Turning Point

by Michael Veitch

  Unbeknown to Bardie, several thousand feet above him, the pilots of his actual patrol were witnessing the scene and, no doubt as bewildered as the Japanese pilots, swooped down. ‘Apparently I performed aerobatics in a Kittyhawk that have never been seen before or since,’ recounted Bardie.

  Ducking into some light cloud, lines of orange tracer arced under and over his aircraft, then: ‘One Zero went past my wing tip so closely it nearly hit me, and the other one went past even closer.’ Unbelievably, at that moment Bardie’s engine began to splutter and fail. Knowing he could not remain in the protective cloud forever, he desperately attended to the failing engine, hoping the Zeros would not find him again. Then, in a flash, he remembered his drop tank: ‘In the panic I hadn’t switched it over to the main fuel tank.’ With the throwing of a lever, the engine roared back into life and Bardie dived away to safety. ‘I was a bit lucky,’ he would say later, ‘they wasted a lot of ammo on me.’

  Now, however, on the eve of the battle, the focus would shift for a time away from the airstrip and Milne Bay to Goodenough Island, off the Papuan coast to the north.

  •

  In the late morning of 25 August, from their commanding but expertly hidden lookouts above the western shore of Goodenough Island, three private soldiers of the Australian Coastwatchers were on alert, having been told via their AWA 3BZ radio sets to expect evidence of Japanese activity somewhere in the vicinities of Port Moresby, Milne Bay or possibly Guadalcanal, several hundred miles to the east. As their view was limited to approaches from the west, that was where they focused their army-issue binoculars, sweeping back and forth across the endless blue ocean.

  At times over the previous week or so, privates Anthony Morrow and Thomas Royal had had to remind themselves there was a war going on at all, such was the peace and tranquillity of Goodenough. The local people had been kind and accommodating, supplying them with food and shelter, secure in their belief that the Japanese would not bother to disturb their island paradise, 23 miles across and 17 wide, with the spectacular mountain of Vineuo rising more than 8000 feet in the centre. After all, there was nothing here the Japanese could possibly want: no decent harbour, a handful of small villages and nearly 435 square miles of dense and extremely steep jungle. The Coastwatchers concurred, and could not imagine their idyll being disturbed by the hand of war. On the morning of Tuesday, 25 August 1942, however, the war came to Goodenough Island.

  •

  At 0500 the previous morning, from their new base 150 miles away at Buna, the seven motorised Daihatsu barges of Commander Tsukioka’s 5th Sasebo SNLF had set out on a two-day journey towards their objective, Taupota, on Papua’s northern coast, above Milne Bay. From here, they would travel a short distance overland and emerge to surprise the Australian and American forces, linking up with other SNLF forces advancing from the east. Together they would capture Rabi and its base.

  After a full day and a morning in these dreadful barges, however, the 352 men under Tsukioka’s command were finding the going rough. Packed in full kit into the open, flat-bottomed, 10-foot-wide, 50-foot-long motorised crafts, their second day on the water was beginning to wear them down. Nor was Commander Tsukioka feeling particularly happy about the mission. The whole thing had been a rush job, and a badly planned one at that. He had only received his orders 24 hours before sailing, and although he’d tried to exude confidence while addressing his men, he suspected he was not all that convincing.

  To his superiors he had mentioned that although his men had trained in amphibious operations, two days was a very long time for them to spend on the ocean in open barges. The senior officers were unmoved, arguing that the trip would be broken up with a night of camping along the way. Besides, they assured him, the 200-mile route he was to follow to Taupota would hug the coastline, avoiding the worst of the open sea.

  This was all very well, thought Tsukioka, as he bowed deferentially to his superior and left, but such a course would make their progress clearly visible to the army of spies the Australians had planted along the coast. Worst of all, there had been no time to order any radio sets from Rabaul, so they would be setting off deaf, with no way to communicate with anyone should anything go wrong.

  However, his men were young and fit and aching to take part in the battle for which they had so long prepared. All that was needed for them to be refreshed and eager to continue was a rest and a good meal.

  Late in the morning, Tsukioka saw a fine and mountainous island ahead, which his map told him was Goodenough. They were making good progress, and well over the halfway mark to Taupota. Here, he decided, he would feed and rest his men and proceed in a few hours’ time. It was a fateful decision which would bear heavily on the outcome of the battle.

  High above the water, Morrow and Royal could not believe what they were seeing. For miles, they had been tracking the seven dark dots on the horizon; now the barges were just over 200 yards from the shoreline. The sound of the motors and the voices of the several hundred uniformed men were clearly audible as they motored past, seemingly looking for a place to land. A coded message was immediately tapped out on a wireless set alerting Milne Bay, with the rejoinder: ‘Await further instructions.’ Those instructions were to observe the Japanese landing point, then to get out of there as quickly as possible.

  The men on Goodenough were not the first to sight the small flotilla of barges. As Commander Tsukioka had suspected, their journey had been noted soon after their departure the previous day, and had been reported by observers stationed at Porlock Harbour and Cape Nelson on the Papuan coast. Their first night of camping, at a spot called Fona, had been monitored, with some of the Coastwatchers convinced the Japanese were coming ashore there to stay. The spies made a hasty retreat with their radios and equipment.

  With orders to evacuate to nearby Normanby Island as soon as practicable, Morrow and Royal put in a final report to Milne Bay, observing that the Japanese had put ashore on the far south-west tip of the island, at a secluded spot called Galaiwa Bay – and that they appeared to be preparing for lunch.

  The Coastwatch team enacted their evacuation plan and made for the place where a small boat had been secreted for the journey to the safety of neighbouring Normanby Island. As they departed, just after 1 p.m. on 25 August, the men looked into the sky above their heads to see ten Kittyhawks descending from 10,000 feet. This, they observed with some pride, was the direct result of their work.

  Two flights of five aircraft from 75 Squadron took off from Gurney Field into a typical dismal sky. Flying Officer Geoff Atherton’s flight, it was agreed, would attack first, while Flying Officer John Piper’s would stay aloft to provide cover. Initially flying north through a wet blanket of grey, the weather suddenly lifted as they crossed the coast and a bright sunny day emerged, the first they’d seen in weeks. Ahead lay the distinct outline of Goodenough Island, which seemed to rise almost vertically from the sea. Commencing their search in the island’s southwest corner, it did not take the pilots long to sight their quarry. Below, on a small ribbon of sand, were seven barges, conveniently lined up along the water’s edge. The first shots of the Battle of Milne Bay were about to be fired.

  ‘It was like target practice,’ recalled Warrant Officer Bob Crawford. ‘We’d just sort of dive down, strafe, go back in a circle and … do the same again.’

  The Japanese had been caught red-handed. Their barges, fully laden with equipment and ammunition, were torn to shreds by the guns of the Kittyhawks as they swooped. As if on a training exercise, the pilots flew low enough that they could make out the paintwork and serial numbers on the prows of the vessels. Some Japanese were still inside the barges, as John Piper recalled when his flight was called down after Atherton’s had exhausted their ammunition. ‘We actually saw them skedaddling off the barges and onto the beach.’

  Eight Japanese soldiers were mown down, with several more wounded; the remainder sheltered out of sight under the trees. Not a shot was fired in return. Ten thousand shells were expen
ded, setting the barges on fire, leaving them a mess of splintered wood and metal with thick black fumes rising up a thousand feet. More important, the 352 men of Commander Tsukioka’s 5th Sasebo SNLF were now stranded on an isolated island, without even a radio to call for assistance. The unit had been dealt out of the battle almost before it had started.

  The entry in the logbook of 75 Squadron Pilot John Pettet that day read simply: ‘Massacre!’

  CHAPTER 16

  BATTLE LINES

  The task confronting Major General Cyril Clowes, commander of Milne Force, was a daunting one. In one of the most difficult and isolated battle terrains in the world, it fell to him to organise the defence of 30 miles of coastline of a sodden jungle bay for which he possessed no accurate map, and along which at virtually any point an enemy could land in force. He would have no immediate idea of the attacking force’s size, its tactical direction, nor when it would arrive. The enemy had complete command of the sea, and he had no way of preventing them from entering the wide entrance to the bay. And once they were inside, he possessed not a single shore gun, nor even a searchlight, with which to challenge them.

  Unable to defeat the Japanese at sea, Clowes knew that he would need to beat them on land. For this task, he had at his disposal around 9000 men, of whom approximately 4000 were fighting troops from the two infantry brigades under his command. One of those had never fought the Japanese, while the other – a militia battalion – was completely untested in battle.

  Yet the consequences of defeat were unthinkable, not only for himself and the men under his command, but for the Allied cause in the Pacific in general. Failure would lead to a direct threat to the security of his own country.

  Such problems would have tested even the most experienced military structure, but Clowes’ untested HQ staff had been thrown together at the last minute, and had never worked under the stress of battle. Besides Clowes and his staff chief, Fred Chilton, none had any battle experience whatsoever.

  But if the weight of the world was bearing down on the shoulders of Cyril Clowes in the days prior to the battle, none of his closest associates, nor the men, suspected it. Even though he had only taken full command of Milne Force on 22 August, Clowes at all times, in public and in private, exuded an aura of calm and control, and a grasp for detail that had those around him sincerely believing that not even the smallest fact regarding the base and its defence had escaped his attention. In his command headquarters – a purpose-built Papuan hut with a thatched roof and bamboo walls, and which was still being fitted for power and telephone lines – he clenched his pipe between his teeth and pored over lists of displacements with Colonel Chilton and his two senior commanders, Brigadier John Field of the 7th and Brigadier Frank Wootten of the 18th.

  The RAAF had finally agreed to appoint a senior overall commander, Wing Commander William ‘Bull’ Garing, to whom Major General Morris had earlier put the case for the relocation of the original garrison from Mullins Harbour to Milne Bay. One of the RAAF’s most colourful and enduring figures, ‘Bull’ Garing had arrived just in time. The men of the Kittyhawk and Hudson squadrons, Clowes knew, would play a vital – perhaps the vital – part in the battle.

  In a decision that would be examined by military analysts and historians for decades, Clowes decided to use his two primary weapons – the 7th and 18th Brigades – in very different ways. Assuming the Japanese landed somewhere close to the Gili Gili base, the inexperienced militiamen of the 7th would be used in a largely defensive role – to hold off the enemy, and gauge their strength – while the veteran infantrymen of the 18th would wait in reserve to launch the counterstrike.

  With no idea exactly where the Japanese would land, in early July Field had dispersed some of the 7th Brigade along the 30 miles of Milne Bay’s northern shore, giving the job primarily to the 61st Battalion of ‘Queensland Cameron Highlanders’, whose task was to report any Japanese landing as quickly as possible, and resist it where they could.

  The 61st had two of its companies dug in around the incomplete No. 3 Strip and had sent a platoon north to Taupota to counter a possible Japanese landing there. This was an accurate enough guess as the Japanese had indeed intended to land at Taupota, but, as we have seen, they were dispatched by the guns of the Kittyhawks on Goodenough Island. Still more of the 61st was spread further east, with B Company ten miles from Gili Gili at KB Mission, and D Company further along the shoreline at the village of Ahioma, the site of Milne Bay’s only other anchorage and the location of a government store.

  The 7th’s two other battalions, the 9th and the 25th, held the bay’s western flank, with the 9th stretching from Ladava Mission to Gaba Gabuna Bay, dead in the centre of Milne Bay’s western end, while the 25th stretched further around to cover Gurney Field, and be in position to rush to No. 3 Strip if needed. In fact, many of these men were already camped along the airstrip’s defensive line, and barely needed to move anywhere. At the climax of the battle fought at the No. 3 Strip, the men would be fighting almost where they slept. Behind the 25th, more units of the 18th Brigade lay waiting in reserve.

  In his headquarters, consulting the disposition map with the CO of the 61st Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Meldrum, Clowes noticed some markings on the shoreline 30 miles away at East Cape, right at the bay’s entrance. This was far beyond where he had intended any of his forces to be situated.

  ‘Who are these people?’ he asked Meldrum, who scrutinised the map beside him.

  ‘Don Company, sir,’ he replied. ‘Seventeen Platoon.’

  ‘Well, get them out of there,’ was Clowes’ response.

  Several days earlier, D Company at Ahioma had received a report from some villagers of suspicious lights and a possible Japanese spy in the area, and so had sent their 17 Platoon, under the command of Lieutenant Tom O’Keefe, to investigate. Nothing of note had been found, and now they were nearly out of food. Alarmingly, O’Keefe was suffering severely from malaria, and exhibiting bouts of delirium so severe that Sergeant Jack Newcombe had felt it necessary to confiscate his officer’s pistol. A few days later, 16 Platoon had been dispatched from Ahioma to relieve them.

  Clowes did not like what he saw. Both platoons were now strung so far out that they would most likely be cut off by any Japanese landing to the west. In fact, thought Clowes, all of D Company’s position was precarious, so he ordered it back to Gili Gili, where they would be used to reinforce No. 3 Strip.

  Time being of the essence, three small civilian boats were found to ferry some of the soldiers back: the Elevala, the Dadosee and the masted lugger Bronzewing, which in a previous life was the property of the actor Errol Flynn, and which had recently retrieved the crashed Kittyhawk from Goodenough Island.

  At 3 p.m. on 25 August, Major Harry Wiles, on board the Elevala, departed Gili Gili to retrieve the farthest-flung of his men out at East Cape. He found them not in a good way. Their food had run out, and now others besides O’Keefe were ill with malaria. A private had seriously wounded himself, virtually severing his big toe while cutting, of all things, a pumpkin. All were tired and extremely hungry. The Elevala, it turned out, could not carry everyone, and some of the fit men were required to walk the 35 miles back to Ahioma, a journey which would take them several difficult days.

  After the Elevala arrived at Ahioma’s little jetty at dusk, men were put to work packing the company’s equipment onto the little flotilla of ships for the trip back to Gili Gili, all under the supervision of Major Wiles, who seemed agitated.

  After the sun had set, the light of a dim moon managed to struggle down through the scattered clouds. At around 8.30 in the evening, Sergeant Jim McKenzie – one of a party of men organising the stowing of a load of corrugated iron on the Bronzewing – had his attention caught by something out to sea. Standing on the deck of the little lugger, he made out a series of shapes, barely illuminated by the moon, apparently moving in a line. ‘Sir,’ he said, turning to Major Wiles, ‘what do you make of those dark shapes out there?’ />
  Wiles looked up; it appeared his worst suspicions were confirmed. ‘Just get on with loading the boat, Sergeant,’ he replied curtly.

  Japan’s long-awaited invasion convoy had arrived at Milne Bay.

  PART TWO

  THE BATTLE

  CHAPTER 17

  INVASION

  Lieutenant Fujikawa was one of the first to inspect the transport ship Nankai Maru when it arrived at Rabaul on 21 August to take several hundred men of the 5th Kure SNLF. He was less than impressed. She was a rust bucket, old and worn out, and her thin, flaking plates offered no assurance that they’d stop a bullet. The second transport ship, the Kinai Maru, was comparatively newer, but small. Both vessels had at least proved themselves recently, landing Japanese troops at Buna and Gona in Papua for the trek to Kokoda and, eventually, Port Moresby. But they were very cramped. The trip to Rabi, thought Fujikawa, would be an uncomfortable one.

  The next day, 22 August, a final rehearsal of the landing operation was undertaken in full combat conditions inside Rabaul’s harbour. The men climbed aboard the barges in complete battle kit, while others worked the ship’s davits, lowering them to the water, all in virtual darkness, before they set off to the shore. A light mist moved across the water as they made their landing on a nearby beach under a quiet volcano. Here, just as they had trained countless times before, they pulled the barges up off the shore, quickly grouped together under the orders of their NCOs, and fanned out to take positions over the flat, pebbly beach and foreshore. The entire exercise took just two hours.