Word: finschhaven
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...territory, Japan made all its gains south and west of Formosa and the Carolines in less than a year. The Allies, on the other hand, have spent a year sending that little sprout up from Moumea to Guadalcanal and Munda and those tiny arterioles out from Port Moresby to Finschhaven in the north and to the Woodlark Islands off Milne Bay in the east. The difference is that no one was dug in to delay the Japs, whereas the Japs, who are diggers extraordinary, have consolidated themselves. Their arteries are hardened...
...Scheme. It was a vital goal of the counteroffensive which MacArthur began last June 30. Inch-by-inch land fighting had brought MacArthur's men laboriously to Lae, to Finschhaven in New Guinea, to Munda and Vella Lavella in the Solomons. Americans who toiled in the rain and heat to build airfields, Australians who fought to clear the enemy from Huon Gulf, made the aerial climax possible...
...Guinea. Finschhaven was the third Jap base on the Huon Gulf to succumb to General Douglas MacArthur's relentless drive. Salamaua had fallen in 75 days, Lae in twelve, Finschhaven in ten. The crack Australian 9th Division knocked out the Jap's last pillboxes with hand grenades and swarmed over their stronghold. Few Japs were taken prisoners. Some fled into the jungle with hard-bitten Diggers on their heels. The Japs fought fiercely but, according to the men of the 9th, not as formidably as the Germans. The 9th ("Morshead's Marines") should know. They helped crack...
Simultaneously other Australians struck across the mountains to envelop the enemy from Finschhaven to Madang 200 miles beyond. Jap troops on the whole Huon Peninsula were pocketed. Despite talk of new Jap planes (see p. 20), MacArthur held complete and vitally effective command of the air. It was a climax to MacArthur's New Guinea campaign, which according to Brigadier General Charles Willoughby, MacArthur's intelligence chief, had been fought with "pinchpenny precise planning." The margin of success was always so small that MacArthur could never "afford to be wrong...
With the capture of Finschhaven, MacArthurs's forces will be separated by only 70 miles of water from horn-shaped New Britain, which points at New Guinea. Liberators in one raid last week pounded the horn's point with 94 tons of bombs-a heavy raid for that theater. Kenney's fighters flew 250 miles from their base to strafe enemy shipping and installations in , the horn's curve. At the horn's far end stands Rabaul, the enemy's key position in the area and the logical climax of the General...