The end of the fighting at Sanananda

At 1.15 p.m. on 22 January 1943 the headquarters of the Australian 7th Division received a report that the 2/9th and 2/10th Battalions had linked up on the coast west of Sanananda. On the same day the American 163rd Infantry Regiment wiped out the last encircled Japanese positions on the Soputa–Sanananda track. Organised Japanese resistance on the northern coast of Papua was over. The commander of New Guinea Force, the Australian Lieutenant General Edmund Herring, announced in an order of the day that the campaign to recapture the Buna–Gona area was “practically over”. The American official historian Samuel Milner observed that this came almost exactly six months after the Japanese had landed at Gona and Buna, opening the fighting on the Kokoda Track.

The formula “the Allies liberated Sanananda”, repeated in some chronologies, is a simplification. The Australians had taken the village itself as early as 18 January. What ended on 22 January was the clearing of the whole beachhead between Cape Killerton and Giruwa – the last place where the Japanese were still holding on in Papua.

The toughest sector

Of the three Japanese beachheads on the coast, Sanananda held out longest. Gona fell on 9 December and Buna on 2 January, while on the Sanananda track the Allies advanced by hundreds of metres over two months. Falling back from the mountains, the Japanese had manned several belts of bunkers and trenches across the only dry road, which was flanked on both sides by swamp and jungle. Between 4,000 and 5,500 men – hospitals and rear units included – defended it under Major General Kensaku Oda, who had taken over the South Seas Detachment after the death of Tomitarō Horii, and Major General Tsuyuo Yamagata, who commanded all the forces in the Giruwa area.

The Huggins roadblock became the symbol of this fighting. On 30 November some 250 Americans of the 126th Infantry Regiment outflanked the first Japanese line and dug in across the track behind it. The position was meant to cut off the forward Japanese posts, but was itself surrounded. Its commander, Captain John Shirley, was killed in the first days; he was succeeded by Captain Meredith Huggins, after whom the roadblock was named and who was wounded on 8 December. For weeks the soldiers beat off attacks from flooded foxholes, while food, ammunition and the wounded were carried through the jungle along a narrow path covered by snipers. On 22 December the Australian 39th Battalion, brought from Gona, took over the roadblock, and at the beginning of January it passed to the American 163rd Infantry Regiment of the 41st Division, flown in from Port Moresby. The Japanese positions between the roadblock and the attackers’ front line could be taken neither by infantry assault nor – as an attempt on 12 January showed – with the help of tanks, which on the narrow track were quickly knocked out by a concealed anti-tank gun. Major General George Vasey, commander of the 7th Division, wrote that attacking bunkers with infantry alone was “repeating the costly mistakes of 1915–1917”.

Hunger and the decision to withdraw

The fate of the defenders, however, was decided not on the track but in Tokyo and Rabaul. Japanese aircraft and warships could not keep the beachheads supplied: destroyer convoys turned back after air attacks, and submarines and barges brought in little. By the end of December a soldier at Sanananda was receiving about 360 ml of rice a day against a normal ration of about 600 ml (800 g); at the beginning of January it was 40–80 ml, and between 8 and 12 January he received nothing at all. Most men were sick with dysentery and malaria. On 12 January Oda reported to Eighteenth Army headquarters: “Most of the men are suffering from dysentery. Those who are not lying sick have nothing to eat and are too weak for hand-to-hand fighting. […] Starvation is claiming many lives.” As they occupied abandoned positions, Australians and Americans found evidence that some of the starving men had resorted to cannibalism.

On 4 January Imperial General Headquarters decided that, given the shortage of shipping, it would no longer try to hold either Guadalcanal or the Papuan beachheads. The Sanananda garrison was to be evacuated to Lae and Salamaua, which were then being reinforced – the convoy carrying the Okabe Detachment reached Lae on 7 January. The timing was left to the commander of the Eighteenth Army, Lieutenant General Hatazō Adachi, who did not authorise the withdrawal until 13 January: the units were to make for the mouths of the Kumusi and Mambare rivers and from there go by sea or on foot to Lae and Salamaua.

The Japanese anticipated the order. On the nights of 12/13 and 13/14 January they abandoned the forward positions on the track that had held up the Allies for weeks. Between 13 and 20 January, according to Milner, 1,190 sick and wounded were taken out by motor launch. When the front began to crumble, Yamagata brought the general withdrawal forward by five days – from the 25th to the evening of 20 January – and himself left by sea with part of his staff and 140 wounded on the night of 19/20 January. The rest were to fight their way through the swamps westwards, beyond Gona, where boats were waiting. Estimates of how many succeeded range from 1,000 to 1,900 men; at the time the Australians believed that about 700 had slipped through their lines.

The last days

The Australians and Americans now advanced faster. Brigadier George Wootten’s 18th Brigade, brought over from Buna, took Cape Killerton, and on 18 January the 2/9th Battalion, having crossed the swamp from an undefended clearing of kunai grass, surprised the defenders and captured the village of Sanananda. From the east, along the coast from Buna via Tarakena, the American 127th Infantry Regiment was advancing; on 21 January it took Giruwa and joined hands with the Australians at the lagoon. Beyond the village an American patrol came upon the remains of a Japanese field hospital: the sick and wounded lay among unburied corpses, many in the last stages of starvation. Even there some of them resisted; 69 men were taken prisoner.

General Oda was killed in the last days of the fighting, around 20–21 January. Milner, drawing on Japanese sources, writes that he and Colonel Yazawa, who commanded the troops east of Giruwa, died when they ran into Australian outposts while trying to lead their men out through the swamps. According to other accounts Oda, finding no boats and unwilling to abandon the wounded, shot himself together with a staff officer. On 21 January the 163rd Regiment took one of the two last encircled pockets on the track, counting more than 500 Japanese dead on the field – according to Milner the most in a single day since the November fighting at Gorari – and on the morning of 22 January, after a massive mortar bombardment, it overran the last. Scattered groups of Japanese wandered the area for many days afterwards.

The cost of the campaign

The end of the fighting at Sanananda closed the Papuan campaign, which had begun in July 1942 with a Japanese landing and a march over the Owen Stanley Range towards Port Moresby. Its price was very high. According to Milner’s figures, more than 33,000 Australians and Americans fought in the campaign as a whole, of whom 3,095 were killed and 5,451 wounded – 8,546 battle casualties in all. On the Sanananda sector alone the Australians lost about 2,700 men and the Americans nearly 800, more than at Buna. Losses to disease were greater still: the American ground forces had almost 8,000 sick, and the battalions of successive Australian brigades dwindled to the size of companies before they were relieved. In Papua one Allied soldier in eleven died; on Guadalcanal, one in 37. Japanese losses are harder to establish; Japanese sources speak of about 8,000 killed and dead of disease on the beachheads between Gona and Buna alone. At Gona and Sanananda just over 200 men were taken prisoner, 159 of them Japanese.

Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters presented the victory differently. Its communiqué of 28 January announced that Allied losses had been low, less than half those of the Japanese, because “the time element in this case was of little importance” and there had been no need to hurry. Lieutenant General Robert Eichelberger, who from 13 January had commanded all Allied units at the front, later wrote that this statement was “one of the greatest surprises” of his life, since as field commander he had repeatedly been told of the need for haste.

Significance

The Papuan campaign removed the threat to Port Moresby and gave the Allies the northern coast of eastern New Guinea, with the airfields at Dobodura and the harbour in Oro Bay, which in the following months supported operations against Lae and Salamaua. Together with the almost simultaneous victory on Guadalcanal, where in the last days of January the Japanese were already preparing to evacuate, it meant that the initiative in the South-West Pacific had passed to the Allies.

For both sides Buna, Gona and Sanananda were a lesson. The Australians and Americans learned that tanks, artillery, engineers and outflanking were needed against jungle bunkers, and that discipline in preventing malaria determined an army’s strength as much as its weapons. The haste forced by MacArthur increased casualties and, in the view of some historians, actually prolonged the fighting. The Japanese moved the defence of New Guinea back to the Lae–Salamaua–Madang line. Just a week after the fall of Sanananda, on 29 January, the Okabe Detachment struck from Salamaua at the Australian air base at Wau (the Battle of Wau lasted until 4 February), and an attempt to reinforce Lae further ended in early March 1943 with the destruction of a Japanese convoy in the Bismarck Sea.