Captain,
A couple of issues involved here, I believe. The American WWII historical vision sees the USMC and the USN charging across the Pacific and rolling up the IJN and IJA. Fair enough, that is accurate. The US Army?s participation in the Pacific is somewhat of an ?Oh by the way?. I believe this has more to do with the conflict between Gen. MacArthur and the USN/USMC than it has to do with real history. The vast majority of combined Australian-US Army WWII/Pacific history is associated with MacArthur and is not yet front-page stuff. But it should be, for sure. In my personal library I have a book entitled ?The War in the Pacific, Victory in Papua?, and this is a historical narrative of the Papua battles including the Australian forces at Kakoda Gap. This was published by the US Army in 1949 and is excellent reading. There are lots of photos and talk of the Australian 25th, 7th and 14th brigades, and more. For those interested, this book is probably in your public library in the volume of books called ?US Army in WWII? and Samuel Milner authors this particular volume. As well, I believe that Time-Life did a WWII series a while back and I do recall that Australian Forces in Papua were well represented and Kakoda Gap is described.
A situational book that does a reasonable job of working through the MacArthur conflicts of the time is entitled ?An American Cesar? by William Manchester. He was a US Marine in the Pacific during WWI and also wrote ?Raggedy Assed Marine?, a classic humorous but sad saga of real Marines. Example: Manchester evidently was endowed with larger sized pecker and as a result the Marine?s nic-named him ?Tri-pod? and the book just keeps getting better with every page. So I?d say his views of MacArthur are representative of what the USN and USMC had on their mind at the time. Some would say ?bad attitude?, but Ok that?s fair as well. MacAuthor is described as both brilliant and arrogantly vein glorious so I guess we can pick one definition and there is lots to read about either way.
A second issue is what Hollywood locks on to as being representative. Thus far you Australians of WWII are represented as the friendly but ornery coast watcher that bails out ?Rock Tory? (John Wayne) in the movie ?In Harms Way?. That kind of thing happened but I wouldn?t call it representative of what happened in Papua, not in the slightest. Not at all fair but I don?t ever recall Hollywood having the reputation of being in the business of being fair, or reasonable or even accurate for that matter.
Scamp
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