War at the End of the World: Douglas MacArthur and the Forgotten Fight For New Guinea, 1942-1945

ALSO BY JAMES P. DUFFY

The Sinking of the Laconia and the U-Boat War: Disaster in the Mid-Atlantic

Target: America: Hitler’s Plan to Attack the United States

Hitler’s Secret Pirate Fleet: The Deadliest Ships of World War II

Target Hitler: The Plots to Kill Adolf Hitler

Hitler Slept Late: And Other Blunders That Cost Him the War

Lincoln’s Admiral: The Civil War Campaigns of David Farragut

NAL CALIBER

Published by New American Library,

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This book is an original publication of New American Library.

First Printing, January 2016

Copyright © James P. Duffy, 2016

Maps by Chris Erichsen

Front jacket photographs: planes © Everett Historical/Shutterstock Images; mountains © Minden Pictures/Getty Images; soldier © Getty Images. Back jacket photograph © Corbis.

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eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-61109-8

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

Duffy, James P., 1941–

War at the end of the world: Douglas MacArthur and the forgotten fight for New Guinea, 1942–1945/James P. Duffy.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-451-41830-2

1. World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns—New Guinea. 2. MacArthur, Douglas, 1880–1964. I. Title.

D767.95.D84 2016

940.54'265—dc23 2015019828

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

Version_1

To the memory of Mary Gallagher

In addition to all our other difficulties, there was New Guinea itself, as tough and tenacious an enemy as the Japanese.

—GENERAL DOUGLAS MACARTHUR

Heaven is Java; hell is Burma; but no one returns alive from New Guinea.

—SAYING POPULAR AMONG JAPANESE SOLDIERS

CONTENTS

Also by James P. Duffy

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

List of Maps

INTRODUCTION

PROLOGUE

PART ONE: 1942

CHAPTER 1. This Is War, Not a Sunday School Picnic

CHAPTER 2. Every Man for Himself

CHAPTER 3. First Landings in New Guinea

CHAPTER 4. A General in Search of an Army

CHAPTER 5. To Port Moresby by Sea

CHAPTER 6. Second Landings in New Guinea

CHAPTER 7. Death Along the Kokoda Track

CHAPTER 8. First Defeat at Milne Bay

CHAPTER 9. Take Buna, or Not Come Back Alive

PART TWO: 1943

CHAPTER 10. Sailing the Bismarck Sea

CHAPTER 11. Assault on Salamaua

CHAPTER 12. Pincers Around Lae

CHAPTER 13. War on the Huon Peninsula

CHAPTER 14. Invasion Across the Straits

PART THREE: 1944

CHAPTER 15. The General and the Admiralties

CHAPTER 16. Reckless and Persecution

CHAPTER 17. Next Stop: Wakde

CHAPTER 18. Bloody Biak

CHAPTER 19. The General, the President, and the Admiral

CHAPTER 20. Breakout from Wewak

CHAPTER 21. Island-Hopping to Victory

EPILOGUE

Photographs

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Source Notes

Index

MAPS

The Japanese Plan for War, December 1941

Rabaul and Vicinity, 1941

The Japanese Advance into the Solomons–New Guinea Area, January–July 1942

The Pacific Areas, 1 August 1942

Japanese Thrust Across Mountains Toward Port Moresby

The Huon Peninsula and the Straits

Southwest Pacific Operations, September 1943–February 1944

Admiralty Islands

Hollandia-Aitape Operations

New Guinea, 1942–1944

Biak Island Operation

Morotai Island Operation

INTRODUCTION

It was four years of some of the worst warfare in history. Fought in monsoon-soaked jungles, debilitating heat; impassable mountains; torrential rivers; animal-, insect-, and disease-infested swamps—the combat raged across what one American soldier called a green hell on earth.

The war for New Guinea is perhaps the least-known campaign of World War II, yet was one of the most crucial. Gaining control of New Guinea was the cornerstone of the Japanese war strategy. So badly did the Japanese want the island that they dramatically depleted their defense of their other strongholds by pulling tens of thousands of troops, dozens of warships, and hundreds of aircraft into the quagmire of New Guinea. The more resources they committed, the more important the campaign became to the Imperial General Staff.

For the Americans, victory in New Guinea was pivotal in breaking the Japanese war machine, the vital first step in a long march through the South and central Pacific to the Japanese Home Islands and the ultimate destruction of the Japanese Empire. The vast number of troops, ships, and warplanes that the Japanese pulled away from other fronts to commit to New Guinea contributed directly to Allied successes at places such as Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan and Iwo Jima. Japanese generals themselves, interrogated after the war, concluded that the New Guinea campaign had contributed a good deal to their losing the war.

This book is the story of the almost four-year campaign for control of New Guinea. From January 23, 1942, when the Japanese first landed on New Guinea, until the last holdouts in the mountain jungles surrendered on September 11, 1945, the fighting was virtually nonstop.

Emboldened by easy successes throughout the Pacific and Southeast Asia, the Japanese could not know that the world’s second-largest island would ultimately break them. New Guinea would halt their juggernaut, just as the attempt to take Moscow broke both Napoleon and Hitler. Similarities between the events in Russia and those in New Guinea are striking. After sweeping across Europe in a succession of victories, the Germans were stopped at the Moscow suburbs by a combination of heavy snows, subfreezing temperatures, difficult terrain, a breakdown in their supply system, and militia-type defenders who fought ferociously until regular army units could arrive from Siberia. In New Guinea, the Japanese were slowed by monsoons that turned tracks and paths into raging streams and difficult terrain that drastically reduced their ability to resupply units in the field, before being stopped by militia and volunteer units who inflicted severe losses on the invaders until American and Australian regular army troops could arrive.

Winning the war in New Guinea was of personal importance to Allied commander in chief General Douglas MacArthur. His avowed I shall return to the Philippines could be accomplished only after taking New Guinea. For MacArthur, there was no way around New Guinea. He could not bypass the island and leave tens of thousands of enemy troops in his rear. The road to Manila was through New Guinea.

PROLOGUE

Historians differ on the start of World War II in the Pacific-Asia theaters. The earliest any can agree on is September 18, 1931, when soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army stationed as guards along the Japanese-owned South Manchurian Railway in the Chinese province of Manchuria set off a minor explosion along the railway that did little damage. They quickly blamed the incident on Chinese bandits and used it as an opportunity to fire a series of artillery shells into a nearby garrison of the Chinese army. The Chinese returned fire. Fighting broke out and grew in intensity as it spread, leading finally to the Japanese occupation of all of Manchuria. They soon renamed the province Manchukuo, and installed a puppet government.

When news of the incident reached the West, United States secretary of state Henry Stimson urged President Herbert Hoover to impose economic sanctions on Japan. General Douglas MacArthur, then chief of staff of the U.S. Army, supported Stimson, but to no avail, as Hoover decided not to provoke Tokyo.¹

A second date used by some for the start of World War II is July 7, 1937, when Japanese soldiers stationed in north China used the temporary disappearance of one of their own to open fire on Chinese troops across the Marco Polo Bridge that spanned the Yunting River near Peking. Local Japanese commanders wanted control of the vital bridge for their planned occupation of Peking. Following a series of failed cease-fires and truces, serious fighting broke out between Nationalist Chinese troops and Japanese forces, leading ultimately to the bloody battle for Shanghai in August 1937.²

Japanese expansion continued from there, based largely on the country’s economic and resource needs. As General MacArthur later described it, They lacked sugar, so they took Formosa; they lacked iron so they took Manchuria; they lacked hard coal and timber so they invaded China. They lacked security so they took Korea.³

With all this land captured, they still needed the nickel and other minerals from Malaya, and the oil and rubber from the Dutch East Indies. In fact, Japanese plans called for complete hegemony over much of China, Southeast Asia, and the western Pacific, which included the Philippines. They desired to establish the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, with a defensive perimeter running from the Kuril Islands in the north to the island of New Britain, off the coast of New Guinea, then turning west to include northwestern New Guinea and ultimately ending around Malaya, Burma, and Thailand. As Japanese planners viewed the situation, the greatest dangers to meeting their goal were the Pacific Fleet of the United States Navy, stationed at Pearl Harbor, and the United States Far East Air Force, headquartered in the Philippines. To negate these risks, they boldly launched near-simultaneous attacks at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines on December 7 and 8, 1941.⁴

Following the devastation on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, the Japanese blitzkrieg swept across the western Pacific and Southeast Asia, scoring one victory after another. In December 1941 a pair of American possessions in the Pacific, Guam and Wake Island, fell to Japan. The following months saw Imperial forces conquer Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, Burma, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines.

To retain their authority over these lands, Tokyo’s war planners knew they had to prevent American forces from building up in Australia. How to do this was the overarching question that dominated Japan’s military policies throughout the South Pacific. The Imperial Japanese Navy and the Imperial Japanese Army heatedly disagreed on the answer. The navy was in favor of occupying at least Australia’s northeastern portion, but the army was against it. Close to one million army troops were already committed to the war and occupation of China, Southeast Asia, and Manchuria, where they were worried about a possible Soviet invasion. Even if they succeeded in invading and taking control of a portion of the Australian continent, Japan would inevitably face a continuing war of attrition there. The army favored instead a naval blockade that would sufficiently isolate Australia from the United States. Either way, the key to driving Australia out of the war was New Guinea, from which bombers could threaten and even attack Australian cities, and from which Imperial ships could patrol the entrances to Australian ports.

When war came to the southwest Pacific in January 1942, Australia could not have been less prepared. The four combat divisions of the Australian Imperial Force were serving alongside other British Empire troops in North Africa and on the Malay Peninsula, as were nine squadrons of the Royal Australian Air Force. The five cruisers—two heavy, three light—of the Royal Australian Navy were returning to Australian waters following several months of service in the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. With the exception of one armored division that had no tanks, virtually no trained soldiers were left to defend a nation of slightly over seven million people. The defense of Australia was left to militia troops who required several months of training before they were ready to face Japanese combat forces. Air defenses for the nearly three-million-square-mile nation amounted to twenty-nine Hudson medium bombers and fourteen Catalina flying boats. Defense against air attacks would rely to a large degree on a small number of Australian-built training planes called Wirraways, which were almost useless in air combat.⁵

Such was the condition of the forces charged with the defense of Australia and New Guinea in January 1942, as a large Japanese war fleet steamed south.

Part One

1942

CHAPTER 1

This Is War, Not a Sunday School Picnic

As the huge four-engine flying boat roared in over the lagoon, Truk Harbor below bristled with activity: massive warships steamed in and out, while dozens of freighters unloaded their cargo into massive warehouses. Rich green jungle reached out into the deep blue waters of the lagoon. Presiding over all, shore batteries of antiaircraft guns jutted from dozens of volcanic and coral islands that dotted the area. Truk defied an enemy to approach.

A triumphant wave of attacks across the South Pacific had further energized an already-confident Imperial Navy. Now, on January 3, 1942, just four weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, an assembly of top army officers were flying in for a rare meeting with their naval counterparts, with whom they seldom agreed on anything. Aboard the plane, Major General Tomitaro Horii, commander of the Imperial Japanese Army’s South Seas Detachment, and several of his regimental and battalion commanders braced for landing. As the flying boat skimmed the glittering waters, the officers were quiet and tense.

Truk was part of the Carolines, a string of tiny islands which had been mandated to Japan by the League of Nations following the First World War. Now, Truk Island was home to the Japanese Empire’s southern military base. Known as the Gibraltar of the Pacific, it was Japan’s most formidable base in the South Pacific.

Within minutes of landing, the army officers clambered off the aircraft into the bright morning sunlight and onto a boat that ferried them to Admiral Shigeyoshi Inoue’s flagship, the Katori. The fifty-three-year-old admiral, who had earlier served as military attaché to several European nations, was bringing the two services together to discuss plans for the invasion of New Guinea, which lay just eleven hundred miles to the southwest. Governed primarily by Australia, with a smaller portion under Dutch rule, New Guinea would be their largest and most challenging target to date. The immense island, off the northern coast of Australia, was notorious for its hostile terrain: impenetrable shorelines, dense jungles, steep mountains, rain that seemed never to stop, and a native population rumored to include cannibals. Yet as the officers all knew, New Guinea was the gateway to Australia, an Allied nation that must be neutralized—either through invasion and occupation, or by cutting her supply and communication lines to the United States.

General Horii had been selected to lead the New Guinea invasion, his last and most fateful assignment. At age fifty-one, Horii was a seasoned and respected commander, a combat officer who often personally led his men into battle. During the 1930s, he had served in China, fighting in the Shanghai Incident of 1932, which had left ten thousand Chinese civilians dead. The Japanese atrocities had affected Horii deeply, and they would influence him as he took command in the Pacific War.¹

In 1940 the Imperial Army had promoted Horii to major general and assigned him command of the South Seas Detachment, an elite amphibious landing unit that was part of the Imperial Navy’s South Seas Force. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the detachment participated in the successful battle for Wake Island against U.S. forces, then joined in on the swift move south that conquered island after island. During this period, Horii distinguished himself from his contemporaries, many of whom either ordered despicable acts or looked the other way when they were committed. Disturbed by his colleagues’ atrocities, he issued a written order to his men, titled Guide to Soldiers in the South Seas, that explicitly forbade looting, violating women, and the needless killing or injuring of local inhabitants.²

Now, Horii’s first targets were two smaller islands east of New Guinea: New Britain and New Ireland. Gaining control of New Britain’s town of Rabaul was key. Ideally situated as a prospective base of operations, Rabaul was nestled snugly inside the deep-anchorage Simpson Harbor, protected on three sides by mostly mountainous terrain. The only entrance was through Blanche Bay, which opened into the St. George’s Channel, separating New Britain and New Ireland. From Rabaul, Japanese warships could control the surrounding sea, including the Solomon Islands to the southeast. What was more, the town’s two operating airports would enable Japanese aircraft to dominate the skies.

A plan developed by Imperial General Headquarters in November 1941, known as the First Operational Stage, had identified Rabaul as the key element in the defensive perimeter around Truk. Japanese planners believed that Truk, Japan’s most important base in the South Pacific, would not be safe from enemy attack as long as Rabaul was in Allied hands.³

In the crowded wardroom, the army and navy officers shared intelligence reports gleaned from photographic reconnaissance flights and on-the-ground spies. They discussed several possible landing sites, but finally selected the town’s waterfront inside Simpson Harbor as offering the best access to the airfields. Intelligence reported that the port and town were lightly defended, with fewer than two thousand troops, including volunteer militia.⁴

Nonetheless, Horii planned for an overwhelming invasion. A fleet of bombers would destroy any enemy aircraft before the 5,300 men of the South Seas Detachment launched a three-pronged attack. Two prongs would head toward the two airports outside Rabaul in an attempt to limit sabotage and secure landing sites for carrier-based aircraft. The center prong would go directly into the town itself. Orders from Tokyo were that all defenders were to be annihilated.⁵

The officers assumed that Rabaul’s shore batteries could keep some of their ships out of the harbor. Fifty-one-year-old Rear Admiral Kiyohide Shima, whose warships were to escort the invasion’s troop transports, expressed concern over reports that the Australians might have as many as ten coastal guns defending Rabaul. To lessen the danger to ships that would be clearly visible in daylight, the navy decided on a night assault. Several army officers, including General Horii, were unhappy about landing on a mostly unknown shore in the dark, but the final decision was the navy’s.

—

With a population of five thousand, composed of fewer than a thousand of European ancestry, a thousand Asians (mostly Chinese), and three thousand members of local Melanesian tribes, Rabaul had once been a cosmopolitan town, with several hotels, a movie house, department stores, a well-stocked public library, a variety of restaurants, several druggists, a baseball field, and a cricket field. Simpson Harbor had boasted modern wharves, warehouse facilities, and a seaplane base. Yet in May 1937 a series of volcanic eruptions had buried the entire city under several inches of wet ash, destroying many of its buildings. These eruptions had transformed a formerly flat island in Blanche Bay into a seven-hundred-foot-tall conical mountain within which volcanic rumblings continued. Rabaul was just starting to reestablish itself when the war started.

The town’s defenses were slim, numbering only fifteen hundred men and women, even less than the figure reported to Horii. Some were civilians—clerks, planters, miners, bankers, lawyers, and government employees—who had enlisted for training with the recently formed New Guinea Volunteer Rifles. They had signed up expecting to serve in support of regular Australian Army forces, not as frontline troops. However, a few had experience from the Great War, and most took to their training with enthusiasm and energy.

New Britain’s main defense was Australia’s 2/22 Infantry Battalion, known as Lark Force, under the command of fifty-two-year-old Colonel John Scanlan from Tasmania. Scanlan was a decorated veteran of the Great War and a holder of the French Legion of Honor. His Lark Force was a mixed bag of infantry and artillery units, along with a medical detachment that included female nurses and a twenty-five-member band.

The defenders’ weapons were out-of-date and inadequate. Among them were two old three-inch antiaircraft weapons—one deeply cracked—that gunners had dragged up the slope of a nearby sixteen-hundred-foot mountain following the attack on Pearl Harbor. They looked like two huge, grotesque lawn ornaments. Of the fifty-three members of the antiaircraft battery, only six had ever witnessed a shot fired by an antiaircraft gun. Their drills consisted of having one person, usually someone who had violated a rule and been dubbed the pilot officer, run back and forth in front of the guns holding a long bamboo pole with a model airplane attached to one end.⁶

Two outdated six-inch breech-loading Mark VII coastal guns constituted the Rabaul shore battery. Made in 1901, they bore the marking VR, dating their manufacture to Queen Victoria’s reign. The infantry carried mostly Lee-Enfield rifles manufactured before the Great War. There was also a mix of Bren guns, light machine guns, some mortars, and numerous handguns. Such was the force the Australian government had supplied Rabaul to defend the fifteen-mile-long coast on either side of the town.

Unknown to Rabaul’s defenders, the Australian chiefs of staff had already decided to make the town a sacrificial lamb to the greater cause of slowing down the expected invasion of New Guinea. On December 15, 1941, Herbert Evatt, the Australian minister for external affairs, sent a secret cable to Washington, D.C., in which he outlined the decision not to reinforce Rabaul, nor to provide any large ships for its evacuation in case of a Japanese invasion. Evatt wrote that the government recognized that Rabaul was an important target for the Japanese and that any concentrated Japanese attack would be beyond the capacity of the small garrison to meet successfully. With most of Australia’s armed forces fighting alongside the British in North Africa, the Middle East, and Malaya, there was little the government could do to defend New Britain.⁷

Perhaps to soothe its conscience over leaving the defenders hostages to fortune, the government did transfer fourteen Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) aircraft to Rabaul. These included four coastal reconnaissance light bombers and ten Wirraway fighter-trainers that were less fighters than trainers. The bombers were a military version of the twin-engine Lockheed Electra passenger plane made famous by Amelia Earhart, who was piloting one when she vanished in 1937. The Wirraways were the Australian version of North American Aviation’s NA-16 trainer and all-purpose craft. This makeshift air force contingent, given the designation 24 Squadron, was under the command of twenty-nine-year-old wing commander John Lerew, a former race car driver and civil engineer.

A message distributed to all members of Lark Force on January 1, 1942, concluded with this sentence: There Shall Be No Withdrawal. They were to fight to the last man.⁸

The situation was even worse on the neighboring island of New Ireland, which the Japanese planned to attack at the same time as Rabaul. One hundred fifty enlisted men and officers of the 1st Independent Company were the sole defenders of the 3,300-square-mile island. Their commander, Major James Edmonds-Wilson, a thirty-five-year-old farmer from South Australia, was instructed to resist an enemy invasion long enough to destroy all fuel supplies and military stores in and around the town of Kavieng, the island’s chief port, and to sabotage the small airport to render it unusable for the Japanese. Edmonds-Wilson’s force was to then escape the island in a small schooner and head for Rabaul. The 1st Independent Company had initially trained, as did many of the defenders of Rabaul, for combat in the open country of the Middle East; none had training in the tropical jungles that covered the islands they were now expected to defend.

The Australians in Rabaul were not idly waiting for an enemy attack. Following several December high-altitude reconnaissance flights over the town by Japanese flying boats, Wing Commander Lerew set out to accomplish a directive from the RAAF regional headquarters at Townsville on the northeastern coast of Australia: To strike at Japanese bases and shipping wherever possible.⁹

On New Year’s Day, Lerew led his four bombers on a mission against a Japanese seaplane refueling station on Kapingamarangi, a tiny atoll at the southern end of the Caroline Islands, approximately four hundred miles from Rabaul. It was the only potential target within range of the Hudsons, but only if they cut their thousand-pound bomb loads in half and added extra fuel tanks. The attack resulted in damage to several slipways used by seaplanes and flying boats and set a large fuel storage area aflame. Smoke from the burning fuel rose to about ten thousand feet. The four crews were airborne for five and a half hours.¹⁰

—

The plan in place, General Horii and his staff returned to their flying boat for the 630-mile trip back to their headquarters on Guam. The next day, January 4, 1942, Tokyo issued orders that the simultaneous invasions of New Britain and New Ireland, known as Operation R, were to take place in the second half of January. According to meteorologists, there would be little or no moonlight during the third quarter of the month. General Horii immediately ordered his staff to begin loading vehicles, fuel, weapons, nonperishable foodstuffs, and other supplies aboard nine transport vessels at Guam’s Apra Harbor. Troops and horses would be the last to board.

That same day, sixteen bombers from the Imperial Japanese Navy’s 24th Air Flotilla took off from Truk and headed south for Rabaul.

—

At ten thirty on the clear, bright Sunday morning of January 4, Cornelius Page, known to his friends as Con, watched in shocked disbelief as sixteen airplanes passed high over his coconut plantation on the small island of Tabar, twenty-five miles of off the northeast coast of New Ireland. Page was a sublieutenant in the Royal Australian Navy Volunteer Reserves and an unpaid member of the Coastwatchers, trained to report unusual or suspicious events; sightings of strange ships, aircraft, floating mines; and anything else that might be of interest to the Royal Australian Navy, under whose auspices they operated.¹¹

Con, whom the Japanese would later hunt down and kill, quickly identified the planes as Japanese bombers, rushed inside his house, cranked up his wireless radio, and reported what he had seen to military headquarters at Port Moresby, on the southwest coast of New Guinea. Port Moresby radio operators instantly transmitted the report to members of Rabaul’s Lark Force, who assumed their town was the likely target. They immediately blasted the air-raid sirens, shattering the Sunday-morning peace. For a few minutes confusion reigned. Was it a drill or the real thing? A few daring souls waited in the open to find out, while others rushed to take cover in air-raid shelters.

As the bombers finally roared overhead, many of the antiaircraft gunners, most of whom were under nineteen years of age, began pointing skyward, yelling like schoolchildren until one finally asked the commander, Lieutenant David Selby, for permission to fire. Selby, a tall, thin attorney from New South Wales whose pencil mustache and bearing gave him the appearance of an aristocrat, watched the planes for a few seconds as the naive young men clamored around him. He suddenly turned and said, perhaps more harshly than he meant, For heaven’s sake, shut up. This is war, not a Sunday school picnic. Momentarily abashed, the young men collected themselves before rushing to the guns, now determined to display their professionalism. To everyone’s surprise, the damaged three-inch gun fired without difficulty. Yet even with the fuses set at maximum height, the shells fell far short of the bombers, which maintained an altitude of eighteen thousand feet.¹²

Japanese planes took only minutes to pattern-bomb the Lakunai Airdrome, just outside of Rabaul along the coast, with fifty high-fragmentation bombs the Australians called daisy-cutters. These released thousands of pieces of shrapnel intended to maim or kill anyone within reach. Only three bombs hit the runway; seventeen landed in a nearby tribal compound, killing fifteen people instantly and seriously injuring fifteen more. The rest of the bombs fell harmlessly into the sea. Wing Commander Lerew rushed two Wirraways up to try to intercept the bombers, but the Japanese planes were gone by the time the frustrated Australians reached fighting altitude.

Rabaul’s defense forces remained on alert throughout the day as rumors spread of a possible enemy landing. The rumors finally gave way when reports made clear that there were no Japanese ships in the area. Life was settling back to relative routine when, just before dusk, eleven Japanese flying boats appeared overhead and bombed the Vunakanau Airfield, eleven miles south of the town. One person died, but the runway suffered only slight damage. Once again, the enemy owned the skies.

Rabaul was quiet on Monday, with only the sound of an occasional Wirraway passing overhead on patrol. Tuesday morning, January 6, the flying boats returned for another devastating attack on the Vunakanau Airfield, destroying a Wirraway and significantly damaging the field, its tiny air force station, and one of the Hudson bombers. Early the next morning a flight of twin-engine bombers flew in for the kill, pelting the airfield with more bombs, this time destroying a Hudson and a Wirraway, and heavily damaging two more Wirraways. Now only eight or nine Australian airplanes remained.

The tension in Rabaul grew. Few people in the town had any idea of what to do when the enemy arrived. The highest-ranking government official on the island, Deputy Administrator Harold Page (no relation to Con), had arranged a month prior to evacuate many of the women and children to Australia. Unfortunately, the nation’s racial immigration policies had limited the evacuation to those of European descent. Now, as enemy bombers arrived almost daily, Page desperately cabled officials in Canberra, the Australian capital, asking for permission to evacuate the remaining civilians, including males. His requests went unanswered.¹³

With no intelligence or help from Australia, the Lark Force defenders decided to launch a reconnaissance flight against the Japanese. On Friday, January 9, a Hudson equipped with extra fuel tanks took off from the field near Kavieng on New Ireland and headed north to Truk. Flight Lieutenant Robert Yeowart, a twenty-seven-year-old accountant from Brisbane, and his six-man crew had volunteered for this dangerous mission. The Japanese dominated the skies over the entire length of the nearly fourteen-hundred-mile round trip. After dodging antiaircraft fire and defending fighters at Truk, Yeowart returned with photographs of a massive ship and aircraft buildup that looked to Scanlan and Lerew like an invasion force soon to be heading south.

—

Back on Guam, General Horii continued to oversee the final loading of his men and horses aboard the transport ships. Flying boats overhead kept a watch for enemy submarines. In the early afternoon of January 14 the transports sailed from Guam with Horii and his staff aboard the Yokohama Maru, a 6,143-ton armed passenger and cargo ship. The 5,300-man invasion force consisted of three infantry battalions, a regiment of engineers, three battalions of sailors from the Special Naval Landing Forces, a cavalry company, and a battalion of antiaircraft guns. There was also a fully staffed field hospital, a signals company, and a transportation company to monitor and repair the detachment’s hundreds of vehicles. Finally, there was a veterinary unit to care for its five hundred horses.

As protection, three light cruisers, nine destroyers, and two minelayers steamed with the transports, while planes swept the seas in advance of the fleet in search of enemy ships and submarines.

—

In Rabaul, life settled into a tense monotony. The last bombing raid had been on January 7, and the only enemy spotted since were daily Japanese reconnaissance aircraft, presumably taking photographs. These planes flew beyond the maximum altitude of the Wirraways, frustrating the courageous pilots who took off in pursuit. Deputy Administrator Page continued to send urgent pleas to Canberra for an evacuation of civilians, but his pleas were left unanswered.

On January 8 an event occurred that should have alerted Page, and the others in authority at Rabaul, that the Australian government had all but abandoned them. Almost immediately upon arriving, the cargo vessel M.V. Malaita, carrying a full shipment of military supplies for Rabaul, received orders from Canberra to leave and return her cargo to Australia.

More frustration followed the next week, when six PBY Catalina bombers from Port Moresby flew into Kavieng to refuel before setting off to bomb Truk. Strong swells buffeted one of the planes when it tried to lift off the water, and somehow its bomb load ignited. The plane exploded and quickly sank. Another pilot, Lieutenant George Hutchinson, a U.S. Navy officer on loan to the RAAF, set his plane back down on the water to look for survivors. His efforts were in vain; all eight crew members perished. Of the remaining planes, only one actually found Truk in the bad weather that blanketed the Carolines. The single bomber dropped its sixteen bombs, but poor visibility prevented the crew from seeing whether they hit anything.¹⁴

Five days later Lieutenant Hutchinson became the first American combat casualty in the war for New Guinea. Hutchinson was flying a patrol along the north shore of New Guinea when he encountered a flight of Japanese fighters. He immediately radioed the Port Moresby operator that he was being attacked by five fighters. In the uneven battle that followed, Hutchinson’s Catalina, despite being riddled with bullets, managed to remain flying on autopilot. The last signal received from the American pilot was the ominous On fire!¹⁵

Hutchinson’s tail gunner, Corporal T. H. Keen, discovered that the entire crew of ten was dead. With no knowledge in piloting the aircraft, Keen realized his only chance of surviving was to parachute out before the plane exhausted its fuel. He did not know if he would be landing in enemy territory, but jumping over land was safer than over the open sea, where he would likely become lunch for some sharks. Luckily, the Catalina was over the main island of New Guinea when Keen dropped out of the hatch. On the ground, local villagers took him to a nearby mission station.¹⁶

On January 14 the townspeople of Rabaul were surprised when a ship steamed into their harbor. It was the Norwegian-owned Herstein, now under charter to the Australian government. At the main dock, the crew unloaded her cargo, which included two thousand bombs for the now nearly nonexistent bomber force. Captain Gottfred Gundersen then moved the Herstein to another wharf to begin loading as quickly as possible several thousand tons of copra, the meaty inner lining of coconuts used primarily to make coconut oil. Gundersen scanned the sky for Japanese airplanes; the faster he could load his ship and get out of there, the better. Government officials in Canberra had refused him permission to leave Rabaul without a full load of copra.¹⁷

Deputy Administrator Page again cabled Canberra, pleading for permission to put some three hundred civilians aboard the Herstein for evacuation. When the response came in, Page stared at it in disbelief. The authorities wrote that all essential personnel must remain at their posts in Rabaul, and nonessential personnel could not board the freighter. The orders were explicit: "No one is to take the place of the copra aboard the Herstein." Page crumpled the cable in his hand. That settled it. No one was getting away before the invasion.¹⁸

—

About the same time the Herstein was loading her cargo, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo sailed from Truk with a large and powerful fleet that included four aircraft carriers, two battleships, two heavy cruisers, one light cruiser, and nine destroyers. Always a cautious commander, Nagumo sent two squadrons of submarines ahead to patrol the St. George’s Channel. The fifty-four-year-old Nagumo, who suffered from severe bouts of arthritis, was described by one contemporary as an officer of the old school. Although he had disagreed with the attack on Pearl Harbor, he had carried out the mission as commander of the First Air Fleet. Nagumo was gruff and often uncommunicative, but many of his junior officers looked up to him as a father figure. Navy officers who knew him considered the pug-faced admiral to be Japan’s leading advocate of combined sea and air operations. His carrier pilots were fresh from their Pearl Harbor victory and anxious for more combat. As the First Air Fleet sailed south toward its rendezvous with General Horii’s transports, Nagumo obsessively studied the operational plans for the invasion and conquest of New Britain and New Ireland.¹⁹

—

Life aboard Horii’s transports was miserable—cramped and hot. Temperatures inside the holds that housed most of the ranks often reached one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Nevertheless, senior officers kept morale high with speeches that reminded the men of their samurai heritage and their absolute obedience and devotion to the emperor.

The monotony was briefly broken at 6:25 p.m. on January 17. A lookout on the minelayer Tsugaru reported seeing the mast of a ship under sail on the horizon, about eighteen miles distant. The Tsugaru’s captain later wrote, At first . . . we suspected it to be MacArthur fleeing from the Philippines to Australia in a small vessel. The minelayer picked up speed and pursued it with great excitement. Crew members rushed to the rails to catch sight of the enemy general as the small, distant vessel put on more sail in an attempt to escape. In the end, however, it turned out to be Japanese fishermen who had thought the pursuing warship was an American destroyer. The fishermen were so relieved that they gave the Tsugaru’s crew four large tuna from their catch.²⁰

In the early-morning hours of January 20, the South Seas Detachment became the first Japanese army in the nation’s history to sail across the equator. The crews marked the event with celebrations and praise for the emperor. That afternoon Horii’s and Nagumo’s fleets rendezvoused according to plan, and more than one hundred aircraft took off from the decks of the four carriers under the command of Japan’s top pilot, Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, the commanding officer of the squadrons that had attacked Pearl Harbor.²¹

Once all aircraft were airborne, they separated into three formations. Based on the plan prepared by Fuchida, they were to approach Rabaul from three directions: east, west, and north.

—

At 12:48 p.m. that same day, January 20, Con Page informed Port Moresby by wireless that he had seen a formation of twenty bombers heading toward Rabaul. Port Moresby relayed Page’s message to Lark Force, which again sounded the air-raid siren. People ran for cover or to battle stations. The seven remaining Wirraways took off and flew east, in the direction of Page’s plantation on Tabar Island.

Suddenly a second group of thirty-three enemy aircraft appeared, approaching from the west. Minutes later another fifty Zero fighters approached from the north. The sky filled with a mix of fighters, bombers, and dive-bombers. According to their commander, Lieutenant Selby, Rabaul’s antiaircraft gunners were awestruck that the Japs had a plane capable of anything like three hundred miles an hour.²²

The Wirraway pilots were quickly under attack from all directions. Despite a daring and aggressive defense, the pilots were doomed. Selby later wrote that he and his gunners watched in stunned silence as their compatriots fought with desperate gallantry against the enemy. They all knew that there could be only one conclusion to this fantastically uneven combat.²³

In a matter of minutes, Japanese aircraft commanded the skies over Rabaul. Three Wirraway pilots perished in dogfights against the much faster and more maneuverable Zeros. Two others crashed while trying to land. One other plane did land successfully, but could no longer fly, with a portion of its tail shot away. Only one of the defenders managed to touch down safely and intact. All that was left of the squadron were two Wirraways and one Hudson bomber.

Now without defending aircraft, the members of Lark Force fought on with the weapons they had, although they knew that their rifles and Bren guns were no match for the high-flying bombers. For more than a half hour, the bombers circled far out of range and dropped their loads at will, targeting the two airfield runways and buildings, as well as any aircraft on the ground. The dive-bombers and the Zeros focused their attention on the waterfront, looking for ships, wharves, docks, and anything that resembled a military installation.

Once the enemy planes departed, the gun crews fell silent. Gone were the clamoring schoolboys. They were now subdued veterans who had witnessed one of the worst days in Australian military aviation.

Unbeknownst to them, however, their two antiaircraft guns had done some damage. Ensign Haruo Yoshino, who had commanded a torpedo bomber at Pearl Harbor, reported nearly fatal damage to his aircraft from the two old guns and serious damage to five planes in his group as he limped back to the carrier Kaga. He later described that day’s mission as frightful. Tokyo radio reported, Seven of our planes failed to return.²⁴

The courageous performance of Selby and his young gunners came to the public’s attention a few months later when ABC war correspondent Haydon Lennard wrote, Military officers in New Guinea are still talking about this man Selby and his unit. Selby’s fate is unknown. But one thing is certain: Selby and his men behaved like heroes.²⁵

From high above the action, Commander Fuchida had watched and realized with regret that he could have taken the port town’s air defenses with far less airpower. The attack, he later said, was like a hunter sent to stalk a mouse with an elephant gun.²⁶

Historian Gordon W. Prange, who interviewed Fuchida in 1947, reported that the pilot, on his return to the carrier Akagi, told Admiral Nagumo that it was ridiculous to use so many aircraft against the target. He believed it was a waste of time, gas, and bombs, none of which Japan had to spare.²⁷

At the time the attack began, the Herstein had already loaded two thousand tons of the highly flammable copra. Three Val dive-bombers swept down on the ship, each dropping a single bomb. All three hit the target. One slammed into the engine room, and a fuel fire erupted, quickly reaching the cargo. Trained crew members operating the two old antiaircraft weapons mounted on the freighter kept up a continuing fire at the airplanes until the spreading flames forced them to jump overboard and swim to shore. Captain Gundersen was ashore meeting with the shipping agent when he saw his vessel explode.

The ship’s steward, Karl Thorsell, ran down the gangway to escape. He almost succeeded, but suddenly turned and inexplicably ran back to the ship, vanishing into the inferno. The lines tying the Herstein to the wharf caught fire, and the vessel drifted free into the harbor. She burned all night and into the next morning.²⁸

Wing Commander Lerew radioed RAAF headquarters in Townsville about the attack. Waves of enemy fighters shot down Wirraways. Waves of bombers attacking aerodromes. Over one hundred aircraft seen so far. Will you now please send some fighters? The response was not what he hoped to hear: Regret inability to supply fighters. If we had them you would get them.²⁹

Lerew’s reply was straightforward. Wirraways and Hudsons cannot be operated in this area without great loss and sacrifice of skilled personnel and aircraft. As fighters cannot be obtained only one course of services of trained personnel valued. The wing commander informed his headquarters that he planned to withdraw what personnel he had left from Rabaul with the hope they would live to fight another day.