by Bruce Gamble
The great irony was that the Japanese did not plan to invade Rabaul any sooner than the middle of January, more than a month away. The timing no longer mattered, however. Lark Force had already been given up for lost.
IN ALL FAIRNESS TO THE ECONOMICALLY STRAPPED COMMONWEALTH, THE War Cabinet did make two concessions on behalf of the Rabaul garrison. The first was the transfer of a Royal Australian Air Force composite squadron from its base in Queensland to Vunakanau airdrome. A trio of twin-engine Lockheed Hudsons from 24 Squadron landed on the grassy strip on December 7, and another arrived the following day. Next, ten CA-1 Wirraways landed at Vunakanau over a period of days, the last arriving on December 12. Employed as fighters by the RAAF, the two-seater CA-1s were actually duplicates of the North American AT-6 trainer, built in Australia under license by the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation.
Commanded by Squadron Leader John M. Lerew, a veteran with eleven years of service in the RAAF, the pilots at Vunakanau were dismayed to find only a few structures in place. The most substantial was a piece of galvanized roofing on poles which served as both hangar and workshop. Flight Lieutenant Wilfred D. Brookes, the squadron’s second in command, groused that “no facilities existed for operations, stores, medical section, armament, photographic, or parachute sections. Messing was provided by the army some distance from the aerodrome and left much to be desired.”
In truth, just about everything at Rabaul fell short of expectations. The conditions that 24 Squadron experienced were simply consistent with the limitations which plagued Lark Force and almost every other Allied unit in the Pacific.
Canberra’s second concession was a last-minute decision to evacuate the women and children from the mandated territory: European women and children, that is. Asians and Melanesians would have to fend for themselves. The evacuees were allowed one suitcase per person, and some families received only one or two days’ notice to proceed to the nearest embarkation point. One passenger ship was dispatched to Port Moresby and two others were sent to Rabaul, where most of the European families outside New Guinea were instructed to gather.
Not all women were able to leave. The six civilian nurses at Namanula Hospital were considered essential public servants according to the local health director, who denied permission for them to evacuate. Harold Page, still the senior government authority at Rabaul, intervened and permitted the nurses to decide for themselves. One elderly nurse elected to sail for Australia, but the other five stayed, and the vacant position was actually filled by a retired nurse.
No such options existed for the six army nurses: they remained with the staff attached to the 2/10 Field Ambulance at the Government House hospital. Similarly, the nuns and female staff at Vunapope considered themselves duty-bound to remain at the mission, as did many women among the Protestant missions. Other strong-minded, independent women living among the islands—including several widowed plantation owners—ignored the evacuation notices and vowed to never give up their hard-earned properties. A few didn’t have much choice. Alfred A. “Ted” Harvey, a former coastwatcher, chose to move his wife and eleven-year-old son to a camp hidden in the jungle near their plantation on the north coast of New Britain.
But for every holdout, hundreds of women and children did converge on Rabaul. By the afternoon of December 22, the Burns-Philp liners Macdhui and Neptuna were ready to embark passengers. The skies, dark with rain, reflected the somber mood throughout town as the evacuees filed aboard the two ships and found their assigned cabins. “There was a hushed atmosphere as the mothers and children gathered,” remembered Diana Martell, then eleven years old. “Most of our fathers were still at work. When at last they came aboard, our parents were all talking earnestly, and there was the feeling that something really serious was happening. It was dark when I was called into our cabin to say goodbye to my father. I was not really distressed, as I could hardly imagine that I would never see him again.”
Similar scenes were repeated in almost every stateroom. The bespectacled Rev. Laurie McArthur, the senior Methodist missionary in New Britain, said goodbye to his family; and John Poole, the missionary who had traveled the mountains with Bill Harry, bid farewell to Jean. The couple, married only two years earlier in the Rabaul Methodist church, had been happy at their mission at Kalas, and she was extremely reluctant to leave everything behind. But so it went, among hundreds of families aboard both ships.
That afternoon, a schooner sailed into the harbor carrying twenty rain-soaked women and children from Bougainville. The cabins aboard the two liners were already filled, so the newcomers were ushered into one of the Macdhui’s salons just as darkness fell. The men were called ashore, and families said their last goodbyes, everyone trying to mask their concerns with lighthearted quips and other acts of bravado. The atmosphere that night seemed altogether foreboding, and for good reason. Within months, virtually every family present would be touched by the worst maritime disaster in Australian history.
IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING THE EVACUATION, THE MOOD IN RABAUL GREW even more somber. The few Japanese families in the area were rounded up, but unlike their counterparts in America, only the men were interned. The Burns-Philp liner Malaita delivered them to Australia while the women and children tried to subsist on their own.
Many of the two-hundred-odd Australian civilians who remained on the Gazelle Peninsula stayed busy by digging slit trenches in their gardens. They also participated in air raid drills under the watchful eye of longtime territorial official Robert L. “Nobby” Clark, the chief warden. A civil engineer by trade, he organized the construction of a community air raid shelter just outside of town. The facility, located in a small valley dubbed “Refuge Gully,” featured thatch-roofed huts named in jest after famous hotels. Arrangements were made to have various civic groups provide valet parking and serve afternoon tea, but the frivolous notions were abandoned after the women and children departed for Australia.
By late December, Rabaul seemed like a ghost town. The Christmas season—normally the start of the summer holidays for Australians—was gloomy. The only thing that held anyone’s interest for long was the war news, especially the propaganda broadcasts from Tokyo. The army camp became a breeding ground for all sorts of wild rumors, including one that had the town’s Chinese laborers making hundreds of grave markers, ostensibly for the men of Lark Force. Concerned about the effects such tales would have on morale, Captain Selby wrote detailed notes of the next radio broadcast, then typed out the particulars under the heading: “A.A. News Bulletin.” The information sheet was passed around, and quickly gained such popularity that daily updates were distributed to all units.
Despite Selby’s upbeat approach, an atmosphere of misgiving was kindled in Lark Force, primarily by Colonel Scanlan. On New Year’s Day, 1942, he posted two ominous-sounding proclamations. “Every man will fight to the last,” he wrote, followed by the boldly underlined announcement: “THERE SHALL BE NO WITHDRAWAL.” Perhaps he had learned of the War Cabinet’s position regarding the garrison, but if so, he kept the grim facts to himself. As a result, the abruptness of his declarations both puzzled and disturbed the garrison.
Scanlan’s posturing may also have resulted from his perception that certain officers in Lark Force lacked fighting spirit. During a staff meeting, Captain Selby made the mistake of asking whether there was a contingency plan in the event that a withdrawal became necessary. Scanlan snorted, “That is a defeatist attitude, Selby!” In a different incident, the 2/22nd’s supply officer recommended hiding some of the massive quantities of canned food—two years’ worth had been stockpiled at Rabaul—in several strategically placed caches in the jungle. Scanlan’s response was similar: he gruffly denied permission.
Nonetheless, members of the staff continued to quietly consider the alternatives to a pitched battle against the Japanese. The most logical idea was to pull back into the jungle and harass the enemy with guerilla-style warfare. Several men possessed considerable knowledge of the terrain, especially Private Harry
, but when members of the NGA staff brought up the supply officer’s suggestion again, Scanlan would not budge. “You will fight on the beaches,” he told them brusquely. He may have intended to exhibit the sort of stalwart defiance that Winston Churchill showed before the Battle of Britain, but his attempt fell short. This was not England.
The colonel’s stubbornness revealed a critical shortcoming: Scanlan was apparently still fighting the last war, at least in his mind. The weapons had not changed, and his own record for combat bravery was beyond question, but most of the conventions of that war were long outdated. Scanlan possessed other idiosyncrasies as well. A devout Roman Catholic, he sometimes went off to Vunapope for “retreats” that lasted days. At other times he just seemed out of touch, not only with the coming war but with his own troops.
To cope with his supercilious manner, Scanlan’s subordinates held their tongues and hoped for the best. Few, if any, realized that they had already been cast off by their own government.
CHAPTER FOUR
PRELUDE TO AN INVASION
“We who are about to die salute you.”
—Squadron Leader John Lerew, RAAF 24 Squadron
Lark Force and 24 Squadron were terribly disadvantaged. Not only were they expected to defend an enormous region with inadequate weapons and equipment, they knew very little about the enemy they would have to face. Few people in the Western world did.
Only a few decades earlier, the island nation of Japan had been a feudal state, developmentally backward compared to the world’s industrialized countries, and almost completely closed to foreigners. In a remarkably brief period, however, a central government radically overhauled the empire. By the conclusion of World War I, Japan had emerged as one of the five most powerful nations on Earth. Her people, believing they were linked by common mythical and spiritual origins going back almost 2,600 years, had never been defeated by outside invaders. Brimming with nationalistic fervor, the Japanese believed themselves superior in virtually every way to other races, especially those of the Eastern hemisphere.
The Japanese were determined to rule a much larger empire, but their own tiny islands lacked sufficient natural resources. Therefore, they created a program called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, under the guise of which they intended to occupy territories rich in oil, rubber, and other resources important for continued industrialization. The expansion began in September 1931, thanks to a trumped-up clash with Chinese troops that Japan used to justify the occupation of Manchuria.
Almost ten years later, Japan “peacefully” entered French Indochina in the summer of 1941, after first sending a note to the Vichy regime demanding the right to occupy their country. Alarmed by the takeover, the American government responded by freezing all Japanese assets in the United States and placing an embargo on exports to the Japanese, particularly oil. Great Britain, the Philippines, and the Netherlands quickly followed suit by cutting off Japan’s access to oil supplies in the Far East. The Tokyo leadership was infuriated. Many Japanese had hoped to avoid war against the coalition of countries in the Pacific, but as petroleum stockpiles dwindled to dangerously low levels—less than two years’ worth for the empire’s fleets and armies—the government and Imperial General Headquarters were pushed into a belligerent position from which there was no turning back.
Tokyo had already started preparing for war. Military planners completed their outline for the Southern Offensive, a massive, multi-pronged strike across the Pacific. On November 6, Imperial General Headquarters mobilized the Southern Army for the invasion of the Philippines, Malaya, and parts of Burma and Thailand; simultaneously the South Seas Detachment, an independent organization under the direct command of General Headquarters, was formed for operations against Guam and the Bismarck Archipelago.
The acquisition of strategic islands was a key element of the overall plan. Once fortified, the island bases would allow the military to secure a perimeter around the newly occupied territories, thereby forming an empire of truly hemispherical proportions. From the Kurile Islands, the line would extend southward to the Gilberts and the Marianas in the Central Pacific, then southwest through the Solomon Islands and the Bismarcks to New Guinea, and finally around Java and Sumatra to Burma—a total of more than twelve thousand miles. As a major component of that strategy, the South Seas Detachment had specific orders to capture Guam in cooperation with the 4th Fleet, after which the combined forces were to “occupy Rabaul at the earliest opportunity and establish air bases on New Britain.”
Clearly, the Japanese considered Rabaul to be a vital objective of the Southern Offensive. Simpson Harbor would be developed into a major fleet headquarters, and there was ample flat terrain south of the caldera for the development of additional airfields. Rabaul was slated to become the hub of the Southeast Area, a stronghold from which new campaigns would be launched. As the center for both Imperial Army and Navy operations in the Southeast Area, it would eclipse even the great naval base at Truk.
When the Southern Offensive commenced on December 8, Tokyo time, the 5,500 troops of the South Seas Detachment were already en route to Guam, a small island in the Marianas defended by only 153 U.S. Marines and a few hundred Guamanian militiamen. Land-based Imperial Navy bombers from nearby Saipan began to pound the defenses that same day, and were joined by floatplanes from a tender attached to the 4th Fleet the next day. Consequently, when the invasion troops stormed ashore on December 10, the American garrison surrendered within minutes.
THE SOUTH SEAS DETACHMENT, RAISED THE PREVIOUS YEAR ON THE ISLAND of Shikoku, was led by fifty-one-year-old Major General Tomitaro Horii. A veteran of the war against China, he had fought in Shanghai ten years earlier and more recently commanded the 55th Infantry Group, from which his current forces were drawn. The main combat elements were the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Battalions of the 144th Infantry Regiment supported by the 3rd Company of the 55th Cavalry Regiment, a battalion of the 55th Mountain Artillery Regiment, and a company of the 55th Engineers. Ancillaries included a signals unit, a transportation company, a field hospital, a veterinarian unit (to care for the hundreds of horses used by the detachment), and a battalion of antiaircraft artillery.
The South Seas Detachment also included several hundred members of the Maizuru 2nd Special Naval Landing Force, presently involved in operations at hotly contested Wake. Often referred to as “marines,” a misnomer, the SNLF excelled at amphibious assault tactics and specialized in beachhead defenses, including the rapid deployment of antiaircraft guns. After Wake fell on December 23, the naval infantry rejoined Horii’s forces on Guam.
Back at full strength, the South Seas Detachment spent the rest of December preparing for the invasion of New Britain and New Ireland. On January 3, 1942, Horii and several other officers boarded a flying boat and flew 630 miles southeast to Truk for an important meeting with Vice Admiral Shigeyoshi Inoue, commander of the 4th Fleet. After their plane touched down in the lagoon, the army staff met with their navy counterparts in the wardroom of the light cruiser Katori, Inoue’s flagship.
Such cooperation between the Imperial Army and Navy was unusual. Normally the two services shared a fierce rivalry, but they were under specific orders to work together. The directive from General Headquarters called for both services to “coordinately attack Rabaul” and specified that all defenders in the Bismarck Archipelago were to be “annihilated.” Fond of using Roman letters, the Japanese gave the name R Operation to the invasion of the Bismarcks.
In the Katori’s wardroom, the assembled officers exchanged intelligence data, most of it obtained from aerial reconnaissance. The consensus was that Rabaul would be defended by a force of “about 500” soldiers, but allowed that a total of fifteen hundred Australian troops might be present. The Japanese were also aware of a “volunteer defense force,” almost certainly a reference to the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles, which strongly indicates that some of their intelligence was provided by spies. It was true that many civilians at Rabaul still had unrestricted ac
cess to Australian positions, and members of Lark Force suspected Axis sympathizers of passing information to the enemy. But the Japanese did not interpret everything accurately. Rear Admiral Kiyohide Shima, commander of the warships that would escort the invasion fleet, received intelligence that the defenders might have as many as ten coastal gun emplacements on Crater Peninsula. Possibly because of this erroneous information, the assembled staff decided that the invasion should be made at night.
The next step was to discuss potential beachheads. The Japanese officers considered three landing sites: Kokopo, Talili Bay, and the Rabaul waterfront. They dismissed the first on the flimsy rationale that “the enemy will heavily guard the place as it was a landing point of the British army during the First World War.” Likewise, they arbitrarily rejected Talili Bay on New Britain’s north shore on the grounds “that the enemy must have set up some obstacles; that the enemy may quickly discover us because of lookout posts at Watom Island, and that well-grown coral reefs may hamper our landing.” Compared with those arguments, some of the assembled officers deemed an assault deep inside Simpson Harbor “foolhardy,” but it offered the most expedient means of capturing the two airfields. Therefore, the officers gave approval for a direct assault, albeit with a broadly worded escape clause: “The army plan will be adopted, but if the situation demands, the landing will be made at Kokopo instead.”
Based on the approved invasion plan, the assault on Rabaul was going to be highly unorthodox. Few commanders would have considered making a large-scale amphibious landing into so deep a harbor, especially at night, but Horii and his staff put together a solid tactical plan. By landing in the darkest hour of the night with an overwhelming number of troops, they would use the element of surprise to smash through the Australian defenses.
ARRIVING BACK AT GUAM ON JANUARY 4, HORII RECEIVED ORDERS FROM Imperial General Headquarters to occupy Rabaul “as quickly as possible after around the middle of January.” This was predicted to be the most appropriate time for a night invasion, as there would be little or no visible moonlight. The timetable also allowed for a period of preliminary bombing attacks to soften up the Australian defenses. For that purpose, two air groups from the Imperial Japanese Navy’s 24th Koku Sentai (Air Flotilla) had already shifted about half their strength from the Marshall Islands to Truk. The experienced aircrews, undoubtedly eager to launch their first attack against the Australians, did not have long to wait.