South Pacific:
Sinews of Victory
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
December 2024
Since the Second World War, the American way of war has been based on overwhelming materiel superiority. Not just directly on the battlefield (men and tanks and firepower), but in fire support (mountains of artillery ammunition), mobility (oceans of fuel) and food supplies (plentiful rations at the front, extras like ice cream and soft drinks behind it).
Japanese advances into the eastern edge of the Indonesian archipelago (New Guinea and the Solomons) represented a threat to the lines of communication between the U.S. forward bases in Hawaii and Australia. That route passed through a whole string of island groups held by Britain, France, New Zealand, and the United States, chief among them Samoa, Fiji, and New Caledonia. The Japanese Operation FS, the invasion of Fiji, Samoa, and New Caledonia, had taken form by January 1942 with an initial target date of April 1942 (later pushed back to July).
To counter the Japanese, the U.S. Navy began a frantic program to prepare the logistical infrastructure in the South Pacific. The islands had no means of handling the influx of men, equipment and goods that made up the American way; few if any had airfields, and little to no development of ports. Only Samoa had any military infrastructure, and none of the islands boasted much civilian development. Nearly everything would have to be erected from scratch.
American Samoa had a small naval station, and in July 1940, construction began on an airbase, tank farms for fuel oil and aviation gasoline, barracks, and other facilities. That work accelerated after Christmas Day 1941, when Ernest J. King, designated but not yet installed as Chief of Naval Operations, ordered planning to begin for a network of bases to protect the line of communications between Hawaii and Australia.
Seabees drag a 7-inch coast defense gun to its hilltop emplacement on Bora Bora. The guns would be abandoned on the island after the war.
King identified French-ruled Bora Bora, in the Leeward Islands, as the first location for a new fueling depot. A convoy with 7,000 men, construction equipment and materials, and a coast-defense artillery battalion armed with 7-inch guns taken from scrapped pre-dreadnought battleships set out on 25 January 1942, arriving on 17 February. They found their maps and reports regarding the island mostly fictional: it had no water supply, and no unloading facilities. Key equipment had been left behind. Fixing those problems delayed the actual mission, and construction of the tank farm began only in April.
By the time the Seabees completed the refueling base, King had decided on an offensive posture in the South Pacific. The base remained operational until 1946, but most of the men and materials were ordered shifted to New Caledonia in March 1943.
A much larger effort would be made on Efate, the southernmost major island of the New Hebrides, a chain then jointly ruled by France and Britain. The Marine 4th Defense Battalion arrived in March 1942, followed by several requisitioned “tuna clippers” (large fishing boats active in the waters off Southern California during peacetime). Two companies of the Navy’s 1st Construction Battalion (the Seabees) landed on 4 May along with the Army’s segregated African-American 24th Infantry Regiment; the Black soldiers were intended to provide manual labor for the construction projects.
The Net and Boom Repair Area on Efate, seen in 1944.
The Marines had begun clearing the ground for an airfield, but many of them soon fell ill in a malaria outbreak. The Seabees took over the work, using their heavy equipment (seven bulldozers and three graders) and bringing in local labor to help out. Workers were not the only thing they sought from the island’s population.
“Some (Americans) treated us well,” islander Wallace Andre recalled decades later. “But others treated us poorly. There were a lot of problems in the villages. In secrecy some troops would take aside managers, like my father, and demand, ‘Bring us some women.’ If it didn’t happen, they’d pull out a pistol, put it to the manager’s head, and say, ‘I’ll shoot if you don’t.'”
The Seabees built a road around the island, and the first plane landed at the new airfield on 28 May. Three days later, a seaplane base became operational. The Seabees began work on two airstrips to handle fighters, but it soon became obvious that fighter planes could not reach Guadalcanal from Efate, depriving the B17 bombers of needed protection. New bases closer to the Solomons would be needed.
On 28 June, a small scouting party from Efate identified sites for airfields and a deep-water port at the south-east corner of the island of Espiritu Santo, the largest of the New Hebrides and the closest to Guadalcanal. Seabees arrived ten days later, along with a company of 24th Regiment infantrymen and a Marine anti-aircraft battery, beginning work first on a strip for fighter planes. They met their twenty-day deadline, and the first fighter squadron landed on the field, now known as Turtle Bay airfield, on 28 July. A squadron of B17 heavy bombers touched down the next day, and after refueling from drums, set out on the following day for the first bombing raid over Guadalcanal.
Seabees lay down Marston Matting on Bomber Field #2 on Espiritu Santo.
The work continued over the weeks that followed, even as Marines landed on Guadalcanal and fought to keep the Japanese-built airfield there under American control. A second fighter strip followed the first, and three much more extensive airfields to handle the bombers. Then came a tank farm, ammunition depots, an engine repair facility for aircraft, barracks, hospitals, and offices.
Naval Advance Base Espiritu Santo arose in and around Luganville, a sleepy colonial town on island’s south-eastern corner. Luganville featured two deep-water harbors, and Seabees built a boat repair facility, more tank farms and ammunition storage, piers, more barracks, offices, and a seaplane base. Eventually four floating drydocks arrived from the United States, including ABSD-1, the largest such ever built with a lift capacity of 90,000 tons. Even the largest battleships could be repaired at Espiritu Santo; by war’s end Espiritu Santo stood second only to Pearl Harbor as a Navy advanced base in the Pacific theater.
The Navy’s planners decided to build a separate base dedicated to replenishing its warships. Nouméa, the capital of the French colony of New Caledonia, offered an excellent deep-water harbor. It already hosted a small Australian seaplane base, but the Australians moved out when the Americans indicated their interest in the site.
Initially, the Americans had intended to build up Auckland, New Zealand as their major fleet base in the South Pacific. Nouméa lay just about halfway between Auckland and Guadalcanal (Guadalcanal lay 2,500 kilometers from Auckland, but only 1,200 kilometers from Nouméa). On the other hand, Nouméa had almost no civilian infrastructure while Auckland was New Zealand’s largest city and largest port.
Battleship West Virginia inside floating drydock ABSD-1 at Espiritu Santo.
In Japanese hands, Nouméa’s harbor would be a danger to the sea lands between Australia and Hawaii. New Caledonia’s locally-raised battalion had fought in the 1940 campaign in France and then joined the 1st Free French Division fighting in North Africa; that left security in the hands of a lone Australian Independent Company and a hastily-raised local force of 800 men. The Americans landed two infantry regiments in March 1942 and a third a month later, plus anti-aircraft and coastal artillery units. The three infantry regiments, all of them National Guard units made surplus when their original divisions went from four to three regiments, were combined in May 1942 to form the Americal Division, which began to deploy to Guadalcanal in October 1942.
King decided on an offensive posture in the South Pacific even before the victory at Midway, and ordered a pair of convoys bearing Seabees, construction equipment and materials diverted to Nouméa instead. The first arrived on 26 June 1942, and the Seabees got to work building a massive tank farm just north of Nouméa, to hold vast reserves of fuel oil and diesel fuel. Tankers soon began arriving, and Nouméa became the primary refueling point for the Allies in the theater.
The base rapidly expanded, adding a huge ammunition depot for Navy, Army, and Marine uses. Huge complexes of warehouses sprung up, and Quonset hits to provide housing, but still tens of thousands of Americans lived under canvas, and at least two thousand officers rented rooms from the French inhabitants and huts owned by the locals.
But other planned facilities ran into staunch obstruction from the Free French High Commissioner for the Pacific, Rear Admiral Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu. D’Argenlieu resented every effort by the Americans to improve their facilities on New Caledonia. When the Americans moved their theater headquarters from Auckland to Nouméa, D’Argenlieu refused them office space and Vice Admiral Robert Ghormley conducted the Guadalcanal campaign from the cramped and decrepit transport Argonne, which had no air conditioning. When D’Argenlieu shifted to Tahiti, new theater commander William F. Halsey led a party of Marines to seize the French High Commissioner’s residence and the former Japanese consulate.
Masses of supplies await on the docks of
Nouméa.
French intransigence continued to plague American operations on New Caledonia throughout the war, even as Nouméa became the second-busiest port in the Pacific Basin after San Francisco. Almost all reinforcements and supplies for the Solomons Campaign made their way through Nouméa, and the American carrier task forces made it their major base.
Seabees built piers and wharves, with cranes to handle unloading; still, shipping piled up in the harbor awaiting the chance to disgorge their cargo. The French administration complained bitterly that the Americans prioritized military goods over the needs of the island’s 11,000 French inhabitants, yet interfered with American efforts to hire local Kanak people to work as stevedores and speed the process. The French objected to the Americans paying cash wages, and the Kanaks found their treatment by the Americans - even under a strict regime of Jim Crow - preferable to what they received at French hands. The French accused the Americans of fomenting unrest among the Kanaks, as part of a plan to annex the island after the war.
When the war finally ended in 1945, the Free French government sought to obtain the mountains of weapons, ammunition, vehicles and other supplies and equipment left behind on New Caledonia and the New Hebrides. Repaying French wartime cooperation, Pacific commander-in-chief Chester Nimitz ordered the Seabees still stationed at all bases on French territory to dump all of the materiel into the Pacific.
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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good.
He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and new puppy. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.
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