Target: Rabaul: The Allied Siege of Japan's Most Infamous Stronghold, March 1943 - August 1945

by Bruce Gamble

  With the Japanese scattering in disarray, the AIB formed an armed guerilla unit called Lion Force. Manned mostly by islanders, with Skinner directing operations from the south coast, the unit conducted hit-and-run attacks against the Japanese. By that time, most of the coastwatchers had been hiding in the mountains for nearly a year, and the burgeoning population of downed aviators was stretching their resources to the limit. Two evacuations were arranged—one for the groups in northern New Britain, the other for Figgis and the coastwatchers near the south coast.

  Several individuals almost missed the northern rendezvous with USS Gato. Departing on February 3 from Roberts’s camp, Manuel bid an emotional farewell to the islanders who had cared for him since the previous June. He and Roberts, plus aviators Planck, Czarnecki, and Giertsen, made their way with native helpers to Open Bay. On the evening of February 5, Gato surfaced in Open Bay and crept within a few hundred yards of shore. Crewmen launched two rubber boats and paddled them in for the pickup. With the evacuees on board, the rubber boats started out toward the bay, but had covered only two hundred yards when a frantic flashlight signal from shore got the sailors’ attention.

  A message, described by Gato’s skipper as “crude blinker signaling,” was interpreted aboard the submarine to read: “sixty-seven more aviators.” Lieutenant Commander Robert J. Foley told his cook to prepare soup for dozens of guests, and the two rubber boats went back to the beach. There they found not sixty-seven aviators, but a party of six to seven, including Hargesheimer and two members of an RAAF Boston who had been shot down on the other side of the island the previous November.*

  The new arrivals had come from Skinner’s camp, where a runner had informed them days before of the planned evacuation. The aviators set out the next day, but they wound up walking in a circle. Stokie then sent word that the pickup time had been moved ahead and sent a “hill native guide” with extra carriers to assist the anxious aviators. Their subsequent arduous trek, a race against time, brought them to the rendezvous beach within minutes of the rubber boats’ departure. Fortunately one of the men possessed a working flashlight and signaled the submarine. Had they arrived just fifteen minutes later, they would have missed the boat entirely.

  Soon after the three aviators left Skinner’s camp, he crossed the island to meet with Figgis. There, arrangements were made to evacuate Figgis’s team along with the seven airmen under his charge, five of whom he had been supporting for more than four months. Assisted by several islanders, the party vacated the camp on March 17 and made their way carefully to a rendezvous point. At 0100 on the morning of March 26, they boarded an eighty-foot Elco of Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 7, based at Thursday Island, New Guinea. The boat, commanded by Lt. Alfred “Dix” Leeson, delivered them later that day to the mainland. From there, the long-stranded aviators were flown to Australia for hospitalization. Anxious to return home, Krantz and his crewmen were frustrated to find that the festering sores on their legs continued to resist the doctors’ efforts and were very slow to heal.

  As one of the few who escaped New Britain in 1942, Peter Figgis had served his country honorably and bravely. He was under no obligation to risk his neck again, yet he returned to the island and spent a year and twenty-five days in that unforgiving place. Throughout the rest of his life, Figgis remained modest about his role, crediting his success as a coastwatcher to the support of the island people. “I did not have a close call or narrow escape from the Japanese,” he said. “This was because, having the total confidence of the native community, we were always aware of any Jap activity and laid low until we got the all clear.”

  Figgis thought he did not contribute much to the war effort, but his government disagreed. In 1947, Figgis was award a Military Cross, Australia’s third-highest medal for valor.

  *The word for white man (also known as a “European”) in Pidgin English is “masta,” obviously derived from the pronunciation of “master.” The islanders were not enslaved, and many Australians have insisted that “masta” is merely an honorific. Perhaps so, but Melanesians were typically treated like children during that period, with grown men referred to as “boys” and women as “marys,” while toddlers and small children were “picaninnies.” When it came to discrimination and bigotry, Australians were no different than their American counterparts.

  *Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit, created in March 1942 to provide military personnel for administrative duties in the Mandated Territory of New Guinea

  *Bearss eventually became chief historian of the National Park Service. As of this writing, he is retired from government service but still leads walking tours, primarily across his favorite haunts, the battlefields of the Civil War.

  *Wing Commander William E. Townsend and Flight Lt. David M. McClymont escaped from their Boston after it was hit by antiaircraft fire and ditched off Palmalmal plantation on November 3, 1943. The gunner was killed in action.

  CHAPTER 17

  The Twisted Code

  NEARLY ALL THE coastwatchers in New Britain in 1943 returned to Australia in relatively good health and were recognized for their service to the Allies. John Murphy, however, saw two of his fellow coastwatchers shot dead by the Japanese and faced indescribable hardships as a prisoner at Rabaul. Although he proved to be amazingly resilient, the same could not be said for most of his fellow POWs.

  Any comprehensive study of Allied operations against land-based Japanese units must eventually touch on atrocities. They happened everywhere. At almost every location where the Japanese built a major airfield, army base, or shore establishment, structures were either converted or erected to serve as prison compounds. Some were large and fully staffed, such as the former British Army barracks at Singapore. (Known as Changi Prison, the name of a nearby facility where three thousand civilians were interned, the barracks housed fifty thousand Allied POWs.) Others were tiny, temporary holding facilities. Ralph Cheli and Williston Cox were held in small buildings in New Guinea, and Bill Welles, shot down over Buka, spent several weeks in a nondescript enclosure. Those individuals, along with numerous others held at small facilities in New Guinea and the Solomons, were eventually transported to Rabaul. But at least as many—probably a lot more—were simply marched to the nearest execution site.

  Because Rabaul was the military hub of the Southeastern Area, the Japanese maintained separate prison compounds for civilian internees, POWs, and forced laborers all across the Gazelle Peninsula. The exact number is not entirely clear, as some of the suspected sites have never been fully identified.

  Prisoners were held in a variety of enclosures. The smallest was a “sleep-out” shelter, screened with wire, adjacent to the ice-making and cold storage plant at the former W. R. Carpenter store. Three civilians with engineering or mechanical experience, captured in January 1942, were housed in the rickety enclosure to maintain the plant’s machinery. Gordon Thomas, the American-born former editor of the Rabaul Times newspaper, had no special mechanical skills but was retained with the others as the cook. When not busy with housekeeping chores, he had time to observe the Japanese as they spoiled his once-lovely town.

  In contrast to this chicken coop, 350 civilians were interned on the sprawling campus at Vunapope. Their leader, the vicar apostolic of Rabaul, Bishop Isidoro Leone Scharmach, provided boundless intellectual guidance and spiritual support. But the Japanese displayed no regard for the civilians’ religious beliefs or the sanctity of their buildings. The battalion commander took over Scharmach’s residence, the battalion’s horses were stabled in the sanctuary of the immaculate white cathedral, and a monks’ dormitory housed dozens of conscripted prostitutes. Strangely, the Japanese also disregarded the fact that the bishop and many of his staff were German. Rather than treating them as neutrals, let alone allies, the captors showed contempt for the missionaries, as though they were from opposing nations.

  If Scharmach was mortified about Vunapope’s desecration, he didn’t show it. Slightly built, with an impressive proboscis and owli
sh round spectacles, he looked like an intellectual—yet he possessed the courage of a crusader. He calmly outwitted his captors at every opportunity, winning moral victories that delighted his people. As war correspondent Osmar White later described him, Scharmach “simply out-faced the Emperor’s little men, beat them down with … sublime self-confidence, an arrogance that not even the most fanatical follower of the Bushido code could match.”

  A stone’s throw from Vunapope, thousands of Indian army soldiers captured in Malaya were housed in squalid camps. In theory they were “inductees” into the Japanese Eighteenth Army. As conscripted laborers, the Indians received the same abusive treatment as POWs. An unfortunate confluence of unsanitary camp conditions, malnutrition, job hazards, and Allied bombing and strafing attacks led to an estimated six thousand deaths among the Indian soldiers.* The majority occurred at the hands of the Japanese, either indirectly through illness borne of neglect and abuse, or occasionally by execution.

  Of the approximately one thousand Chinese civilians in Rabaul at the beginning of the war, most evacuated the town before the Japanese invasion. Gathering at inland plantations, the Chinese were continually harassed. Those who had been active participants in Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party (Koumintang) were sought by the Japanese, who executed at least a dozen party members in the center of town. Otherwise most of the Asian civilians were treated indecently, though not atrociously. One noteworthy exception occurred in late 1943, when an entire Chinese family and several of their associates were killed at a plantation on the southwest coast of New Britain.

  Some fifteen hundred captured soldiers of the Chinese National Army were shipped in as slave labor. Along with the Indian Army conscripts, they worked as coolies to repair airdromes after Allied bombing attacks, build roads, and dig bomb shelters. More than half perished. Again the primary cause of death was neglect and malnourishment, exacerbated by the strain of forced labor.

  An astonishing number of Chinese and Indian laborers died at Rabaul. The death toll among captured Allied airmen was comparatively low, yet the probability of death was much higher for Allied airmen than any other category of captives. Whereas approximately half of the Indians and Chinese perished, an estimated 90 percent of the Allied POWs at Rabaul died of neglect or were executed.

  The army and navy prisons were considerably different. Aside from a dozen or so civilian internees held at the 81st Naval Garrison Unit’s compound, no captured airmen were known to be alive at the end of 1942. Among those captured during 1943 and beyond, some were shipped to Japan for further interrogation, while others were transferred to the Kempeitai compound. Many died by the navy’s hand—usually by the sword.

  In comparison, no Allied POWs were known to have died in the military police compound during 1943, despite a mushrooming number of captives.

  ONE OF THE most compelling new prisoners was shot down over Bougainville on his first combat mission. Lieutenant junior grade Joseph G. Nason flew an SBD-3 in Composite Squadron 38, based on Guadalcanal. During a strike against enemy gun emplacements on October 23, Nason was in the middle of a seventy-degree dive over Kieta airdrome when his Dauntless took a direct hit from an antiaircraft shell:

  When I got hit, it wasn’t terribly traumatic. I got some phosphorus particles in my legs. There wasn’t a great big bang, but I knew I’d been hit. My flight suit was on fire, and both ankles were burned. The engine was on fire. I called my rear seat man but he didn’t answer. I told him I was going to jump, and he’d better jump, too. We were right over the runway at probably 5,000 feet. I didn’t have any doubt about jumping, not with my flight suit on fire. No hesitation. I had pulled out of the dive, but we were still dropping. It takes a bit of pulling on the stick to get back to level flight.

  I jumped out and saw the plane’s tail go by me slowly. All I could think was, Oh what miserable, rotten luck! There was nothing you could do about antiaircraft fire—you’re hit or you’re not hit—but I kept thinking, Why me? Why such terrible, awful luck?

  I came drifting down over the airfield. There was some machine gun fire coming up at me. I pulled on the risers—they’d told us we could control the chute by doing that—and I floated past the runway into the jungle. I came down in thick stuff. When I landed I was almost suspended from the branches of a tree. I was probably eight or nine feet above the ground. I got out of the chute and dropped to soft earth. I ran like hell.

  Nason’s rear seat gunner, Aviation Radioman Third Class Thomas E. Furlong Jr., was not seen exiting the aircraft before it hit the ground.

  After several days, Nason became weak from hunger. “I was in the jungle alone for about a week, trying to make my way toward the ocean,” he added. “I hoped I could find a dugout canoe and get out to sea where I might be found, but the fuckers caught me and interrogated me. One of their questions was, ‘When will the Americans come to Bougainville?’ I didn’t know, because they didn’t tell us. They didn’t want us to have information like that in case we were captured. So I said, ‘Soon.’”

  Nason was lucky to be captured by a Kempeitai detachment on October 31, one day before the marines landed at Empress Augusta Bay. His guess about the invasion’s timing gave him credibility and probably saved his life. Held at Kieta, he was later transported in a Daihatsu landing craft to Buka Island. To avoid Allied aircraft and PT boats, the vessel took the long way around, first passing Tonolei Harbor, then following the entire northern coast of Bougainville. Moving only at night, it took two weeks to reach Buka. There, Nason was confined briefly with Bill Welles, the Saratoga F6F pilot. A day or so later, both men were put aboard a destroyer crammed with troops being withdrawn from Buka to Rabaul. After the high-speed run to Simpson Harbor, Nason and Welles were driven in an old Chevy sedan to the Kempeitai compound in Chinatown.

  About a month before Nason and Welles arrived, in early December, the population at the compound had shrunk by nine POWs. No one could figure out why the Japanese had divided McMurria’s crew and sent half to Tokyo. Les Burnette, Fred Engle, Bob Martindale, and Frank Wynne left the compound on November 13, accompanied by five other POWS: Jack Wisener, Will Cox, Cephas Kelly, Joel Griffin, and Pvt. Ronald C. Cassidy. An Australian soldier, Cassidy had been a member of the 2/40th Infantry Battalion, garrisoned on Timor.

  For McMurria, the separation of his crew was maddening. It created fear and resentment, emotions shared by the other surviving crewmembers—Tom Doyle, Al Sugden, and Ray Farnell—who reasoned that those going to Tokyo would receive better treatment. They were correct. All nine of the POWs transported to Japan survived the war. For those left behind, the outcome would be terribly different.

  WHEN COASTWATCHER MURPHY was handed over to the 81st Naval Garrison Unit on November 3, he noticed several civilian internees. One turned out to be an American missionary. Father Joseph Lamarre, a Marist priest, had been captured in the Solomon Islands in early 1942 and came to the navy prison about six months before John Murphy. Most of the other internees were Australians—former plantation personnel or businessmen captured soon after the Japanese invasion. Like Lamarre, they had been imprisoned for almost two years.

  The civilian internees were sent out on work parties and provided the POWs with their daily rations, which Murphy described as “light.” The civilians were allowed to mingle, but the military prisoners were guarded closely, one man per cell, with handcuffs on at night and during air raids. Despite the restrictions, the captives managed to convey information. Murphy learned of several American airmen who had been there for five months.

  More recently, four of Murphy’s fellow Australians had arrived at the prison. During the renewed bombing offensive in October and November, Joseph Hewitt made certain that his No. 9 Operational Group participated, sending his Beaufort squadrons on unescorted night attacks against Rabaul. Depending on the mission, the multi-role Beauforts could carry either bombs or a torpedo. After midnight on October 22, for example, three squadrons of Beauforts loaded with torpedoes took off
to attack a convoy making a run from Truk to Rabaul. Several “fish” were launched, but results were unobserved due to the darkness and the blinding flash of antiaircraft guns. One Beaufort failed to return, its crew listed as missing in action. The aircraft, piloted by Flight Lieutenant Geoffrey H. Vincent, had been hit and forced down at sea, with all four crewmembers captured. Picked up by one of the convoy ships off New Ireland, the Australians arrived at the 81st Naval Garrison Unit’s prison less than two weeks ahead of Murphy.

  The American captives there were survivors of five downed B-17s, three of which had been shot down by Petty Officer Kudo in his night fighter. In chronological order, Heichel and seven other crewmen from Reckless Mountain Boys had ditched off New Ireland on May 7; Rippy and Curry had parachuted from Honi Kuu Okole, the first B-17 shot down by Kudo, on May 21; and four crewmen from the second bomber he downed that night were likewise brought to the navy prison. Two others, Naumann and Cascio, had been ejected from Texas #6 when it blew up near Waterfall Bay on June 1. The most recent B-17 captives were Lieutenants Bek and Wisener, both of whom had bailed out of Georgia Peach, hammered by Kudo’s guns on June 13. After just a week at the navy prison, however, Wisener had been transferred to the Kempeitai compound.

  Prior to the capture of the Beaufighter crew, the navy prison population had been stable for months, but the influx of Australians started a trend. Within weeks of Murphy’s arrival in early November, the number of captured aviators nearly doubled. Stefan Nyarady of VT-12 and his turret gunner, Harlan Burrus, were captured on November 11; less than two weeks later, a U.S. Navy flying boat from Patrol Squadron 52 was forced down in St. George’s Channel, resulting in the capture of the pilot, Lt. John M. Arbuckle, and seven of his crewmen. Taken initially to Kavieng, the prisoners were delivered to Rabaul within days, though the date of their handover to the 81st Naval Garrison Unit is uncertain. If it occurred on November 24, the arrival of the eight Americans may have led to an atrocity. Over the preceding thirty days, at least eighteen new captives had been brought in, an influx that evidently was greater than Capt. Tatsuo Kiyama, commanding officer of the 81st Naval Garrison Unit, was willing to handle.