didn’t interfere.

That brought the third question: How could he take Buna. Again he lacked the means which would have been his two years later. There would be no carrier planes to sweep in on D-Day and numb the defenders, no big naval guns to sling steel and explosive at pill boxes and bunkers, no amphibious vehicles clambering over the reefs guarding the harbor entrance. There remained but one course, march the troops through the swampy back door, after an expensive airplane ride or a perilous sea voyage.

MacArthur launched the Buna Campaign in October, 1942, with establishment of an air base at Wanigela on the north coast. Into this terminal he funneled two battalions of infantry to spearhead a march to Buna 60 miles northwest. But impassable jungle thwarted the roadbuilding and the soldiers had to take to the sea. Xo fine transports for them, merely auxiliary ketches or canoes manned by stone-aged natives and hardy Australians. Creeping along the* shore, these craft moved soldiers to Pongoni 15 miles south of Buna. While engineers carved out another air strip at Pongoni, the soldiers trekked inland and on Xovember 20, joined the Australians who had shoved Horii across the Owen Stanley Mountains. The juncture of forces occurred at Dobodura on a level plain of kunai grass. Here the Americans constructed their main airfields and started troops on the final eight miles to Buna.

In late Xovember the Americans met the Buna Japanese for the first time, at the southern bastion of the defenses. Other Americans slogged through mire to feel out Nips’ lines to west and north of the Buna field. Farther to the north the Australians lunged tentatively at Gona. The flanks of all these forces touched on swamp with no trails between. Meanwhile the Japs, with a short serviceable highway, could rush troops to a threatened sector in a matter of minutes.

With troops deployed, the Allies embarked on “the toughest fighting in the world.” Lieutenant General Robert L. Eichelberger flew to the front with an order from MacArthur to “take Buna or don’t come back alive.” Many an American didn’t. The Japanese, with skilled and fanatic leaders, held stubbornly to every pill box. Air bombs or artillery might dislodge them momentarily but they usually came back at nightfall. Combat losses, malaria, dysentery and dengue fever eroded Allied ground strength alarmingly. General George Kenney’s Army fliers performed miracles bringing in some 14,900 troops and several thousand tons of equipment including heavy artillery, but the campaign would have been longer and bloodier except for a motley “Lilliput Navy” of ketches, sloops, corvettes, and remnants of the Dutch East Indian merchant fleet. These craft carried approximately half of all supplies bound for the front, though they suffered grievously in so doing. None escaped air attack. On one occasion the Jap fliers sank four ships and put the supply line out of commission for three weeks. Two U. S. Army generals had to swim when the lugger they rode went down under air attack. What wouldn’t they have given for naval air and AA-gun support!

If the Allied logistic problem was tough, the Japanese problem was insurmountable. Gona, their one decent harbor, fell to the Australians in early December. The only ships that could be spared and operated safely were submarines and coast-hugging barges traveling by night. Here the American Navy made its single significant contribution to the siege of Buna. In size it wasn’t much, a handful of fragile motor torpedo boats. These boats nested in a remote inlet north of Papua and went to work in late December. On Christmas Eve, PT-122 spotted submarine I-22 on the surface, drove in to half-mile range and let fly two torpedoes for one hit. Another pair of “fish” from 500 yards scored and the I-boat sank in a welter of flame and water. I-22 had a partner who retaliated with four torpedoes (no hits) and then escaped to tell Admiral Mikawa that hereafter he must reckon with those wicked mosquito boats. That same night PT-124 and PT-121 sank two barges crammed with troops for Buna. Such is the potency of sea power that the tiny PTs assumed an importance out of all proportion to size, becoming a miniature “fleet in being” which discouraged Japanese reinforcement efforts.

Japanese air power helped Buna’s defenders with attacks on Allied convoys and fighter-sweeps against planes and ships, but supply by air was hopeless for lack of transport planes. The wretched garrison resorted to cannibalism and a Japanese diarist recorded: “With the dawn the enemy starts shooting all over. All I can do is shed tears of resentment. Now we are waiting only for death. Even the invincible Imperial Army is at a loss.”

On Christmas day Rabaul Headquarters ordered the men to evacuate but they had no sea transport or protection and all land trails were bottled. They burned code books and faced the Americans for a last stand which ended on January 2. One job remained, to capture the village of Sanananda north of Buna where 3,000 more Nips waited resolutely. Australians and Americans pitched in, tired but willing. On January 17-18 the tip- off came when PT-120 knocked off three escaping barges jammed with Japanese officers. On the 22nd Sanananda fell and the Buna campaign ended. Of the 13,645 American troops engaged, casualties totalled 10,879 killed, wounded and sick.¹ The Australians paid dearly too. For the Japs it had been annihilation.

The Allied soldier and airman had fought honestly and bravely in this strange siege. The Japanese trooper had struck back resourcefully and relentlessly. The excessive price in time and men stemmed from lack of seapower on both sides. Modern military strength is like a platform poised on a tripod, one support being an army, another a navy, and a third an air force. On the Allied side the navy leg was so much shorter that the whole platform tilted dangerously. Compare Buna with the swift investiture of such places as Hollandia and Leyte where the tripod had legs of equal strength—where carriers and bombardment ships pinned the enemy down while assault troops dashed to the beach in amphibious craft; where planes and warships guarded the sea while each supply ship brought in as much tonnage as hundreds of airplanes. Buna attacked in such fashion would have lasted only a few days. On the Japanese side, the platform toppled, yet if the might of the Imperial Navy had been concentrated near Papua, the Allies would have been unable to approach Buna, let alone attack it.

After Buna’s fall naval weakness manifested itself again to the disadvantage of both sides. MacArthur wanted to exploit his victory by shoving up the Papuan coast to Lae and Salamaua. This time the Japanese ground and air strength was too great for him to ignore seapower. He needed amphibious craft, naval guns, carrier planes and fat transports. He had none; therefore it would be six months before he made a first timorous advance, and September before he could support an all out assault. Meanwhile the enemy could consolidate garrisons and build up air power.

That is just what the Japanese intended to do, but unlike MacArthur, they forgot for once that safe voyaging on the sea requires control of that sea. They didn’t have the transport aircraft and, with hostile PTs rampant against barges, they couldn’t feed and arm the New Guinea troops. Consequently they decided to risk an overseas convoy from Rabaul to Lae—big-bellied merchantmen escorted by destroyers. Aside from the initial blunder in sending such a convoy at all, they planned well. Rear Admiral Masatomi Kimura led eight transports and eight destroyers from Rabaul at midnight February 28 into the driving rain of a storm front predicted by Japanese meteorologists. When the storm capriciously veered away, taking with it the clouds and mist, Kimura called on some 200 Army and Navy fighters poised in New Guinea. But he didn’t know that alerted Allied planes in Papua far outnumbered these, and were about to try a new technique—bombing from masthead height with delayed action fuses.

On March 2 a Liberator glimpsed Kimura’s convoy and passed in the word. Flying Forts roared out to sink one transport, damage another. Kimura should have countermarched for home after this, but like most Japanese, he wouldn’t change a plan already in motion. Furthermore, he expected fighter cover. He merely dispatched two destroyers ahead into Lae with survivors of the sunken ship. Next day General Kenney’s bombers and fighters found the convoy sprawling nakedly under tropic sunshine with a meager air patrol of 40 fighters. While fighters fought fighters and Flying Forts bombed from medium altitude, A-20s and B-25s darted in so low their slipstreams ruffled the water. Japanese skippers, thinking it was a torpedo attack, turned their ships to comb the “fish” and thus were set-ups for the masthead bombs and enfilading machine-gun bullets of the fliers. Nine ships suffered fatal hurts. That night the PTs came out and polished off an abandoned transport. Next day the bombers sank two destroyers which were rescuing survivors. Kimura lost all eight transports, four destroyers, and 3,000 men in the debacle.

Did this victory mean that seapower was washed up when matched against airpower? Not at all. The Japanese did not have sea- power present—no carriers, no heavy ships mounting adequate AA armament, and not enough defending fighters. Furthermore, if nasty weather had held or if the Japanese had estimated enemy air strength accurately and prepared to destroy it on the ground, Kimura might have pushed through to the point where only a surface attack could have stopped him. We proved later in the war that with balanced seapower we could take our slowest, most vulnerable ships where we willed.

Since both sides urgently wanted Papua the question arises why one or the other did not introduce seapower to shorten the campaign or change its outcome, even at the expense of other fronts. Here again the answer lies in the necessity to retain control of vital sea lanes. If we had shifted naval might from the Solomons to Papua, MacArthur could have taken Buna quickly. But then Guadalcanal would have been as easy picking for the Japs as one of their cherry blossoms. We couldn’t let that happen because Guadalcanal was a scimitar aimed at the sea lanes between the United States and Australia. Without those lanes, not only Papua, but Australia would have been endangered further. For anonymous reasons the Japs didn’t sail their Navy to Papua.

Now suppose that one side had owned no Navy to stalemate the other fellow’s fleet. In that case there would have been no Papuan Campaign. Instead it would have been fought on the home territory of the nation which didn’t have a Navy. Homer Lea described such a situation back in 1909; a mythical Japanese invasion of California. The Philippines in 1941 furnish another example; MacArthur had no significant naval support, so the fighting took place where the enemy chose—on Philippine territory.

The Papuan Campaign provokes one final question. What effect would mass-destruction weapons have produced? Actually we possessed one such weapon at the time—poison gas. Since we didn’t need Buna as a base of our own, a few dustings with mustard gas would have done to the Japanese what DDT does to cockroaches. One reason we did not employ gas was because it was illegal. However, had it been authorized and used, the enemy could have played turnabout, not necessarily in Papua but elsewhere. The same would go for an atom bomb. One bomb and no more Buna, but also, one bomb and no more Port Moresby or Milne Bay. Furthermore if gas or the bomb were in use, we wouldn’t find a commander fool enough to concentrate his troops as the Jap did at Buna. The potentiality of any new weapon is eventually limited either by countermeasures or threats of retaliation. The ownership of a mass-destruction weapon did not change the outcome in Papua nor diminish the need for seapower.

Any insular power—and we in the United States are insular—must wage its wars overseas or lose. To carry troops, beans, and bullets across water requires ships and protection for those ships—seapower in other words. Supremacy on and over the sea is the only guarantee against suffering debilitating Papuan Campaigns or Bismarck Sea maulings.