ABSTRACT
Between March 1942 and the end of World War II, the tropical islands of New Guinea witnessed an intense armed struggle involving hundreds of thousands of troops and millions of tons of war materiel. The Japanese, who had first chosen to fight there, alone suffered more than 200,000 fatal casualties in a doomed attempt to consolidate their early conquests and strengthen the perimeter of their “Southern Resources Belt.”2 Although fighting continued in isolated areas, the main part of the campaign was over by August 1944, after American troops had landed at Sansapor in the Vogelkop Peninsula (the “head” of the New Guinea “bird”) and successfully completed General Douglas MacArthur’s northwestward drive along the New Guinea coast. From Sansapor, “They were prepared to push on toward the ultimate defeat of Japan.”3 While New Guinea was undoubtedly of great importance to those forces directly involved, in terms of the wider Allied war in the Pacific a case can also be made that the New Guinea campaign was peripheral to the outcome. After all, American resource superiority was such that the U.S. Army and Navy were eventually able to advance on Japan from multiple and overlapping axes. By late 1942, the Japanese in New Guinea were already effectively compartmentalized and could largely have been left to wither. In truth, MacArthur’s advance from his Southwest Pacific Area through New Guinea and on to the Philippines was defined as much by inter-service rivalry as it was by strategic rationale.4 Arguably, the re-conquest of New Guinea dispersed the Allied effort and was neither the most direct nor the most effective means to carry the war back to Tokyo. Nevertheless, it was of crucial importance to the U.S. alliance with Australia.
