Three Generals Were Shot at His Side. MacArthur Was 300 Miles Away.-ZZ

On the afternoon of November 30th, 1942, Lieutenant General Robert Eichelberger arrived at Port Moresby, New Guinea.

He did not know why.

MacArthur’s headquarters was a house called Government House on the western shore of Port Moresby.

Before Eichelberger could even settle in, he was summoned to the veranda.

MacArthur was pacing.

He did not stop when Eichelberger arrived.

He kept walking and he talked.

Bob, I want you to take Buuna or don’t come back alive.

Then he pointed at Eichelberger’s chief of staff, Brigadier General Clovis Buyers, who was standing nearby.

And that goes for your chief of staff, too.

The meeting was over.

Eichelberger walked out of that building knowing this.

Somewhere on the northern coast of New Guinea, American soldiers had been attacking a Japanese position called Buuna for 13 days straight.

They had gained almost nothing.

MacArthur’s entire Pacific campaign was stalling, and the man MacArthur had just ordered to fix it had never commanded troops in actual combat before.

No tanks, no heavy artillery, no reinforcements on the way.

just a general, a chief of staff, and a Japanese garrison that had already stopped every American attack for two solid weeks.

Why did Eichelberger succeed where everyone before him had failed? And why, when it was all over, did Douglas MacArthur look him in the eye and say, “Bob, those were great days when you and I were fighting at Buuna, weren’t they?” That question has an answer and it tells you everything about what really happened in that jungle.

In the fall of 1942, American newspapers were printing photographs of General Douglas MacArthur in New Guinea with captions describing him as personally leading troops into battle.

Eichelberger read those articles in Australia where he was training soldiers.

He did not comment publicly, but in a letter to his wife, he referred to MacArthur as the great hero.

He wrote those two words without further explanation.

He did not need to explain them.

MacArthur was running his Pacific command from Port Moresby, hundreds of miles behind the front lines.

He had not visited the fighting since the campaign began.

His information about the battle came from reports written by staff officers who also had not visited the front lines.

What made this matter was that Eichelberger had tried to warn him months earlier when the plan to attack Buuna was being formed.

Eichelberger had told MacArthur directly.

The 32nd Infantry Division was not ready.

These were National Guard soldiers from Michigan and Wisconsin.

good men, but they had been training on the same curriculum used back in the United States.

Nobody had taught them jungle warfare.

Nobody had prepared them for the diseases, the terrain, or the specific tactics that Japanese defenders used in the Pacific.

Eichelberger asked to send his own core staff officers with the division to help.

MacArthur told him to stay in Australia and keep training.

Six weeks later, with the attack collapsing and MacArthur’s career on the line, the phone call came.

To understand what Eichelberger was being sent into, you need to understand what Buuna was.

Buuna was a small coastal village on the northern shore of Papua New Guinea.

And it mattered for one reason.

Whoever controlled it controlled the only usable coastline in that part of the island.

MacArthur needed it as a base to push further up the Pacific.

The Japanese had been there since July, and they had used every one of those months to build.

The ground at Buuna was swamp, black water, and mud that swallowed a man’s boot to the ankle with every step.

The jungle overhead was so thick that sunlight barely reached the ground.

The temperature sat near 100° every day, and the rain came into sheets that turned the swamp into a lake.

Malaria was not a risk at Buna.

It was a certainty.

Every man who spent more than a week there came down with it.

The Japanese had constructed hundreds of bunkers from coconut palm logs stacked so thick that a rifle bullet could not penetrate them.

The bunkers were built low to the ground and camouflaged so carefully that attacking soldiers often could not see them until they were close enough to be shot through the loophole.

The defenders connected everything with crawl trenches so they could shift men between positions without ever showing themselves above ground.

They had months to prepare.

The Americans arrived expecting a short fight.

They found something that had been built specifically to kill them.

The 32nd Division had been attacking Buuna since November 16th.

They had made almost no progress.

The casualty numbers were climbing.

MacArthur’s reports described the problem as a failure of leadership and fighting spirit.

His chief of staff, General Sutherland, had visited the front and reported that the officers were not aggressive enough and the men lacked the will to fight.

MacArthur summoned Eichelberger.

He told him to relieve the division commander, Major General Edwin Harding, a man who had been Eichelberger’s classmate at West Point.

He told him to remove any officer who would not fight.

If necessary, MacArthur said, put sergeants in charge of battalions and corporals in charge of companies.

Then came the final instruction.

Eichelberger flew toward Buna the next morning.

Buyers sat beside him.

Neither man spoke very much.

Eichelberger landed at Doadura airfield on December 2nd, 1942.

He did not go to the command post.

He went to the front.

The front at Buuna was not a line you could point to on a map.

It was a series of positions in the swamp connected by footpaths that disappeared underwater between rainstorms.

You did not walk to the front at Buuna.

You waited.

You ducked under branches.

You moved slowly and quietly because the Japanese positions were close enough that a loud conversation could get you shot from a bunker you had not yet seen.

What he saw did not match the reports MacArthur had been receiving.

The soldiers of the 32nd Division were not cowards.

They were not sherking.

They were men who had been living in swamps for weeks, wearing uniforms that had rotted off their bodies in the tropical heat and rain.

Their rifles had rusted shut from the moisture.

Many of them were shaking with malaria.

Some had not eaten a real meal in more than a week.

When soldiers at the front saw a three-star general walking toward them through the swamp, some of them did not believe what they were seeing.

Generals did not come to Buuna, not to the actual front.

Staff officers came occasionally, looked around from a distance, wrote their reports, and left.

This man was different.

He was not looking from a distance.

He was standing next to them in the same water, asking them what was stopping them and listening to what they said.

One lieutenant told him directly, “Infantry could not advance past the Japanese pillboxes.

Not without support, not without something that could hit the bunkers hard enough to crack them open.

The men were not refusing to fight.

They were dying, trying to fight a position that their weapons could not destroy.

” Eichelberger listened.

He did not argue.

He went looking for the reason.

The reason became clear within hours.

At Doadura airfield, a few miles behind the front, there were crates stacked in long rows.

Food, ammunition, medicine, supplies that had been flown in and simply left there because no one had organized a system to move them forward to the men who needed them.

The soldiers at the front were starving and sick while the supplies they needed sat on a runway.

This was not a failure of courage.

It was a failure of management.

Eichelberger stopped all offensive operations.

He spent the rest of December 2nd reorganizing the supply chain.

On December 3rd, for the first time in nearly 2 weeks, the men of the 32nd Division ate a hot meal.

He also relieved Harding, which was the hardest part.

The two men had graduated West Point together in 1909, the same class as George Patton.

They had known each other for 33 years.

Eichelberger sat with him that evening, and gave him the news.

Harding accepted it without argument.

Waldron replaced him as division commander.

Then Eichelberger did something that experienced officers do not generally recommend.

He put on all three of his silver stars and walked to the front.

He knew that Japanese snipers were specifically trained to target officers and that rank insignia made officers easier to identify.

He wore the stars anyway.

He wanted his soldiers to see exactly who was standing next to them.

Some of his officers called him Prussian behind his back.

They said he was ruthless and cold.

The men of the 32nd division named the division cemetery after him.

They called it Eichelberger Square.

He kept walking to the front.

On December 5th at 10:30 in the morning, Eichelberger launched a full attack on both sections of the Buuna perimeter.

He was at the front to watch it personally.

Standing with him that morning were Waldron, several colonels, his aid, Captain Edwards, and other staff officers.

The attack went in.

It was stopped by the same Japanese bunkers that had stopped every attack before it.

Then the snipers found them.

Waldron went down first.

A Japanese snipers bullet hit him in the shoulder.

He was evacuated.

Eichelberger stood where he was.

Captain Edwards was wounded the same morning.

Eichelberger stood where he was.

Buyers took over from Waldron.

The same buyers who had been standing on that ver 11 days earlier when MacArthur pointed at him and said, “That goes for your chief of staff, too.

” Buyers moved to the front to command the troops in the field.

For 11 more days the battle ground on, slow, brutal, bunker by bunker.

Those 11 days had a rhythm to them that anyone who was not there would find hard to imagine.

Each morning began with an attack.

Each attack reached the same bunkers, each time the same result.

Men going down in the swamp in front of positions they could not see clearly enough to hit.

The Japanese used ammunition with flashless powder, so there was no muzzle flash to aim at.

You heard the shot and then someone near you fell.

That was all the information you got.

At night the rain came.

The water in the trenches rose.

Men slept in positions half submerged.

Rifles held above the waterline to keep them dry enough to fire in the morning.

Mosquitoes were constant.

The smell of the jungle at Buuna, the rot and the mud and the standing water was something the survivors described decades later as the first thing they thought of when anyone mentioned New Guinea.

Not the fighting, the smell.

Eichelberger was at the front for all of it.

He kept moving between positions, talking to soldiers, watching what was working and what was not.

MacArthur’s telegrams kept arriving, “Faster, move faster.

” On December 16th, Buyers was shot.

He continued observing the battle and encouraging his soldiers until he had to be carried out.

He was later awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

His citation noted that he had been within 50 yards of the attacking troops when he was wounded.

Eichelberger was now the only American general officer at Buna.

Three generals had been shot.

Mcnder before Eichelberger arrived, Waldron on December 5th, Buyers on December 16th.

None of them had been more than 75 m from Japanese lines when they were hit.

MacArthur was in Port Moresby, 300 m away.

Every day, telegrams arrived from MacArthur’s headquarters.

The messages were variations on the same theme.

Faster, move faster.

Time is critical.

Eichelberger read each one at the front in the same jungle where his generals kept getting shot, and he sent back reports on what was actually happening.

The Japanese bunkers still could not be penetrated by rifle fire.

Tanks were coming, but had not arrived yet.

Until they did, every forward movement meant crawling through swamps under fire from positions that were invisible until you were close enough to touch them.

The man responsible for the defense of Buuna was not an army officer.

His name was Captain Yoshitatsu Yasuda, and he belonged to the Imperial Japanese Navy.

His nickname among his own men was Army Colonel Yasuda because he was considered the finest ground combat specialist in the entire Navy.

Tokyo had assigned him to Buna because they knew it would be the hardest position to hold.

Yasuda had spent months building his defenses before the Americans arrived.

The bunkers were constructed from coconut palm logs, thick trunks stacked in layers with earth packed over them, and jungle vegetation used as camouflage.

A network of crawl trenches connected each position to the others.

When American aircraft came over or artillery fired, the defenders pulled back into the bunkers.

When the bombardment stopped, they moved back to their firing positions between the bunkers.

An Australian officer who inspected captured positions afterward wrote that the loopholes were completely hidden from outside until you were standing directly in front of them.

The camouflage was that good.

Rifle fire did not penetrate.

Light artillery did not penetrate.

The logs were too thick, too wet, too dense.

In the first two weeks of the battle, Yasuda had watched every American attack come apart against his perimeter.

Sometimes he ordered his men to let American patrols pass through their positions before opening fire from behind.

The Americans would advance, thinking the way was clear, and then the firing would start from all directions at once.

But inside those bunkers, the situation was different from what the early victories suggested.

Each man was rationed 15 rifle rounds per day.

That was not an abundance.

That was careful management of a supply that was running out.

Many of Yasuda’s soldiers had stopped using their own weapons and were firing captured Australian and American rifles because the ammunition for those weapons was easier to salvage from the dead.

Four Japanese supply convoys had tried to reach Buna by sea.

American aircraft turned back two of them completely.

A third managed to land troops at a different location along the coast, not at Buna.

A fourth was driven off before unloading.

The men inside the perimeter had been told help was coming.

It was not coming.

They could not bury their dead.

The perimeter was too small, the ground too soft, the fighting too constant.

Some soldiers slept next to men who had died beside them in the same foxhole.

The water in the trenches was kneedeep and getting deeper with each rain.

On December 9th, the garrison at Gona fell.

Yasuda could see the direction of smoke rising from where Gona had been.

He knew what it meant.

The men who survived Gona swam into the ocean to escape the Australians.

The Australians shot them in the water, their shapes visible in the phosphorescent surf.

Yasuda sent a farewell telegram to Rabul, not a request for reinforcement, not a report on the tactical situation, a farewell.

He was telling his commanders that he understood what was coming and that he intended to remain.

The orders from Tokyo had not changed.

Hold to the last man.

No retreat, no surrender.

At Guirua, a few miles away, Colonel Yokoyama received his own reports on the deteriorating situation.

He commanded the Girua garrison, the last position that remained after Gona.

He had no reliable communication with Yasuda.

He could watch the pressure building on the Buuna perimeter from a distance.

And in the first week of December, Yokoyama noticed something had changed on the American side.

The attacks were not the same as before.

Not the scattered, exhausted rushes that had been easy to break up.

There was organization now, sustained pressure from multiple directions, men who kept coming back after being driven back without the long pauses that had broken up the earlier attacks.

Yokoyama did not know what had changed.

He did not know about the hot meals, the reorganized supply lines, the general in three silver stars walking among his troops.

He did not know the name Robert Eichelberger.

He never would.

On the afternoon of December 5th, while Waldron was being evacuated with a sniper’s bullet in his shoulder and Buyers was taking command and Eichelberger was standing at the front watching it all, a staff sergeant named Herman Botcher did something that changed the battle.

Botcher had been born in Germany.

He had come to the United States, become a citizen, and joined the army.

He was commanding a platoon in the 126th Infantry Regiment.

On December 5th, instead of attacking west toward the Japanese bunkers like every other unit, he turned north.

He led 12 men through a gap in the Japanese perimeter that nobody had known existed.

They pushed through jungle, through mud, through fire from positions on both sides.

They reached the beach.

They were now between Buuna Village and Buuna Mission, the two main Japanese strong points.

The perimeter that had held for 3 weeks was cut in two.

Eichelberger later wrote about that moment in his memoirs.

He said the breakthrough was possibly lucky, but that holding the position afterward was accomplished by intelligence and sheer guts.

Botcher’s 12 men held what became known as Botcher’s corner against counterattacks from both directions through the night and into the following days.

Eichelberger promoted Botcher from staff sergeant to captain on the spot.

No paperwork waiting, no approval from higher command.

He simply told Botcher he was a captain and that was that.

The Japanese launched repeated counterattacks against Botcher’s corner in the days that followed.

Botcher’s 12 men held everyone.

Botcher himself was wounded twice during those days.

The first time a bullet hit his right hand.

He tied it off and kept going.

The second wound took him out of the line temporarily.

By the time he returned, the battle had shifted because the tanks had finally arrived.

On December 18th, Australian tanks moved up from the coast to the Warren front on the eastern side of the perimeter.

They were Stewart light tanks, not heavy armor, but against coconut log bunkers.

They were something the Japanese had no answer for.

The tanks drove directly at positions that had held for weeks.

Infantry following close behind.

The logs that had stopped every rifle bullet for a month splintered under the tank guns.

The defenders who had survived artillery, air strikes, and infantry assaults for 30 days found themselves facing something they had not prepared for.

The Warren front broke open.

Australian troops poured through.

Within days, they had captured the plantation ground on the eastern edge of the perimeter.

On December 14th, American soldiers walked into Buuna village without firing a shot.

The last h 100 defenders had slipped out three nights earlier in the dark through the swamp heading toward Gerua.

There was no one left to fight.

On the night they left, the village was silent for the first time since November 16th.

Buuna mission fell on January 2nd, 1943.

The entire Papua campaign ended on January 22nd.

From the original Japanese force of nearly 2,000 men who had defended Buuna, six were taken prisoner.

After Buuna fell, Eichelberger’s name appeared in newspapers across America.

The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a headline, “General Eichelberger helps erase defeat of Baton.

” Papers in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles carried similar stories.

Overnight, the man who had never commanded troops in combat before December 2nd, became a nationally recognized figure.

MacArthur summoned him to a private meeting.

The atmosphere was not warm.

MacArthur made it clear, without saying so directly, that the publicity was a problem.

He suggested, without stating it as an order, that a man who allowed his name to appear in newspapers that prominently might find his career taking an unexpected turn, perhaps back to the rank of colonel, perhaps back to the United States.

Eichelberger understood the message.

He wrote to an old friend in the War Department’s public relations office and told him, “I would rather have you slip a rattlesnake in my pocket than to have you give me any publicity.

” Then MacArthur issued his official communique on the Papua campaign.

One sentence stood out above all others.

There was no necessity to hurry the attack because the time element in this case was of little importance.

Eichelberger read those words.

He was the man who had received the order to take Buuna or don’t come back alive.

He was the man who had stood at the front while three generals were shot around him.

He was the man who had named a division cemetery after himself and kept walking toward the Japanese lines.

I was feeling decidedly hurt, he wrote later.

He said nothing publicly.

He went on to fight 52 more amphibious campaigns across the Pacific.

Every time MacArthur needed results somewhere that mattered, he called Eichelberger, Byak Lee, Mindanao, the Philippines.

52 times MacArthur picked up the phone and told him to go somewhere difficult and fix a situation that had gone wrong.

Eichelberger went every time.

There is one more thing that was never made public while the war was being fought.

After Buuna, Brigadier General Clovis Buyers, the same man who had been shot at Buuna and carried out of the jungle on a stretcher, submitted a formal recommendation that Robert Eichelberger be awarded the Medal of Honor for his conduct at Buuna.

He documented everything.

The frontline command, the three silver stars worn deliberately in sniper range, the reorganization that turned a broken division into a fighting force in 72 hours.

MacArthur disapproved the nomination.

No explanation was recorded.

The nomination was disapproved and that was the end of it.

Years after the war ended, the two men met again.

MacArthur looked at Eichelberger and smiled.

Bob, he said, “Those were great days when you and I were fighting at Buuna, weren’t they?” Then he laughed.

Eichelberger recorded that he heard the remark.

He did not record that he responded to it.

He knew what the laugh meant.

It meant we both understand what really happened in that jungle and we both understand that only one version of it will ever be told publicly and that version does not belong to you.

Eichelberger published his memoir in 1950.

He called it our jungle road to Tokyo.

He wrote about Buuna honestly in the careful way that a man writes when he knows that being too honest will cost him something.

He wrote that buuna was bought at a substantial price in death, wounds, disease, despair, and human suffering.

He wrote that it was in retrospect a nightmare.

What he did not write, because he did not need to, was what that nightmare had cost the men who fought it, or what it had cost the man who led them out of it, standing in the jungle in three silver stars, reading MacArthur’s telegrams about the importance of moving faster, while the generals around him got shot one by one.

The 32nd Infantry Division called their cemetery Eichelberger Square.

They did not name it after MacArthur.

If your father, grandfather, or someone you loved served in the Pacific, in the Army or the Marines, in the jungle or at sea, leave their name in the comments below.

This story is about men like them.