Invasion Rabaul

by Bruce Gamble

Two hundred-odd civilians were also gathered on the parade ground. A significant number were senior government representatives, including Harold Page, Harry Townsend, and “Nobby” Clark. One of the younger officials was Noel Mulvey, a surveyor with the public works department. He and Alice Bowman had decided to become engaged on the morning of January 4, just as the first wave of Japanese bombers approached Rabaul. The largest percentage of civilians consisted of local businessmen, some of whom had dedicated their livelihood to developing Rabaul. There were also sixteen missionaries in the crowd, most of them Methodists (including Laurie Linggood, Laurie McArthur, and John Poole), and thirty-one Norwegian sailors from the freighter Herstein.

  Standing in the morning sun, the soldiers and civilians showed obvious signs of their unhealthy imprisonment. For at least three months, longer for some, they had grown weak from malnourishment while enduring unsanitary conditions—yet they still performed hours of manual labor each day. Their clothing hung in tatters from their skinny frames. Paradoxically, some men had swollen limbs because of beriberi, which caused painful edema.

  At 0900, calling cheery farewells to the officers who had been ordered to stay indoors, the ragged-looking prisoners began to shuffle toward the gate. The long file headed slowly down Malaguna Road toward the waterfront, covered on both sides of the road by teams of machine gunners—an unnecessary precaution. Crowds of Asians, natives, and foreign laborers also gathered along the road, drawn by the spectacle of the white men carrying their own belongings.

  TIED TO ONE OF THE WHARVES ALONG THE WATERFRONT WAS A LARGE SHIP with a rakish prow and clipper-shaped stern. Completed in 1926 for service between Japan and South America, the Montevideo Maru had the classic profile of a prewar transoceanic cargo liner. With a slender black hull almost 450 feet long and a large white superstructure amidships, it appeared to be a 10,000-tonner, though it actually displaced just 7,266 tons.

  In its heyday with the Osaka Shosen Kaisha line, the Montevideo Maru could accommodate thirty-eight passengers in first class, more than six hundred in second class, and ninety-four in third or “special class,” the domain of immigrants. But those days were long gone. In 1941 the Imperial Navy requisitioned the ship and assigned it to the Kure Naval District. After participating in the landings at Makassar during the Indonesian campaign in February 1942, it returned to Japan in early March and worked between the cities of Yokosuka, Kure, and Sasebo for two months. Leaving again for the Southwest Pacific, the Montevideo Maru stopped briefly at Java, and then sailed for Rabaul in early June with a load of troops and war material.

  Now, after sixteen years on the high seas, the vessel showed a few wrinkles. Routine maintenance under naval control had become almost nonexistent, due mainly to the enormous workload imposed on the merchant fleet, and the ship was in need of cosmetic repairs at the very least. Not that its outward appearance mattered to the POWs: their journey was guaranteed to be unpleasant. They were not passengers, but human cargo.

  The Montevideo Maru boasted five holds, though the Numbers 4 and 5 holds aft were partially occupied by large tanks of fuel oil which fed the twin Mitsubishi-Sulzer diesel engines. Additional space was taken up by the tunnels for the port and starboard propeller shafts. The three remaining holds—one amidships and two forward—were likely fitted with wooden ‘tween decks to accommodate troops. The Imperial Army crammed soldiers by the thousands into its crudely equipped transports, and the troops were expected to endure days or even weeks of excessive heat and unsanitary conditions without complaining. They called it chomansai, extreme overload. For them, it was just another element of army life.

  AFTER STRUGGLING UP THE MONTEVIDEO MARU’S GANGWAYS, THE PRISONERS were directed toward ladders that descended into the dark holds. There is no way to know with certainty which of the compartments they went into—perhaps all five—but logic suggests that they occupied the two forward holds at the very least. With slightly more than five hundred men in each, the conditions would be terribly cramped yet still considered luxurious by the standards of the Japanese army. A detachment of naval guards was assigned to provide security, a task that would be greatly simplified by confining the prisoners in two holds.

  Among those who watched the POWs file aboard was Jiro Takamura. Unlike most of his countrymen, he had developed an appreciation for the Australians and was actually sorry to see them go. Although well aware of the “insufficient food” situation, he nonetheless enjoyed spending time with the POWs who worked in his shop. He was also proud of their accomplishments. “They repaired 5 cars, more than 20 telephones and about 10 radios,” he wrote in his diary. “It is a wonder that only 6 men could do so much work in a little over a month’s time. This is not all. Spiritually we have gained a lot from them. They never left a job unless it was completed.”

  Takamura observed that the hatches were battened down after the prisoners disappeared into the holds. He quietly honored them by remaining at the wharf until the Montevideo Maru departed. Later that evening he wrote: “Saw them off, and watched the ship until it disappeared over the horizon.” Two days later he noted that the ship was bound for Hainan, an island off the south coast of China, thereby confirming what some of the prisoners had been told.

  AFTER EIGHT FULL DAYS AT SEA AT AN AVERAGE SPEED OF ALMOST FIFTEEN knots, the Montevideo Maru was three thousand miles from Rabaul. The captain had elected to stay east of the Philippines rather than plowing straight across the Celebes Sea—which was both tricky to navigate and a popular hunting area for submarines—but the longer route had required extra time. Reaching the eastern entrance of the Babuyan Channel on the night of June 30, he put on extra speed for the five-hour dash through the chokepoint. Once clear of the channel, it was just two days to Hainan across the South China Sea.

  Inside the holds, the prisoners knew almost nothing about their destination except its name. Awaiting them on Hainan Island was a camp for hard labor. The POWs there built roads under extremely harsh conditions—not as evil as the infamous “death railway” camps in Burma and Thailand, perhaps, but a dreadful place nonetheless. Considering the lack of medical attention and the starvation diet forced upon the POWs by the Japanese at Hainan, the men aboard the Montevideo Maru faced long, grim years of hardship. The odds of surviving the entire war under such conditions were not favorable.

  And yet the prisoners would have gratefully accepted those odds, if only to get out of the dark, slimy holds of the Montevideo Maru. Two more days inside that floating oven would be an eternity. The heat and humidity within the steel hull must have been unbearable, and it is highly probable that some of the sickest men had already perished during the first eight days of transit.

  There was good reason why the Montevideo Maru, like all the other Japanese vessels employed as POW transports, was considered a “hellship.” Throughout the war tens of thousands of POWs and slave laborers were shipped between Japan’s territories aboard dozens of different ships, and in each case the conditions were utterly despicable. If the journey was supposed to be short, food and water were sometimes withheld. On longer trips, only small portions of moldy rice and containers of filthy water were passed down into the holds by the guards.

  There were no sanitation facilities down below except a few buckets, the only toilets being topside. These were crude wooden benjos, suspended precariously over the side rails, and to use them the prisoners had to be strong enough to climb the ladders to the main deck. Even then, the facilities were only available during daylight hours, as the holds were locked at night for security. Not that it mattered to the men who were sick with dysentery or even simple diarrhea: too weak to move, they defecated where they lay, which in turn caused outbreaks of bacterial disease. On top of that was seasickness, a virtually endemic problem that only grew worse as the air within the enclosed holds became increasingly foul. After just one or two days of accumulating excrement, urine, and vomit in the holds, the stench was indescribable; after eight days inside the Montevideo Maru, the prisoners knew the defini
tion of hell.

  The ship carried no special markings that identified it as a POW transport, and was therefore indistinguishable from the legitimate targets being hunted by Allied aircraft and submarines. Therefore, no one should have been surprised that an American submarine lurked west of Luzon on the night of June 30, waiting for the next ship that passed through the Babuyan Channel in the moonlight.

  AT 2216, A LOOKOUT ABOARD THE STURGEON SIGHTED A SHIP RUNNING alone with no lights. It first appeared to be on a northward course, but after Bull Wright observed it for a few minutes, he concluded that it was a cargo-passenger liner headed west, and fast. He ordered all four diesels on line, and the submarine surged forward at flank speed.

  The Sturgeon was supposedly capable of making twenty-one knots on the surface, but it could barely keep up with the ship. “For an hour and a half we couldn’t make a nickel,” Wright later reported. “This fellow was really going, making at least 17 knots and probably a bit more, as he appeared to be zig-zagging.”

  Wright needed to get well ahead of the ship in order to set up a proper attack, but he could draw no closer to the speeding liner than eighteen thousand yards—approximately ten miles. Nevertheless he held on like a determined terrier, and shortly past midnight his persistence was rewarded. The ship abruptly slowed to twelve knots, allowing the Sturgeon to close the distance quickly. “After that,” Wright noted, “it was easy.”

  An interception point was plotted along the ship’s projected path. For the next hour and a half the Sturgeon raced ahead, and at 0146 on July 1, Wright took the sub down to periscope depth. Then, deciding to make his attack using the stern tubes, he turned away from the target. It was a simple matter of efficiency. One of the bow tube doors still did not function, and the torpedoes in the four aft tubes were fitted with the largest warheads currently available.

  Watching through the periscope as the ship drew closer in the moonlight, Wright judged its heading to be “slightly left of west.” This would bring it no nearer than five thousand yards to his current position, so he maneuvered the Sturgeon with the electric motors, narrowing the gap by a thousand yards. He then began relaying periscope information to Lieutenant “Chet” Nimitz, who stood before the torpedo data computer (TDC) console.

  Four aiming points were calculated using a method known as “divergent shifting points of periscope aim from aft forward.” As Wright called out data from the periscope, Nimitz twisted knobs on the TDC panel to set the target’s estimated length, speed, and angle off the stern. A position keeper then tracked the target and predicted its location at the point of impact based on constant updates from the Sturgeon’s navigational equipment. The assorted information was fed into the angle solver, which automatically determined the proper settings for each torpedo’s internal gyroscope. The solutions were passed verbally to the men in the aft torpedo room, who dialed them manually into the weapons.

  At 0225 the first torpedo was fired at a range of four thousand yards—almost two and a half miles. Three more torpedoes followed at eight-second intervals, and then Wright ordered a full-rudder turn to bring the bow tubes to bear. Lieutenant Nimitz didn’t think the maneuvering was necessary. “We won’t have to use any more,” he said aloud. “One of those will get him.”

  AT 0229, VIRTUALLY THE SAME TIME THAT THE INVASION OF RABAUL HAD begun exactly 158 days earlier, a warhead containing the equivalent of seven hundred pounds of TNT detonated against the Montevideo Maru’s starboard hull. The blast ripped open the fourth and fifth holds, and moments later a secondary explosion occurred in the fuel oil tank. The first explosion was heard clearly throughout the submarine, and Wright confirmed the hit. Observing through the periscope, he saw the bright flash of an explosion approximately one hundred feet aft of the single stack. The ship’s lights came on briefly, and then flickered out. From his brief glimpse of the illuminated vessel, Wright made an educated guess that it was the Rio de Janeiro Maru or a “very similar type … he was a big one.”

  Wright could also clearly see that the ship was listing to starboard and settling rapidly by the stern. Nimitz was correct: one torpedo had been enough.

  ABOARD THE MONTEVIDEO MARU, THE CREW AND NAVAL GUARDS SCRAMBLED for their lives. Those not on duty had been jolted awake in the darkest hour of the night by explosions and alarms; now they groped along passageways in absolute darkness, searching for exits. The lights had come on for only a minute or two after the torpedo struck, and then oil from the ruptured tank spilled into the engine room, forcing the engineers to deliberately shut down all power.

  Some of the crewmen made it to the lifeboat stations—there were three on each side of the superstructure and two more along each side of the aft deckhouse—but because the ship was listing so rapidly and going down by the stern, only the three lifeboats on the starboard side of the superstructure had a prayer of being launched. The sailors weren’t quick enough. Within six minutes the ship’s bow had risen high out of the water, and all three lifeboats capsized from their davits, with one sustaining major damage.

  There is no evidence that any of the hatch covers were unfastened during the eleven minutes that the Montevideo Maru remained afloat. The Japanese were concerned only about saving their own lives. Dozens got safely into the water, but twenty crewmen and guards were either killed by the explosions or drowned. The surviving Japanese righted the capsized boats and climbed aboard. One boatload headed west; the other two remained more or less stationary until daylight, and then headed east toward Luzon.

  For the prisoners down in the pitch-black holds, those last eleven minutes were measured quite differently. If any men were confined in the aft two holds, they did not suffer long. Those not killed outright by the exploding torpedo were knocked senseless by its concussive effects, and then quickly drowned as tons of seawater rushed in.

  The truly unfortunate victims were those in the forward holds. Before the end came, they endured eleven minutes of mind-bending terror. No one could see what was happening; they could only feel the ship canting steeply, and their ears were assaulted by the screech of collapsing bulkheads and painful pressure changes as air was forced from flooded spaces. Some men probably attempted to reach the hatches, but as they groped upward they found no escape. The effects of adrenalin gave them strength only for a short time. Then, as their black world tilted ever more crazily, they slid aft and piled up against the lowest bulkhead. Under the crush of filthy bodies, those at the bottom quickly lost consciousness.

  The panic that surely accompanied those final minutes can only be imagined. Sentimentalists would like to believe that some of the prisoners calmly faced their impending death, but the circumstances strongly suggest that a contagious, mass hysteria swept through the black holds. And who could blame the victims: in the middle of the night they were plunged into an unfathomable nightmare, each second filled with the tormenting sounds of water rushing in and the ship breaking apart. As the minutes wore on, the men who were still conscious would have instinctively tried to claw their way upward, their shouts and screams only adding to the freakish pandemonium.

  The terror mercifully ended at 0240. With a final hiss of foul-smelling air, the bow of the Montevideo Maru slid beneath the waves.

  Wright waited ten minutes before bringing the Sturgeon to the surface. He had no inkling of the tragedy that had just occurred, and thus made no attempt to maneuver the boat among the floating debris to search for survivors. Instead, satisfied with the knowledge that he had sunk a large enemy ship, he called for an eastward course toward Cape Bojeador.

  With the exhaust from her diesel engines burbling softly, the Sturgeon moved off in the darkness to resume the hunt.

  * The author’s uncle, 2LT John J. Steinbinder, was the navigator aboard DuBose’s aircraft. During eleven months with the squadron, Steinbinder flew forty-three combat missions, eight of them against Rabaul.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE LONG WAIT

  “Oh, the hunger and the cold …”

  �
��Lorna Whyte Johnson, Australian Army Nursing Service

  The stockade on Malaguna Road seemed desolate after the exodus of more than a thousand men on June 22. Only sixty Australian officers and fewer than a dozen civilians remained. Some of the officers were ordered to clean up the vacant barracks. Although eerily quiet, the Fibro huts yielded many prizes: scraps of food, extra clothing, and even enough tobacco for a few hand-rolled cigarettes.

  After they cleaned up the camp, the officers wired off a smaller compound consisting of four huts in the northeast corner of the stockade. Food was more plentiful, and instead of laboring outside the camp, the remaining POWs passed the time doing domestic chores.

  Without permission, a few energetic officers built a platform for deck tennis between two of the huts. They hoped it might precipitate a change in fortunes, and the 2/22nd Battalion certainly had a strange history when it came to tennis courts. The first had been built at Trawool, but as soon as it was finished the battalion received orders to Bonegilla. The soldiers built a new court, and were transferred to Rabaul. Later, as POWs, they built yet another court, this time for Japanese officers at the naval headquarters building, and after it was finished the enlisted POWs and civilians were taken away. Some of the officers had become superstitious, and half-jokingly decided to tempt their own fate by building the deck tennis platform in the middle of the stockade. At first all it got them was “an ear-bashing” from Captain Mizusaki, who was irate that they built it without permission; but they had faith in their latest effort.

  The days passed quickly as the officers continued working on the tennis platform and doing chores. Two more civilian internees arrived on July 2, bringing news about events on the outside. Robert Evenson, the plantation manger at Pondo, and his assistant, William Korn, had supposedly been “paroled” when Pondo was captured in early February. For a few months they had been allowed to continue overseeing the plantation, but recently the Japanese had taken over the lucrative operation and sent both men to Rabaul. They revealed the stirring news that hundreds of Australian soldiers had escaped from New Britain.