It doesn’t seem to be well known outside some Australian and serious American military history circles, but it certainly wasn’t minor. Without it, MacArthur would never have returned to the Philippines. It seems to be one of those campaigns that made a major contribution to victory but which for some reason are ignored or forgotten.
It was by far the most sustained campaign in the Pacific war and, with Guadalcanal, the most important campaign in the first couple of years of the Pacific war because it stopped the Japanese advance and laid the foundations for the thrust to the Philippines.
The completion of the New Guinea campaign marked the successful execution of the primary mission of the Southwest Pacific Forces, which was to extend control to the westward and establish bases from which the Allies could launch attacks against, first the Philippines, then Formosa, and finally the Japanese mainland.
http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/USSBS/PTO-Campaigns/USSBS-PTO-8.html p. 185
However, few people realise how important it was, and notably in America despite a huge and sustained American contribution to that campaign. For some reason the focus is usually on the central Pacific thrust towards Japan later in the war, and for that matter while the New Guinea campaign was continuing.
In a way, for three years the Pacific war really took place in New Guinea. It was an important side theatre that for the length of the war conveniently pinned down 350,000 elite Japanese troops as MacArthur island-hopped his way to Tokyo.
In New Guinea, Japan lost 220,000 troops.[46] In a land that was never imagined to become a battlefield, not by late-Tokugawa southward advance protagonists who envisaged the Philippines as a possible war theatre, not by Meiji intellectuals who saw the prize in Malaya and in Indonesia, not even by the General Staff at the outbreak of war.
It is an irony of Pacific war history that several other islands come to mind immediately when we speak of action in the Pacific, but not New Guinea. The many battles there are little known, except to specialists who study that place and period and to people in Australia, although the war on that island was the most drawn out and frustrating of battles in the Pacific war.
http://ajrp.awm.gov.au/ajrp/remember.nsf/pages/NT00002FAA
The New Guinea Campaign is really the story of two Allied armies fighting two kinds of war–one of grinding attrition and one of classic maneuver. During the attrition period, from January 1943 until January 1944, Australian infantrymen carried the bulk of ground combat while the Americans reconstituted, reinforced, and readied themselves for the maneuver phase of the campaign. During attrition warfare characteristic of eastern New Guinea ground operations through the seizure of the Saidor in January 1944, the Allies suffered more than 24,000 battle casualties; about 70 percent (17,107) were Australians. All this to advance the front line 300 miles in 20 months. But following the decisive Hollandia, Netherlands New Guinea, envelopment in April 1944, losses were 9,500 battle casualties, mainly American, to leap 1,300 miles in just 100 days and complete the reconquest of the great island.
The series of breathtaking landings, often within a few weeks of one another, were the fruits of the Australians’ gallant effort in eastern New Guinea. They fought the Japanese to a standstill at Wau and then pushed a fanatical foe back to the Huon Peninsula. This gave Sixth Army the time to train and to prepare American forces for the amphibious assaults that MacArthur envisioned. It also bought the time to bring the industrial capacity of America to bear in the Southwest Pacific. Aircraft, ships, landing craft, ammunition, medicine, equipment–in short, the sinews of war–gradually found their way to MacArthur’s fighting men.
http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/USA-C-NewGuinea/index.html pp. 29-30
Australia made the major army contribution to the New Guinea campaign during its main offensive phase.
For the first two years of operations Australian troops formed the bulk of the forces fighting in the South-West Pacific Area. Indeed, at no stage did the proportion of Australians involved drop below 65%.
Charlton, Peter, The Unnecessary War: Island Campaigns in the South-West Pacific 1944-45, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1983, p.11
