Pacific Halfback

OUR JUNGLE ROAD TO TOKYO (306 pp.)--Robert L. Eichelberger with Milton MacKaye-- Viking ($4.50).

It was the kind of order a second lieutenant sometimes gets, but not a 56-year-old lieutenant general, a corps commander and former superintendent of West Point. General MacArthur stopped pacing up & down his headquarters veranda, turned to General Robert Eichelberger and said: "Bob, I want you to take Buna, or not come back alive."

That was at Port Moresby on the afternoon of Nov. 30, 1942. Bob Eichelberger flew to Buna the next morning and what he found was a jungle Valley Forge. The 32nd Division troops were hungry, ragged, sick and demoralized. Attacks were ordered and never made--in one such "attack" by a regimental combat team, only 150 men got up to the front lines to face the Japanese, while the rest of the 2,000 were allowed to straggle in the rear.

Writes Eichelberger in Our Jungle Road to Tokyo: "When I went to the front on December 2 I couldn't find a front." It didn't take him long to establish one, or to fire the 32nd's commanding general. Eichelberger bucked up morale by getting into the front lines where his riflemen could see him. Officers were shot down at his side (three of his brigadiers were wounded), but he was never hit, even escaped malaria. He lost 30 pounds in 30 days, but on Jan. 3, 1943 the troops had Buna. It was the first Allied ground victory of the Pacific war.

52 D-days. Jungle Road is General Bob's story of the infantry in that war. Coming after such chesty accounts as Seaman "Bull" Halsey's and Airman George Kenney's, it seems almost sober and reflective, but it is a tribute to the embattled foot soldier and a deeply felt one. No army general spent so much time at the front and few appreciated so clearly what they were asking of their men.

Eichelberger was seldom still. During the Philippines campaign, he flew on 70 out of 90 days, once ordered his personal B-17 Miss Em (named for his wife) down to 200 ft. to make strafing runs in support of his troops. If the Sixth Army's General Krueger was MacArthur's power-play fullback, Eichelberger was the team's imaginative, elusive halfback who took daring chances and made touchdowns. From Christmas Day 1944 to the Japanese surrender, his Eighth Army had 52 D-days, used tactics that constantly kept the Japs off balance.

Looking back, Eichelberger is good-naturedly contemptuous of Army Intelligence (he was told to expect 6,000 Japanese on Leyte--his Eighth Army killed more than 27,000 there), and he is impatient with the kind of War Department nonsense that brought ranking generals to Brisbane to be photographed in midwar. That one consumed five precious Eichelberger days.

One Piece of Advice. One of his toughest chores, he considers, was squiring Mrs. Roosevelt on a trip around Australia (it boosted morale but Eichelberger found the protocol terrific).

General Bob retired in 1949 after commanding the occupation troops in Japan for three years (his Eighth Army had been picked by MacArthur for the Japanese invasion). In a book remarkably free of gratuitous advice, he suggests this stand to U.S. policymakers: "We will consider aggression against Japan as we would consider aggression against our own territorial limits. If aggression occurs, we will fight."

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