Landing at Saidor - Preparation

Preparation

General Krueger selected the 32nd Infantry Division for the Saidor operation as it was at Goodenough Island but no longer required for the New Britain campaign. The assistant division commander, Brigadier General Clarence A. Martin was appointed commander of Task Force, which was built around the 126th Infantry Regimental Combat Team. The 126th Regimental Combat Team had been rebuilt after the Battle of Buna-Gona and had received six weeks' amphibious training in Australia and a further three weeks' training at Milne Bay. Units assigned to the task force were at Goodenough Island, Milne Bay, Oro Bay, Lae, Finschafen, Port Moresby, Kiriwina, Arawe, Cape Cretin, and Australia.

The mission of Task Force was to (1) seize the Saidor area; (2) establish facilities for a fighter group; (3) assist in the establishment of air forces in the area; (4) assist in the establishment of light naval forces in the area; and (5) construct minimal port and base facilities. Notably, it did not contain any explicit instruction to fight the Japanese. Lieutenant General Frank Berryman's Australian II Corps would cooperate by exploitation along the coast, while the Australian 7th Division would contain Japanese forces in the Bogadjim area by fighting patrols.

Maps were supplied by the Australian Survey Corps. There was insufficient time and opportunity for ground reconnaissance, so three beaches, codenamed Red, White, and Blue, on the west shore of Dekays Bay were chosen from aerial photographs. They proved to be "narrow, rocky and exposed to heavy seas". The intelligence staff at GHQ in Brisbane believed that there were no more than 4,500 Japanese forward of Sio, and only 1,500 more between there and the Madang area. They estimated that if the Japanese decided to counter-attack at Saidor, they would take a week to bring up 3,000 men. Accordingly, General Martin elected to dispense with a preliminary aerial bombardment. Removing this requirement permitted a dawn landing.

The assault troops with their supplies and equipment had to be loaded on board the ships on 31 December 1943, just five days after the assault on Cape Gloucester. Rear Admiral Daniel E. Barbey's VII Amphibious Force allotted 6 Landing Ships, Tank (LSTs), 10 High speed transports (APDs) and 17 Landing Craft Infantry (LCIs). A last minute hitch developed on 30 December when it was discovered that only nine APDs would be available. New embarkation tables were drawn up, shifting personnel not required in the assault waves to LCIs, and the landing schedule was revised in the light of the reduced number of landing craft.

The difficulty of simultaneously supplying operations at Saidor, Arawe, Long Island, and Cape Gloucester was sufficiently daunting for General Krueger to request for a postponement of the Saidor operation. But the commander of the Allied Naval Forces and the United States Seventh Fleet, Vice Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid assured MacArthur that enough supplies would be delivered, and MacArthur overruled Krueger. "I am most anxious that if humanly possible this operation take place as scheduled," MacArthur informed him, "Its capture will have a vital strategic effect which will be lost if materially postponed."