Buna was General Douglas MacArthur’s first offensive campaign against Japanese troops in World War II. As supreme commander, Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA), MacArthur expected American soldiers to seize the Japanese forward base at Buna, on Papua New Guinea, speedily and without many casualties. After all, the SWPA intelligence officer, Brigadier General Charles Willoughby, assured MacArthur on the eve of the operation that there was ‘little indication of an attempt to make a strong stand against the Allied advance.’ The battered Japanese forces were closely defending the airstrip at Buna and had established an embarkation point to the west of the base–all pointing to a general withdrawal by sea. MacArthur and the officers and men of the U.S. 32nd Infantry Division, the unit ordered to take Buna, therefore expected a quick victory. They were told–and they believed–that Buna would be a pushover, taken in a few days from the emperor’s understrength and already badly mauled forces. Unfortunately for the American soldiers, no one told that to the Japanese defenders.

National Archives

GIs and native porters cross the Sambago River during the advance toward Buna. For the untried American soldiers of the 32nd Division’s 126th Infantry Regiment, the grueling 40-day march to reach the battlefield was a supreme test of endurance.

Since mid-July 1942, Imperial Japanese army and naval troops had been fighting Australian militia and Regulars along the Kokoda Trail, which was little more than a dirt track running from Buna to Port Moresby–about 100 miles as the crow flies. However, on the ground any march along the trail became a twisting trek whose meandering course through jungle and across the towering Owen Stanley mountain range added at least another 30 miles to the distance. Although the Japanese army’s 144th Infantry Regiment had steadily driven the outnumbered Australians back toward Port Moresby, the Japanese now found themselves at the wrong end of a long supply line running through dense jungle, steep mountains, razorback precipices and gluelike mud that soon exhausted the strongest of men. Still, the tough Japanese infantrymen pushed forward nearly to the Imita Range, from where they could see distant searchlights probing the night sky above their objective, Port Moresby.

Rather than order the regiment to seize the objective, however, the Imperial General Headquarters (IGHQ) in Tokyo directed it to withdraw back to Buna. Faced with the desperate situation in the Solomons, where U.S. forces were going on the offensive, IGHQ had opted to consolidate its Papuan forces at Buna and put its main effort into retaking Guadalcanal. Orders in hand, the 144th grudgingly recrossed the Owen Stanleys, this time pursued by the Australian 7th Infantry Division, which had been rushed to the Pacific from North Africa in response to the Japanese advance.

While those intense seesaw battles raged, American Maj. Gen. Edwin F. Harding was preparing his untried 32nd Infantry Division for combat. Orders issued in late 1941 had originally slated the division for the European theater, and its artillery regiment had already been sent to Northern Ireland. With the war in the Pacific heating up, however, the rest of the division, awaiting shipment at Fort Devens, Mass., suddenly found itself en route to warmer climes. After arriving in Adelaide, Australia, on May 14, 1942, the 32nd had its training program disrupted by the cold, wet, wintry weather of southern Australia. Then, in mid-August, the division deployed north to Brisbane, where the warmer weather improved spirits and training conditions. Just about the time the 32nd had settled into its new camp, orders arrived to move north still again–this time to New Guinea.

At this early stage of the Pacific campaign, there was not enough shipping available to transport the division’s personnel and heavy equipment simultaneously. As a consequence, most of the unit’s heavy 81mm mortars and its regimental artillery were left in Australia. Likewise, there was little combat engineer support. The few platoons of engineers that were available had deployed without such basic equipment as axes, shovels and block and tackles, on the assumption that coastal barges would carry those items and their heavy construction equipment to Buna by sea. In addition, the Americans had none of the specialized clothing and equipment characteristic of later Pacific campaigns. They lacked insect repellent, and, despite the fact that they were entering a rain forest, had not been issued waterproof boxes or pouches. Once they were in the field, the men discovered that the constant tropical downpours fouled fuel for cooking, and their diet was reduced to unheated tinned rations eaten from unwashed mess kits. Still, American officers believed it would be a brief operation and the immediate deficiencies would soon be corrected by aerial and seaborne resupply.

The plan of attack called for a dual advance, one pincer advancing overland across the mountains to strike the Japanese from the west, the other swinging around the eastern tip of New Guinea by sea, landing about 25 miles southeast of Buna, at Oro Bay, and then advancing north along the coast to seize the Japanese base. The staff college aphorism that no plan survives the first contact with the enemy had tragic application at Buna. On the morning of November 16, 1942, a Japanese navy patrol plane reported enemy cargo ships entering the harbor at Oro Bay. Early that same afternoon, 30 Japanese land-based navy bombers struck the landing area. Lost along with the vessels during the attack were the division’s reserve ammunition, 81mm mortars, heavy machine guns and engineering equipment. If things were not going according to plan for the amphibious force, the overland prong of the American advance, which had begun on October 6, was degenerating into a nightmarish approach march that lasted more than 40 days in some of the most inhospitable terrain imaginable.

One of those who endured that march was Lieutenant Robert H. Odell, recently assigned to Company F, 2nd Battalion, 126th Infantry Regiment, 32nd Division. Odell found himself leading a small group of men to join the battalion, which was headed for Buna along a track running about 130 miles from New Guinea’s southern coast to its northern coast. The routine was to march for one hour and rest for 10 minutes, repeating that cycle day after day. The GIs trudged through 6-foot-high kunai grass under a blazing sun and into jungle so thick that the vegetation seemed to block out the air. Torrential rains quickly turned the track into a muddy bog, torpid streams into roaring torrents, and the humid, equatorial climate soon began to rot uniforms. ‘In New Guinea,’ an Australian officer told Odell, ‘it rains every day for nine months, and then the rainy season begins.’ Wet boots had to be walked dry, otherwise the leather would shrink, making them unwearable. Fleas, leeches, sand flies and mosquitoes bit every inch of exposed skin.

Trail discipline was dreadful, and the track was littered with discarded equipment, gas masks being among the first items of government-issued equipment to go. Odell’s party further lightened its load by tossing away mess kits. For the remainder of the campaign, a single spoon was the sum of the lieutenant’s eating utensils. Weapons–rifles, pistols and Browning Automatic Rifles (BARs)–shone, though, because they were cleaned and oiled daily for reasons of life and death. A blanket, shelter half and mosquito net were the other essentials.

In addition to the many discomforts, there were the mountains themselves. The Owen Stanleys rise to heights of 8,000 feet in places. Soldiers struggled up steep slopes and then stumbled down ravines, only to repeat the exhausting climb on another slope just a stone’s throw away. Four or five of those climbs and descents could take up an entire day. The men were supposed to receive airdropped supplies at established dropping grounds, but even if the deliveries arrived (which was never guaranteed), about half the boxes were generally damaged beyond recognition from being pushed out of the transport plane at low altitude without parachutes to retard their fall (medical supplies were the exception). After 70 miles and two weeks of plodding along winding trials, Odell’s group reached a dropping ground, only to find that it had just been abandoned. They managed to catch up to the rear elements of their regiment the next day, missing two meals. They were still 60 miles from Buna, but at least they were out of the mountains.

After Odell reported to regimental headquarters, the 2nd Battalion commander, Major Herbert M. Smith, gave him command of a platoon in Company F. ‘Here I was commanding a platoon for the first time in my life,’ Odell later recalled. The march continued, but now the men began to glimpse the detritus of the retreating enemy–signs lettered in Japanese, abandoned equipment and graves. Finally, in late November, Odell’s party arrived at the 2nd Battalion’s assembly area at Bofu. They were now within striking distance of Buna but still had little idea what they were up against. They soon learned, as Odell recorded, that ‘the hardships thus far encountered were nothing compared with the hell that was to come.’

Opposite the 126th Infantry, the Japanese had their backs to the sea. They defended a shallow perimeter less than a mile deep, whose 3 l/2-mile-long front line formed an arc with flanks anchored on the sea. To get at them, American forces would have to attack through swamps, some waist deep, and marshy ground, which denied units space to maneuver and slowed any forward movement to a crawl. To further complicate matters, the well-dug-in Japanese defenders covered every approach with interlocking bands of fire from mutually supporting, well-designed and expertly concealed strongpoints sited on high ground–or in this case dry ground.

Unable to dig deep shelters because of the 3-foot-deep water table, Japanese naval construction battalions had laid out hundreds of coconut log bunkers, most mutually supporting and organized in depth. Some large bunkers were even reinforced with steel beams, while a few steel-and-concrete pillboxes were sited near the now abandoned airstrip about a mile from Buna Mission, the site of a small compound of administrative buildings. Earthen blockhouses, capable of holding 20 or 30 men, had been built where terrain and tactical advantage permitted. Throughout the perimeter numerous smaller field fortifications were placed in terrain thick with trees or jungle vegetation. Given that firing slits were placed only a few feet above ground, and with the bunkers themselves rising only 6 to 8 feet above the surface and well-camouflaged by natural vegetation, the deadly Japanese emplacements were almost invisible until the traps inside spewed forth a stream of machine-gun or rifle fire at the unsuspecting Americans.

Unfamiliar with the state of Japanese defenses, Lt. Gen. Richard K. Sutherland, MacArthur’s chief of staff, glibly referred to these fortifications as ‘hasty field entrenchments.’ Although Sutherland did fly to the front for a conference on November 30 with the 32nd Division brass, the truth was that no senior officer from SWPA headquarters had ever seen the ground that they were now ordering Harding’s men to cross. Besides ignoring the restrictions that the formidable terrain placed on maneuver, and dismissing the imposing Japanese defenses, SWPA headquarters also grossly underestimated the enemy’s determination to hold Buna no matter what the cost.

It was true that the 144th Infantry was in bad shape. Bloodied, pushed back across the Owen Stanleys by the Australians and Americans, the surviving Japanese infantrymen sought refuge at Buna. A machine-gunner scribbled in his diary on November 17: ‘Our food is completely gone. We are eating tree bark and grass.’ Two days later, the same soldier recounted: ‘In other units there are men eating the flesh of dead Australians. There is nothing to eat.’ But contrary to MacArthur’s estimates, more than ‘a few sick Japs’ held Buna.

The Japanese may have been riddled with casualties and disease, but there were still about 5,500 fighting troops from various army and navy units around Buna. Facing the 126th Infantry alone was the Yokosuka 5th Special Naval Landing Force, about 400 tough naval infantrymen augmented by another 600 naval construction troops. Beginning on the evening of November 17, Japanese destroyers had carried 2,300 fresh troops from Rabaul, New Britain, to Buna. Among the reinforcements was the 3rd Battalion, 229th Infantry Regiment, 38th Division, a veteran outfit that had seen service in China, Hong Kong and Java. Furthermore, the Japanese commander, Maj. Gen. Tomitaro Horii, unlike his American counterpart, also had some artillery–75mm naval guns, 37mm anti-aircraft guns–and heavy machine guns. Nevertheless, on the 16th, General Willoughby had confidently asserted that the enemy’s situation at Buna was so desperate that even reinforcements could not save the day. Whether the enemy made a suicidal stand or fled into the jungle, he said, ‘the seizure of the Buna area is practically assured.’

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