by Mark Lardas
While the Fifth Air Force’s October air campaign had been spectacular, it had been indecisive. Nor is it likely that continued attacks with just B-24s, B-25s, and P-38s would have yielded the results achieved by the introduction of single-engine fighters and light bombers.
Sieges are won through attrition. So was Rabaul. Once the Allies were established on Bougainville and could bring enough force against Rabaul’s air garrison, Japanese resistance eventually collapsed. Ultimately Japan’s failure was due to its flawed doctrine. Japanese doctrine called for victory won through one decisive blow. This principle acknowledged Japanese industrial weakness. If Japan failed to win quickly it would eventually be crushed by the industrial capacity of its primary foe, the United States. It was the philosophy underpinning the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was the concept behind minimal protection for Japanese aircraft. Get in a blow first, hard enough, and your foe cannot strike back.
Yet it was virtually impossible to land a true knockout blow in one battle. Even decisive victories, such as Pearl Harbor, left most of the enemy’s capabilities undamaged. No pilot could guarantee a kill on a first pass, leaving an opportunity for a counterattack. The one opportunity for a “one decisive blow” Japanese victory during the Rabaul campaign was stop-punched by the US Navy’s November 5 air raid. Ironically the attack sank no warships. All but one was still capable of steaming, but none were battle-worthy.
Japan ended up locked into an attrition battle it was unprepared to win, yet could not avoid. It compounded its problem by taking no steps to mitigate its losses, priming its pilots to die trying rather than surviving to fight another day, and failing to train its pilots to fight as a team, rather than see themselves as individual samurai. Meanwhile the Allies had dedicated aircraft to rescue downed pilots, provided replacement aircraft, and emphasized teamwork.
Rabaul was the first Allied campaign where airpower substituted for ground occupation. The campaign was so successful it formed the pattern for future Allied campaigns. Except where geography required (such as the Marianas and Iwo Jima) or sentiment dictated (the Philippines) Japanese strongholds were isolated by air and bypassed. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese fighting men sat out the late stages of the war as spectators.
Bypassing Japanese strongholds shortened the war by years. Instead of “Golden Gate by ’48,” GIs were able to come “Home alive by ’45.” Airpower reached its apogee with the strategic bombing campaign against Japan in 1945. As at Rabaul, once US bombers could reach the Japanese Home Islands they were able to immobilize and isolate Japan to the point where – with the encouragement of atomic bombs delivered by air – it surrendered without requiring Allied ground forces on Japanese soil to force surrender.
Surviving aircraft
It is possible to find examples of the aircraft types which fought in the Rabaul campaign in museums throughout the world. This is especially true of the US aircraft built in thousands or tens of thousands: B-25s, P-38s P-40s, F6Fs, F4Us, and TBFs. There are plenty of aircraft such as the SBD or SB2C and the B-24. Sometime survivors number in the scores, even 70-plus years after World War II ended.
Japanese aircraft are more difficult to find. Thirty-plus Mitsubishi A6M variants are on display throughout the world. One Aichi D3A is undergoing restoration in California and two unrestored D3As are at the Nimitz Museum in Fredericksburg, Texas. There are no complete G4Ms or B5Ns on display although there are two partial examples of each. In some cases the “survivor” Zeroes suffer from George Washington’s Axe syndrome. (We’ve replaced the head twice and the handle five times, but otherwise it is the exact same axe used by George Washington.) They are made up of bits and pieces of multiple Zeroes or consist mainly of replica parts added to replace missing pieces.
What is harder is finding existing aircraft which actually fought in the skies in or around Rabaul. Most of these seem to be in museums in Australia, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea, especially examples of Allied aircraft. The B-25D displayed at Australian Aviation Heritage Centre flew with the 345th Bomb Group, which participated in the campaign. A B-25C and B-25D on display in Papua New Guinea are probably also Rabaul veterans. The SBD on display at the National Museum of WWII in New Orleans was a veteran of the Guadalcanal campaign, but missed Rabaul. It was sent to Chicago as a training aircraft, but crash-landed in Lake Michigan. It was later recovered and restored.
Perhaps the best example of a surviving warbird from the campaign is an RNZAF Kittyhawk, now in the possession of the Tri-State Warbird Museum in Batavia, Ohio. Flown by Geoff Fisken, the RNZAF’s highest-scoring ace in World War II, this aircraft fought in the Solomons, almost certainly participating in RNZAF actions during the Rabaul campaign. It is being restored to flying condition. The Tri-State Warbird Museum also has a Corsair, an Avenger, and a B-25 on display, although these aircraft did not participate in the campaign.
Surprisingly, examples of Japanese aircraft that participated in the fight for Rabaul exist. Since the 1960s a small industry has emerged in recovering wrecked Japanese aircraft in New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and New Britain. The Australian War Memorial Museum in Canberra, Australia has an A6M2 on display restored from a wreck. It was flown by Saburo Sakai at Lae. The Australian War Memorial Museum recovered several Zeroes at Rabaul in the 1970s. One was on display as a wrecked aircraft at Fantasy of Flight in Polk City, Florida.
FURTHER READING AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
The best popular account of the siege of Rabaul comes from the final two books of Bruce Gamble’s Rabaul trilogy, Fortress Rabaul and Target Rabaul. The first of the trilogy, Invasion Rabaul, describes the Japanese invasion of the Bismarck Archipelago. The other two, especially Target Rabaul, describe the struggle for the island and the Allied neutralization of the bastion. All three are worth reading both as history and as literary masterpieces.
Japan committed sophisticated military electronics and communications systems to Rabaul. This radio direction-finding station at Rabaul provided directional information about Allied ships, aircraft, and shore installations. (USNHHC)
My preference is using primary sources and official histories. Thanks to the Internet many sources which would have been difficult to locate 25 years ago are available digitally. Some make for dry reading or are highly technical, but I found them invaluable. Two periodicals which proved especially valuable were US Army–Navy Journal of Recognition and Intelligence Bulletin. Both were periodicals printed by the War Department in World War II, and circulated among those in uniform. They can be found on www.archive.org, as can all books with an asterisk following them.
I also used several memoirs. They can be useful, but must be used with your baloney detector turned up to 11. Participants on both sides tend not to let the truth get in the way of a good story.
The principal sources used for this book are:
Craven, Wesley Frank and Cate, James Lea (editors), The Army Air Forces In World War II, Volume Four: The Pacific: Guadalcanal to Saipan, August 1942 to July 1944, Office of Air Force History, Washington, DC, 1983*
Gamble, Bruce, Target: Rabaul: The Allied Siege of Japan’s Most Infamous Stronghold, March 1943–August 1945, Zenith Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2013
Gamble, Bruce, Fortress Rabaul: The Battle for the Southwest Pacific, January 1942–April 1943, Zenith Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2010
Hirrel, Leo, Bismarck Archipelago, US Army Center of Military History, Washington, DC, 1994*
Hough, Frank O. and Crown, John A., The Campaign On New Britain, Historical Branch Headquarters US Marine Corps, Washington, DC, 1952*
Kawato, Masajiro (Mike), Flight Into Conquest, KNI Incorporated, Anaheim, CA, 1978
Kenney, George C., General Kenney Reports: A Personal History of the Pacific War, Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, New York, NY, 1949*
Miller, John, Cartwheel: The Reduction of Rabaul, Washington, Office of the Chief of Military History, Dept. of the Army, Washington, DC, 1959*
Morison, Samuel Eliot, Breaking the Bismarcks Barrier: 22
July 1942–1 May, 1944 (History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Vol. 6), Little, Brown, and Company, New York, NY, 1950
Nakagawa, Yasuzo, Japanese Radar and Related Weapons, Aegean Park Press, Laguna Hills, California, 1997
Sakaida, Henry, The Siege of Rabaul, Phalanx Publishing Co, Ltd., St Paul, Minnesota, 1996
Shaw, Henry I., Jr and Kane, Douglas T., Isolation of Rabaul: History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II, Volume II, Historical Branch, G–3 Division, Headquarters, US Marine Corps, Washington, DC, 1963*
United States Strategic Bombing Survey, The Allied Campaign Against Rabaul, Washington, DC, 1946
United States Strategic Bombing Survey, The Fifth Air Force in the War Against Japan, Washington, DC, 1947*
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Author’s Note
The following abbreviations indicate the sources of the illustrations used in this volume:
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Author’s Dedication
I would like to dedicate this book to my good friend, Jim Oberg, and to his uncle, Lieutenant Albert Oberg, who gave his last full measure of devotion aboard the USS Strong in July 1943 in the Solomon Islands during the run up to the events described in this book.