8 Bells Lecture | Alan Rems: World War II's Great Forgotten Battlegrounds

John I appreciate that kind introduction and I very much appreciate seeing this wonderful audience today while I talk about a very favorite subject of mine James Jones the author of From Here to Eternity was a veteran of the war in the South Pacific in the 1970s he wrote about those battlegrounds and he called them places that people in the United States mostly never heard of today I'm going to be talking about one of those Forgotten battlegrounds Bougainville and I'll be showing how many importance and stirring events occur there that are every bit as much worthy of being remembered just the way we remember Guadalcanal and it's particularly appropriate that I do talk about Bougainville because that is the subject matter on my book cover and we know who this marine is his name is corporal William Cochran of Flint Michigan and he appears here fighting on d-day at Bougainville with the 3rd Marine Raider battalion now to understand how Bougainville fits in with the rest of the Pacific War we have to go back to the early days of the war when command in the Pacific is divided as between Joan Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz Nimitz will then subdivide his command and he appoints Admiral Robert Gormley took command in the South Pacific however some months later during a crisis at Guadalcanal he loses confidence that Gormley has the right fighting spirit to get through the crisis and he appoints instead someone who is certainly not deficient in that capacity and this of course is Admiral William F Halsey known as bull Halsey to the press to his biographer the great professor Potter Halsey was a swashbuckler of the old tradition unlike many swashbucklers part little boy who never grew up and now now we have this is the same area that we have in here I'm going to point out just for orientation here down here at the lower left you've got a little bit of Australia that's speaking up just a little little smidgen right there here you have the lower half of the island of New Guinea there's about as much of it that continues upward from there and if you will continuous straight line you'd come to the Philippine Islands in that direction out here across the Solomon sea you have the chain the Solomon Islands the island of Guadalcanal here at the southeast end extending up here's the island of New Georgia their figures in our story here is Bougainville the largest of the island chain you get the island of New Britain here now what's very important about it is the great Japanese of Base of Rabaul sitting right here at the eastern end up here you'll have the Admiralty Island which figure a bit in our story later and if you go out to go due north you'll come to the caroline islands and the great japanese base of truck now here's how the situation stands in January of 1943 MacArthur's forces here at Papua have cleared this area of the Japanese after a very difficult six-month battle and pretty much at the same time and also after a difficult here for your battle halls these forces here on Guadalcanal have forced the Japanese to evacuate the island and so after a year of retreats and holding actions the Allies are now in a position to go on to the offensive magatha is objective all along is going to be to get himself back to the Philippines but he can as long as Japanese power is extending here through the South Pacific with all the power radiating out of the central point of Rabaul magatha conceives a plan that is called cartwheel a very ambitious plan we're in roughly over an eight month period thirteen separate operations will be conducted some by his own forces and here I should say that his own forces wouldn't be principally Australian at this stage and somebody calls ease and they are going to obtain a string of air bases from which they can try to pound down Rabaul it is thought at that stage of things that would be ultimately necessary to go into a ball and actually capture the place unfortunately that last step does not prove necessary now we're going to in this course this session talk about what's happening on halsy side hall zis first step is going to be here moving into new georgia and his offensive as well as Maga tha's kicks off at exactly the same point the mid-year 1943 June 30th 1943 our duel offensive gets underway and while New Georgia is being fought over planning is already underway for that next leap up in the song is chained to Bougainville and that brings us the situation right here this is Hall Z's headquarters on August 15th 1943 incidentally this photo was unknown until I discovered in the Marine Corps archives and what is happening here Halsey is holding an order appointing a new commander for the first marine amphibious Corps I'll abbreviate it as I Mac Y Mac is the organization that is going to be conducting the invasion of Bougainville the outgoing commander is at our left that is Archer Vandergrift who made a splendid name for himself as commander of the 1st marine division on Guadalcanal and in consequence has been slated to become the new marine commandant comes the 1st of the year between this point and then he is going to be going off on a tour of Pacific bases the incoming commander is seated right here his name is Charles Barrett Barrett is a comes from a distinguished Virginia family has a fine reputation in the Marine Corps though he has no combat experience but that's true of many a marine at this point in the war he is the man who had formulated amphibious Corps doctrine for the Marines and most recently he is the man who trained the 3rd Marine Division and they are the principal component of iMac that is going to be going in there to invade Bougainville well as I said this is on August Oh just before we leave here I should make mention of this gentleman who will pop up in our story just a little later this is general Harman not to be confused with the general Harman who is in Europe he is a commander of the army and Army Air Forces in the South Pacific it's an illustrative command not a tactical command this is on August 15 1943 the planning is going forward for Bougainville until October the 8th when something very dramatic occurs barrett falls from the window of his headquarters building at Nemea he's killed there's a hard court of inquiry and they reached the conclusion that he died accidentally I got intrigued in this case eight years ago I found letters in the marine corps archives that had never been seen before that conclusively proved that Halsey had decided to fire him had that it had not yet been announced he took his own life and it was decided that they would hold a phony-baloney court of inquiry with everybody knowing what result that they wanted they did not want the truth to out the facts are indeed remarkable I devote my entire 10 chapter 10 to this including substantial excerpts for the most amazing letters that you will ever see these are letters that being exchanged some are from Vandegrift himself writing to the Marine Corps commandant and I think it had been supposed to all along that note these letters would never see the light of day so people are not talking in militaries they are being very off the in their comments so if you do read my book and read chapter 10 do not miss the notes at the end because I packed in as much as I could between the text and the notes now Vandegrift is still out in the Pacific making us to our preparatory becoming the marine commandant so he is hurriedly called back to stay around long enough to execute the invasion and here is our target this is the island of Bougainville and the area that we have selected to invade is where you see the little arrow here on the west coast we pick that area for a few different reasons number one we know that there are very few Japanese there and indeed when we get there we'll only find that there is a single Japanese company the trails into that area are very primitive from both of the top end and the bottom end of the heart of the island where most of the Japanese are concentrated and therefore we know we're going to get a nice long respite before the Japanese can arrive and strength and attack the perimeter and of course we want to build an airstrip and the soil is found conducive to that sort of thing so these are the factors that make that particular area desirable and then we get certain refinements of the plan and here is the Treasury Isles Treasury Islands are very close by and what makes them attractive to us is that it can be serve as a good forward supply base if we can get our foot in there even before we're going into Bougainville and get ourselves established there we can avert a supply crisis like we ran into our Guadalcanal when it seemed for a while is if we might not even be able to hold on to the place that would be very convenient now the downside of our doing that is the fact that the way it is aligned with the west coast of Bougainville would be tipping our hands to the Japanese that we have designs are moving against the west coast and therefore we get the idea for a raid here at the northern end of the island of choise ile we just got to go in there to try to just shoe things up a little try to convey the impression that we have a real invasion that's going on there to give the Japanese the idea that we're clearing the path to move against the east side of Bougainville here we have a scene that holds these headquarters and he's enjoying a cool brew with the New Zealand Brigadier who is going to be leading something like 3500 New Zealanders against something like under 300 Japanese and needless to say we do take the Treasuries quite easily I love photographs like this that don't get too much play elsewhere into the greatest extent possible in my book you will find if there's any question I would go with rarity of versus a picture that's better so in some cases they are very well-known pictures some cases I couldn't avoid that and next we have here a very youthful looking lieutenant colonel who's going to grow up to be a marine legend victor croolik he conducts a brilliant raid on choisir destroys a Japanese barge base destroys lusts of their supplies and we leave the Japanese guessing as to where our blow is going to fall and here we are on invasion day the aircraft is hovering over the principal invasion beaches as well as that island in the foreground that is Parata Island and that specifically is where the marine who's on my book jacket is doing his fighting on invasion day here we have a lower level photograph of pretty much the same scene however we know that this picture must date from at least several weeks later because right here you can see the airstrip at cater Akina that we construct once we are in there the incidentally this is the hot spot during invasion day because you can see across it you can have a crossfire Japanese being here in Japanese being here and our boats are are entering the area in-between so that is where the fighting is happening principally on invasion day here the troops are going down the cargo nets into the Higgins boats the Higgins boat circling here we have the men hitting the beach and here they are on the beach getting ready to move inland it's a very successful invasion day just according to plan we plan to bring in two regiments of the third Marine Division and we succeed in doing that we get most of their supplies out we incur under 200 casualties including 88 killed now these are very small numbers compared to some of the numbers that we come accustomed to in other battles but this is a matter of fact it's a little on the high side for landings in the South Pacific we have large land masses we can pretty much pick our shots and most of the time we are going in even without with either no casualties or just a handful of casualties but before the end of the day all our ships clear out of the harbour because where does come down that the Japanese at Rabaul have set down a force of four cruisers to attack our beachhead there to lighten and two heavy cruisers opposing them is admiral tip Merrill Merrill has four cruisers but all our cruisers are light cruisers so we're somewhat outgunned by the Japanese however we do have one ace up our sleeve we have very good radar the Japanese do have radar but is so poor that Japanese Admiral said that he never even really made use of it while the battle is called the Battle of Empress Augusta Bay and here we see what that action looked like from the flagship of Admiral Merrill the big task that he had was to try to stay out of the way of that heavier Japanese gunfire and he executed a brilliant figure-eight with his ships very difficult maneuver to to execute and that prevents our ships from taking any that much damage how ever our gunnery is not at all good that day it's been estimated by a similarly Morrison that out of the we 4600 shells that were fired off by our four cruisers that day they made something like 20 hits that's not a very good batting average however the main thing is that we do keep the Japanese out of Empress Augusta Bay the Japanese just the same way as the Americans during a night action it's very easy to go astray you see a ship out there and there's a flash and suddenly you don't see the ship anymore and it's easy to jump to conclusions so that you're sending ships down it's not really happening well it's happening on both sides but fortunately the Japanese Admiral decides to these done a good enough day's work breaks off the action and to that extent alone we can consider this a American victory because the Japanese are not pressing on to bombard our beachheads has happened to us at Guadalcanal well comes the dawn and there's no rest for the weary because Admiral Merrill's Playa ships are being beset by an enormous swarm of Japanese planes like we haven't seen in longest one and they managed to fight them off and they would have probably been a further onslaught except for what we see here and here's a Rabaul Harbor and what you're seeing is these are planes that are coming in from MacArthur site until this point MacArthur's Air Force under general Kenny has been responsible for the regular rains over a ball and they're going in on this day and just the way Merrill you know found himself in a wasp nest that is exactly what is happening to Kenny's planes they take a very high number of casualties I think was 16 or 18 planes Kenny referred to it as the hardest fought battle of his fifth Air Force during the war and this is what has happened the Japanese before they knew when Bougainville was going to be invaded had made a decision let's beef up our air forces around Rabaul we're not going to need our carrier planes for a while they send 173 of their carrier planes with some of their best it's to Rabaul to buttress their forces and this is the reason why we run into such heavy opposition this will turn out in the longer run to be a rotten rotten decision on the part of the Japanese because those planes are sitting out on those air strips they are today they're going to be suffering tremendous attrition and by the time the Japanese realize the extent that they have shot themselves in the foot then the foot and they have pulled those planes back to their carriers the damage has been done and just three weeks after Bougainville invasion Admiral Nimitz and the Central Pacific inaugurates the Central Pacific offensive with the invasion of Tarawa and the Gilberts the Japanese fleet is a no situation to contest the the situation they're going to need a long rebuilding period and by the time they do rebuild you get the Battle of the Philippine Sea and what's known as the film as the Marianas turkey shoot when the this new generation of Japanese planes and pilots is nothing at all like what they had before so they've done tremendous damage to themselves and this is a very interesting event you know the ramification up in the Central Pacific to what occurred down here the decimation of the Japanese aircraft down here when you read about the war in general it's very easy to lose sight of the fact that these are war fronts really interlocked and you do have you know ramifications that are happening one place that from events that are happening elsewhere and we'll see a similar thing happening just a little later on in the discussion and now we will come to what falls he called his most desperate emergency in his entire 20 months in the South Pacific the Japanese at truc have sent down a force of seven heavy cruisers to attack our beachhead in any shipping that they might encounter Halsey has no firepower that can match that what he does have however by two carriers Saratoga and Princeton commanded by the most aggressive of our carrier Admiral Ted Sherman we know the Japanese are going to have to put in at Rabaul to refuel and that will give us a window of opportunity now we can't expect to catch them completely flat-footed they do have radar they do have very formidable defenses around the harbor and they have all those those planes that are still there including as I say including those carrier planes it's a very very desperate gamble Halsey has written that he's thought that he might lose both of the air groups as well as the ships but he goes has little choice except to go ahead with a gamble and here we have the scene at the left is what it looks like from the aircraft of commander Henry Caldwell who is coordinating the entire attack from an aircraft high above the harbor he's got a couple of women with him and he's getting on the mic and he's making sure that his fliers down below are going after those heavy cruisers because you see you see lots of shipping down there but we don't want to waste our shots against anything other than those heavy cruises if we have a cruiser target to give you a sense of what it looks like from a dive bomber up at the right you have the scene from one of the dive bombers coming in on the heavy cruiser chicama the raid will take something like 25 minutes we lose incredibly only about 10 aircraft the Japanese take rather heavy hits for the heavy cruisers a badly damaged to sustain lighter damage and only one of them comes through pretty much unscathed so it's a tremendous victory and we have thwarted the Japanese there's no way that they can - on their mission after that here we have the planes returning to Saratoga and we'll saw with the picture on the right that is a commander Henry Caldwell hopping out of his aircraft you see the plane is tilted over he's coming on one wheel Plus no flaps no Ella run no radio down below you see what they are doing they are removing the body of the photographer Japanese saw those planes out there they knew that they were acting as to controlling the event and the Japanese you know really went after him and after his wingman miraculously they all made it back full holes but they all didn't make it back to the carriers in the picture at the left there is the charred gunner from the same aircraft his name is Kenneth Bratton we know that Bratton is going to make a full recovery from his wounds because later in the war there's a wonderful photograph that shows Bratton back in uniform and looking at a blow-up of this now iconic photo at the what the upper left we have a very happy carrier Admiral Ted Sherman and he is being apprised of the results of the raid by his very colorfully nicknamed fighter commander jumpin Joe Clifton who as a matter of fact took down one of the Japanese planes during that action Halsey flies up to meet the carrier when it pulls out of the war zone and there again you have jumpin Joe with a very happy Admiral Halsey who's whose bets certainly paid off here and now we've been through two great naval actions and now we are going to have another one and it's going to involve someone who is not yet famous but certainly will be later and right here on the bridge of the destroyer Charles Osborne is arleigh Burke Burke at this stage of the war is in command of destroyers they their nickname is a little beavers this little beaver a Signia and those who remember the old Red Ryder comic-strip will remember little beavers a little in employ here's a nice painting showing didn't work yes here are some of the little beavers in action and they're great day is very auspicious ly going to occur on Thanksgiving Day of 1943 up till this point the Japanese destroyer men have pretty much ruled the waves when it comes to clashes between their forces and all forces on a in Moscow that is going to end abruptly on this day Paul Burke is going to be leading four destroyers against four Japanese destroyers will send three of the enemy destroyers to the bottom without loss this is the Battle of Cape st. George's the late classic that I think is still taught about in the Naval Academy so now we have now had three great naval victories all during the same month of November 1943 well meanwhile what's been happening on shore and it's this mud and lots of it we discover that there is this a vast swamp that lies just immediately beyond the beaches we did not know it until we got there and that you know it makes you bet makes you wonder but is one reason why there weren't there many Japanese there because I think they they said we was going to want to go to land here well all in all it was not the most pleasant place I I quote one marine who is in all sorts of nasty places during the war and he said just for sheer living conditions there was nothing as bad as as Bougainville Bougainville was sheer hell and here we have beginning up at the upper left here is Admiral Halsey who's flown to Bougainville about ten days after the landings at the upper left you you can see I don't know if how well you can see it he has a shirt off to show off that nice anchor tattoo that goes back to his days at the Naval Academy in the picture at the right here he is talking with thee his commanders and here is the man who has now taken over iMac that is Roy Geiger Geiger is very unusual in that up to this point he has been an airman he was the one who commanded our air forces on Guadalcanal and then after afterwards he had been whisked off to Washington he was sitting behind a desk but he's just a natural fighter and it was just intuitive correctly that boy he could make a great ground commander too and he makes a truly great ground commander by the end of the war on Okinawa he takes over the 10th army when the army general is killed and that is the highest command that a Marine has ever had and probably ever will have wonderful wonderful commander who should be better known in our pantheon and then down here at the bottom here is Geiger again with Halsey and they're watching the this marching past of army troops we are have the Ohio National Guard 37th division that has come to Bougainville to operate along with the Marines because the idea is we are only going to keep the Marines in there long enough to do their business and then get out we're not going to keep them in too long the way we do it did at Guadalcanal and really wore them down to the bottom here is a typical Japanese position and it's not that easy to see but here you can see the bar of a of a machine gun peeking out of one of their positions and in the other picture you have one such position that is being taken out with flamethrower and we acquire some very valuable forfeited allies we have had war dogs before but never on such an organized basis as on Bougainville these are mostly Doberman Pinschers some German Shepherds one German Shepherd appropriately named Caesar acquitted himself very courageously in battle was wounded got a commendation from the marine commandant and a promotion from PFC which all the dogs were to start with - sergeant and I don't know I don't know how he spends his extra pay but that was his business and here we have some very tired looking Marines that came back from one of the many engagements and in my book I go through all these individual battles that they are fighting what they're doing is they're carving out a secure perimeter to enclose both the turkey airstrip that we saw earlier plus two additional air strips that we have decided that we are going to construct there and one of our last battles there this is here we are in the middle of December of 43 and one of the less battles was known as the Battle of hellzapoppin Ridge and coincidentally it was fought just around the time when we had to finish that that Cape Tokina the first of the air strips and we were actually able to land planes there and have them go off on one of the one of the shortest bombing missions of World War two two to attack Japanese just almost a stone's throw away and they did materially help to win the position well we have now reached the point where the Marines have pretty much accomplished everything that they were interested in doing on Bougainville so we pull them out and the army will take over all our and the air campaign can now begin here we have some pilots running out to their Corsairs and we use the Corsairs among other things they use them both as escorts but also we do fighter sweeps as well over the Japanese air strips we try to lower them up in our planes can usually knock down a heck of a lot more than they can knock down of ours so that's all part of their missions and the best-known of our course air pilots is of course this fellow Pappy Boyington hopping in his aircraft and here he is with with some of his men Boyington is shot down in january in 1943 not 44 over a ball Japanese submarine fishes him out of the harbor he's whisked off to Japan we have no idea what's happened to him because the Japanese don't disclose that he's a prisoner we award him the Medal of Honor during that time and then comes the end of the war and he is released from captivity and he reports truthfully or otherwise we have no way knowing for sure that he down to Japanese planes during that last mission so the the air campaign is getting underway in earnest in December of 44 it starts off very slowly at first we just bring lots of holes in the Japanese air strips and they are filling them in as fast as we could hold them well we get into January we are seeing some more substantial results and we get into February and we can really see the light at the end of the tunnel but we're still getting some very very you know strong opposition the last big air battle over a balls fought on February the 19th of 1944 and then abruptly the air war in the South Pacific essentially ends because you get another one of these seismic effects such as what I had described earlier in this case it was happening up in the Central Pacific at truck in the Caroline Islands Admiral Marc mature has conducted on February 17th the devastating carrier attack on the Japanese base he destroys lots of the Japanese shipping and even more important that he destroys a tremendous number of aircraft including many though had been destined to be brought back down to the South Pacific and they were just waiting for somebody to ferry them down and the Japanese have now had to make a decision they cannot hold everywhere and they realize it they're going to have to give up the South Pacific they've already decided certain areas are more more crucial for them than others so something has to give and it's the South Pacific that's giving here they pull out their aircraft or almost all their aircraft from the South Pacific and then on top of all that and for this I'll have to use the other map as I said less big air battle was on February the 19th on the last day of the month and that we have leap year there so actually we're talking on February 29th on February 29th right here in the Admiralty Islands MacArthur's forces that have worked their way up here move here into the Admiralty Islands and MacArthur says that we'll put the cork in the bottle you can kind of see what he meant by it this forces have come up here hoses have come up here we have been encircling them and now we have covered the the top part now is that the end of the war in the South Pacific absolutely not it's another year and a half of the war still to go the war on South Pacific will go on for another year and a half that is usually the point where most writers will break off they lose interest in the South Pacific but I find lots and lots of interesting things are happening from here out as I said the Army has taken over and here we have the army High Command there's Harmon behind the wheel of the Jeep you may remember him in that photo sitting next between Halsey and Barrett Harmon commanding both the Army and the Army Air Forces in the South Pacific next to him is Nathan twining who commanded the 13th Air Force until during the Battle of Bougainville he moves to Europe takes over air forces there and some of you may remember twining as being a chief of staff in the years after World War two the gentleman in the middle of the photo in the helmet that is Oscar Griswald Griswald commands the 14th Army Corps and it's his troops that are now manning the perimeter on Bougainville and if you're interested in knowing who the 4th gentleman in the Jeep is he is one of our great unsung heroes of World War 2 here he's a colonel later on he becomes general Breen who has responsibility for coordinating all supply in the South Pacific a horrendously difficult task which does not get the credit it should and here we have the two division commanders under Griswold at the left this is general beat ler commanding the 37th division Ohio National Guard beat ler is very unusual he is the only Army National Guard general who is allowed to retain command of his division throughout the entire course of the war and for their that reason alone you know that he must be a very able individual the other is general Hodge Hodge is commanding the Americal division that has now joined the 37th division on the perimeter he will rise to become a corps commander later on during the Philippine campaign and in the later after war years he'll actually move up to become an army commander to very able men and they will be facing this gentleman this is general Hyakutake he was the commander on Guadalcanal who was forced off forced to evacuate by Admiral Halsey and he would like nothing better to do then have the Americans as a matter of fact he is so confident of success he has his maps mark to show where the Americans are going to surrender to him what he manages to do is really quite remarkable given how primitive the jungle trails are and the fact that he has at the very end no air or Navy support he manages the greatest concentration of Japanese infantry and artillery that will fight at a single place in the South Pacific and you can leave to the Japanese to never do something with ease if it could be done with difficulty they are very good at coming up with the most complex of plans and for their initial blow they have selected this point on all perimeters known as Hill 700 and you can see from the steepness of that hill that is one hell of a hill but the way the thirty seventh division historian wrote about it was hard to hit an enemy that was hiding almost literally under the front lines you couldn't depress your guns enough to be able to hit them while they were gathering it at the base of the hill well during one dark and stormy night they come up the hill on all fours which is about the only way you can you could do it with their rifles slung across their backs they you by sheer weight of numbers they break into the front lines of the thirty seventh division and then those Ohioans have the fight of their lives on their hands now most of the battle is taking place on the thirty seventh division front except here this is not actually on the perimeter this is a hill in advance of the perimeter it's called Hill 260 and what makes it special is that enormous bang entry that you see at the left from which you can just about see everywhere the Japanese seize it early on in the action seize the hell early in the action and they hold on to Italy we try every which way to try to win it back and we don't succeed some Wegg refer to that tree referring to the blood that was expended for it as the most expensive tree in the world well that tree does not look like it's worth very much comes the end of the battle and you can see the bare remnants that are left there again that's on the Americal front but all the other action is happening by the america on the okay here on the 37th division front here are the troops in action and here you see something that you'll notice it went too far something that you do not see very often here is a division commander John beat ler with rifle and hand who's gotten right into the battle and he wrote a letter to his wife saying all the fun that he had in a battle that he had you know I shot people from some so many yards away and all and his commanders were not at all thrilled about having their division general acting like a second lieutenant and they told him that they gave him Silver Star anyway well we are we are now very late in the battle the Japanese have been losing very many men and fruitless attacks because we are along most of our front very very well defended because we know sooner or later the Japanese we're going to be arriving and we rebuff them and then at the very end of the action we own loose a tremendous artillery barrage and they go limping away and they will never again be a serious offensive threat on Bougainville and now for the next many months here we were in March of 44 when you get right all the way down into December it's hardly anything happening there we own as much of Bougainville as we're interested in owning the Japanese are certainly in not in a position to attack us anymore they are can content to just cultivate their gardens and try to stay alive till the end of the war and during this period you get a experiment and these are African American troops from the 93rd division now if the Army was left to its own devices it probably would have not try this experiment to see if these troops might be used in combat pressure had come down from the White House was an election year and it was what they decide to do is they would take the troops company by company out into the jungle and acclimate them and from there they will it was somebody referred to it it was like a klieg lighted atmosphere they really had it under the microscope to see how they would perform well the experiment went on until what was called the company Kelley affair it was one company that just came up against the handful of Japanese and they pretty much folded up shooting at each other and it was a great mess uh there were lots of reports full-scale investigation and consequence it was the experiment was closed down however there were other African American troops on Bougainville who we see right here these are been in the 20 fund the 25th Infantry Regiment and they acquitted themselves very nicely their situations were very different and what it really boils down to I think is that there was only one solution to the problem and that is an integrated army and that had a wait till the end of the war the situation is very complex and you get too many simplistic books that are written about the situation during the war we're very lucky that a very able african-american historian named Ulysses Lee wrote one of the volumes in the official army history called the employment of Negro troops and he went into the whole worldwide situation with tremendous objectivity and it's makes wonderful reading still after these many years and if you own a computer you own the book because every one of our official histories the army official history the Marine official history the Air Corps official history not Navy but those are all have all been digitized and they're all available on your computers and now we will be going into what I consider most tragic phase of the entire war in the South Pacific and I say this because warfare is bad enough but sometimes it's something you got to do this time we don't have to do it and as far as I'm concerned the villain of our story is right here this is Australian general Blaney very controversial figure for our many scores he is clearly a very able individual as far as military talents it's also a very brutal aspect to him and also some rather unsavory aspects he was the chief of the British General Staff said about him that one morning he looks entirely drink-sodden as if he spent the most debauched night is the way he referred to it which is but in any event blame he makes the decision that this tacit truths that are set in between the Americans and the Japanese that has gone on for now many months he is going to stop it and the Australians are going to go after the Japanese and he makes some very poor excuses that are in my book here we have the scene that second figure from the right is a general Bridgeford commander of the Australian 3rd division and here he is taking over on Bougainville from the Americas American troops are wanted by MacArthur for his campaign in the Philippines so he pretty much this is happening not just here on Bougainville but is happening elsewhere a South Pacific of the Australians taking over from the Americans and most of these battles the situation as much as you see it in a picture on the right these droves of you know whereas the Australians in most cases only take very few casualties the Australians the Japanese they've been cut off from all supply they're in a semi starvation state and their casualties tend to be very numerous however sometimes the Japanese construct back very forcefully as we see in the picture at the left this was amphibious attack that was attempted by the Australians at place called Porton plantation it went completely awry and in my book I refer to it as a Gallipoli in miniature well here you have very forceful looking Australian Brigadier very very appropriately his name is hammer and Brigadier hammer in this picture is explaining his plan of attack for the final battles to his higher echelon commanders the idea is we're going to be pressing on to the Japanese Japanese base at Bowen at the south of the island the Japanese have nowhere to run nowhere to hide so in knowing what the Japanese are like we would have had one heck of a battle in those last stages and we have pretty much the same thing going on on New Guinea which I cover in my book I've just been able to just focus in on one little period area here the range said in forcefully fortunately and when things find Dryad and takes a while for the Australians to get organized for that last big push Japan surrenders the war is over and here is the scene at Australian headquarters the man at his left who is signing the the surrender is general Conda because general Jia kotaki is still on the island however he suffered a stroke and in his incapacitated state it was not possible to remove him because Bougainville has been completely cut off from the world I found very interesting oops okay I'll point to it the second figure from the right uh that is an American his name is John quasi and I was curious who John cause a was I did a little look up and I'm discovering that he was a Marine who is aboard the Mersey Arizona on December 7th 1941 he was part of the minority that survived when I brought this to the attention of the historical office at Quantico they thanked me for and they were specially notating the records but that was an interesting little a little something that occurred now in closing I don't think there's a danger why am i giving away the ending because I'd like to read from the last page of the book with the coming of Peace in the South Pacific each man needed to find peace on his own terms Blamey left no question about his feelings when he presided over the capitulation of the Japanese Second Army and the Netherlands East Indies he told the Japanese and receiving your surrender I do not recognize you as an honourable and gallant foe but others felt differently none of the Australian brigadiers was more fiercely anti-japanese than Arnold Potts who needed to be leashed in by Blamey in the final months of the war placed in charge of Bougainville and its prisoners Pat's ordered a full dress inspection that included 17 Japanese generals and 15 admirals it was wondered how he would react to everyone's surprise at the conclusion of the proceedings putz exclaimed good Joe and he shook hands with a Concord he would explain quote many dreadful things have been done during the course of the war by both sides there should not be recriminations after the event once it was over it was over thank you all and any questions please sir those two things that having shut down then I get in 26 oh I think I've got I think I've got it on the book I can't it somehow it feels right that that sounds right yeah yeah this is quite a tough there was a quite an accomplishment that though I I believe that he added in the the the planes that he took out before he was with the Americans when he was a flying with the Flying Tigers in China and I think he he threw those in as well so it wasn't all with the American Air Force's any any other questions if not just to kind of move things along you know when you write a book like this you know it's very hard not to get invested to a certain extent with the with the characters halsy I have to admit that in terms of this period Halsey is a great favorite of mine he's great favorite for only for this reason that he does not get enough credit for these 20 months in the South Pacific for those of you who don't know the halls he's full story what happens after the South Pacific is pretty much subjugated in June of 1944 he moves on to command ships again he starts out the war on command of ships and during this interim period he's just sitting behind a desk at no Meah he goes back aboard ships and a two bath or actually I should say three he allows the Japanese to almost the fleet to inflict tremendous losses on us at Leyte Gulf that that could have been avoided he's lucky because net-net at the end of the battle we still are coming out ahead so there's not too much of a fuss set as made during the war however our fleet gets caught later in two typhoons whilst be enough to get caught in one typhoon but by the time he's caught in the second typhoon there there a court of inquiry and it's presided over by a very hard-nosed individual named genial John Hoover because he was anything except genial and he wanted to sack a palsy Admiral Nimitz appreciating his fine services earlier on in the war said now we can't have that and particularly system Wars winding down so that does save palsy but they don't these are dark clouds that hang over his head a hangover said among historians who are too ready to not give full cognizance of this one period where he is just absolutely doing an amazingly good job I can't even hit hit on every aspect he was so it's very interesting that in the magazine that I write for naval history uh there was someone else Richard Frank very fine writer he had to assess our different Navy commanders and he went break down the line in terms of what they with a superior average or inferior he had a chap Halsey in half he had to take a take the the pre pre mid-1944 Halsey gets the highest marks and the low marks for the second half of Halsey so you just can't you can't just look at somebody and just make a too much of a flat out judgment sir you had a question numbers for entire Bougainville and Japanese and pretty much I think that I I'm pretty sure that I do have the numbers including the Australians that they're in my bucket for if you come up here I think I can I can show them to you the Japanese the point I make about the Japanese casualties is a boudin Ville has some of the highest cat you know if you compare it against battles like Saipan or others higher profile battles a lot of them are not dying in battle a lot of them are dying just to malnutrition and and just because it's a very insalubrious environment there but the the Japanese as I recall I think they're the casualties are roughly the same during the the Australian phase of the American phase and if you come up here I think I can lay me Zana pretty quickly Oh further questions yes sir the air strips were they built by Construction Battalion maybe yes yes and they were there were three in total uh there was the one cater kena and then the the two additional strips that were built did a great job yes sir Sanderson I was in Japan they had a train came through from the station and it was over with trucks that have been used in World War two uh-huh taking them back into the words of Japan staring wall but I got that's huh yes we just left France the throwing stones at us we plant sometimes but what's going to happen to us from the deputy pan people oh I thought yes the Japanese tend to be very obedient if the government says obey they what they will obey and yes sir my friend had made some the cab driver pulled right over the crowd get out was it a really isolated place he's still out there okay are we there yet all right thank you very much

Channel: U.S. Naval War College

Views: 30,799

Rating: 4.7647057 out of 5

Keywords: South Pacific Cauldron: World War II's Great Forgotten Battlegrounds, Naval War College (College/University), World War (Film Subject), World War II (Military Conflict), Alan Rems, War (Quotation Subject), Japan (Country), Guandalcanal, Iwo Jima (Island), Battle Of Iwo Jima (Military Conflict), Battleground (Film)

Id: VB5Q27AqJc8

Length: 55min 16sec (3316 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 16 2015