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"You've got to devise stuff like that," Kenney says. "I'd studied all the books on these different goddam campaigns, and Buna was not in any of them."
A new kind of war. The textbooks did not tell George Kenney what he would find in the Southwest Pacific. It was a war for a cocky, enthusiastic little man who can inspire his flyers with his own skill for improvisation.
Though it apparently marks the beginning of an Allied offensive in the Southwest Pacific, the Battle for Buna, in perspective, was only a local action 3,500 miles south of Tokyo. But it probably will go down in history as the first campaign ever supplied entirely by air.
Having arrived two weeks after the Japs landed at Buna (July 20), Kenney spent two months organizing his air force, pepping up laggard flyers, briefing new ones, getting his fresh supply of planes ready for action. By Sept. 28 the Jap was at Ioribaiwa, only 32 miles from Port Moresby. MacArthur, his chief of staff Major General Richard K. Sutherland (a pilot himself), Australian General Blamey and Kenney fixed on a plan: to wrest control of the air, despite hell and high mountains, by blasting the Japs out of Buna and far-off Lae and Salamaua, the bases from which Buna was supplied.
While the retreating Aussies made a stand at Ioribaiwa, Kenney's planes swarmed north. They struck the supply line crawling from Buna. They struck airdromes again & again. Presently the stunned Jap no longer bothered to repair the craters in his strips. During the height of the Guadalcanal action came a six-week period in which no Jap plane dared to take the air. Since Nov. 1 no Jap reinforcements for New Guinea have landed intact. Most of them never landed at all.
The Hard Way. Meanwhile, more of Kenney's planes were dropping troops on an emergency strip at Wanigepi, on the coast of southeast Buna. As the troops moved toward Buna, Kenney had to find new strips for his supply planes. He found them by sending light planes to drag the coast for level ground. Sometimes it was pocked with palms, sometimes wing-deep in grass. The first pilot to land would squirm to a semi-crash landing. When the ear-ringed natives gathered round, he spread his wares—cowrie shells and tobacco sticks—and bargained to have trees and grass sliced down. The natives, men & women, usually set to work with a will.
On these makeshift strips George Kenney soon was landing 2,000,000 lb. of supplies a week. In a single day he delivered 519,000 lb.—100 planeloads. He flew in a 250-bed hospital with enough equipment to maintain it for ten days. He delivered a four-gun battery of 105-mm. howitzers, with tractors to haul them and crews to operate them. A Flying Fortress is designed to carry no more than 6,000 lb.; a 105-mm. howitzer unit weighs 7,000. Kenney flew the guns 1,500 miles from Australia and delivered them over weather-treacherous, 12,000-ft. mountains to makeshift airfields. Among other items he also delivered over 4,000 infantrymen, using 16 different types of planes to haul them in. He delivered bulldozers and horses and mules (which frightened the aborigines, though they were long used to airplanes).
Kenney's lessons, in half a year of fighting the Jap are four: