World War II Day by Day

West New Britain, Papua New Guinea • December 26, 1943

Following the successful conclusion of the U.S. and Australian Buna-Gona Cam­paign on New Guinea’s south­eastern penin­sula in late-Janu­ary 1943, the Allies moved west along the island’s north shore. Gen. Douglas Mac­Arthur, Supreme Com­mander of Allied Forces in the South­west Pacific Area, used Buna (see map, lower center) as the staging base for attacks up the north coast after the exhausted and battle-depleted Allied troops had recovered and were recon­sti­tuted. During these six months of recovery, as each side rein­forced and replaced ear­lier losses on New Guinea, the Japa­nese still retained the stra­te­gic initi­a­tive on the island, and they still held the prepon­derant air, naval, and ground strength in the South­west Pacific, despite being forced to aban­don their Solo­mon Islands forward base on Guadalcanal in February 1943.

The stalemate in the Southwest Pacific was broken at the beginning of Septem­ber 1943 by a joint opera­tion launched by Mac­Arthur and U.S. Rear Admiral Daniel E. Barbey, who headed up what even­tually became the VII Amphib­ious Force—the ships that carried the ground forces, their equip­ment, and supplies. The first coor­di­nated air­borne and amphib­ious assault in the Pacific occurred at Lae in the Huon Gulf (center in map). Finsch­hafen north­west of Lae, a Japa­nese strong­point that guarded the western side of the 60 mile-wide Vitiaz and Dam­pier Straits sepa­rating New Guinea and New Britain, proved a tougher nut to crack. In the mean­time, Mac­Arthur’s choice to lead his new Alamo Force, the U.S. Sixth Army’s Lt. Gen. Walter Krueger, was training his growing num­ber of divi­sions to fight as amphib­ious task forces just as the U.S. was gaining over­whelming numer­i­cal supe­riority in air and naval strength in the South­west and South Pacific areas. The U.S. also now held the stra­tegic and tac­ti­cal initi­a­tive and could select the dates and locations for forth­coming oper­a­tions that would most advance the Allied cause.

In December 1943 MacArthur ordered amphib­ious assaults across the Vitiaz and Dam­pier Straits. In the pre­dawn hours of Decem­ber 15 the U.S. Army’s 112th Cavalry Regi­mental Combat Team, with help from a U.S. Marine amphib­ious tractor bat­talion and Allied naval and air units, seized Arawe, a Japa­nese air and PT (patrol torpedo boat) base on the south­western coast of New Britain garri­soned by 120 soldiers and sailors. And on this date, Decem­ber 26, 1943, the 1st Marine Divi­sion, vete­rans of the Guadal­canal Cam­paign (August 7, 1942, to Febru­ary 9, 1943), landed at full strength at Cape Gloucester on the island’s northwestern tip.

Aided by naval salvos from American and Austra­lian warships and by aerial attacks and smoke screens from the two nations’ air forces, the 1st Marine Division’s landing at Cape Gloucester proved success­ful. Four days later, against only light enemy oppo­si­tion, the Marines secured the air­fields that were the ini­tial objec­tive of the oper­a­tion. Heavy fighting tapered off after the first two weeks of 1944. Towards the end of Febru­ary the Japa­nese began to leave their defen­sive posi­tions for the rela­tive safety of Rabaul on the oppo­site end of the island. When U.S. rein­force­ments arrived on New Britain, the 112th Cav­alry Regi­ment deployed to New Guinea in early June. The 1st Marine Divi­sion returned to the Solo­mons, to the Russell Islands 30 miles north­west of their Gua­dal­canal stomping grounds, for rest and refitting before being dispatched to Peleliu in mid-September 1944. Amer­i­can casual­ties (killed and wounded) during the Arawe and Cape Glouces­ter oper­a­tions, which ended April 22, 1944, numbered 1,863, with 4 missing. Japa­nese dead amounted to just over 1,300, with an unknown number of wounded and missing.

Battle of Cape Gloucester, December 26, 1943, to April 22, 1944

Above: Map of Eastern New Guinea and Japanese-occupied New Britain. The Japa­nese bastion of Rabaul appears in capital letters on the north­eastern tip of the Taiwan-size island of New Britain and Cape Glouces­ter on the north­western tip of New Britain. Arawe appears on the south­western coast. The U.S. Army’s offi­cial history con­cluded that, in retro­spect, the New Britain landings at Arawe (Oper­a­tion Direc­tor) and Cape Glouces­ter (Oper­a­tion Back­hander) were not essen­tial to the reduc­tion of Rabaul as intended. (Actu­ally Rabaul, with its esti­mated 100,000-plus ground troops, was neu­tralized for the remain­der of the war by the Allies’ pro­longed aerial attacks and by the “island hopping” stra­tegy adopted in late 1943 to iso­late and by­pass enemy strong­points, letting them literally “wither on the vine” as U.S. forces advanced.) The landings and occu­pa­tion of Western New Britain simply seem to have tied down good men who could have been engaged to greater advantage elsewhere.

Left: Men and cargo of the 1st Marine Division, veterans of the cam­paign on Guadal­canal, are pictured aboard a landing craft for the invasion of Cape Glouces­ter, Decem­ber 26, 1943. Despite the narrow beaches and the rough surf that buffeted their landing craft, 13,000 Marines and an excess of 7,500 tons of supplies came ashore in a single day.

Right: The initial landings in the Cape Gloucester area had as their ulti­mate objec­tive the iso­la­tion of the huge Japa­nese air and naval base at Rabaul, 300 miles to the east on the other side of the island. The plan called for the Allies to secure Cape Glouces­ter’s beach­heads and capture the dual air­fields at Tuluvu to assist in the planned attacks on Rabaul. The Marines took the air­fields on Decem­ber 30, 1943, after slogging for three days through neck-deep swamps (marked “Damp Flats” on their maps), where men were actually killed by sodden branches falling from rotting trees. Impeded by heavy rains, Army avia­tion engi­neers worked around the clock to make Air­field No. 2, the larger of the Tuluvu air­strips, oper­a­tional, a task that took them until the end of January 1944. In the end the two air­strips proved of marginal value to the Allies.

Above: Embattled Marines at times could see no more than a few feet ahead of them owing to the thick jungle (left frame). Retreating at first into the jungle of Cape Glouces­ter, Japa­nese soldiers finally gathered strength and counter­attacked their Marine pur­suers. The photo in the right frame shows Marines in the forest’s dark­ness fending off a Japa­nese attack using an M1917 Browning machine gun. Marines needed three weeks of hand-to-hand com­bat to clear more than 10,000 enemy troops from the imme­diate area around Cape Glouces­ter. The Cape Glouces­ter base effectively bottled up the 135,000 Japa­nese defenders at Rabaul, because the dense, jungle-swathed mountain ridges of the interior were impassable.

Left: Atrocious weather in the “green inferno” of New Britain proved to be the main prob­lem for Marines and soldiers at Cape Glouces­ter. Mon­soon deluges—as much as 16 inches of rain fell in a day—flooded fox­holes and made life miser­able in the base camp. Wet uni­forms never really dried, and the men suffered contin­ually from fungus infec­tions, the so-called jungle rot, which readily developed into open sores. Mosquito-borne malaria threatened the health of the men, who also had to con­tend with other insects—“little black ants, little red ants, big red ants” on an island where “even the caterpillars bite.”

Right: Movement on foot or by vehicle through the island’s swamp, jungles, and tall, coarse kunai grass verged on the impos­sible, espe­cially where mon­soon rains had flooded the land or turned the volcanic soil into slippery mud.

“Rings Around Rabaul.” Victory at Sea Episode Makes Excellent Use of Japanese and American Footage