Hero in New Guinea

Beside his bungalow, in a tropical garden riotous with frangipani, hibiscus and flame trees, sat Douglas MacArthur. In one hand he held messages from the New Guinea front, in the other a quarter-head of green lettuce flown into New Guinea from the Australian mainland. As he read he munched, as he munched he reflected.

The old warrior had cause for happier reflections than he had had since World War II began: the culmination of his first successful offensive was in sight; the fall of Buna might come at any time. Buna is merely a coconut-fringed village of three houses and five huts. But with nearby Gona taken this week, Buna was the only Jap haven left in New Guinea east of the Lae-Salamaua area.

Now it was MacArthur's enemy, Lieut. General Tomatore Horii, conqueror of Rabaul, who was desperate (he was almost captured fortnight ago in the New Guinea jungle). Now General Horii knew what it was like to strive mightily to reinforce battered troops when they were hemmed in on three sides (last week the fresh Americans took over the fiercest fighting assignments from the jungle-weary Australians). For his striving the Emperor's General lost a cruiser and two destroyers, blown to pieces by U.S. and Australian pilots.

In New Guinea, remote, mysterious General MacArthur managed to retain complete privacy where even Australian and U.S. nurses had to glance aside lest they blush at the spectacle of grimy soldiers bathing in the nude under roadside showers. One U.S. soldier, seeing the General one morning before breakfast, ran back to his comrades, exclaimed: "He was under the trees in a pink silk dressing gown with a black dragon on the back."

No Pushover. "We must attack, attack, attack!" General MacArthur had told a press conference in Melbourne last summer. Now he was attacking and the taste was good. He himself was functioning close to a scene of action for the first time since he left Corregidor.

It had been no picnic. His Australians had had to build steps through the jungles to get cannon over the razorback Owen Stanley Mountains. The rest was not going to be a pushover, said Lieut. General George Kenney, the dynamic airman who shares MacArthur's bungalow, and squat Australian General Sir Thomas Blarney warned of possible hard fighting after Buna fell. General Kenney noted that the Japs still had planes they had not yet used, but Allied air superiority was such that a million pounds of food and ammunition had been dropped to MacArthur's fighters in the mountains and jungles.

The Japs would not give up the north coast until almost the last man had been killed, but MacArthur believed that now he had the men and materiel to do the killing.

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