The fighting for Buna and Gona begins

On the evening of 17 November 1942 Japanese destroyers from Rabaul landed about a thousand soldiers at Basabua on the north coast of New Guinea – an infantry battalion and replacements for the units falling back from Kokoda. The reinforcements arrived at the last moment: two Australian brigades and the US 32nd Infantry Division were already closing in through the jungle from the south, convinced that the beachheads were held by a handful of sick and starving survivors from Kokoda. A few days later it became clear how wrong they were. The attacks launched on 19 November stalled before a network of bunkers hidden in the swamps and coconut groves, and at Buna there began a battle that the Americans would remember as one of the hardest of the entire Pacific war.

From Kokoda to the sea

The Japanese beachheads on the coast of Papua had been established in July 1942, when Colonel Yōsuke Yokoyama’s detachment landed at Gona to advance from there across the Owen Stanley Range on Port Moresby. The land offensive collapsed in September almost within sight of the town, and at the end of that month the troops of Major General Tomitarō Horii began to withdraw. The Australians followed them throughout October and on 2 November took Kokoda with its airstrip.

Horii made a last attempt to halt the pursuit in the mountains at Oivi and Gorari. In fighting from 4 to 11 November, Major General George Vasey’s Australian 7th Division outflanked the Japanese positions and shattered the main body of the South Seas Detachment; the Japanese lost some 430 killed and 400 wounded and a dozen or so guns, the Australians 121 killed and 225 wounded. The survivors fled towards the swollen Kumusi River, in which many drowned. Horii himself, travelling downriver towards the coast first by raft and then by canoe, died at sea off its mouth – on 19 or 23 November, according to different sources. On 13 November the Australians reached the Kumusi at Wairopi, where the wire-rope bridge had been destroyed, and on 16 November, after crossing, set off on the last stretch of the road to the sea. Historians date the Battle of Buna–Gona from that day. Thus closed the chapter of the fighting on the Kokoda Track.

The Japanese, however, had no intention of abandoning the coast. The strip of land between Gona and Buna was their only base in eastern New Guinea apart from Lae and Salamaua, and the command in Rabaul, although it was directing its main forces and reserves to Guadalcanal – where it had just lost the naval battle and most of a reinforcement convoy – ordered it to be held. On 16 November the 8th Area Army of Lieutenant General Hitoshi Imamura was formed at Rabaul, and under it Lieutenant General Hatazō Adachi’s 18th Army, which took over responsibility for New Guinea; the 17th Army was henceforth to deal solely with the Solomon Islands.

Reinforcements from Rabaul

The beachhead was not defenceless. Since the summer Buna had been held by a garrison made up largely of sailors and naval infantry – including the 5th Special Naval Landing Force – together with men of construction and airfield units, while at Gona and on the road to Sanananda the survivors of Oivi and Gorari, sick, wounded and exhausted, were gathering. Over several months, however, the garrison had built positions that the Allies later considered among the strongest they encountered during the war: hundreds of mutually supporting bunkers of coconut logs and earth, camouflaged with vegetation so well that attackers saw them only from a few metres away. The positions had their backs to the sea and were protected on the landward side by swamps into which no heavy equipment could be brought.

To man them, Rabaul sent reinforcements. On 16 November Major Hiaichi Kemmotsu’s III Battalion of the 229th Infantry Regiment, 300 replacements for the 144th Regiment and that regiment’s new commander, Colonel Hiroshi Yamamoto, who later took over the defence of Buna, were dispatched to Basabua. The destroyers landed them on the evening of 17 November; together with what was brought in the following night, between 1,000 and 1,500 soldiers came ashore. On 21 November a further 800 or so replacements for the South Seas Detachment landed at Basabua. According to the most frequently cited estimates, at the start of the battle the Japanese had between 5,500 and 6,500 combat-fit soldiers in the beachheads, and including the sick, the wounded and the units on the Kumusi as many as 11,000–12,000. Buna was defended by 2,000–2,500 men, Gona by 800–900, and the positions around Sanananda and Giruwa by the most. Later convoys were less fortunate: Allied aircraft turned back the destroyers on 28 November, and subsequent reinforcements could land only further west, at the mouths of the Kumusi and the Mambare.

The Americans at Buna

The Allied command knew little about the beachheads. Douglas MacArthur’s intelligence staff estimated that Buna was held by at most a thousand sick and undernourished soldiers who would offer no serious resistance. The task of taking it was given to Major General Edwin F. Harding’s US 32nd Infantry Division – National Guardsmen from Michigan and Wisconsin, trained for an entirely different kind of war and brought to New Guinea only two months earlier. Most of the division was flown to the north coast, to the Wanigela and Pongani area, and from there marched on foot or moved by boat along the shore. One battalion reached the front after a gruelling march over the mountains along the trail from Kapa Kapa.

Even before the first clash the division lost part of its already meagre supplies. On the evening of 16 November a dozen or so Japanese Zero fighters attacked, off Cape Sudest, three small coastal vessels and a barge that were carrying guns, ammunition and part of the staff towards Hariko; all of them caught fire, and Harding himself survived by jumping into the water and swimming ashore. Twenty-four soldiers and 28 Papuans were killed, and supply by sea practically ceased for several weeks. As a result the Americans began their attack with two mountain howitzers as their entire artillery support – without tanks, with little mortar ammunition, supplied mainly by air drops, of which up to half were lost in the jungle or smashed on landing.

On 19 November two battalions of the 128th Infantry Regiment attacked the eastern end of the Japanese positions – through the Duropa coconut plantation towards Cape Endaiadere and along the track from Simemi towards the airstrips. The attack immediately ran into fire from invisible bunkers and came to a halt. The same day Lieutenant General Edmund Herring, commanding New Guinea Force, took two battalions of the 126th Regiment away from Harding and placed them under the Australians marching on Sanananda – wrecking the American’s plan just as he was opening the battle. Further attacks on 20 and 21 November gained a few dozen metres each; on 21 November bombs from friendly aircraft killed ten Americans and wounded fourteen without destroying the Japanese positions. Things went no better on the western side, at the Government Station and Buna Village, where the troops soon named Urbana Force were attacking (the eastern group was called Warren Force). Even the major attack of 26 November, preceded by a strike by some 50 aircraft and a half-hour bombardment by six Australian 25-pounders sent up in the meantime, ended without any gain of ground.

The Australians at Gona and on the Sanananda road

West of the Americans, Vasey’s 7th Division was attacking. Its 25th Brigade, advancing along the track from Jumbora towards Gona, struck the Japanese positions on 19 November, and the 16th Brigade, marching from Soputa along the road to Sanananda, a day later. Both brigades had already come the whole length of the Kokoda Track and were down to about a third of their establishment, the men worn out by marching, hunger and disease. Repeated frontal attacks at Gona and on the Sanananda road ended in heavy losses and small gains; to cut the road, the III Battalion of the US 126th Regiment, placed under Australian command, was also sent in, and on 30 November it drove a wedge between the Japanese positions and set up a block later named after one of its officers as “Huggins’ Roadblock”.

Conditions were appalling for both sides. The Buna and Gona area was among the most malarial places in the world, and on top of malaria came dengue, scrub typhus, dysentery and tropical ulcers. According to historians’ estimates, most Allied soldiers on this front contracted malaria, and for every man wounded several were evacuated sick. Swamps, tall kunai grass and dense jungle made manoeuvre and heavy-weapons support impossible, and attacks on bunkers that could not be seen resembled – as was later written – a tropical version of the trench warfare of 1914–1918.

Place in the war

By the end of November it was clear that there would be no quick victory. MacArthur, who was at the same time watching the Americans’ heavy fighting on Guadalcanal and – in historians’ judgement – also needed a quick success to shore up his own position, put ever greater pressure on his subordinates. On 30 November he summoned Lieutenant General Robert Eichelberger, commander of I Corps, to Port Moresby and ordered him to take Buna “or not come back alive”. Eichelberger flew to the front on 1 December and the next day relieved Harding. Gona fell on 9 December, Buna Village on 14 December and the Government Station on 2 January 1943, after the Australian 18th Brigade and tanks had been brought into the fight. The fighting at Sanananda went on until 22 January 1943; the defenders, cut off from supplies and starving, mostly held out to the end, while some were evacuated by sea or escaped overland to the west.

The Battle of Buna–Gona was the first victory of the Allied land offensive in New Guinea, but it was bought at an enormous price – higher, in proportion to the forces engaged, than on Guadalcanal. It showed how fiercely the Japanese would defend fortified positions and forced the Allies to learn jungle warfare: the importance of tanks and artillery against bunkers, of anti-malarial measures, and of supply by air and by sea. For the American public it was also the first battle from which photographs of dead American soldiers were shown.