The Harlem News

MacArthur Lauded
For Leadership

When the chapter of war history dealing with the Battle of New Guinea is written, it will be one of the most important in the whole book. That is what military men here tell me.

They began telling me that bit by bit just before the second front in Africa opened. Then the African story wiped everything else off the first pages. Recently they have been talking about New Guinea again.

They keep saying to me a little reproachfully, "the American people don't realize what MacArthur has achieved down in that jungle country."

These aren't the "MacArthur men"—there are such in the army, a little group of hero worshipers who perhaps worship a bit more fervently than logically. But the men who have watched the New Guinea campaign from Moresby straight up over the Owen Stanley range and down the other side and up to the eastern coast of the island tell me that MacArthur and the leaders he has about him have done a great and a significant job.

It is great because he has accomplished what it was freely predicted the Japs could not do (and didn't).

It is significant because it has proved that Australians and Americans, given the training, can beat the Jap at his own game. They can (and have) beaten him with less training, without the fatalistic quality of the Jap, whose religion is to die rather than surrender even when dying isn't a military necessity.

There are two reasons, which military men put forward why the battle of New Guinea has not been painted in its true colors—represented in its true importance. One is the fact that MacArthur leans backward in his communiques.

Another is a peculiar copy-desk prejudice of American newspapers, which causes them to play down reports from the distance and play up the reports from the war department in Washington.

There are two reasons why MacArthur's reports are given out from his headquarters in Australia instead of by the war department in Washington. One is that the Australians (and perhaps MacArthur) want it that way, and another is because American newspapers, who pay a lot of money to keep correspondents in that area, don't like to have their men scooped by Washington.
Why He Is Winning

MacArthur may have another reason for not ballyhooing his achievements. He was beaten in Bataan. He may feel that until he has a complete victory to his credit, he doesn't want to sing too loudly.

But MacArthur has won so far in New Guinea because the men under his command were able to do what they never had a chance to do on Bataan because of lack of numbers, supplies and food.

On New Guinea they were able to do better than the Japs could, the very things which the Japs could do best. And they did it in the kind of jungle country in which that "best" was even better. They were able to adapt themselves to the environment which required a kind of fighting and a kind of endurance for which the Japanese had spent years in preparing. The kind of fighting that resulted in the fall of Singapore and the kind which the conventional British soldiers—even the Far Eastern experts—said was impossible.