The fall of Gona and Buna

In mid-December 1942 Allied communiqués from New Guinea were able to report successes for the first time in a month. On 9 December the Australian 39th Battalion took the ruins of the mission at Gona, and on 14 December an American battalion entered Buna village, which the Japanese had abandoned. The Allied press reported that the Japanese had been “driven out of Buna” – and in that form the news found its way into many chronologies of the war. In reality, on 15 December the fighting on the north coast of Papua was far from over. Buna village was only one point in the Japanese defences: the Buna Government Station and the mission by the sea fell only on 2 January 1943, and at Sanananda the Japanese held out until 22 January. December was nevertheless the month in which the battle, which had opened a month earlier with a series of bloody failures, at last began to tip in the Allies’ favour.

Eichelberger at Buna

At the beginning of December the situation at Buna was very bad for the Allies. Since its first attacks on 19 November the US 32nd Infantry Division had made almost no progress; its men were hungry, sick and demoralised, and Douglas MacArthur – who never visited the front himself – was demanding results ever more sharply. On 30 November he summoned Lieutenant General Robert Eichelberger, commander of the US I Corps, to Port Moresby and – according to Eichelberger’s own account – told him to take Buna “or not come back alive”. We know these words only from the general’s memoirs, written after the war, but they capture the mood at headquarters well.

Eichelberger flew to the front on 1 December. What he saw confirmed his worst fears: units were intermingled, communications and supply were working badly, the men were not getting hot meals, and many officers did not know where their own sub-units were. On 2 December he relieved the division commander, Major General Edwin F. Harding, along with most of the regimental and battalion commanders; the division was taken over by Brigadier General Albert W. Waldron, until then its artillery commander. Eichelberger halted the attack for two days to sort out the units and improve rations and medical care, and – in defiance of custom – walked the front line himself with the three stars on his collar, so that the men would know that their general was sharing the danger with them.

The new attack began on 5 December. On the eastern sector, in the Duropa Plantation and in front of the airstrips, Warren Force was sent in with five Australian Bren Carriers – light, open-topped vehicles that were meant to stand in for the missing tanks. All five were knocked out within about twenty minutes, and the infantry was once again pinned down in front of the bunkers. Things went better on the western sector, where Urbana Force was attacking Buna village. A group of a dozen or so men under Staff Sergeant Herman Bottcher – a German-born veteran of the Spanish Civil War – broke through between the Japanese positions to the beach and held a foothold there for several days, cutting the village off from the Government Station. The same day General Waldron was wounded; the division was taken over briefly by Brigadier General Clovis Byers, Eichelberger’s chief of staff, and when he too was wounded on 16 December, Eichelberger took direct command.

Gona

At the western end of the beachheads, at Gona, it was the Australians who were fighting. The old Anglican mission was defended by 800 to 900 Japanese troops – largely from construction and road-building units, reinforced by survivors from Kokoda – in a dense network of bunkers and trenches among the buildings and on the edge of the swamps. The exhausted 25th Brigade, which had already marched the whole length of the Kokoda Track, suffered heavy losses in attacks from 19 to 23 November without taking the mission. At the end of November it was replaced by Brigadier Ivan Dougherty’s 21st Brigade, some 1,100 strong – also veterans of the mountain fighting. Its attacks of 29 November and 1 December, along the beach and from inland, cost it – according to Australian figures – some 430 killed and wounded in five days.

Gona fell only after further reinforcements had been brought in. The 21st Brigade was joined by Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Honner’s 39th Battalion from the 30th Brigade – a militia unit that in the summer of 1942 had been the first to face the Japanese on the Kokoda Track, and which now numbered only a few hundred men. On 6 December the Australians renewed the attack: the 2/27th and 2/16th Battalions along the beach, the 39th Battalion from the landward side. On 8 December Honner’s men broke deep into the Japanese positions, and on 9 December – in the morning or the afternoon, according to different sources – organised resistance ceased. Honner signalled his brigade commander tersely: “Gona’s gone”, words that became one of the best-known reports of the war in Australia.

The Japanese command at Rabaul tried to save Gona. At the beginning of December destroyers landed several hundred troops at the mouth of the Kumusi River, some twenty kilometres to the north-west, under Major General Tsuyuo Yamagata, who on 6 December took command of the entire northern force. The reinforcements could not break through to the mission, however: the Australians stopped them near Haddy’s Village west of Gona, where fighting went on into the second half of December. After taking the mission the Australians buried at least 638 Japanese soldiers; many of the defenders died in their bunkers without attempting to surrender. Australian losses at Gona are put at about 750 killed, wounded and missing. Among the ruins the victors found decomposing bodies, some of which the Japanese, unable to bury them, had used – as the Australians recorded – as cover for their firing positions.

Buna village

At Buna the mood changed more slowly. Over the following days of December Urbana Force tightened the ring around the village, and the Japanese, cut off from the Government Station by Bottcher’s breakthrough, could only defend themselves or escape through the swamps and by water. On 14 December, after a heavy mortar bombardment, the 3rd Battalion of the 127th Infantry Regiment – a fresh unit of the 32nd Division flown in during the first half of December – entered the village. The Americans met no resistance: the defenders had slipped away during the night towards the Government Station. In the bunkers and trenches lay the bodies of the dead, abandoned equipment and signs of many days of hunger. On 15 and 16 December the Americans also cleared the nearby Coconut Grove on the west bank of Entrance Creek.

The capture of the village was the Americans’ first clear success in the battle, and reports of the Japanese being “driven out of Buna” went round the Allied press, but strategically it meant little. Between the village and Cape Endaiadere, over a stretch of several kilometres, the Japanese still held the Government Station, the mission, both airstrips and the strongly fortified “Triangle” at a fork in the tracks. The strongest positions lay to the east, where Warren Force had made almost no progress for a month.

Sanananda, disease and hunger

The hardest sector proved to be the central one – the track from Soputa to Sanananda, which the Japanese, falling back from Kokoda, had fortified with several belts of defences. An American roadblock on the track, established on 30 November behind the first Japanese line, held out surrounded throughout December, supplied with difficulty through the jungle. Successive Australian attacks – including those by newly arrived militia battalions of the 30th Brigade at the beginning of December – ended in heavy losses and small gains. The defence here was directed by Colonel Yōsuke Yokoyama, the same officer who in July had landed at Gona, and he held out stubbornly even though his men were receiving less and less food.

Disease wore down all the combatants on both sides. According to estimates cited by historians, between 85 and 95 per cent of Allied troops on the beachheads were carrying malaria, and for every battle casualty almost five men were evacuated sick – three-quarters of them with malaria. Between 25 November and 23 December the Australian 7th Division received 4,273 reinforcements but lost 5,905 men from all causes. On the Japanese side things were even worse: supplies from Rabaul arrived only sporadically, by submarine and destroyer, and the defenders lived on scraps of rice, roots and grass. Signs of extreme starvation were found in captured positions, and Australian reports from those weeks also contain accounts of cannibalism among the starving defenders.

Bombers over Rabaul

The Japanese beachheads in New Guinea and the troops on Guadalcanal were fed from the same hub: Rabaul on New Britain, taken by the Japanese in January 1942 and built up into Japan’s largest base in the South Pacific. At the turn of 1942 and 1943 several dozen ships at a time lay in its harbour, and hundreds of aircraft on the surrounding airfields. General George Kenney’s US Fifth Air Force had been attacking it for months, but it had few heavy bombers at its disposal, and the distance from Port Moresby usually allowed only a handful of aircraft, or a dozen or so, to be sent at a time, often by night.

A mention of American bombers over Rabaul on 25 December, repeated in some chronologies, is inaccurate. According to the American chronology of air operations, only single aircraft operated over New Britain that day: a B-17 attacked a submarine in Wide Bay, and a B-24 bombed the landing ground at Cape Gloucester. B-17s struck Rabaul itself on 6 December (Lakunai airfield and the town), and in the last days of the year the raids became more frequent: on 27 and 30 December B-17s attacked shipping in the harbour, and on 28 December B-24s appeared over the base. The targets were above all the vessels that might carry reinforcements to New Guinea and Guadalcanal. The damage done by these few raids was slight; Kenney’s real weapon became the low-level attacks on convoys only in 1943, and Rabaul itself began to be systematically neutralised from the air only from the autumn of 1943.

Place in the war

The capture of Gona and Buna village did not end the battle, but it changed its character. With the new command, the Americans began to receive what they had lacked from the start: artillery, ammunition, and better supply by sea and air. A few days after the fall of the village, on 18 December, Brigadier George Wootten’s Australian 18th Brigade attacked on the eastern sector, supported by M3 Stuart light tanks of the 2/6th Armoured Regiment. The tanks, destroying bunkers with fire at close range, enabled the infantry within an hour to reach Cape Endaiadere, for which the Americans had fought in vain for a month. Over the following days the Australians and Americans took the airstrips; on 28 December the Japanese abandoned the Triangle, and on 2 January 1943 the Government Station – the last Japanese strongpoint at Buna – fell. At Sanananda, where American reinforcements from the 41st Infantry Division joined in, the fighting went on until 22 January; some of the defenders had been evacuated by sea beforehand.

The battle cost the Allies – according to the most frequently cited figures – several thousand killed and wounded and well over ten thousand sick, more in proportion to the forces engaged than the fighting on Guadalcanal. The Japanese lost most of the more than ten thousand troops who had fought on the beachheads or been sent there. For the Allies it was the first land battle won in New Guinea after the defence of Port Moresby and the fighting on the Kokoda Track – a victory that opened the way to the later operations against Lae, Salamaua and finally Rabaul itself. As historians judge, it was also a lesson for MacArthur and his staff to avoid frontal attacks on fortified beachheads and to bypass the strongpoints of the Japanese defence; this principle was to shape the conduct of the whole South West Pacific campaign in the years that followed.