War at the End of the World by James P. Duffy

Author:James P. Duffy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-11-12T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

Pincers Around Lae

Although located on the island of New Britain, Rabaul had been the capital of all New Guinea until 1937, when it was partially buried under volcanic ash. Before settling on Port Moresby, the Australian government considered making Lae, the second-largest town on the main island, the new capital. With a well-developed port on the Huon Gulf near the mouth of the Markham River, Lae had grown up during the gold rush of the 1920s and 1930s, serving as a supply depot for the thousands of miners and prospectors working in the nearby mountains and valleys.1

Japanese troops first landed at Lae in March 1942 and worked tirelessly to build a well-fortified base that, when fully garrisoned, the Allies would find extremely difficult to penetrate. MacArthur’s deceptive attacks on Salamaua, however, fooled General Adachi. He bled off troops from the more important base at Lae and sent them south in numbers that were more or less easily devoured by the Australians and Americans. By the time of the Allied invasion in early September, Lae’s defense relied on fewer than ten thousand combat and noncombat solidiers—too small a force to withstand MacArthur’s powerful drive against the base from three directions at once, with nearly thirty thousand troops.

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While the forces around Salamaua were in a holding action, generals MacArthur and Blamey devised a two-pronged pincer attack on Lae. The Australian 9th Division was to be brought up the coast from Milne Bay aboard ships of Admiral Barbey’s amphibious force, set to assault the beaches near Lae, while the Australian 7th Division would move along a road running through the Owen Stanley Range toward Nadzab, twenty miles northwest of Lae. There, a small airport, idle for more than one year, offered the opportunity, once improved and expanded, to locate fighters and bombers even closer to the enemy.

The importance of Nadzab lay not just in its airfield but also in its location in the Markham Valley, nestled between two vitally important waterways, the Markham and Ramu Rivers. The Markham runs for 110 miles southeast from its source in the mountains to Lae on the Huon Gulf. The Ramu flows northwest for nearly four hundred miles before emptying near the Hansa Bay between Madang and Wewak, two future targets for the Allies. These rivers form the huge Markham Valley, which divides the Huon Peninsula from the rest of New Guinea and offered the Allies a route to the big Japanese bases at Madang and Wewak.

Despite the planning, the 7th Division’s role in the mission was soon forced to change. When MacArthur learned that their road through the Owen Stanleys—a route being hacked by Allied troops through thick jungle, across rivers, and up and down mountains—was proceeding too slowly to meet his timetable, he turned to an idea suggested by the Air Force’s General Whitehead: parachute troops.

Never before had Allied paratroopers made a combat jump into enemy-held territory in the Pacific. The previous year another airborne unit, the 1st Marine Parachute Battalion, fought at Guadalcanal, but as infantry, with no tactical jumps.

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