The capture of Buna

On the afternoon of 2 January 1943 American soldiers from two forces, attacking along the spit and from the bridge over Entrance Creek, met among the ruined buildings of Buna Government Station on the north coast of Papua. A few hours earlier Australians of the 18th Brigade, supported by light tanks, had wiped out the last pocket of resistance in the coconut plantation beyond the airstrips. After seven weeks of fighting, which had begun on 19 November 1942, the whole Buna area – from Cape Endaiadere to the mouth of the Girua river – was in Allied hands.

The news that Americans and Australians had “retaken Buna” needs one clarification. The Americans had captured Buna village as early as 14 December; what fell on 2 January was the neighbouring Buna Government Station – an outpost of the Australian colonial administration which the Japanese had occupied in July 1942. Many accounts call it “Buna Mission”, although there was no mission there in the strict sense. Together with the airstrips and the Duropa Plantation, it was the most strongly defended part of the Japanese beachhead.

Two flanks

At Buna the Allies fought in two separate forces. In the east, facing the Duropa Plantation, the airstrips and Cape Endaiadere, stood Warren Force; in the west, facing the village and the government station, Urbana Force. Both initially consisted of regiments of the US 32nd Infantry Division, which throughout November, despite heavy losses, had been unable to break through the Japanese bunkers. Only when, at the beginning of December, command of the troops at Buna passed to Lieutenant General Robert Eichelberger – sent by General Douglas MacArthur with orders to take Buna “or not come back alive” – did the attacks gather pace.

The breakthrough on the eastern flank was the work of the Australians. Brigadier George Wootten’s 18th Brigade, veterans of Tobruk and Milne Bay brought in by sea, attacked on 18 December with M3 Stuart light tanks of the 2/6th Armoured Regiment. Within two weeks it had driven the Japanese from Cape Endaiadere, crossed Simemi Creek and cleared both airstrips. On 1 January 1943 the 2/12th Battalion, with six tanks, attacked the last strip of coconut plantation between the Old Strip and the sea. The fighting went on all day and through the night; according to Samuel Milner’s US official history, the last position fell at 9.55 a.m. on 2 January, and sporadic firing continued into the afternoon. In those two days the battalion lost 12 officers and 179 other ranks, and the 18th Brigade as a whole had lost 863 men – killed, wounded and missing – since 18 December.

The final assault on the station

On the western flank the road to the station was harder. It was shielded to the south by swamps and Entrance Creek, and to the west by a narrow spit and Musita Island. Attacks in the second half of December – across the island, against the fortified “Triangle” at a fork in the tracks, and through the former Government Gardens – cost Urbana Force heavy losses for little gain. On the night of 29 December, however, patrols found that the Japanese were no longer defending the seaward side of the spit. An attack on 31 December nearly ended in disaster when an inexperienced company of the 127th Infantry Regiment fled after its commander was wounded; it was rallied in person by the regimental commander, Colonel John Grose. A second company held on to a foothold on the spit.

On 1 January the Americans attacked the station from two directions: along the spit and from the bridge over Entrance Creek. The defenders, who had been starving for weeks – from the end of December a Japanese soldier at Buna was receiving a fraction of the normal rice ration – and were under mortar fire, began to abandon their positions. On the morning of 2 January dozens of men could be seen on the beach and in the water, swimming westwards, clinging to boxes, rafts and logs or escaping in small boats. American artillery and machine guns opened fire on them, and from 10 a.m. they were strafed from the air by B-25s, P-39s and Australian Wirraways. Some of the fugitives nevertheless reached the coast near Giruwa and Tarakena, where they were picked up by Colonel Yazawa’s Japanese troops, sent as a relief force that arrived too late.

Those who remained fought to the end. According to Milner, Eichelberger called it the “fiercest fighting” of the day; that morning a sniper’s bullet killed Major Edmund Schroeder, commander of one of the attacking battalions. The bunkers had to be taken one by one, with grenades and machine-gun fire. At around 3.30 p.m. American companies reached the point on which the station stood and took their first prisoners – a dozen or so Chinese labourers. In the afternoon the troops from the spit and from the bridge linked up, and the 18th Brigade made contact with Urbana Force. The next day, 3 January, the rest of the area was cleared as far as the Girua river.

The death of Yasuda

The Japanese defence of Buna was led by two officers: Captain Yoshitatsu Yasuda, commander of naval infantry from Yokosuka, regarded in the Japanese navy as an authority on land warfare, and Colonel Yamamoto, who with men of the 144th and 229th Infantry Regiments had defended the airstrips on the eastern flank and, after losing them, fell back with the remnants of his units towards the station. Both died on 2 January. Milner, drawing on Japanese accounts, writes that they met that day and committed seppuku; according to other accounts, Yasuda fell leading a final attack. Yasuda was posthumously promoted two ranks, to vice admiral, and his lengthy testament, with observations on Allied tactics, later circulated as a kind of manual of defensive fighting.

The toll

By noon on 3 January the Americans had counted some 150 Japanese dead around the station; according to Milner, about 1,400 were buried in the whole Buna area. Only about 50 men were taken prisoner, most of them exhausted Korean and Chinese labourers; the few Japanese soldiers among the prisoners were captured naked and unarmed as they came out of the sea. According to the same tally, the Allies lost 620 killed, 2,065 wounded and 132 missing at Buna – more than 2,800 men in all, which was more than the Japanese garrison had numbered at the start of the fighting (estimated at about 2,200). Of these, 1,954 belonged to the US 32nd Division and 863 to the Australian 18th Brigade. To the battle casualties must be added thousands of cases of malaria, scrub typhus and dysentery: American battalions that had arrived in Australia at full strength in the spring of 1942 were sometimes down to a few hundred fit men after the capture of Buna.

On 3 January the commander of New Guinea Force, the Australian Lieutenant General Edmund Herring, thanked the Australians and Americans in an order of the day for their “magnificent and sustained effort”, and General Thomas Blamey congratulated Wootten’s 18th Brigade. Eichelberger told the soldiers of the 32nd Division that they had passed their baptism of fire and become veterans, and that the lessons of Buna would help reduce losses in future. MacArthur, who had not once visited the front line during the entire battle, decided that his presence in Port Moresby was no longer needed and returned to Brisbane on 8 January. His communiqués presented the campaign as all but over and stressed its low casualties, which caused bitterness among the officers who had fought at Buna.

What came next

The fall of the station ended the fighting on the eastern flank but not the battle. Between Buna and Gona the Japanese still held a beachhead at Sanananda and Giruwa, where the Australian 7th Division and American units had been fighting inconclusively since November. The 18th Brigade and its tanks were now sent there, together with the 127th Infantry Regiment, which was to advance along the coast from Buna, and the fresh US 163rd Infantry Regiment. On 13 January Eichelberger took command of all Australian and American troops at the front, and the fighting at Sanananda went on for almost three more weeks.

Decisions were being taken on the other side as well. On 4 January 1943 Japan’s Imperial General Headquarters concluded that, for lack of shipping, neither Guadalcanal nor the beachheads in Papua could be supplied. It was decided to evacuate both areas and to shift the defence of New Guinea to Lae and Salamaua. For the Allies Buna was a costly school of fighting against bunkers in the jungle: it showed that such defences called for tanks, artillery and patient outflanking of positions rather than repeated frontal assaults. These lessons were to shape the later campaigns in New Guinea, in which Eichelberger, awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for Buna, became one of MacArthur’s principal commanders.