How Australian Tanks Broke the Buna Bunkers That Stopped an American Division for a Month 

For a month, an American infantry division attacked a line of coconut log bunkers on a beach in New Guinea and could not get through. They tried infantry. They tried Bren gun carriers as makeshift tanks. Those were destroyed inside 20 minutes. Their commanding general was sacked. Around 500 Americans were killed or wounded, and the bunkers were still there.

 On the 18th of December 1942, at 7:00 in the morning, an Australian battalion went at the same bunkers with seven light tanks. Within about an hour, they were standing on the Cape behind them. This is the story of the first tank battle in the Southwest Pacific. It is also the story of the day an American general handed his own men to an Australian brigadier, watched what the Australians did with them, and called it spectacular.

 It cost the Australians 171 men before lunch to understand what the Americans were up against for a month. You have to start with the bunkers. They were not trenches. They were not foxholes. They were not what MacArthur’s intelligence staff had told the 32nd Infantry Division they would find. MacArthur’s staff had described the Japanese positions at Buuna as hasty field entrenchments.

 That was wrong in every word. The Japanese had been on the coast at Buuna since July. They had 5 months. They used them. They built with what the place gave them. The whole strip of coast between Cape Endiadair and the government station was fringed with coconut palms. And the trunks of coconut palms are almost perfectly suited to the making of bunkers.

 They are long, they are straight, they are heavy, and when they are packed in earth and layered in courses, they will stop a rifle bullet. They will stop a browning machine gun burst. and they will absorb a mortar round without noticing. Each bunker was low to the ground. Some had roofs of three or four courses of logs packed between with sand and earth, sometimes with sheets of corrugated iron, then more earth, then a growing skin of grass and vine.

 From 10 yards away in that country, in the flat light under the palm canopy, you did not see them. You saw a low green hummuck. Then the hummuck fired at you. They were cited in mutual support. If you got past the first, the second was already tracking you. Some had firing slits looking down the air strips, along the beaches, across the gaps between the palms.

Others faced sideways so that infantry crawling toward the one in front were being hit from the flank by the one they had not seen. The swamps at the edges of the position closed off any wide flanking move. You could go straight in or you could not go at all. Rifles could not touch them.

 Grenades bounced off the roofs. The 70 mm and the two 5-pounder field guns the Americans and Australians had in the country could not at the range they were being used punched through the log and earth roofing. Bombing was tried. B25s came in over the palms and dropped their loads and went home and the bunkers went on firing. The men holding them were largely Japanese special naval landing force Yasuda’s men and later regular army under Yamagata.

They were dug in. They were fed. They had ammunition. And they had been told what would happen to them if they left the position. They were prepared to die where they stood. And most of them did. That was the target. That was what the 32nd Infantry Division had been ordered to break.

 There is one more thing that has to be said about Gona before anything else can be said about it. Because everything else that happened there was shaped by it. The place was one of the worst pieces of ground on which soldiers of the 20th century were ever ordered to fight. The coast was swamp and behind the swamp was more swamp and behind that was the mountain wall of the Owen Stanley’s over which most of these men had walked to get there. It rained. It rained most days.

And when it did not rain, the humidity did the same job as rain. The temperature did not fall. Men were wet when they lay down at night and wet when they got up in the morning and wet in between. Their boots rotted on their feet. Their skin rotted on their bones. The tropical ulcers on their legs and arms went deep and did not close.

 Under the swamp was malaria. Under the swamp was scrub typhus, which killed men in a week if it was not treated and could not always be treated even when it was. Under the swamp was dysentery which took men down as reliably as machine gun fire. In the American 32nd Division during November and December of 1942, sickness took men out of the line at a rate that would have been considered a battle casualty rate in any other campaign.

 The unofficial rule was that you did not present yourself for evacuation until your temperature was above 103° F. Men with malaria who were still under the limit stayed in their weapon pits and shivered. Rations were short. Air resupply was intermittent because the air strips at Doadura were still being built and because the weather closed in over the Owen standies on any given day without warning.

 What food did come forward was often bully beef and biscuit. Fresh food was almost nothing. Cigarettes came in when they came in. That was the state of the American infantry as they approached the coconut log line. They were not fresh. They had been in the country for weeks by mid- November and by mid December they were physically rung out.

 This is worth saying because the standard shorthand for what happened at Bouer has often been that the Americans failed and the Australians succeeded and left at that. It was not that simple on the ground. The Americans failed against a position that would have destroyed almost any troops sent in the way they were sent in the state they were in without armor.

 What the Australians brought on the 18th of December was not just courage. Courage was not what had been missing. What they brought was fresh legs, tanks, jungle experience, and a divisional level willingness to concentrate armor and infantry at the point of decision. That was what the American front had needed for a month and had not been given.

 Now the month 19th of November 1942, first American attack goes in. Two regiments of the 32nd division advance on Buuna from the south and the east. They run into the bunker line. They stop. 20th of November. MacArthur 400 m away in Port Moresby sends a message to the divisional commander, Major General Edwin Harding, ordering him to attack regardless of losses. 21st of November.

Second message from MacArthur. Take Buna today at all costs. Harding attacks again. The bunkers hold. 22nd of November. The attacks continue. There is no artillery in serious weight to open the position. Kenny MacArthur’s air commander has told MacArthur that tanks and artillery have no place in jungle warfare.

 This is a strange thing to have told him because it is not true and Kenny is an airman who has never fought on the ground in a jungle. But MacArthur has believed him. There are no tanks at the front. There are almost no heavy guns. The infantry go forward with rifles and grenades and mortars and the bunkers hold. 23rd of November. The second battalion of the 126th is thrown into another attack.

 It cannot get up to the wire. It cannot see the bunkers until it is in among them. It takes casualties from positions it did not know were there. 24th of November, the attacks continue. The bunkers hold. 25th of November. Lieutenant General Edmund Herring who commands the New Guinea force comes forward to look at the American front.

 He goes away and files a report. He writes that the American infantry has maintained a masterly inactivity at Buna. The Australian core commander Vy uses the same words about the same troops. He is not wrong, but what he is looking at is a division that has been in the wet for weeks, that has taken repeated failed attacks against positions its own intelligence has failed to describe accurately, that has no armor, that has no heavy artillery, and that has by now lost enough men that some rifle companies are half strength before the next attack begins. 26th of

November, the attacks continue. The bunkers hold. 30th of November, a battalion of the 126th Infantry finally punches a small hole in the Japanese line several hundred yards deep. It is the first genuine breakthrough. It cannot be widened. It cannot be exploited. By the end of the day, the bunkers on either side of the penetration are still holding, and the men who made the penetration are pinned in it.

 1st of December, MacArthur has run out of patience. He calls in the commander of the American First Corps, Major General Robert Eichelberger, and gives him an order that will follow Eichelberger for the rest of his life. Relieve Harding. Take Bunner or don’t come back alive. Eichelberger flies forward. 2nd of December. Eichelberger walks the American front.

 He writes what he sees. He writes that the rear areas are strong and the front line is weak. He writes that inspired leadership is lacking. He writes that the patrols are dazed by the swamp and by the jungle and that they are unwilling to go out and find the enemy that is killing them. He is not writing about cowards.

 He is writing about men who have been in the wet for weeks, who have not been briefed on what a bunker looks like from 10 yards away in this country, who have lost their officers to sniper fire, and who are being asked to do something for which they have not been trained and for which they have not been equipped.

 But he is writing what he sees. And what he sees is that they are not going forward. 3rd of December, five Australian Bren gun carriers arrive at Porlock Harbor, fied up by barge. They are little tracked open topped vehicles, lightly armored, designed to carry a Bren gunner and his loader across country.

 They are not tanks. They are not intended to be used as tanks. But there are no tanks and the American front needs armor. 5th of December, the Bren gun carriers are pushed into a three battalion attack up the coast into the Duropa plantation alongside the third battalion of the 128th Infantry. Their crews are Australian.

 One carrier is hit by a mortar round early and goes on fighting until its engine fails. The others catch on the fallen coconut logs that lie all through the plantation and belly out and cannot move. Snipers in the palmtops shoot down into the open tops of the carriers at close range, straight down into the crews.

 Japanese infantry crawl up and drop grenades over the sides. The carriers are silenced one after another. All five have been immobilized inside. 20 minutes the attack that they were leading fails. The bunkers hold. Also on the 5th of December, on another part of the front, a young American staff sergeant named Herman Botcher of German birth takes 18 men through a gap in the Japanese line and reaches the beach between Buuna village and Buuna mission.

He holds it, cuts the Japanese in two, and stays there for a week under counterattack. Eichelberger, when he hears of it, promotes Botcher on the spot from staff sergeant to captain. Botcher is one of the reasons Buuna Village eventually falls. But Botcher is one platoon in one gap. The main line of bunkers, the ones facing the airirst strips, is untouched by his action.

 6th of December, the attacks continue. The bunkers hold. 7th of December, the attacks continue. The bunkers hold. In Australia at Mil Bay, 700 m to the east down the coast of New Guinea, the Australian 18th Brigade is being warned to move. 9th of December, Gona, further up the coast, falls at last to the Australian 21st Brigade.

 The famous signal goes out. Goner’s gone, but Gona is not Buuna. Buuna is bigger, more heavily fortified, and still holding. 11th of December. On the night of the 11th into the 12th, the first four M3 Stewart light tanks of the Australian 26th Armored Regiment sail from Milm Bay for Oro Bay on a Dutch ferry called the Carich, escorted by an Australian corvette.

 The operation is called Carich after the ship. The tanks come off at Oro Bay, drive along the beach through the surf and the sand and the palm shadow and are hidden in the coconut groves out of sight of Japanese air. Bore December. The American 127th Regiment takes Buna village. That is a real gain. But the bunker line east of the Girua River along the airirst strips protecting the government station and covering the beach up to Cape End Diadeair is still holding.

 That line is what the Americans have not been able to break for a month. It is still there. On the same day, the second Carich run comes in. Four more Steuart tanks and the men of the 29th Battalion are landed at Oro Bay. The battalion marches up to the front. 15th of December, MacArthur, still 400 m away, is still not satisfied.

 He sends his chief of staff, Southerntherland, forward with written authority to relieve Eichelberger if Eichelberger has not produced results. Southerntherland goes forward, looks at the position, sees what Eichelberger is doing, decides not to use the authority, and flies home. 16th of December, the 29th is at the front line at Buuna.

Brigadier George Wooten, commanding the 18th Brigade, arrives with his headquarters. Wooten was born in New South Wales in 1913 years earlier than most of the officers in his brigade would have guessed to look at him. He is a Dunrrew graduate from the last war. A solicitor in civilian life.

 A very heavy man, physically imposing with a very quiet manner. By the middle of December 1942, he has done more serious infantry work than almost anyone else in Australian uniform. He commanded the 18th brigade at Tbrook in the siege against Raml. He commanded it at Mil Bay in August and September 1942 when the Japanese made their first opposed landing on Australian held soil on the muddy eastern tip of New Guinea and were driven off it inside 2 weeks.

 He knows what a bunker line looks like. He knows what a Japanese infantry position on a beach looks like. He knows what tanks can do to one and what tanks cannot do to one. The men under him know similar things. The 29th Battalion, the 210th Battalion, and the 212th Battalion, which make up the 18th, are second Australian Imperial Force units raised in 1940, sent to the Middle East, blooded in the Western Desert, then brought back to Australia after the outbreak of the Pacific War and sent up to Milm Bay. At Mil Bay in August, they

had fought at close quarters through Coconut Plantation and Swamp against Japanese Special Naval Landing Force troops. That was the first significant defeat of a Japanese ground force in the Pacific War. It had been fought in ground almost identical to what they were now looking at across their start line at Buuna.

 Coconut palms overhead, wet ground underfoot. An enemy holding low, cited to fire on the horizontal at close range, prepared to die in place. It was the same enemy in the same kind of country at the same range. The 29th had done this work before. That was what Eichelberger and Wooten had between them on the front line on the 16th of December.

 Fresh infantry that had done it, fresh armor that had never done it, and three American battalions that had been trying to do it for a month. Eichelberger makes a decision that is unusual for an American general. In December of 1942, he puts an American force under an Australian brigadier’s command, the American Warren Force. The units that have been attacking east of the Guerua for a month.

 First Battalion of the 126th, First Battalion of the 128th, Third Battalion of the 128th is placed under Wooten. Wooten now has his own 29th Battalion. Coming up behind them, the 210th Battalion, a squadron of Steuart tanks from the 26th Armored Regiment and three American Infantry Battalions. He also has the American and Australian artillery in support.

 17th of December. Wooten and his tank commanders and his infantry commanders spend the day working out how they will do it. They talk to each other. This sounds like a small thing. It is not a small thing. Tanks and infantry that have not worked together before, especially in ground like this, will kill each other very quickly if they do not agree in advance on what they are doing.

 The Stewarts have never gone into action against Japanese bunkers. The 29th has never gone into action behind tanks. They agree on signals. They agree on the pace. They agree on the order in which the bunkers are to be taken. The tanks will lead. Each tank will have a protective party of infantry close behind it.

 Watching the ground the tank cannot see. Watching for the grenadethrower creeping up on the tank’s blind quarter, watching for the sniper in the palmtops. The tanks will not go faster than the infantry can walk. The tanks will not go where the infantry cannot follow. They agree the artillery will fire a barrage first and lift and then the tanks will start.

 They agree the start line and they agree the time. 7:00 in the morning, 18th of December. That night, at last light, the 29th moves to its start line. The tanks are brought forward through the coconut groves in the dark. Engines muffled, no lights, guided in on foot by tape and by whispered command. The men in the battalion assemble in the wet under the palms. Some of them have been at Tbrook.

Some of them were at Mil Bay in September killing Japanese in the mud at airirstrip number three. They know what to expect. What they do not yet know is what a bunker line built through 5 months of preparation looks like from the front. There is very little sleep. Rifles are cleaned once and cleaned again. Grenades are checked.

 Bandeliers are settled on the shoulder so that they do not shift on the run. Section commanders go over the signals for the fifth time, the 10th time quietly, because in a coconut plantation, in the noise of an attack, a shouted order is not going to be heard. And hand signals with a tank crew that cannot see you well through its vision slits are the difference between the tank turning to fire on your bunker and the tank turning to fire on you.

 The barrage begins in the dark before dawn from the two first and two-fifth Australian field regiments and from the American guns. It is small by European standards. It would not have counted as a barrage at Elmagne or at any of the great artillery battles further west. It counts here. The shells go into the palm crowns and into the ground and into the bunker roofs and the palm crowns come down and the ground shakes and the bunker roofs which were designed exactly to take this weight of shell. Hold.

 The barrage is not there to kill the bunkers. Everyone on the start line knows the barrage will not kill the bunkers. The barrage is there to keep the heads of the men in the bunkers down for the moments before the tanks arrive so that the tanks are already on top of them before their firing slits are back at eye level. It lifts at 7:00.

 The tanks start. They come out of the coconut groves in line. Seven Stewarts are breast across the front of the battalion with an eighth in reserve behind them. They move at walking pace because the infantry are behind them and beside them and walking is what the infantry are doing. 12 tons of American light tank, 37 mm gun in the turret.

 Two Browning machine guns, a crew of four Australians in each. They come across the open ground at the eastern end of the new strip. To their right, 20 yards away, is the sea. In front of them is the Duroka plantation. The first bunker fires. The tank in front of it sloos sideways, turns its front to face the firing slit, and fires the 37 mm point blank into the slit.

 The infantry party behind the tank goes wide of it, one section left, one section right, and comes at the bunker from the flanks. They are inside the position before the men in the second row of bunkers have understood what has hit the first. The bunker’s crew is finished with a Thompson submachine gun through the entrance and grenades over the top.

 The second bunker fires. The next tank turns to it. Same procedure. 37 mm through the slit. Infantry flanking Thompson through the entrance. Grenades. The third bunker. The fourth. Some are harder than others. Some sit in the elbows of two others. So that as a tank turns to face one, the tank’s flank is exposed to another.

 Those tanks reverse out of the killing angle and let their infantry parties take the bunker on foot from dead ground from the flank from the rear. The procedure is the same. Fire down the slit if you have a slit to fire down. Otherwise, get to the entrance. Thompson through the entrance. Grenade after the burst. Move on to the next. By quarter 7, the 29th is 100 yards inside the Duropa plantation.

 There is no time to count bunkers. The infantry are moving through the palms, staying close to their tanks, sometimes almost touching the rear plate of the tank in front of them so that the sniper in the palmtop cannot get a clear shot down at them without exposing himself to the men behind. When the sniper does show himself, the tanks Browning machine gun swins up and cuts the palm crown to matchwood.

 Palm fronds and dead men come down together. The tanks and the infantry go through the plantation bunker by bunker. The ground is not made for armor. It is coconut plantation, which means the surface is a checker of shell holes filled with brown water, and of the stumps of palms cut down years earlier, and of the fallen trunks of palms cut down that morning by the barrage. The Stewarts weigh 12 tons.

 12 tons is not much for a tank, but on soft ground broken up by stumps and holes, it is enough to belly. A tank that goes over a stump the driver did not see may lift, come down on its belly, and lose the grip of its tracks. A tank that goes into a water- fil shell hole may not come out of it.

 The drivers pick their way through, feeling for firm ground. Taking a long line where a short one would have been quicker, because a short line into a bog would end the tank’s morning and the crews morning with it. Boged tanks were a serious problem later in the campaign further along the coast where several Stewarts were lost this way without a Japanese gun firing on them.

 On the 18th of December in the plantation, the drivers pick their line carefully and the ground mostly holds. Two of the Stewarts are knocked out during the morning. One takes a hit that jams its turret. One bellies on a hidden stump between the palms, throws a track, and sits there taking hits. Their crews get out and fight on foot, but the other five keep moving.

 The infantry keep moving with them. Behind them, out of sight in the trees, men of the 29th are going down. Officers first, the bunker crews have been trained to shoot at anyone who is giving orders. And in this country, an officer with a pistol at his hip is very visible against an infantryman with a rifle. Company commanders are hit.

 Platoon commanders are hit. The battalion is being cut, but it is still going forward. By 8:00, the leading tanks are through the plantation. In front of them is open ground and beyond it the low sand ridge of Cape Endiad and beyond that the sea in the wrong direction. They are behind the position that has held the Americans for a month. They are on the Cape.

 An hour. That is how long it takes. That was what they had come there to do. And they have done it. And it is now shortly after 8:00 in the morning. And there is a whole day ahead. Behind them. The American battalions of Warren Force are moving up on the west, cleaning out what the Australians have punched through and taking the flanks of the Europa position from the rear.

 Bunkers that have looked east and south into the American attacks for a month are now being taken from the north and the west. From behind their own overhead cover, from directions their firing slits were never cut to face. Some are silenced, some hold, some are burned out with the flamethrowers that have at last begun to work.

 By the end of that day, the 29th has lost 11 officers and 160 other ranks. 171 men, two Stewart tanks are out of action. A third is damaged. The battalion has advanced its right flank about 400 yd west of Cape Endeadair. The front now runs north from the eastern end of the new strip. The Australians consolidate on the 19th. They cannot do otherwise.

 A battalion that has lost 171 men in the first day of an attack cannot go on into the second at the same pace. Reinforcements come forward. A company of the 210th battalion comes up to strengthen the 29ths. On the 20th, the attack goes on. American infantry try to force the semi creek at the bridge and cannot get across.

 On the 21st, on the 22nd, the fighting shifts westward toward the old strip and the new strip toward the airfields themselves. On the 22nd, the 210th Battalion crosses the Simme Creek 500 yd west of the bridge and gets onto the strip. On the 24th, the four remaining Stewart tanks of the squadron are put into another attack. They run into a battery of Japanese anti-aircraft guns, firing over open sights, point blank, at armor that had been designed to fight other armor rather than to be shot at with 3-in high velocity shells at 50 yards. The

Stewart’s frontal armor is under an inch of steel. An anti-aircraft round designed to knock down a bomber at 10,000 ft, fired at 50 yards, goes through it like paper. All four Stewarts are knocked out inside a short time. Some of the tank crews get out, some do not. Those who do get out fight on foot. The infantry without armor ahead of them take the ground yard by yard at the pace grenades and Thompson’s submachine guns and mortars will allow which is slow.

This is the lesson taught the other way. On the 18th at 7:00 in the morning, armor and infantry moving together had broken a bunker line in an hour. On the 24th of December, armor that had been committed without the same combined care into ground where the Japanese had prepared anti-tank fire was destroyed in the same short window.

 It was not the tanks that were the answer. It was the tanks used correctly. The squadron is reinforced. On the 28th and 29th, further attacks are put in with fresh armor and with the 212th battalion, which has been brought up behind the 29th and the 210th. The position west of the new strip is broken. The airfields, which had been the reason for the whole beach head, are cleared of organized resistance.

 Individual pockets of Japanese hold out in bunkers that are already isolated from any relief and from any supply. Some of the bunkers are silenced with flamethrowers, which by now are working better than the first crude models that had frightened their own operators earlier in the campaign. Some are silenced with satchel charges pushed through the firing slits.

 Some are silenced by simply being sealed. The men inside them in some cases are still there when the sun comes up on the 1st of January. On the 1st of January 1943, the last organized Japanese position east of the Gerua is broken at Guropa Point. 11 tanks and two Australian battalions and the American battalions of the reorganized warrant force go through the position from the west.

Drive the last defenders east against the sea and finish the pocket by the following morning. On the 2nd of January, the Australian and American forces east of the river, meet the Americans of Urbana force who have been fighting on the western side. The Buna beach head is finished. By early January, Buuna is over.

 There is still Salinandanda to the west in the swamps. That is another story and it belongs to another script. But the position that stopped the 32nd Infantry Division for a month, the coconut log line from Cape End Diade back through Duropa Plantation to the air strips to the government station. That position has been broken.

Eichelberger wrote about the 18th of December afterwards. He was not sparing with his men. He had been hard on them in his reports, but he was not sparing in his praise either when he thought the praise had been earned. He wrote that the assault of the 18th of December had been spectacular and dramatic, and that it had been brave.

 He wrote that behind the tanks went the Australian veterans, tall and mustached and erect, with their Thompson submachine guns swinging in front of them, and that the concealed Japanese positions, which he said were even more formidable than the patrols had reported, burst into flame at close quarters.

 That is worth pausing on for a moment. He was an American three-star general. His division had been stopped on that ground for a month. He had sacked its commander at MacArthur’s order. He had been threatened with the sack himself. He had watched five Australian carriers destroyed in 20 minutes on the 5th of December in ground he was responsible for.

 And on the 18th of December at 7:00 in the morning, he had watched an Australian battalion he had placed under an Australian brigadier and reinforced with American infantry go through the same ground in an hour. He wrote it up as spectacular. He did not write it up as an embarrassment. That is not the reaction of a small man.

 Two things were learned at Buna on that morning and they were learned for the rest of the Pacific War. The first was that light tanks used at close quarters with infantry protecting their blind spots could break coconut log bunkers. The Stewart’s 37 mm gun was not much of a weapon by the standards of the European War.

 It would not have punched through the frontal plate of a German medium tank. But at 10 yards, fired straight into a firing slit of a bunker built out of coconut logs, it was more than enough. The bunker was designed to stop bullets from small arms. It was not designed to stop a tank round fired into the slit.

 The second harder lesson was that tanks alone would not do it. The four Stewarts lost on the 24th of December, knocked out by Japanese anti-aircraft guns firing over open sights at point blank range made that clear. Armor without infantry protection got killed. Infantry without armor got killed. It was the two together moving at the pace the infantry could walk that worked.

 It was a discipline of not going too fast, of not letting the tanks run away from their guardians, of not letting the infantry drop behind their armor. The Australian second sixth armored had never done it in action before. The Australian 29th had never done it in action before. They agreed on the 17th what they would do and they did it on the 18th and it worked.

 That was the lesson. American, Australian, British and New Zealand units would apply it in one form or another from that morning to the end of the Pacific War. The other thing about Buna, the thing that is easy to lose is what it cost. The Australian 18th Brigade in the 3 weeks it was on the Warren Front took heavier casualties than it had taken at Tbrook.

 Wooten’s brigade, three battalions of jungle experienced infantry, was not the same brigade at the end of December as it had been at the middle. Every rifle company had been cut. Officers had been cut worst of all because it was the officers the bunker crews had been trained to shoot at first and because it was the officers who had led from the front.

 The American 32nd Division at the end of the campaign had lost roughly twothirds of the effective strength it had started with, not all of it to Japanese fire. Malaria took as many men as bullets. Scrub Typhus took a good number more. Men were coming out of the line with temperatures over 103° F and only over that limit because the standing rule was that below 103 you did not present yourself for evacuation.

Whole rifle companies were reduced to 20 and 30 men. The Japanese defenders, of whom there were between 11 and 12,000 at the beach heads across the campaign, lost more than half killed. Their supply, once the Allied air and sea interdiction closed on the coast, ran out. Four separate destroyer convoys were sent from Rabal between late November and mid December to try to land reinforcements and supplies on the beach heads.

 Two were turned back by Allied air attack. two landed men in stores near the mouths of the Kumusi and Mambari rivers well up the coast from Buna from where they had to march down along the coast under air harassment and were mostly used up before they reached the fighting. By early December, some of the bunkers at Buuna were being held on rice already going bad.

 In the last diaries recovered from the bunkers after the position fell, men wrote that they had been waiting for reinforcements for 4 days that had not come and then that they were waiting only for death. One entry read that the man expected his body would be buried in New Guinea and become fertilizer for the soil of Buna.

Most of them died where they had been ordered to stand, which is what they had been ordered to do. Very few surrendered. Prisoners taken at Buuna and at the other two beach heads together numbered fewer than 300 out of a defending force of between 11 and 12,000. That is not a battle in the sense that a European front was a battle.

 It is closer to the reduction of a fortress. There was no maneuver in the deep sense. There was no envelopment on the operational scale. There was a beach and there were bunkers on it and the bunkers had to be broken one by one and the men in them had to be killed one by one because that was what they had been sent there to do and it was what they would go on doing until they were killed.

 This was the pattern that would recur on every island the Allies took across the Pacific for the next 2 and 1/2 years. Buuna is where the Allied armies first met it. Buuna is where they first worked out at cost how it had to be done. That was the price of the beach. Not just on the 18th of December, on the whole month before it, and on the two weeks after, the 29th battalion’s casualties on the morning of the 18th, 171 men, 11 officers, and 160 other ranks in something like an hour of close quarter fighting through coconut log bunkers are what an assault on that kind

of position costs when it works. Those numbers are not a failure. Those numbers are the price. The failure would have been the fourth week of trying it without tanks, without integration, without the disciplined pace and losing that many men and not being on the cape at the end of it. The Americans lost their men and were not on the Cape at the end of it.

 The Australians lost their men and were on the Cape at the end of it. The difference between those two sentences is what the 18th of December was about. None of this is to belittle the Americans of the 32nd Division. They were National Guard infantry from Michigan and Wisconsin sent to New Guinea because MacArthur had asked for a division and they were the division to hand.

 They had been trained for something else, then for something else again. Then thrown across the Owen Stanley Mountains without heavy weapons and asked to reduce a fortified beach head that MacArthur’s own intelligence staff had described to them as a line of hasty field entrenchments. That intelligence estimate was wrong.

 It was catastrophically wrong. What they were sent against was not what they had been told they were being sent against. Their divisional commander was under a direct order from MacArthur to attack regardless of losses. He did that. His men obeyed the orders they were given. They obeyed them for a month.

 They took their casualties and they did not run. What they did not have and what the Australians did have when they arrived was tanks. What they did not have was jungle experience. What they did not have was integration between armor and infantry because they had no armor. What they did not have was a divisional commander who was willing to tell MacArthur what the ground actually looked like until Eichelberger arrived and told him.

 What Eichelberger did in early December was to look at the position with his own eyes and see what it needed. What it needed was tanks. The tanks were already on their way. What it also needed was infantry that had done this kind of fighting before. That was the 18th brigade. And the 18th brigade was already being moved up.

 Eichelberger also did one other thing and it was harder than it sounds. He took an American force in the middle of a battle in which his own career was on the line and he handed it to an Australian brigadier. He did not fight the arrangement. He did not undercut it. He watched Wooten do the job and then he wrote it up as spectacular.

 That is not a common thing in coalition warfare. It is very rare. It was one of the things that made him respected by the Australians for the rest of the campaign and for the rest of the war. That is the story of the 18th of December 1942 at Buuna on the north coast of Papua. A month of American attacks on a coconut log bunker line that did not move.

 an hour of Australian tanks and Australian infantry at 7:00 in the morning. That put them on the Cape behind it. The month took roughly 500 American casualties. The hour took 171 Australian casualties. The month had the bunkers still standing at the end of it. The hour did not. The men in the bunkers were the same men in both cases.

 The bunkers were the same bunkers. The ground was the same ground. What was different was armor working with infantry at the pace infantry could walk with a plan agreed the day before executed at first light. That was the day the coconut log line at Buuna broke. That was the first tank battle in the Southwest Pacific.

 That was the morning an American general looked at what he had watched an Australian brigadier do with a mixed force of Australians and Americans and wrote afterwards that it had been a spectacular and dramatic assault and a brave one. He was right.