"Small Battle, Big Implications: ..." Topic

Japan Lost the Upper Hand When it Lost New Guinea

"The Southwest Pacific proved to be Japan's undoing in World War II because the Imperial Army overreached, stretching its manpower and its supply lines too far. But beyond issues of men and equipment, the Imperial Army's failure exposed fundamental weaknesses in military doctrine. This study focuses on the battle for the island of Papua as an indicator of Japanese losses to come and concludes that the military doctrine that had been so successful for the previous 10 years would lead in the end to Japan's defeat. Using the accounts of Japanese soldiers and civilians and contemporaneous news reports, this study blends Japanese and American perspectives on one of the first land battles in the Southwest Pacific. The analysis of those accounts leads to five central conclusions: (1) command decisions, not the fighting effectiveness of individuals, sealed the fate of the Imperial Army; (2) the Japanese struggled to get reinforcements, arms, and supplies to the front; (3) they found past combat experience inadequate as preparation for jungle and mountain fighting; (4) they underestimated the Allies; and (5) those miscalculations were the result of flawed strategic analyses and operational choices. By itself, Papua was not vital for either side. For the Japanese, New Guinea lay beyond the vital perimeter, and for the Americans, the island had strategic value mostly as a stepping stone. The inescapable fact was that the battle for ground so insignificant was also a fight that proved so deadly: some 220,000 Japanese dead on New Guinea, 12,000 on Papua alone. This study contributes to the history of World War II by laying out the conditions, the state of morale, and the way of war that led to Japanese defeat in a land battle early in the Pacific war.

Japan looked unstoppable five months after Pearl Harbor. In early May 1942, a task force of the Imperial Japanese Navy set course through the Coral Sea headed for Port Moresby in New Guinea to establish an outpost on the southwestern edge of Japan's Pacific empire. Port Moresby sat on the peninsula of Papua, a rocky point of land separated only by a thin slice of ocean from the northern coast of Australia and the Allied army stationed there. The U.S. Navy stopped the Japanese in the Battle of the Coral Sea. That defeat was important for Japan on three counts. First, it marked the first major setback in the empire building that Japan had begun a decade earlier. Second, the Japanese were forced to abandon plans to invade Port Moresby. Third, Australian and American land forces bought time to implement a new strategy of their own. Deciding that the best defense of Australia was to keep the Japanese off the southern coast of Papua, the Allies moved their line of defense from the mainland of Australia across the water to Papua…"
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Amicalement
Armand

Interesting article, very American centric. Rather a lot of Australians were present, indeed bore the brunt of the ground fighting in this campaign.

Glad you like it my friend!. (smile)

Agree with your comments.

Amicalement
Armand