Chapter 26
By the morning of the second day the situation on the north and west coast of the main island was starting to look grim. The Kiwis had fought hard, with the village of Lautoko north of Nandi changing hands twice in the long days fighting. The key factor, however, was the complete control of the sea and skies around the island. Japanese cruisers with powerful 8-inch guns were able to weigh in heavily on the fighting along the western shores, and by nightfall, the haggard Kiwis were starting to call Nandi Bay ‘Battleship Row.’ Kongo, Kirishima and Haruna had sat out there all day, pounding any location where they could get a good fire order from shore based spotters. Those heavy rounds were simply too much for the infantry to endure, and the New Zealanders were forced to withdraw into the heavily wooded interior to gain positions where the Japanese could not easily call in those guns.
The problem with that strategy was that all their stores and supplies had been in those positions along the coast. The Japanese now had all the ports on the west coast they had been after, clearing Nandi and Lautoka, and the Sakaguchi Regiment had secured Tavua in the north. Brigadier Robert Row had the 8th Brigade, and he huddled with Brigadier Lawrence Potter of 14th Brigade to see what could be done. Potter had been literally holed up in his underground communications center and headquarters at a place called ‘Black Rock,’ a fortified post hacked out of the stone by the Kiwi engineers a month earlier.
“We’ve lost our main objective,” said Potter. “Now that they’ve taken the aerodrome at Nandi, there’s nothing else of real military importance between here and Suva. The Yanks have some engineers in the south hammering out emergency airstrips along Queen’s Road, but we won’t do much good here, and not under those naval guns.”
“Agreed,” said Row. He had fought his battalions well, and would later become a tenacious factor in the battle for this island, so much so that the Americans came to respect and admire the Kiwis. They had once called the heart of the batting order for their beloved New York Yankees Murders Row, and now, after seeing the Kiwis fight, they started calling them “Row’s Murderers.” It had taken the entire Abe Detachment, reinforced with the 4th Yokosuka SNLF battalion and the 48th Cavalry Regiment to dislodge the New Zealanders from their positions around Nandi Bay, but now that fight was over.
“Look,” said Brigadier Row. “There’s only one good road inland to get us down to the south coast and Queen’s Road. We can’t sit here in the jungle. I say we get to that road and hoof it south. It’s our only play.”
“I hate to give up such plush accommodations,” said Potter looking around the roughly hewn cave site at Black Rock. “But I can’t see any other course of action.” So the orders were given to withdraw the New Zealand Brigades south and east. In effect, the only game in town now was going to be the vital port and airfields around Suva Bay, and that was all that would matter until significant reinforcements permitted offensive operations. Gone were the early days where the men would wallow in the mud of the cricket and football fields near Camp Namaka. Now the war had finally come to their island, and they were in it up to their hips.
It was going to be a long, hard trek inland to that road, and then difficult going in the higher country as it wound its way through the hills, following the course of the Singatana River to the south coast of the island. What was left of the garrison at the small Likuri Harbor would meet them at the mouth of that river near the village of Nayawa. That had been an American post, but General Krueger, the overall commander of all forces in Fiji and Samoa, had decided the position could be too easily outflanked by enemy troops coming down that road. So he sent an order to Patch to pull his troops out, the Regimental Engineers, and a battalion of Aviation Engineers that had been working on a small airstrip. They marched east along Queen’s road, which would follow the entire southern coast of the island all the way to Suva.
The Kiwis would follow the Yanks east along that road, and Krueger asked for a meeting with the two Brigadiers to coordinate the defense they now had to plan.
“We gave them a good fight,” said Potter, “but the thing is this, we had to be at every place along that coast that provided a suitable landing point, and they could pick and choose any spot they want, and then hit it with an entire regiment. By the time we moved in supporting troops, they were already well established ashore. It was just impossible to hold on the coast under that naval gunfire, so you end up withdrawing inland.”
“Well how do we avoid that down here?” asked Krueger.
“That’s easy enough—you need your damn navy to stop them if they come by sea. As long as they control the seas, you’ll always be looking over your shoulder wondering where they’ll put men ashore. Only a strong navy or air force presence can neutralize that advantage. Do that, and I think we can go toe to toe with them on the ground.”
“Well you just get your boys safely into our end of the island and I’ll see about that naval support.” Krueger was Army through and through, rising all the way from Private to his current rank of Major General. Born in Prussia in 1881, he had fought in the Spanish American War, and the Philippine American War that followed. In the first World War he was chief of staff for the US 84th Division, and later served in that same role in the Tank Corps. In training exercises known as “The Louisiana Maneuvers” in the States before the war, Krueger had requested the services of an enterprising staff officer to help him run his VII Corps, Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower. He shined in those maneuvers, employing the very able services of another man with a fated path before him in this war, one George S. Patton, who was commanding the 2nd Armored Division at that time.
Yet it was MacArthur who would ask for Krueger to fight with him in the Pacific, in spite of his age of 60 years when the war broke out. In Fedorov’s history, Krueger would do exactly that, fighting his way “From Down Under to Nippon,” which became the title of his memoirs of the war. This time, his battles would begin right there on Fiji, and that journey would take him to some very unexpected places. A careful man, Krueger had a methodical style of command, taking risks only when they were necessary. If he had been a chess master, he would have favored positional play, building his strategy around his pawn structure, trading pieces in the middle game, and then playing the endgame like a machine to push one of those pawns home to become a Queen.
Here, in these Altered States, he would get his chance to ply his operational art, but at this early date in April of 1942, that endgame was very far away. In the world this one was born from, MacArthur once wrote a very fitting tribute to Krueger saying: “History has not given him due credit for his greatness. I do not believe that the annals of American history have shown his superior as an Army commander. Swift and sure in the attack, tenacious and determined in defense, modest and restrained in victory—I do not know what he would have been in defeat, because he was never defeated.”
So it was that the man who never tasted defeat would now face an army that had seen nothing but one successive victory after another. Another methodical man had stopped the Japanese briefly on the island of Singapore, this time it would be Krueger’s turn to see if he could stem the tide.