The Battle for the Beachhead, New Guinea 1942–43
Big Sky Publishing, Newport NSW, 2023, 440 pp
Paperback ISBN: 9781923004702
Author: David W Cameron
Reviewed by: Phillip Bradley
The battle for Buna was one of the most important battles fought by Australia’s armed forces in the Second World War. With the US Army at a standstill in its first battle in Papua, it was the Australian infantrymen of the 18th Brigade and the tankers of the 2/6th Armoured Regiment who made the critical breakthrough that led to the capture of the Japanese beachhead. That victory was vital to General Douglas MacArthur’s South West Pacific Area command and its future. Buna is part of the bedrock on which the Australian–American alliance rests.
Buna was one of three Papuan beachheads held by the Japanese following their defeat along the Kokoda Track. The first of these, at Gona, fell to the Australian Army on 9 December 1942. The first American attack at Buna had taken place on 20 November 1942 but it would not be until the Australian 18th Brigade arrived, nearly a month later, that the stubborn Japanese defence began to crack. Buna fell on 2 January 1943. The third of the beachheads, at Sanananda, would not be captured until 22 January 1943.
There are many lessons to learn from the Papuan beachheads campaign. This fact is recognised by the regular battlefield studies conducted by current-serving Army personnel to understand the terrain, the climate, the people and the applicable battle strategy and tactics for operating therein. The current debate about the need for the direct fire capability of tanks and the protection of infantry fighting vehicles can easily be put to rest by a study of the beachhead battles. Rather than seeking control of mountainous jungle terrain similar to the Kokoda Track, it is more likely that any future conflict in the Pacific or in Asia will involve operations for the control of coastal airfields and anchorages like those established in wartime on Papua New Guinea’s northern beaches.
Therefore, it is encouraging to see another book on this campaign. Bloody Buna certainly covers the Buna campaign in great detail, the author seemingly determined to include everything published or digitised on the subject. The book is organised chronologically, starting with the initial US 32nd Division operations and moving on to the arrival of the Australian 18th Brigade and part of the 2/6th Armoured Regiment, which broke the stalemate and led to the fall of Buna. As the author rightly points out, postwar claims (particularly from General Robert Eichelberger) that Buna was an American victory need to be set right. This book will help do that. Brigadier General George Wootten and the infantrymen of his 18th Brigade, backed by Australian armour and artillery, deserve the main credit for the victory at Buna.
Bloody Buna is more a compilation of secondary sources than a readable narrative, and that makes it hard going. At times while reading it, I felt like I was wading through those crocodile-infested swamps that the author writes about. If the book had brought new material to the table, that effort may have been worthwhile, but the lack of primary sources is stark. Most of the book is simply a retelling of the Australian and American official histories, with Dudley McCarthy’s Australian history, South–West Pacific Area—First Year: Kokoda to Wau,[1] cited 338 times, and Samuel Milner’s US official history, Victory in Papua,[2] referenced on 483 occasions. Australian war diaries, including map references to absent maps, are quoted verbatim throughout the text, putting the onus on the reader to distil such a mass of unnecessary detail into a coherent form. That should be the author’s job.
Based on the bibliography and references, it is doubtful that the author has visited the Australian War Memorial (AWM) research centre for his research for this book, which would be an extraordinary omission. There is no reference to the AWM54[3] operational reports, the AWM55[4] Allied Translator and Interpreter Section (ATIS) interrogation and captured material files, the AWM67[5] records of the Official Historian, or the AWM private records collection, all of which contain significant material on Buna. The ABC battlefield interviews at the National Archives are also an important resource, as are the National Library and state library collections. In the USA the unit war diaries and operational reports at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), plus the extensive records in the MacArthur Archive[6] at Norfolk and the US Army Heritage and Education Centre[7] at Carlisle are indispensable for any worthwhile study of the US Army at Buna. The best materials in the book are some extracts from Samuel Milner’s records which the author acknowledges were obtained via another researcher, but this only highlights the paucity of such material throughout most of the book.
There were some peculiarities noted in the referencing, with inconsistencies across the 32 pages of footnotes. For example, a single sentence on page 13 has seven separate references in the footnotes. Although the author gives us as much detail as he can find, frustratingly there seem to be problems with attention to that detail, which could be the fault of the author or the copy editor; for example, on the back page are references to ‘Japanese bill boxes’ and a place called ‘New Guina’. Elsewhere, the author’s statement that the 39th and 2/14th battalions captured Gona would have had 2/16th and 2/27th Battalion veterans who I knew, and who were on the Gona perimeter on the final night, seething.
If the author has been to the Buna battlefield, that is not immediately recognisable from the text. The critical influence of the terrain on the campaign is never satisfactorily explained, and an appraisal of the Japanese defensive layout, much of which remains to this day, is lacking. It was not a continuous front but rather a series of interlocked defences covering those sectors where any attacks would be channelled by the terrain. The author’s decision to cover the campaign day by day, going back and forth in the narrative between the two distinct Buna fronts, fails to give the reader a proper opportunity to understand either of them. The reader also gets some Japanese accounts pitched in at the ends of chapters without being consolidated into a more coherent text. The failure of the author to consult the AWM55 ATIS translations of captured Japanese documents is especially apparent here.
With so many people now getting their military history from podcasts and YouTube videos rather than books, any serious writer of narrative military history has to engage the reader with well-researched primary sources, a flowing narrative and a digestible word count. Unfortunately, this book comes up short on all these attributes. It is at least twice as long as is necessary; the 57 chapters could have been consolidated into about 20. Nonetheless, if you know little of the Buna campaign and have the time to spare, Bloody Buna will give you a solid understanding of the battle. However, for those looking for something new, it is unfortunate that this volume lacks originality from the title onwards.
Endnotes
[1] Dudley McCarthy, Australia in the War of 1939–1945. Series One: Army. Volume V, South-West Pacific Area—First Year: Kokoda to Wau (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1959) at: https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C1417310.
[2] Samuel Milner, United States Army in World War II. The War in the Pacific: Victory in Papua (Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1957).
[3] ‘Written records, 1939–45 War’, AWM54, at: https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C1424597.
[4] ‘Allied Translator and Interpreter Section (ATIS) publications’, AWM55, at: https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C2132363.
[5] ‘Official History, 1939–45 War: Records of Gavin Long, General Editor’, AWM67, at: https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C1424604.
[6] See ‘Library & Archives’, MacArthur Memorial website, at: https://www.macarthurmemorial.org/31/Library-Archives.
[7] See ‘U.S. Army Heritage and Information Centre’, U.S. Army War College website, at: https://ahec.armywarcollege.edu/.