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

by Bruce Gamble

  One day he had been baiting me without getting a rise, so perhaps he thought I was in danger of finally giving up the spark which is the difference between hope and the pit. He bent on me a look of studied contempt and jeered, “Nason, your mother must have been a low bitch to have spawned such a poor specimen of humanity as you for a son.”

  That did it. My dormant adrenalin gushed and I let Murphy have my precious salmon can of soup fair in his sneering face.

  “Cripes, Nason,” he said admiringly. “You’re still alive. It was hard to tell. I think you’ll make it, Joe.”

  In my opinion it was just this prodding and jabbing that spurred my spirit when it lagged and the final apathy looked so welcome. I now feel, and I suppose others do too, that I owe my life to John Murphy. If there is any hero in this tale, it is John Murphy—undaunted and resourceful, cocky and scornful—who stands out in my memories of those dark days.”

  Starting in September, a few signs of better luck appeared. Joe Holguin’s back got stronger, but the wound he had suffered to his jaw before he bailed out of Naughty But Nice more than a year earlier still festered. That he hadn’t died of blood poisoning was miraculous, for he still had a hole in his lower jaw. The drainage looked awful and undoubtedly smelled worse, but the prisoners were so filthy it contributed little to the overall stench. Joe was grateful nonetheless when a P-38 pilot inadvertently cured the situation.

  In the middle of September lightning roared up the gully in a strafing run. The suddenness of the attack caught everyone by surprise, and as the prisoners jumped up from the floor to scramble into their bomb shelter, McMurria accidently slammed his knee squarely into Holguin’s jaw. “The corruption that came out of his jaw puddled on the floor and looked terrible,” recalled McMurria, “but we noticed it contained a small piece of bone.”

  Holguin pulled out other loose splinters, which had prevented the wound from closing. In less than two weeks, his jaw healed without further complications.

  Even better, the attack by the P-38 convinced the Japanese to move the camp closer to a Kempeitai compound, which occupied a cave system west of Tunnel Hill Road. Eleven prisoners were still alive to make the move on October 4, and they were glad to leave Death Valley. Their new enclosure was identical in design to the old one, built against the side of a gully with an air raid tunnel in the back wall. The main difference was a partition that divided the enclosure into two rooms. One was for “healthy” prisoners, the other for those expected to die soon.

  For months, the guards had been telling Joe Nason that he would be next. Like all captives, they addressed him as Horio-san (literally, Mr. Prisoner), saying, “You next die!” Looking as though he would soon expire, he was placed in the partition for sick POWs. “Nason deteriorated to a skin and bone condition, was afflicted with beriberi, frequent dysentery, and huge ulcers from which his very life seemed to drain,” wrote Holguin. “Still he managed to awake each morning, much to his amazement and ours.”

  Another sickly prisoner was Harold Tuck. His mission over Simpson Harbor had come to an ignominious end on January 14, when one of his own squadron mates chopped the tail off his SBD. It was a ridiculous way to fall into the hands of the enemy, made even more troubling by the fact that his gunner, Paul McLeaf, had been among the prisoners executed on March 5. Tuck lingered for weeks, comforted by Holguin, before he finally let go on November 19. His slow death was difficult to watch, impossible to ignore. McMurria noticed that toward the end, dying prisoners seemed to bite the air, their jaws working as they struggled to breathe. Holguin added, “Of all the prisoners who died at the two Tunnel Hill camps, Tuck appeared to me to have suffered the most and the longest.”

  Tuck was the first captive to die in the new Tunnel Hill camp, the last to expire in what had been a very long year of hardships. The remaining ten prisoners, looking more like scarecrows than human beings, thought they would face a dark, brooding holiday season—but the Japanese surprised them.

  Just before Christmas, the captives received a large bundle of cured tobacco leaves and some old issues of Japanese magazines to be used as cigarette paper. Nearly all of them smoked, and often pounced fanatically on any discarded butts they could find. They also smoked just about anything they could get their hands on, including old leaves lying on the ground. Earlier, the Japanese had allowed them to build a simple rolling machine out of wood and other scrap items. With the machine and the cured tobacco, they rolled hundreds of cigarettes. It provided a popular pastime, and the cigarettes they produced were declared superior to those made in Japanese factories. The product also got them into good graces with several guards, yielding additional benefits.

  On Christmas Day, one of the guards brought in a hand-cranked Victrola record player and some German recordings of classical music. The tabletop player was old and dilapidated, the recordings scratched and hissing, but the prisoners heard only music. McMurria, a castaway or a prisoner since January 1943, wept openly at the sound of the first music he had listened to in almost two years.

  With new surroundings and beautiful arias to inspire them, the prisoners’ outlook seemed marginally better. If four more years seemed too long, one day at a time would do.

  *After flying with the marines, Lindbergh spent time with the 475th Fighter Group in New Guinea and helping them extend the combat radius of their P-38s. During two stays with the “Satan’s Angels,” he flew several combat missions and even shot down an Army Type 99 armed reconnaissance plane (Mitsubishi Ki-51 “Sonia”), though he did not receive official credit.

  *Quinones has been incorrectly (and inappropriately) labeled as a Mexican-American. His home of record was Mesa, Arizona, where his parents relocated before the war.

  CHAPTER 23

  Glory

  THE ALLIED PLANES kept coming. Throughout 1944 and well into 1945, bombers, dive-bombers, and fighter-bombers continued to hit Rabaul’s airfields to prevent their use; they kept a watchful eye on Simpson Harbor and attacked barges trying to resupply the garrison; they destroyed gardens to prevent the Japanese from growing food; and they strafed vehicles hauling supplies from remote caches. The number of sorties per month gradually declined, from a peak of approximately 2,200 in January 1944 to less than 300 by December. At the lowest ebb, an average of ten planes hit Rabaul every day, and the effort surged again in mid-1945 to more than five hundred sorties per month.

  Of all the missions flown against Rabaul—or even throughout all of World War II—few were as unusual as the sixteen one-way sorties by unmanned “assault drones” in October 1944. Almost seventy years before the proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) such as those used in the Global War on Terror, expendable radio-controlled drones were used to attack Rabaul. The TDR-1 looked conventional in almost every respect, with two inexpensive Lycoming six-cylinder engines, tricycle landing gear, and the capability to carry an external bomb or torpedo.* A cockpit with flight controls was included for test or ferry flights, then faired over for the unmanned attack. Equipped with an RCA television camera in the nose, along with a gyro stabilizer and radar altimeter, the drones were flown by an operator in a stand-off TBM (General Motors–built) Avenger using radio control. Almost two hundred drones were manufactured, using lightweight tubular frames supplied by the Schwinn Bicycle Company, before the contract was cancelled. Most of the completed TDRs were shipped overseas with a unit called the Special Task Air Group (STAG)-1.

  Before launching the drones against enemy targets, a live demonstration was conducted on July 30 for the benefit of the ComAirSols brass. Four drones carrying two-thousand-pound general purpose bombs were directed by their control planes against Yamazuki Maru, a 6,500-ton merchantman beached on Guadalcanal. Technically the drones scored three direct hits, although one bomb failed to detonate. The fourth drone missed the superstructure by a matter of feet, exploding against the tree line.

  On the heels of that success, two missions were conducted against ships off southern Bougainville, along with other well-
defined targets such as antiaircraft emplacements. Initial results due to malfunctions and equipment failures were disappointing. Nevertheless four separate strikes were flown against Rabaul by STAG-1 in October. Flying from Nissan in the Green Islands, each strike consisted of four drones for a total of sixteen sorties against Rabaul. A great majority either missed due to radio interference or malfunction, or crashed en route. (One of the wrecked drones was partially recovered by the Japanese, who discovered that the lightweight generator assembly and a sparkplug from one of the engines made an excellent cigarette lighter.) The last strike, on October 27, resulted in one direct hit on a secondary target, and a couple of hits on buildings near their intended target. The following day, the program was officially terminated.

  Thereafter, the siege of Rabaul continued with conventional attacks for the remainder of the war. With Halsey’s departure from SOPAC, control of all military activities west of longitude 159 degrees east passed to MacArthur. The Thirteenth Air Force became part of the Far East Air Force, and land-based U.S. Navy squadrons moved to garrison duties in the southern Solomons. Mitchell shifted his headquarters to Bougainville as ComAirNorSols with twenty-five USMC and RNZAF squadrons, many of which were based either on Emirau or the Green Islands. By virtue of being in MacArthur’s area, Mitchell and his squadrons were now part of George Kenney’s domain as the senior airman in SOWESPAC.

  Later, in a sweeping change to free up combat units for the campaign in the Philippines, Commonwealth forces took over the ground war in the northern Solomons and Bismarcks. Australia’s II Corps moved in to continue the nasty jungle campaign on Bougainville, where thousands of Japanese still resisted. In November 1944, elements of the Australian 5th Infantry Division landed on New Britain at Jacquinot Bay and began a gradual push north. Contact with Japanese forces was limited, as General Imamura had withdrawn most of his army units inside the Gazelle Peninsula in anticipation of an invasion, but the “Diggers” did meet some resistance. At Wide Bay, they found the skeletal remains of more than 150 members of Lark Force, murdered at Tol plantation three years earlier in the worst atrocity of the Rabaul campaign.

  SEEMINGLY OVERNIGHT, THE fighting moved north. MacArthur kept his promise to return to the Philippines, and Nimitz slogged island by bloody island across the Central Pacific. The Solomons and Bismarcks, the scene of so many brutal clashes during Cartwheel—from the invasion of Guadalcanal in August 1942 to the seizure of Emirau in March 1944—became backwaters. Marine Air Groups continued the monotonous routine of air strikes, patrols, and night heckling over the bypassed enemy strongholds, but the missions were considered “milk runs.” Still, they provided practical combat experience for Corsair pilots and dive-bomber crews preparing to head north. As explained in the official Marine Corps history: “The flying, gunnery, and bombing experience gained while hitting Rabaul and Kavieng and tackling the Japanese positions in the northern Solomons was invaluable. Although combat and operational casualties were low, there was enough opposition from enemy gunners, enough danger from the treacherous weather, to make pilots handle any AirNorSols mission with prudence.”

  In early 1945, the marine fighter and light bomber groups headed north to join the push into the Philippines. After their transfer, the aerial siege of Rabaul was shared by four PBJ squadrons and several squadrons of RNZAF Corsairs and Venturas. The services often worked in tandem, with PBJs leading Venturas for drop-on-cue bombing runs. Crews assigned to night harassment missions often took along cases of empty soda and beer bottles, tossing out a few bottles whenever a bomb was pickled, the theory being that the bottles would whistle loudly as they fell.

  The New Zealand fighter squadrons predominantly flew dive-bombing missions, usually carrying one or two thousand-pounders, and they conducted extensive “security patrols” over the Gazelle Peninsula. As most of the latter missions tended to be dull, the Kiwis were famous for buzzing American control towers. Combat missions for the bombers were similarly routine. The marines lost a few PBJs and crews due to collisions and other operational mishaps, but none to antiaircraft fire or other combat-related causes during the final months of the siege.

  The same, however, could not be said for the Kiwi F4Us.

  The blackest day in RNZAF history began over Rabaul on the morning of January 15, 1945. Flying from the Green Islands fighter strip, thirty-six Corsairs equipped with bombs attacked the Toboi wharf area and the adjacent floatplane anchorage. Intense, accurate antiaircraft fire hit the right wing of the Corsair piloted by twenty-eight-year-old Flight Lt. Francis G. Keefe, wounding him in the arm. The Corsair caught fire and he bailed out over Simpson Harbor, attracting small-arms fire. Despite his wound, Keefe discarded his rubber dinghy (climbing aboard would have exposed him to even more gunfire) and started to swim toward the open bay. A U.S. Navy Dumbo attempted to get in close for a potential rescue, but was driven off by even heavier gunfire. Other Corsairs strafed the enemy gun emplacements while Keefe struggled against the tidal currents.

  Late that afternoon, a dozen Corsairs arrived over Simpson Harbor to provide coverage while a Ventura dropped two bamboo rafts close by Keefe. By that time, however he was lying face down over a piece of floating debris and appeared motionless. Reluctantly, the other pilots headed back to Green Island. En route, the formation encountered a heavy storm front that extended all the way to the fighter strip. Twelve F4Us entered the squall line at low altitude, but only six emerged. Collisions, vertigo, or sudden downdrafts had caused the other six to cartwheel into the sea. Somewhere near the airstrip, a seventh Corsair disappeared into the evening storm. Evidently disoriented, the pilot either crashed or ran out of fuel. None of the seven pilots survived.

  Seven men had died trying to help rescue one. Ironically, Keefe survived his long ordeal in Simpson Harbor and was picked up by the Japanese. Held at Nangananga, where the 6th Field Kempeitai moved its headquarters in late 1944, he allegedly died of blood poisoning two weeks after his capture. But as always, if the information regarding cause of death was provided by the Japanese, it could not be relied upon.

  Two other Corsair pilots held at the relocated headquarters deserve mention. Marine Lt. Moszek “Mike” Zanger, whose parents had immigrated to the United States from Poland, was in the vicinity of Keravat airdrome on December 5, 1944, when he and a fellow member of VMF-222 collided. Captured after bailing out, Zanger was held near Tobera for nearly eight months. In late June of 1945, Flight Sgt. Ronald C. Warren, RNZAF, was also captured and brought to the camp at Nangananga. He had broken his leg in a crash-landing, which occurred when he pulled out too low from a strafing run over the Duke of York Islands and hit palm trees. Soon after Warren’s arrival at the camp, Zanger died, allegedly killed in an escape attempt. Later recovery of his remains revealed multiple bone fractures, indicating that he had been executed or possibly beaten to death.

  AT THE SECOND Tunnel Hill camp, which the prisoners dubbed “Banana Planation,” the year progressed slowly. The captives were sometimes allowed out of their enclosure in ones or twos to perform small chores, and they began to discuss plots for escaping. Some were practically obsessed with the idea, mostly because they presumed (and the guards regularly reinforced) that they would be executed in the event of an Allied invasion. The captives created elaborate plans, healthy diversions that kept their minds occupied, even though none of them had the strength to travel very far. Nor did they even know exactly where their camp was located.

  One escape plan involved the complicity of a guard. Holguin became increasingly conversant with a few of the friendlier Kempei personnel, speaking with them in a mixture of Pidgin English and Japanese. He caught the interest of an easygoing private using the oldest incentive in the world: bribery. Holguin promised that the United States government would make the guard a wealthy man, and the plan seemed to gain some traction.

  Murphy insisted that everyone had to be healthy enough to travel to make any escape plan feasible. But in early May, another captive died from malnourishment and n
eglect. Jim Miller had been one of the strongest, and his rapid decline troubled all of the prisoners. “He got married a week before he was sent overseas,” remembered John Kepchia. “The Japs respected him. He was a big, husky guy, and always had a good word for everybody. But he started swelling up. Whenever anybody got beriberi and the swelling got up around their waist, you knew they were going to die very shortly.”

  Holguin recalled that Miller started complaining of headaches and chest pains, probable symptoms of congestive heart failure. He refused food one day, and then lay down under a well-worn blanket and died.

  Several days later, some of the guards discovered a small cache of food that the prisoners had just hidden. The incident evolved into a small coverup, because the guards who had been on duty faced severe punishment for letting the prisoners pilfer food. In a bizarre exchange of favors, the story of the escape plan somehow slipped out, and the prisoners had to abandon the idea. As punishment for even contemplating escape, the Japanese took away the prized Victrola record player.

  Setbacks continued. As a result of food shortages, the POWs fought a losing battle with malnourishment. The Japanese themselves had little rice and were extremely reluctant to share any with their captives. Lieutenant Okawara, at naval headquarters, later talked about the food situation:

  The rice supply gradually became very scarce. We had to live on 100 grams of rice per day. The rest of our diet was filled by sweet potatoes, tapioca, and other local production. But since tapioca takes much longer to grow than sweet potatoes, which the Japanese harvested in three months’ time, we encouraged the production of sweet potatoes.