«Your Australians Won't Fight» — How The Diggers Made MacArthur Eat His Words At Buna

Ajouté : 2026-06-05

[00:00:00]By the end of 1942, the men of the Australian 7th Division were being called cowards by a general who had never once seen the ground they were fighting on. They had just come down off the Kakakota track to the swamps of the North Papowan coast, sick and half starved, after 4 months spent turning back the only Japanese army that ever came close to Port Moresby. They had stopped that army within 40 km of the town and then chased it back over the mountains. The man who decided they couldn't fight, General Douglas MacArthur, had set up his advanced headquarters on the 6th of November at Government House in Port Moresby. With the whole Owen Stanley range standing between that headquarters and the fighting on the north coast, he passed his verdict on the Australian soldier without ever standing where the Australian soldier stood. The charge made no sense against what those soldiers had already done. Three months earlier at Mil Bay on the eastern tip of Papua, Australian troops had met a Japanese seaborn landing headon and destroyed it, handing the Japanese their first clear defeat on land anywhere in the war. That fight finished on the 7th of September in the same weeks MacArthur was telling CRA his men wouldn't stand and fight. The soldiers who held Mil Bay and the soldiers climbing back down the Cota track came from the same army and were cut from the same cloth. MacArthur was calling that army unfit at the exact moment it was doing what no other Allied force had managed against the Japanese.

[00:01:31]MacArthur didn't stop at the soldiers.

[00:01:34]He reached up the chain and took their commanders as well. On the 28th of September, under steady pressure from MacArthur's headquarters, General Thomas Blamey relieved Lieutenant General Sydney Rowell, the core commander running the fight in Port Moresby.

[00:01:50]Brigadier Arnold Pototts, who had held the long fighting withdrawal down the Kakakota track against impossible odds, had already been pulled out of the line by then. On the 28th of October, the divisional commander, Major General Arthur Allen, went the same way, relieved in the middle of his own advance and replaced by Major General George Vy. Three Australian commanders were gone inside a single month. Every one of them removed because the advance was judged too slow. The pressure had a reason behind it that had nothing to do with the men in the swamp. MacArthur had been driven out of the Philippines at the start of the year, and he knew that another failure in New Guinea could end his career for good. In a secret conversation with Prime Minister John Cirten in the middle of September, he laid the trouble at the feet of the Australian soldier, said he had lost confidence in the troops in that theater, and warned that New Guinea was turning into a repeat of the collapse under Persal at Singapore. He needed the line held and he needed someone ready to carry the blame if it wasn't. The Australians fit the second job whether or not they ever failed at the first.

[00:02:57]His remedy was a fresh American division. He ordered the 32nd Infantry Division forward to the Beach Heads, a formation untouched by the campaign so far and confident it would take in days what the Australians had supposedly failed to take at all. Its men were National Guardsmen from Michigan and Wisconsin, and most of them had never seen jungle before they reached Papua.

[00:03:21]On the 19th of November, they went in at Buna, certain the Japanese were beaten and ready to fold. What those men ran into over the next fortnight would test MacArthur's verdict on the Australians against the hardest ground in the Pacific. The belief that the Japanese were finished was wrong before the first attack went in. The force that had pulled back from the Kakakota track had done so in good order under orders to hold the coast and it reached the beach heads still able to fight hard between the 17th and the 21st of November in the days just before the allies closed up.

[00:03:55]Destroyers and barges put more than a thousand fresh troops ashore around the beach heads to thicken the garrison. The men dug in at Buuna and Gona had been told to hold their ground to the last and they had been given weeks to prepare the position for exactly the kind of attack now coming at them. The division sent to walk over them was about to learn that the hard way. The ground at Buuna did to the 32nd division what no briefing had prepared it for. The attack stalled in the first hours against bunkers the artillery couldn't locate and couldn't break, and the swamp swallowed every attempt to work around them. American intelligence had badly underestimated both the strength of the garrison and the depth of its defenses, and the maps the troops carried were close to worthless. With no tanks on hand and almost no effective artillery, the infantry was sent at the firing slits on foot across open kunai grass into machine guns sighted to cover each other. Inside two weeks, the division had thrown away much of its fighting strength for almost no ground at all.

[00:05:00]This was a fight unlike anything the Allies had tried in the Pacific up to then. There was no naval gunfire to soften the position and no landing from the sea, the one battle of the theater in which the attackers came from inland while the Japanese held the beach at their backs. The defenders had built their bunkers from coconut logs and packed earth, roofed them over with more of the same, and set the firing slits low in the kunai where they couldn't be seen until they opened up. Shellfire ran straight off the log and earth roofs without touching the men underneath.

[00:05:32]Buna and the beach heads beside it were the first places in the Pacific where Allied infantry had to attack a Japanese garrison that had been handed the time to dig in properly. The division had been set up to fail long before it reached the swamp. It was meant to train together for a full year, the standard the United States Army held to, but it had taken on more than 3,000 raw recruits straight out of boot camp before being shipped to Australia in April. Every hour of its training had been built for open mechanized warfare in Europe. When it landed in New Guinea, its green uniforms turned out to have been dyed in a way that trapped moisture and rotted the cloth, opening painful jungle ulcers on the men inside them. It had gone to war short of machetes and insect repellent, its medical stores left to spoil in the wet, and it had walked into the worst tropical country anyone was fighting in. Disease had been cutting the division down before a single shot was fired at it. One battalion of the 126th Infantry had been marched over the Owen Stanley Range on foot along the Capaca track to the east of Kota. A crossing harder than the Kakota track itself. It ran roughly 210 km over a peak the men named Ghost Mountain and it took them about 7 weeks to cross. Malaria, deni fever, dysentery and jungle rot worked through the column for the whole of it. By the time the division reached Buna, sickness had already gutted its ranks, and across the campaign, it would cost four or five times as many men as Japanese fire ever did. The wreckage showed in the rear as plainly as at the front. Morale broke down under the rain and the steady grind of sickness, and a number of men shot themselves in the foot to get out of the line. Reports of low spirits reached MacArthur at Port Moresby without the reasons that lay underneath them. and a word began to travel through the staff that the Americans at Buna were cowards.

[00:07:34]It was the same charge MacArthur's headquarters had thrown at the Australians only weeks before, now fixed to his own chosen division. These were the freshest troops in the theater, and the enemy in front of them was one the Australians were already beating 15 km up the coast. The pressure on MacArthur to produce a win at Buuna was coming straight from above him. The Navy and the Marines had been locked in their own brutal campaign on Guadal Canal in the Solomons since August, and the two theaters were being weighed against each other by the men in Washington who controlled reinforcements and supply.

[00:08:10]MacArthur had told Washington and Canra to expect the beach heads to fall quickly, and every week that Buuna held made that promise look worse. He needed the position taken fast, far more than he needed it taken cheaply. The men in the swamp would pay the difference between those two things. MacArthur's response was to change the command and leave the conditions exactly where they were. At the end of November, he summoned Lieutenant General Robert Eichelberger, the senior American Corps commander, and ordered him forward to relieve every officer who wouldn't fight, down to putting sergeants in charge of battalions and corporals in charge of companies, if that was what it took. The order he handed him was as blunt as any given in the war.

[00:08:54]Eichelberger was to take Buuna or not come back alive, and the same went for his chief of staff. He flew into the beach head on the 2nd of December, and saw the state of it for himself.

[00:09:05]Eichelberger found an army that had been broken before it ever began, by failures of command above it, and by conditions no one at headquarters had grasped.

[00:09:15]Discipline had gone slack. The men were hollow with fever. Their uniforms were rotting off their backs, and their rifles hadn't been cleaned in days. He relieved commanders on the spot, pulled the troops back out of contact to feed and reorganize them, and then started the attack over from the beginning. The fight he had been sent to win would still take weeks. While he worked at it, the soldiers MacArthur had written off were closing on the first of the three Japanese beach heads, and they were about to take it before he had taken his. 15 km up the coast, the Australians were grinding through their own version of the same battle, the same swamp, and the same kind of bunker. Gona was the most westerly of the three Japanese positions, a coastal mission station held by a garrison ordered to fight to the last man. The troops sent to take it were the survivors of Kota, the 21st Brigade, and the 39th Battalion, men who had fought the long withdrawal down the track since July, and now had to turn around and storm the very coast they had been driven back across. They went in already worn down to nothing, with no relief coming and no fresh division behind them to spend in their place.

[00:10:27]where MacArthur had answered Buuna with 8,000 fresh Americans. Gona was handed to the men who had already given everything on the track. The first attempts at Gona went the way frontal attacks on prepared bunkers always tend to go. The approaches crossed flat open ground under thin supporting fire and attack after attack broke against the Japanese line and fell back with heavy losses. Two of the 21st brigades battalions were so badly cut up that the survivors of the second 16th and the second 27th had to be merged into a single composite force just to keep any strength in the field. The position held through all of it. By the start of December, the brigade had been bled white in front of Gona and still hadn't broken its way inside. What finally cracked Gona came from one officer reading the ground better than the plans ever had. Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Honer commanded the 39th Battalion, the militia unit that had first blunted the Japanese advance at Isarava on the Kakakota track months earlier. He had spotted a covered line of approach that the frontal attacks kept ignoring. After being made to throw his decomp into one more costly assault that gained nothing, he talked the brigade commander, Brigadier Ivan Doerty, into letting him use it. Honor moved his men through a swamp on the flank in under their own falling artillery close enough to the shellbursts that the defenders never saw them coming and they held the foothold through the night. By dawn the 39th was inside the position the brigade had been breaking itself against for weeks. On the 9th of December the signal went back from the battalion to brigade headquarters that Gona was gone. It was the first of the three Japanese beach heads on that coast to fall, and the men who took it were the same menthur had branded unable to fight. The price had been brutal. By the time the 39th Battalion came out of the line, it could put just 32 men on parade out of a unit that had crossed to New Guinea around a thousand strong. Gona had been cleared at a cost that ran through every unit that touched it, with the sickness in the swamp taking a toll as heavy as the bunkers did. The Japanese, who could still move, tried to swim out through the surf and were cut down in the water.

[00:12:46]The beach head that the men MacArthur had written off had just taken was the first solid result anyone on the Allied side had to show on that coast. 15 km to the east. His fresh American division was still pinned in front of Buuna, sitting almost exactly where it had stalled 3 weeks before. The soldiers, who supposedly wouldn't fight, had taken the first beach head, while the soldiers sent to replace them hadn't moved. At Buuna, the fighting hadn't eased off while Gona fell. Eichelberger's reorganization had steadied the American line and put some fight back into it, but the bunkers were still there and the swamp was still there. And the advance was being measured in meters a day. The American press at home had begun reporting the New Guinea fighting as the most desperate that American soldiers were caught up in anywhere on Earth.

[00:13:36]What finally broke Buuna open came from two things the troops on this coast had been without since the first attack. The first was armor and the second was an Australian brigade that had done this exact kind of fighting before and knew what it cost. On the 18th of December, the Australian 18th Brigade came into the line at Buna under Brigadier George Wooten and it brought the first tanks the Allies had managed to land anywhere on the North Papuan coast. They were M3 Stewart light tanks of the Second Sixth Armored Regiment, and they changed what it cost to take a bunker. The second, 9inth, and second, tenth battalions went in behind the Stewarts that morning, and for the first time, the infantry had armor plate between them and the firing slits. The fighting was still slow and savage. The bunkers reduced one at a time, and the first four tanks were knocked out almost as soon as they reached the line. The brigade Wooten brought to Buna was no collection of newcomers. The 18th had held the line at Tobrook through the siege in North Africa and it had been part of the force that destroyed the Japanese landing at Mil Bay back in September. These were men who had already beaten the Japanese on land once in the same campaign in which MacArthur was still questioning whether Australians could fight at all.

[00:14:55]They had been brought across to do at Buna what MacArthur's fresh American division hadn't managed on its own. What they couldn't bring with them was any way to make coconut log bunkers cheap to take. The Stearts that came through couldn't finish it on their own, and the bill kept climbing. Along the old air strip between the 24th and the 29th of December, the Second 10th Battalion attacked over and over for almost no ground, and the 18th Brigade took some of the heaviest losses of the entire campaign in that one stretch. Bunker by bunker, the work fell back on the infantry, and what little artillery could be dragged forward to support them. The brigade that had come through to Brook and Mil Bay was being worn down in the same swamp that had stalled the Americans. The difference this time was that the position was finally beginning to give. The breakthrough came only after a halt long enough to plan it properly. With more tanks fed forward and the exhausted 2nd 10th battalion relieved by the fresh second 12th, they attacked on the morning of the 1st of January. Tanks and infantry working in close cooperation this time and broke the bulk of the Japanese positions before the light went. The next day was spent destroying what was left of the strong points around the strip. By then, the 18th Brigade alone had lost more than 800 men taking Buna, over 300 of them gone for good. The beach head that had held MacArthur's fresh division since the middle of November was coming apart at last. Buna fell in the first days of January, and it fell to the two armies together. While the Australians broke the positions around the old strip, the American infantry of the 32nd division pushed east through Buna village and the government station and the two forces linked up on the 2nd of January. The beach head that had stopped MacArthur's fresh division cold for 6 weeks was taken in the end by that division and an Australian brigade with tanks fighting it out side by side in the same mud. The story that would later be told of an American victory won alone left half of that out of the record.

[00:17:03]That left Saninandanda, the strongest of the three positions and the last to go, sitting in the center of the line. It held deep into January against Australian troops and the American 163rd regiment. Fed by reinforcements the Japanese kept shuttling in by barge. The cost of keeping the pressure on it showed in the seventh division's own books. Between the 25th of November and the 23rd of December, the division took in 4,273 replacements and still lost 5,95 men from its front to all causes, battle and sickness together. That left General Vasey's force more than 1600 men weaker at the end of December than it had been at the start. The only reinforcement the division got from outside was an American regiment. The 163rd had reached Port Moresby on the 27th of December and gone straight under Australian command to feed the same fight. Some of the other men thrown against Saninanda were militia who had spent their months in New Guinea unloading boats and building roads, handed a Bren gun or an Owen gun and shown how to use it days before they were sent in. The last pocket was cleared on the 22nd of January, 1943.

[00:18:20]The beach heads that had held the Allies for over two months were finally gone.

[00:18:24]The arithmetic of the beach heads was worse than anything MacArthur had told CRA to expect. At Buuna alone, the fighting cost the Allies around 2,800 casualties, close to six in every 10 of them Australian. The Japanese lost roughly 3,000 men holding Buna. Most of them ordered to fight where they stood until there was nothing left. across the whole of the north coast. The Papuan campaign cost the allies more men than the fighting on Guadal Canal had. And once the figures are corrected for the size of the forces involved, the losses in Papua ran at about three times the rate. This was the campaign MacArthur had expected his fresh division to wrap up in a matter of days. Almost none of the Japanese garrison came out of the beach heads alive. Across all three positions, the Japanese had put close to 12,000 men into the fighting and the country around it, and only about 250 of them were ever taken prisoner. A good number, even of that small group turned out to be Korean conscripts and Chinese laborers rather than Japanese fighting troops. Around 1,200 of the wounded were lifted off by submarine in the last days, and a similar number slipped away overland before the pockets were closed.

[00:19:38]The bill for that fresh division came in far higher than the men who sent it had reckoned on. 707 of its soldiers didn't come home, and another 1,680 were wounded across the Papawan fighting. Sickness did far worse than the Japanese did. More than 8,000 of its men passed through the field hospitals, the great majority of them brought down by malaria, and the division had to be taken out of the war for close to a year before it was fit to fight again. The formation MacArthur had pushed forward to show the Australians how the job was done came out of Papua, a ruin. The disease that gutted that division was the same disease that ran through every unit on the coast, Australian and American alike. More than twothirds of the Allied troops who attacked the beach heads went down with malaria. Much of it because quinine was in short supply right across the theater. For every man hit by Japanese fire, four or five more were carried out. burning with fever.

[00:20:38]The bunkers and the sickness together took men at a rate that nothing in the Pacific had matched to that point. None of it found its way into the verdict that the Australian soldier wouldn't fight. What MacArthur did with the win was the sharpest insult of the lot. He controlled the war reporting that came out of the Southwest Pacific and the communicates that left his headquarters claimed the whole campaign as a triumph of his own direction. The Australians who had taken the first beach head and carried the larger share of the losses were given little space in them and even less credit. The general had been wrong about those men on the record in a secret message to his own prime minister, and the same men he had been wrong about were now watching him take the credit for what they had done. The honors that followed told the same story as the communicates.

[00:21:28]Once Buona had fallen, MacArthur handed out the Distinguished Service Cross, the second highest award the United States Army could give to 12 officers at once.

[00:21:38]Some of the men who received it had fought on the beach heads. Others had spent the campaign well to the rear, and pinning a decoration for gallantry on staff who had never come under fire caused open anger among the soldiers who had. The general, who had never reached the front, was decorating officers who had stayed back from it as well. The rewriting went well past the wartime press. The American official history of the campaign would state flatly that the 32nd division had taken Buuna by itself with no place in the account for the Australian 18th Brigade or the tanks that had broken the position open.

[00:22:14]Eichelberger himself would later call Buuna the first land defeat handed to the Japanese in the Pacific when Australian troops had done exactly that at Mil Bay months before he ever reached the front. Even Eichelberger, for all that, privately resented the way MacArthur announced victories while men were still fighting and passing in the swamp, waving everything that came after away as mopping up. The Australian generals MacArthur's pressure had helped push out, didn't stay under the cloud either. Sydney Rowell, relieved as core commander in September, rose after the war all the way to chief of the general staff, the most senior post in the entire Australian army. Arthur Allen and Arnold Pototts had both been removed during the Cakakota fighting under circumstances that later officers and historians came to judge far harsher than the two men had ever earned. Every one of them had been sacked over the speed of a campaign that was in fact being won. The verdict on the Fighting Australian had come from the one senior man on that coast who never once fought there. The men who took Gona heard almost nothing of how their war was being written up at home. The 39th Battalion that walked off the coast with 32 men still standing had gone to New Guinea around a thousand strong and within a few months it was disbanded and its survivors scattered into other units. They had taken the first Japanese beach head in Papua ahead of the fresh division that had been sent in to do it for them. That was the campaign the official record would go on to remember as someone else's victory.