Yet the sailor wasn’t too far off the mark with his jibe, for the Sergeant was one of a very special breed assigned to an odd throwback unit that was supposed to be headed for Fiji to join Patch and the Pacifica Division. It was the 112th Cavalry Regiment, Texas National Guard, one of the few still intended to mount up on real live horse flesh—an oddball Army unit for Pappy Patch and his green quilt on Fiji. Most of the regular Army infantry, thought it odd to have a mounted cavalry unit these days, and so the handle got stuck on the 112th. They were the ‘Queers on Steers.’
All they had done up until this point in the war was mount a watch on the Mexican border. Patch had them on Fiji for a time after that long 21-day ride to the South Pacific on the President Grant. Wilson remembered how they had tramped up the gangplank in San Francisco in his khaki uniform, trousers tucked into those high black leather boots, saddlebags thrown over the shoulders of the men, who mostly wore their felt hats. They still had the old steel WWI style helmet slung over their backpack, rattling with the traditional cavalry saber, and canteen.
Fully equipped, he thought, but the Army forgot just one thing—the horses. Where were the goddamned horses?
“Don’t worry about it,” said the Lieutenant at the top of the gangplank when Wilson stepped aboard the ship. “They’ll have horses for all of you when you get where you’re going.”
“Yeah? Where’s that?”
“You’ll find out soon enough,” said the Lieutenant. “Come on, move along. The line’s a mile long.”
So Wilson was logged in and stepped aboard. Hours later they slipped under the massive industrial orange steel span of the Golden Gate Bridge, and put out to sea. When they finally arrived in Fiji, they had done a bit of scouting, a little work on the flanks, but it was the infantry that was getting all the real combat duty, and the misery that came with all that glory, hand in glove. Then the 112th got word that they were shipping out again, but no one knew where. Wilson got wind of it, overhearing a couple officers talking about a White Poppy, but nobody seemed to know what that was all about. MacArthur had asked for them personally, and many were now still trying to figure out if that was good news, or bad.
This time the horses would board along with them, and they switched Presidents to the Samuel Taylor. Their mounts had come all the way from Australia, a special breed called ‘Whalers,’ because they were born and bred in New South Wales. The men called them the ‘Range Broncos’, and they were an ornery bunch; not cooperative at all, so it took two long weeks on Fiji to simply get them to take a saddle, and let a man mount up. Yet once a Whaler agreed to carry you, he would prove to be a trusty and loyal friend, and a hard worker.
White Poppy was code for Noumea, and that’s where they were headed. The biggest island in the region, it was once the home of an aggressive tribe of 70,000 natives, many prone to cannibalism. It took the French military some time to root that out, though it was said that there were still groups of wild cannibals in the high wooded mountains that ran down the spine of the island, nearly 250 miles long. Now it was home to over 17,000 French civilians, along with an 800-man garrison force, the Battalion d’infantrie colonial de la Nouvelle-Caledonie. When the Japanese came, and the island remained under Vichy control in these altered states, the French Colonial Governor in Saigon shipped in one more Battalion of from the Tonkin Division.
The Japanese coveted the island for many reasons, for it was rich in resources, home to 20% of the world’s supply of nickel, and many other strategic metals like chrome, cobalt, iron, manganese, lead, coal and copper, not to mention gold and silver. There were already a thousand Japanese civilian workers on the island when the war started, mostly near the Goro nickel mines in the south, and at the chrome mine near Koumac in the north. Then, while the US was trying to rush troops to that island, the Ichiki Detachment that had once been slated to invade Midway was instead diverted to Noumea when Operation FS was chosen.
It was as far from a forsaken place like Guadalcanal as one could imagine, with banana plantations, farmland growing tobacco, cotton, maize, and fruits, an active timber industry, fishing resources, and the excellent deep water port at Noumea, the capital. In addition to this plentiful food and relatively mild climate, the island had developed hydroelectric power in the larger towns, a small rail line, good coastal roads, and absolutely no malaria.
That was both good news and bad, for while conditions for the average soldier were far better than they might have been on Guadalcanal, it also meant the enemy would not suffer attrition due to food shortages and disease, factors which had as much to do with the Japanese defeat there as anything else. Like Fiji, it was a place where the two sides could have a long protracted fight, and the unusual elongated shape of the island was going to figure heavily in the strategy of that upcoming battle. The US objectives would be in the south, at Noumea, and the airfield at Tontouta, about 33 miles northwest.
The Port of Noumea on Moselle Bay had three good berths, a solid quay and a facility known as the ‘Nickel Dock’ where the ore ships could load. It was scaled to handle 24 ships per month, but the bay itself could provide an anchorage for over 80 vessels. The one good airfield at Tontouta was ready to receive military planes, and the Japanese had made small improvements since they occupied the place.
Yet as MacArthur had asserted, the American landings had come as a great surprise. Only one battalion had been at Noumea, the second at Tontouta, and the third at the nickel mines of Goro. The entire 41st Infantry Division was committed to this attack, a force the Japanese could not hope to repulse at the landing sites. The irregular southwest coast of the island was cut by 15 to 20 bays spanning the distance of 35 kilometers between the airfield and harbor. Troops could come ashore in any of them, and it was simply too much ground for the Japanese to cover. So MacArthur was going to get his 41st Division ashore, and then have a very good prospect of seizing his first key objective—Noumea, but it would not end there.
The huge island pointed northwest to the Solomon Sea, and the Japanese could easily land reinforcements in the north, far from the American center of gravity in the south. Once there, they could move down the long coastal road to contest their enemy, and now there would be three battles underway, forcing both sides to supply three separate garrisons, Fiji, Efate, and New Caledonia. Each side had advantages and disadvantages, and now it would fall to the commanders to sort them out.
The cards were dealt; the game was afoot. MacArthur got his war after all. Now he simply had to win it, and against a battle-hardened enemy who would rather accept death than retreat. He had seen the cruelty of the Japanese on offense. Now he would see how tenaciously they would fight to hold the ground they had taken, and the ugly face of the Pacific war would soon loom over the scene like the sickly smell of burning human flesh being consumed by a flame thrower.
Sergeant Wilson with the 112th Cavalry had no idea where he was going that night, but he would soon find out. The 41st Infantry Division had arrived from Brisbane, the ships approaching Noumea through three openings in the long wall of coral reefs that protected the island, eclipsed in size only by Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Halsey had broken off cruisers Quincy, Minneapolis, Chicago and five destroyers to support the landings, and he had swept the skies over the port area clean by sending over 60 fighters.