James P. Duffy - War at the End of the World: Douglas MacArthur and the Forgotten Fight For New Guinea, 1942-1945

It was four years of some of the worst warfare in history. Fought in monsoon-soaked jungles, debilitating heat; impassable mountains; torrential rivers; animal-, insect-, and disease-infested swampsthe combat raged across what one American soldier called a green hell on earth.

The war for New Guinea is perhaps the least-known campaign of World War II, yet was one of the most crucial. Gaining control of New Guinea was the cornerstone of the Japanese war strategy. So badly did the Japanese want the island that they dramatically depleted their defense of their other strongholds by pulling tens of thousands of troops, dozens of warships, and hundreds of aircraft into the quagmire of New Guinea. The more resources they committed, the more important the campaign became to the Imperial General Staff.

For the Americans, victory in New Guinea was pivotal in breaking the Japanese war machine, the vital first step in a long march through the South and central Pacific to the Japanese Home Islands and the ultimate destruction of the Japanese Empire. The vast number of troops, ships, and warplanes that the Japanese pulled away from other fronts to commit to New Guinea contributed directly to Allied successes at places such as Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan and Iwo Jima. Japanese generals themselves, interrogated after the war, concluded that the New Guinea campaign had contributed a good deal to their losing the war.

This book is the story of the almost four-year campaign for control of New Guinea. From January 23, 1942, when the Japanese first landed on New Guinea, until the last holdouts in the mountain jungles surrendered on September 11, 1945, the fighting was virtually nonstop.

Emboldened by easy successes throughout the Pacific and Southeast Asia, the Japanese could not know that the worlds second-largest island would ultimately break them. New Guinea would halt their juggernaut, just as the attempt to take Moscow broke both Napoleon and Hitler. Similarities between the events in Russia and those in New Guinea are striking. After sweeping across Europe in a succession of victories, the Germans were stopped at the Moscow suburbs by a combination of heavy snows, subfreezing temperatures, difficult terrain, a breakdown in their supply system, and militia-type defenders who fought ferociously until regular army units could arrive from Siberia. In New Guinea, the Japanese were slowed by monsoons that turned tracks and paths into raging streams and difficult terrain that drastically reduced their ability to resupply units in the field, before being stopped by militia and volunteer units who inflicted severe losses on the invaders until American and Australian regular army troops could arrive.

Winning the war in New Guinea was of personal importance to Allied commander in chief General Douglas MacArthur. His avowed I shall return to the Philippines could be accomplished only after taking New Guinea. For MacArthur, there was no way around New Guinea. He could not bypass the island and leave tens of thousands of enemy troops in his rear. The road to Manila was through New Guinea.