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

by Bruce Gamble

  Joe Nason, about six feet, three inches tall, described the cave as eighteen feet deep, five feet wide, and six feet in height.

  Joe Holguin, nearly a foot shorter than Nason, estimated the cave was thirty-five feet deep, nine feet wide, and seven feet high. Either way, the total floor space was only about five hundred square feet, providing barely enough room for everyone to sit. As Holguin observed, it was impossible to lie down.

  After the prisoners were prodded into the cave, its entrance was closed with a barricade of coconut logs. A narrow opening was left for a “door,” which the Japanese covered with a blanket. Without ventilation, the temperature and humidity inside the cave quickly became unbearable. A single wooden bucket at the back of the cave served as the benjo for the entire group. Because the captives were cuffed together in pairs, right wrist to left wrist, anyone attempting to reach the bucket had to drag his partner along. Both men would have to stumble over or around other POWs; thus the men nearest the entrance to the cave didn’t even bother to try. Unfortunately, weeks of unsanitary conditions had left almost all of them with gastrointestinal disorders, including diarrhea. The bucket was soon filled, after which no one could use it.

  Corsair pilot John Fitzgerald, a former cabdriver from New York City, could do a mean cockney imitation. During a lull in the coughing and groaning, he chirped that they had all landed in the “fookin’ black ‘ol o’ Calcutta.”

  No one laughed. The prisoners at the back of the cave, unable to get away from the benjo, were too busy gagging and retching.

  Holguin was one of many whose morale hit bottom. “That first night in the cave was probably the bleakest moment of our entire captivity,” he later wrote. “There was nowhere to turn for help or relief. The future was extremely uncertain and all we could expect was extinction in one way or another.”

  But desperation is often the mother of invention. Holguin worked a short length of copper wire out of the electrical cord that roped the prisoners together, and bent it to form a key that unlocked his cuffs. He passed the key to the other prisoners, whose relief was immeasurable. Whenever the guards called for an inspection—a superfluous annoyance—the prisoners simply snapped the cuffs back on.

  The rubbing out of Rabaul continued on March 3. While the town shook and burned, the prisoners spent the entire day inside the dark, stifling cave. Sneaking their cuffs off again, they took turns sitting or leaning against the bare earthen walls.

  The following morning, several Kempeitai guards approached the cave entrance. Consulting a list written on rice paper, they called out prisoners’ names in pairs. Those who had been identified, still attached to their handcuff partner, made their way through the crowded cave to the front entrance. Outside, the guards unlocked the cuffs and separated those whose names had been called. They were cuffed together by twos and remained outside, while the unnamed POWs were cuffed to a new partner and sent back inside the cave.

  One of those called was Ralph Cheli, who shuffled out into the sunlight with Joe Holguin. After the cuffs were taken off, Holguin was reattached at the wrist with Charlie Lanphier, who went with him back into the cave. At the time, Holguin didn’t know the significance of his two handcuff partners. Cheli had earned a Medal of Honor but probably didn’t know it, as congress had approved the medal as a posthumous award in October, a mere two months after his heroic mission over Wewak. Holguin’s new partner, Lanphier, was the brother of the man who claimed he shot down Admiral Yamamoto—but Charlie kept that information secret.

  After about sixteen prisoners had been identified, several guards marched them away. The remaining forty or so prisoners had slightly more elbow room inside the cave, but conditions were still horrendous. According to Jim McMurria, the rice ball doled out that first evening was the only food the prisoners received for three days.

  Inadvertently, Joe Nason and his handcuffed partner provided some momentary relief from the dreadful conditions inside the cave. The prisoners had unhooked their cuffs again using Holguin’s homemade key, and were lolling about when the guards suddenly shouted in Japanese for the captives to fall in. Nason and his partner, described as “a tubercular Chinese who stood no more than 5 feet, 2 inches,” were near the entrance and had the least amount of time to react. In their haste to snap the handcuffs back on, they connected their right wrists together, as though they were shaking hands. When the two men exited the cave in this awkward position, the guards began to shout. Some of the prisoners couldn’t keep a straight face. “Joe’s explanation to the infuriated guard as to how he twisted his legs over the Chinaman’s head and back around under his left elbow to arrive at this condition was the only thing we had to laugh at for a long time,” recalled McMurria, “and we all busted our sides.”

  The laughter stopped when the guards beat Nason and the Chinese man. After the blows ended, the whole episode was forgotten—and the Japanese never discovered that the prisoners could unlock their own handcuffs. This may well have saved a few lives. Several of the guards were brutal, needing only the slightest provocation or perceived infraction as an excuse to severely bash the weak, emaciated captives.

  The next morning, March 5, the guards called out more names, culling another group of prisoners from cave.* Tom Doyle, the bombardier in McMurria’s crew, was among those called; so were Alston Sugden, the navigator, and Ray Farnell, a gunner from the same crew. Holguin saw tears in McMurria’s eyes as his men briefly said farewell before being led away. McMurria’s crew had survived together for almost a year since their capture in March 1943, but now he was the only one left. The list of those taken away also included six men from Unruh’s crew, five crewmen from various B-25s of the 345th Bomb Group, six RAAF fliers, and four Marine Corps aviators, including football star “Tiger” Mayberry.

  McMurria asked where the prisoners were being taken. “To a safer place,” the guards said. Despite repeated inquiries, the Japanese would reveal nothing more about the departed POWs. The effect was chilling, recalled McMurria.

  We continued to ask about them for several months. Our questions seemed to irritate the guards and we were told to shut up and forget about that group. They wanted no more reference to it. We strongly suspected that [the POWs] had been executed, judging from the attitude of the guards. The incident was a very hot potato and they wanted nothing to do with it.

  The Japanese evidently hoped they could dodge the questions indefinitely. As the months passed, it may have seemed possible; however, when the war ended and the prisoners were still unaccounted for, numerous members of the 6th Field Kempeitai were charged with war crimes. Thereafter, they faced infuriated Allied interrogators who demanded explanations.

  The story told by the Japanese, carefully rehearsed, was that the two groups of prisoners (totaling thirty-one by their count) were to be sent to Watom Island, about five miles west of Rabaul, to alleviate overcrowding at Tunnel Hill. The prisoners were taken as far as Talili Bay on March 5, where they were placed in a temporary shelter while awaiting a boat or barge to take them across to Watom. That very day, an Allied bomb scored a direct hit on the shelter, killing twenty-six of the thirty-one prisoners instantly. The other five, grievously wounded, were allegedly taken back to the Kempeitai camp, where they died of their wounds.

  Or so the Japanese said.

  Interrogated repeatedly after the war, Colonel Kikuchi, Major Matsuda (promoted to second-in-command of the 6th Field Kempeitai in March 1944), and various other members of the unit gave conflicting details and highly evasive answers. But they never budged from the basic story that a friendly bomb had killed the prisoners. In explaining how the guards assigned to watch the prisoners miraculously escaped without injury, the Japanese claimed that the guards were in a different shelter, fifty yards away.

  Other oddities pointed strongly to a deliberate coverup, such as the claim by the Japanese that the remains of all thirty-one victims were cremated. That would have been a first. None of the other prisoners and conscripted laborers who died on New
Britain by the thousands were cremated. Shinto rites were reserved for Japanese who had fallen in battle. To have rendered similar tribute to weak and sickly prisoners, who otherwise were treated as less than human, would have been considered completely inappropriate among Bushido purists.

  Curiously, none of the investigators noticed a glaring flaw in the Japanese account: no Allied air attacks occurred in the area of Talili Bay on March 5. Medium bombers attacked Simpson Harbor, some New Zealand PV Venturas blasted barges sheltering in Ataliklikun Bay, nine B-24s attacked the Rabaul town area, and thirteen Liberators bombed Rapopo airdrome, fully fifteen miles from Talili. The possibility that a bomb hung up and fell somewhere other than its intended target cannot be categorically eliminated—stranger things have happened—but the statistical probability of such an event causing the alleged direct hit would be infinitesimal.

  The Japanese military police realized that they would never undergo torture or face coercion of any sort, and therefore maintained their story that a random bomb had killed the prisoners. As long as they stuck to the basics, they could conceal the truth and frustrate their interrogators. To a great extent that proved to be true, but in one of the most compelling turns of the investigation, a Nisei who had served in the 6th Field Kempeitai agreed to submit to a “polygraph detection of deception technique.”

  American-born Shinichi Kawamoto, who joined the Kempeitai headquarters in early 1944 as an interpreter, willingly agreed to undergo the Keeler-type polygraph test. After a baseline was established, Kawamoto answered multiple questions about his possible direct involvement in the disappearance of the prisoners. The line of questioning showed that the Allies strongly suspected a mass execution, and throughout the test, Kawamoto reacted with deception to many of the questions. The team administering the polygraph stated in their final report that he “definitely lied.”

  Despite evidence indicating that the POWs were executed rather than killed by a bomb on March 5, Kawamoto denied direct knowledge or involvement in the incident. He did budge, albeit slightly, during a separate interrogation after the polygraph test. Upon learning what the Allies thought of his veracity based on the polygraph, and after hearing the details of affidavits submitted by Allied prisoners, Kawamoto was asked if he still believed the original Japanese version of the story. “I cannot believe it now,” he admitted.

  Unfortunately, the primary Japanese suspects did not undergo similar deception tests. The polygraphs probably would not have worked anyway, as the use of an interpreter would have influenced their measurable reactions. Thus, while the outcome of Kawamoto’s polygraph was intriguing, the test did not reveal the smoking gun that interrogators had hoped for.

  To this day, no definitive evidence has been uncovered to settle the controversy. The Allied investigators never believed the version of events as told by the Japanese, but neither could they disprove the obviously fabricated story.

  AT RABAUL, IN the aftermath of what was almost certainly a mass execution of more than thirty POWs, the Allied attacks continued. “The bombings are as intense as ever,” Maj. Gen. Kimihira wrote in his personal diary on March 6. “More than half the city has been reduced to ashes.”

  Mitchell’s strategic planners would have agreed. All of Rabaul’s boundaries were determined by the shoreline of Simpson Harbor and the rim of the caldera. Using aerial photographs, the planners at Strike Command and Bombing Command counted approximately 1,400 structures of all types in Rabaul at the beginning of the campaign. By March 10, about 60 percent of the buildings had been destroyed. The progress of the campaign, combined with the rapid construction of a fighter strip in the newly acquired Green Islands, provided Mitchell and his staff with new options.

  Two naval construction battalions completed a five-thousand-foot runway on Nissan Island just three weeks after it was invaded. The first fighter units soon commenced operations, initially using the new strip for staging, but as soon as billeting and support facilities were prepared, squadrons moved in to stay. Shifting their emphasis to the dive-bombing role, the fighters took over the task of “cleaning out the fringes” of Rabaul.

  With much of the town in ruins, Mitchell shifted his focus to the next phase of the Rabaul campaign, the destruction of the enemy’s supply depots. Outside Rabaul’s busy waterfront, the biggest supply center on New Britain occupied the area between Kokopo and Vunapope. The Japanese had commandeered almost every building inside the mission, except a few dormitories where approximately 350 Catholic missionaries, staff, and family members were imprisoned. The rest of the campus was occupied by a Japanese infantry battalion. Mitchell’s staff estimated that the mission held nine hundred buildings, including tents, most of which contained stockpiles of food, ammunition, and other supplies.

  For months, Bishop Scharmach and his staff had told themselves that Vunapope, with its beautiful cathedral and hundreds of civilians, would not be deliberately attacked. But there had been enough random incidents—some strafing runs, a few off-target bombs from time to time—that Scharmach decided to construct a pair of substantial air raid shelters.

  As a young man, Scharmach had served the Kaiser in the Great War. A veteran of Verdun, the Somme, and several other campaigns, he knew the value of deep, well-engineered bunkers. At Vunapope, he oversaw the construction of two large underground shelters, each essentially a hillside tunnel with multiple entrances, electric lights, and benches along the side walls. Designed to shelter as many as two hundred people each, they were dug into hillsides away from buildings, based on Scharmach’s well-founded theory that a lot of bombs missed their intended targets.

  The bishop reserved comment when the Japanese constructed shallow shelters near each commandeered house, roofing them with coconut logs and perhaps three feet of dirt. The Japanese smugly advised Scharmach to do the same, bragging that they could reach their shelters quickly. But the raid of March 10 proved them wrong.

  The approach of Allied planes that morning sent most of the civilians into their two tunnels. The tireless bishop remained outside, seeing to details that required his attention as head of the largest mission in the South Pacific. He watched the Allied formation as it flew over Saint George’s Channel past his vantage point, heading toward Rabaul—but suddenly the bombers changed course and came straight at Vunapope.

  Caught in the open, Scharmach ran to the nearest tunnel entrance and made his way to the center, where the sisters were huddled. “By the time I reached them, hell had broken loose over Vunapope,” he later wrote. “The ominous sound of diving planes, the scream of the falling bombs and their ear-splitting detonations, the rattle and whistle of machineguns and their bullets, all combined in terrific pandemonium. In the tunnel all this noise was somewhat muffled, but the exploding bombs made the shaft shake in the same manner as we experienced during an earthquake.”

  Scharmach’s recollection was consistent with the profile of the first big attack, conducted by twenty-four RNZAF Kittyhawks, each carrying a five-hundred-pound general purpose bomb. Casualties among the civilians were remarkably light. One member of the brotherhood, recovering from illness, had been inside a small hospital that received a direct hit. Killed instantly, he was buried in a dresser drawer, which proved adequate to hold what little remained of him. Elsewhere around the campus, a cleric, four brothers, and two sisters had been seriously wounded. The men succumbed “after a few days of miserable existence during the following air raids,” wrote Scharmach, but the women gradually recovered.

  The casualties among the Japanese had been far greater. According to the bishop’s estimate, hundreds of Japanese had been killed. As evidence, Scharmach wrote a graphic account of what the missionaries found after the raid:

  In the morning after that first raid, when the Sisters returned to their little convent … they came upon a ghastly sight. Pieces of human bodies were everywhere. Nearly 300 Japanese had fallen victim to bombs or bullets in the area. One of their air raid shelters, only a few yards away, received a direct hit and its 9
0 occupants were partly buried, partly blown all over the convent. Another house, where sick soldiers were sheltering, had likewise been struck by one of the big bombs, and the remains of its inmates were scattered all over the countryside.

  The more heroic amongst the sisters gave themselves to the horrible task of gathering up the mangled remains of the Japanese soldiers. Bucket after bucket was filled up and handed over to the guards.

  Scharmach claimed that two hundred Japanese airmen were inside the former indigent sisters’ convent when it was struck by an “aerial torpedo” that wiped them out. Whether or not the death toll that day was inflated, General Imamura later admitted that approximately 1,500 Japanese were killed in bombing attacks during the collective raids on Rabaul, with approximately the same number wounded.

  Less important than the total casualties was the fact that scores of Japanese were apparently killed by a direct hit on a bomb shelter—an ironic disaster that came just days after the Kempeitai claimed that thirty-plus Allied POWs were killed in the same manner. The difference was that some two dozen bombs were dropped on Vunapope on March 10, whereas none are thought to have fallen anywhere near Talili Bay on March 5.

  The Fates, it seemed, had a sense of poetic justice.

  *Accounts differ regarding the number of POWs separated. Holguin’s unpublished memoir states that about 31 men were removed. John Murphy’s sworn affidavit claimed a total of 40. McMurria stated firmly that 21 were removed, but was evidently referring only to American POWs.

  CHAPTER 22