Americans in Port Moresby

At dawn on 15 September 1942 transport aircraft took off from Amberley airfield near Brisbane carrying 172 soldiers of E Company, 126th Infantry Regiment, of the US 32nd Division. Their uniforms, hastily dyed jungle green at a Brisbane dry cleaner’s, were still damp. In the afternoon, after a flight of more than two thousand kilometres, Captain Melvin Schultz’s company landed at Seven Mile airfield near Port Moresby. They were the first American infantrymen in New Guinea – and at the same time a test of whether whole regiments could be moved to the front by air. The day before, the Japanese had attacked at Ioribaiwa, on a ridge from which they could already see the lights of the town.

The popular version, according to which on 15 September the Americans sent troops to Port Moresby to reinforce its Australian defenders, needs to be made more precise. Only one company arrived that day. The main forces – two regimental combat teams of the 32nd Division – reached Port Moresby over the following two weeks: the 128th Infantry Regiment by air by about 23–24 September, the 126th Regiment by ship on 28 September. The mention found under 24 September of “I Corps being sent to the Pacific” belongs to the same story: the corps headquarters, which from the beginning of September commanded both American divisions in Australia, had already arrived there at the end of August.

Two divisions nobody had trained for the jungle

When Douglas MacArthur arrived in Australia in March, he was counting on an army that he would lead back to the Philippines. Washington, absorbed in preparations for the war against Germany, gave him two National Guard infantry divisions. The first, the 41st Division from the north-western states of the USA, arrived in Melbourne in April 1942 and was stationed near Rockhampton in Queensland. The second, the 32nd “Red Arrow” Division, formed from National Guardsmen of Michigan and Wisconsin, had originally been due to sail to Northern Ireland, but in April it was diverted to the Pacific. It disembarked at Adelaide on 14 May, and in July it travelled by rail across half the continent to a camp in the hills south of Brisbane, named Camp Cable at the end of August.

Both divisions were poorly prepared for the war that awaited them in New Guinea. About a third of the 32nd Division’s soldiers had still been in basic training five months earlier. In Australia the first weeks were spent building camps, and after that the men trained according to the programme from home – drill and manoeuvres in open country, not jungle patrolling. Even so, American officers judged Major General Edwin Forrest Harding’s 32nd Division to be the most combat-ready unit in Australia.

I Corps and General Eichelberger

Since the spring MacArthur had been asking Washington for a corps headquarters to take over both American divisions. On 9 August 1942 the Army Chief of Staff, George Marshall, assigned the task to the headquarters of I Corps under Major General Robert Eichelberger, a former superintendent of West Point who had known MacArthur for years. The original candidate, General Robert Richardson, did not wish – as Marshall put it – to serve under Australian command. On 20 August Eichelberger flew to Australia in a B-24 bomber with 22 staff officers, and on 5 September the corps formally took over the 32nd and 41st Divisions. Eichelberger set up his headquarters in the Criterion Hotel in Rockhampton; the corps came under Lieutenant General John Lavarack’s Australian First Army.

The date of 24 September, under which chronologies place “I Corps being sent to the Pacific”, does not correspond to any clear event in the available sources. Samuel Milner’s US official history links the assumption of command with 5 September, and according to US Army unit records the corps as a whole “closed” its move to Rockhampton only on 17 October 1942, when the remaining elements of the headquarters arrived there.

Eichelberger was disturbed by what he found. The Australian commanders, veterans of North Africa, Greece and Syria, regarded the Americans – as he noted – as inexperienced theorists at best. He warned MacArthur and his chief of staff, General Richard Sutherland, that his divisions could not take on Japanese veterans on equal terms. In September he decided that the 32nd Division would be the first to go to New Guinea – if only because its camp near Brisbane was worse than the 41st Division’s camp near Rockhampton and would have had to be abandoned anyway. Within the 32nd Division he chose Colonel Lawrence Quinn’s 126th Regiment, in his view the best trained and best led.

MacArthur’s decision

At the beginning of September the situation in New Guinea looked threatening from Brisbane. The Australians had indeed repulsed the Japanese landing at Milne Bay, but on the Kokoda Track they were falling back from Isurava past Brigade Hill, ever closer to Port Moresby. MacArthur, who was watching the campaign from two and a half thousand kilometres away, did not understand the conditions of fighting in the Owen Stanley Range and had a low opinion of the Australian soldiers. On 6 September he wrote to Marshall that the Australians were no match for the enemy in jungle fighting, and argued that Americans had to be sent to the island.

On 11 September he presented his plan to the commander of the Allied land forces, the Australian General Thomas Blamey. He considered that driving the Japanese back along the Kokoda Track would be “a very slow business”, and wanted the 126th Regiment to carry out a wide outflanking manoeuvre – to cross the mountains by another route east of the track and come out in the enemy’s rear on the Kumusi River at Wairopi, where the Japanese supply line crossed the river. On 13 September MacArthur issued the order to move part of the 32nd Division to New Guinea.

The commander of the Allied air forces in the South West Pacific, General George Kenney, who since the beginning of September had also headed the newly formed US Fifth Air Force, proposed that the troops be moved by air. The sea route took more than a week, and few ships were available. MacArthur agreed to a trial with one company.

The airlift

E Company of the 126th Regiment, which landed at Port Moresby on 15 September, was that trial. Before take-off it was seen off by General Harding, who called it “the spearhead of the spearhead of the spearhead” – the point of a division that was itself to be the point of the American army in Australia. The flight was a success, and MacArthur agreed to fly in the whole of Colonel J. Tracy Hale’s 128th Infantry Regiment.

Kenney had two days to gather every transport aircraft in Australia. Alongside the machines of the 21st and 22nd Troop Carrier Squadrons – mainly Douglas C-47s and their civilian equivalents – there flew Australian airliners requisitioned by the civil air transport authority and bombers newly arrived from the USA, still flown by civilian ferry crews. Four B-17s carried four 105 mm howitzers from Brisbane to Port Moresby, with tractors, ammunition and crews. The move of the 128th Regiment began around 18 September, the day the 126th Regiment boarded ships in Brisbane, and according to the US air force history the regiment – without its artillery – was in Port Moresby by 24 September. The US Army official history calls this the largest operation American aviation had carried out up to that time; it is often described as the first airlift of combat troops on such a scale in the war, although the Germans had already moved large forces by air in the Netherlands in 1940 and on Crete in 1941.

The 126th Regiment – according to Milner 180 officers and 3,610 enlisted men, without artillery – sailed from Brisbane on 18 September and reached Port Moresby in convoy on 28 September. Colonel Quinn had flown in earlier, on 20 September. On arrival the 128th Regiment was placed under the headquarters of the Australian 6th Division and incorporated into the defence of the Port Moresby area, while the 126th Regiment came directly under New Guinea Force as a reserve, earmarked for the march on Wairopi.

The route via Kapa Kapa

The question remained of which way the Americans were to go. MacArthur’s staff proposed a route along the rivers past the Rouna Falls, which had been drawn on the map rather freely. Brigadier General Hanford MacNider, sent ahead on a reconnaissance from Port Moresby on 12 September, soon judged it impracticable. Two other routes were considered instead: a track of about 140 km from the coast at Kapa Kapa via Kalikodobu and Laruni to Jaure, unused for decades and leading over a pass at a height of about 2,800 metres, and a lower but longer route from Abau. On 17 September Captain William Boice set out with six soldiers and Papuan carriers to reconnoitre the Kapa Kapa route, while Colonel Leif Sverdrup surveyed the route from Abau, which was preferred by Lieutenant General Sydney Rowell, commander of New Guinea Force.

Rowell was not enthusiastic about the American plan, and still less about the pressure from Brisbane. MacArthur persuaded the Prime Minister, John Curtin, to send Blamey to New Guinea to take personal command. Blamey arrived in Port Moresby on 23 September with a small staff. Rowell saw this as a vote of no confidence and protested openly; on 28 September Blamey relieved him, and command of the forward New Guinea Force passed to Lieutenant General Edmund Herring.

Meanwhile on the Kokoda Track itself the situation had changed without American involvement. Brigadier Kenneth Eather’s Australian 25th Brigade, which on 16 September had withdrawn from Ioribaiwa to Imita Ridge, dug in there, and on 20 September two Australian 25-pounder guns, hauled by tractor to the end of the motor road, began shelling the Japanese positions. The Japanese never attacked Imita Ridge. At the end of September they began to withdraw – for reasons that had more to do with Guadalcanal and the defeat at Bloody Ridge than with the situation outside Port Moresby.

Place in the war

The Americans arrived in New Guinea just as the Japanese land offensive had run out of steam, and took no part in repelling it from Port Moresby. They were, however, to become the second pillar of the Allied counter-offensive against the island’s north coast. In mid-October a battalion of the 126th Regiment set out along the track from Kapa Kapa – the march across mountains the soldiers called “Ghost Mountain” lasted several weeks and wrecked their health before their first engagement. Most of the 32nd Division was flown to the north coast, to the Wanigela and Pongani area, in October and November, and from the second half of November it fought alongside the Australians in the Battle of Buna–Gona. There the unprepared division went through a severe crisis: on 30 November MacArthur sent Eichelberger to the front with orders to “take Buna, or not come back alive”, and on 2 December Eichelberger relieved Harding. Buna Government Station fell on 2 January 1943.

The airlift of September 1942 showed something more as well. Kenney convinced MacArthur that in the mountains and jungle of New Guinea the transport aircraft could take the place of the roads that did not exist there. In the years that followed, moving troops and supplies by air became one of the foundations of the New Guinea campaign – from the landings at Wanigela and supply drops to troops by parachute to the airborne landing at Nadzab in 1943.