15 December 1942

The Americans push forward with more frontal attacks at Buna at great cost and to very little effect just as they have done for the preceding month.

Little do they know how the Japanese defenders are thinking. One of them, Private Uchiyama Seiichi, will later leave a diary and he wrote on this day: “Enemy plan is to annihilate us before reinforcements come … we are now completely enveloped. Bombed by enemy planes at dawn, continuously all day. We now only wait for the final moments to come.”