The Japanese assaulted New Guinea shortly after Pearl Harbor, sweeping aside the Australian garrison at the airbase of Rabaul in New Britain. Soon after, waves of Japanese landings up and down the northern coast of New Guinea imperiled Australia, a vast continent that seemed like nothing so much as a blank slate on which the Imperial Army would draw. As General MacArthur was making his nerve-wracking escape from the Philippines, the Japanese were actually sending a squadron of bombers to destroy the airfields at Darwin, in northern Australia. Those were the darkest days of the war in the Pacific, when the whole hemisphere seemed to fall in the shadow of Pearl Harbor and the surrender of Singapore.

Before they could assault Australia, the Japanese had to complete their conquest of New Guinea by seizing Port Moresby, the sleepy town on the island’s south coast. The attack on Port Moresby was two-pronged: one force came by sea, and the other by land over the treacherous ridges of the Owen Stanleys. The sea-borne force met its end at the Battle of the Coral Sea, America’s first naval victory of the war. As for the land attack, they were defeated by the mountains themselves, by the waist-high grasses so sharp they could cut a man’s clothing or skin, by disease, and by sheer exhaustion. The dwindling force actually reached sight of Port Moresby’s searchlights before turning back. Few survived the return journey.

MacArthur put Australian General Blamey in charge of the counterattack up the same treacherous mountain ridges. The Kokoda Trail over the summit became legendary as a test of human endurance, a foot-wide track that was little more than a bone-jarring near-vertical staircase out of the jungle and into the clouds. MacArthur also launched the first air assault by moving tons of men and materiel over the mountain ridge and across to the beaches on the other side of New Guinea. The first American counterattack of the Pacific theater was at Buna, on the northern coast. The carnage shocked President Roosevelt, who granted Life magazine permission to print one particularly gruesome photograph of two dead G.I.’s half buried by sand on a nameless beach. The President, unlike the general, believed Americans deserved to know.

Nevertheless, the fiercely fought campaign continued to remain largely anonymous. The Navy waged more well-publicized battles in its region of authority, the eastern Solomon Islands, including Guadalcanal and Bougainville. Meanwhile, MacArthur cast about for strategies for neutralizing the immense Japanese air base located at Rabaul on New Britain. 100,000 Japanese troops were waiting there for their chance to duke it out with any American who happened to step ashore. MacArthur’s responded with the leapfrog campaign. The Americans bypassed Japanese strong points in Madang and Cape Gloucester by assaulting the northernmost shore of New Guinea at Aitape and Hollandia. The general also took out the Admiralty Islands by seizing an airbase there, effectively surrounding Rabaul. Meanwhile, Kenney’s planes were bombing everything above ground on eastern New Britain, and the Japanese were digging what would ultimately be 300 miles of tunnels to protect themselves from the rain of steel. By this time, the Americans had broken the Japanese codes, and were taking a foothold on the western side of New Britain with the help of Navajo code-talkers, who were essential for transmitting orders and intelligence to commanders in the remote jungle. It was a war of intelligence, where Americans operated out of bases and fields on small islands, redoubts, and hills - outposts whose sole function was to bypass and isolate hundreds of Japanese troops eager for a head-on fight.

The Japanese men at Rabaul never saw an American, nor did they make it home in time for the end of the war in 1945. It would ultimately take two more years, and an American loan, before the Japanese government could afford to bring its boys home again from their humiliation on New Britain.

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