Munda Trail: The New Georgia Campaign

MUNDA TRAIL
The New Georgia Campaign
June€“August 1943

ERIC HAMMEL

The Solomon island archipelago stretches in a roughly east-west direction from New
Guinea to San Cristobal. For the Imperial Japanese forces in 1942, it was a natural
highway into the South Pacific. When checked at Guadalcanal, these forces realized they
had moved east too quickly, and that their defeat was caused in part by inade-quate air
bases between the front and their head-quarters at Rabaul, more than six hundred miles
away. As the last Japanese battalions were wrecking themselves against the Marine defensive perimeter on Guadalcanal, the decision was made to build the Munda airfield on New Georgia, right in the middle of the Solomons chain.

The Americans also recognized the Solomons as a highway, but in the other direction,
toward Rabaul, the Philippines, and ultimately Japan. The two great Pacific powers
clashed in the middle of this strategic island corridor in June 1943, when an untried U.S.
Army infantry division assaulted New Georgia and began to move up the Munda Trail to
take the airfield. This €œforgotten€ battle was in truth one of America€s first sustained
offensive actions in the Pacific, and as such it taught green American troops and equally
green commanders the realities of jungle warfare.

Munda Trail is the dramatic, harrowing story of green American soldiers encountering
for the first time impenetrable swamps, solid rain forests, invisible coconut-log pillboxes,
tenacious snipers tied into trees, torren-tial tropical rains, counterattack by enemy
aircraft and naval guns, and the logistical nightmare of living and moving in endless mud.
A carefully planned offensive quickly degenerates into isolated small-unit actions as the terrain breaks unit cohesion and leads inexperienced soldiers into deadly ambushes. As
physical and psychologi-cal strains mount, Army doctors begin to define a new disease
nearing epidemic proportions€"combat fatigue. Men without injuries simply become
useless for fur-ther fighting, the advance bogs down. Yet, over time, the scared
American soldiers find their inner resolve and climb out of the psychological abyss,
emerge steady and true, combat veterans at last€"and victors.

The New Georgia Campaign was, in Ham-mel€s words, €œa graphic study of the universal
military truths attending the feeding of innocents to the ravenous dogs of war.€ Yet when
it was over, there was no question in anyone€s mind that the tide had turned, that the
forces moving through the Solomons would be American, and that they would move
toward Japan.