by Bruce Gamble
For almost every individual, the trek to Wide Bay had been a nightmare. Hungry and dejected, they had climbed countless ridges, forded raging rivers, and pushed through suffocating jungle, only to wait in vain once they reached Tol plantation. Soon malaria set in, and by the time the men realized that the flying boats weren’t coming back, many lost the will to continue evading the Japanese. The notion of surrender no longer seemed so terrible. Depressed and lethargic, the Australians were content to pass the days sleeping or scrounging for food.
The other large group of evaders had gathered at Adler Bay within an abandoned plantation. Although they were significantly better off in terms of food, with ample livestock and rice, they were advised by a medical officer to surrender. It was probably Captain Robertson who bluntly explained that to continue evading would result in “almost certain death from starvation or malaria.” He subsequently moved south to Tol plantation, and the men at Adler Bay placed a white flag at the water’s edge where it could be seen from the sea.
Angry and frustrated with the Australians, General Horii was more than ready to take both groups prisoner. On February 2 he ordered Lt. Col. Masao Kuwada, commander of the 3rd Battalion at Kokopo, to organize a “pursuit by boats” to Wide Bay. The task was delegated to Lt. Tadaichi Noda, who selected approximately 150 soldiers from the 8th Infantry Company for the operation. He also brought an interpreter assigned to the Kempeitai, the military police and counterespionage branch of the Imperial Army.
Noda and his men boarded five Daihatsu landing craft, which were towed by a coast-wise vessel to Wide Bay. Arriving just after dawn on February 3, the landing craft dropped their tow lines and approached the plantation under their own power. As they neared the beach, the Japanese opened fire with light machine guns and even a small howitzer, mostly shooting into the palm trees. Jolted awake by the sudden attack, the Aussies had virtually no time to run. Most were too tired to care, and only a handful escaped from the large plantation.
As soon as the firing stopped, Captain Robertson stepped forward with twenty-one men under a white flag. Within a few hours the Japanese rounded up all the rest—more than 180 men in all—and fed them a hot meal, the first decent food they’d had in days. Afterward, the prisoners lounged quietly under guard. Their initial treatment seemed to reinforce the idea that they were going to be better off in Japanese hands.
But the next morning, Lieutenant Noda was agitated. Only three commissioned officers had been identified among the captives, the most senior being Robertson. The others were Capt. John R. Gray, Royal Australian Engineers, and Lt. Hatsell G. Garrard, a young infantry officer. Colonel Scanlan and the senior officers of Lark Force were still at large.
Increasingly belligerent, Noda ordered the prisoners out of the building and lined them up. Garrard was singled out and led to the Tol plantation house, where Noda, assisted by the Kempeitai interpreter, began a brutal interrogation. There is no doubt that Noda demanded to know Scanlan’s whereabouts, but if Garrard knew, he thwarted every question. Furious, Noda beat him on the head and body with a stout piece of wood. Garrard was periodically revived with water, but the punishment continued until he collapsed. The Japanese then tied him to a tree and left him to bake in the scorching sun.
The remaining prisoners were also marched to the plantation house, whereupon Noda attempted to identify the men who had surrendered on the beach the previous morning. At first, about forty claimed to have been part of the group. This caused some confusion among the Japanese, but eventually twenty men, Robertson and Gray among them, were separated from the main group of prisoners. Approximately 160 captives remained in the yard outside the plantation house. The Japanese confiscated all personal items, including identity disks, and then tied the captives’ hands behind their backs, binding their thumbs tightly with twine or wire.
Setting up a two-way radio, Noda contacted battalion headquarters for further instructions. An exchange of messages ensued, ending with authorization—either from Colonel Kuwada or Horii himself—to proceed with the next step.
The prisoners were separated into groups of about twelve and roped together in single file. All of the groups, each escorted by an officer or noncom and several soldiers, were then marched away from the main house in different directions, taking roads and footpaths that led into the sprawling coconut groves. As they walked through sun-drenched rows of palm trees, the captives realized that they were going to be killed. Helpless to prevent it, the Aussies relied on the one trait that bound them together like no other army in the world: their mateship. Although fear and anguish tore at them, they refused to allow their emotions to show. Some, true to their heritage, even managed a quip or two. Each man tried to accept his fate with aplomb, if only to help steady the man next to him.
The Japanese were the cowards. Across the vast plantation, groups of roped-together prisoners were ordered to sit. A man was then pulled from each of the lines and led into a nearby thicket, where soldiers stabbed him in the back with their fifteen-inch-long bayonets. Taking their time, the executioners walked back to the waiting groups of prisoners, making a show of wiping the blood from their bayonets before summoning the next man in line.
The killing went slowly. For the captives at the end of each line, the dread of those prolonged minutes must have been intolerable.
After a while the Japanese grew impatient and began killing prisoners in twos and threes. Some were shot. At nearby Waitavalo plantation, one group of eleven men was gunned down in a single volley. Whether by bullet or bayonet, the Australians were murdered from behind.
But the killers proved to be as careless as they were craven. When Noda and his soldiers departed, they left at least nine Aussies alive among the piles of bodies. Several managed to stumble away, and one survivor helped two severely wounded men into the shelter of a utility shed. He then went to find help, but before he could return, a Japanese naval landing party found the two victims and torched the shed with them inside it.
Incredibly, six victims of the massacre recovered, including a medical orderly who was stabbed eleven times. Their survival guaranteed that the horrible atrocities at Tol would be exposed in full.
The Japanese had made no attempt to bury the 150 or so corpses scattered throughout the coconut groves. The only exception was Lieutenant Garrard, who was forced to dig his own grave. Soldiers bludgeoned and then bayoneted him before shoving his body in the shallow hole, leaving it only partially covered with dirt.
Sanctioned by Colonel Kuwada, tacitly if not verbally authorized by General Horii, the murders at Tol conveyed an unforgettable message. To emphasize the point, the Japanese left a personal note for Colonel Scanlan on the door of a plantation house stating that he was responsible for what had happened.
Scanlan himself had narrowly avoided being captured at Tol. When the message and the shocking truth of the massacre were revealed to him, he could stomach no more attempts at evasion. At a Roman Catholic mission a few miles beyond Wide Bay, he made up his mind to surrender. On February 10, accompanied by his batman, two other soldiers, and a major from the 2/22nd Battalion, he began the long walk back to Rabaul.
LIEUTENANT NODA and his men returned to Kokopo with Robertson, Gray, and the small party that had initially surrendered at Tol. Along the way, the Japanese also picked up the dozens of Australians waiting at Adler Bay. Most of the prisoners were delivered to a stockade at their own former army post on Malaguna Road, but Robertson and Gray were held at Kokopo. Robertson returned to the native hospital, where the nurses, upset over being abandoned on the eve of the invasion, gave him a cold reception.
Gray was destined for much worse. The Kempeitai, more determined than ever to capture Scanlan, set up a cordon of outposts across the lower Gazelle Peninsula to guard the main trails. Almost daily, exhausted Aussies walked out of the jungle and turned themselves in, but Scanlan remained at large for two weeks after the massacre at Tol. The Kempeitai were not stupid. By this time they realized that Gray, having earlier ac
companied Scanlan across the Baining Mountains, probably knew more about the colonel’s intentions than anyone on the island. Thus, they subjected the thirty-four-year-old engineer to their unique brand of interrogation.
On the morning of February 20, Gray was led to a palm tree about fifty yards from the bishop’s residence at Vunapope. He was lashed to the tree and tortured for several hours. At one point a soldier scooped up a nest of red ants and threw them on Gray, who squirmed and twisted against the ropes as the insects bit him. The day-long interrogation was witnessed at various times by four local islanders—two villagers and two native catechists—who later provided testimony about Gray’s torture.
Finally untied from the tree, Gray fell to the ground but got back on his feet in a silent show of defiance. The Japanese then led him to a remote spot where a medical doctor named Chikumi, attached to the 144th Infantry Regiment, administered “injections” and cut open Gray’s chest. The captain was still alive when his heart was removed so that Chikumi could observe the results. Circumstantial evidence suggests that someone administered the coup de grace with a bullet. Chaplain May, on duty at the native hospital, heard the shot.
Gray died protecting the secret of Scanlan’s whereabouts. But the very next day, the colonel and his party walked up to a Kempeitai outpost near the Warangoi River and surrendered.
CHAPTER 6
Counterattack
A LTHOUGH VIRTUALLY NO ONE in Australia knew what had happened on New Britain, the evidence was overwhelming that a Japanese force now controlled the island. Rabaul had changed hands. Overnight, it had become the most important target in the Southwest Pacific. In fact, within hours of the invasion the RAAF began planning its first counterattack.
The only Australian base within range of Rabaul was Port Moresby, located on the Gulf of Papua in what was formerly British New Guinea. The colonial township boasted two airdromes—Seven Mile, named for its distance by road from the center of town, and Kila Kila, a small airstrip near the coast southeast of town—plus an excellent harbor with an RAAF seaplane facility.
The latter was especially important. Rabaul lay five hundred miles northeast of Port Moresby, and only one type of plane in the RAAF inventory was capable of delivering a load of bombs that far: the American-built Consolidated PBY Catalina. Powered by a pair of Pratt & Whitney radial engines, the ungainly flying boat could carry up to four thousand pounds of bombs on external wing racks and stay airborne for more than twenty hours. But the Cat-boat was also plodding and awkward. With a full combat load of fuel, bombs, machine gun ammunition, and eight crewmen aboard, the Catalina tipped the scales at more than seventeen tons, cruised at less than one hundred miles per hour, and had a maximum ceiling of only eighteen thousand feet.
The distance to Rabaul was not the greatest obstacle. That distinction belongs to a unique combination of the complex tropical weather systems and mountainous islands that define the Southwest Pacific. Few places on the planet are as challenging to human existence as New Guinea, the world’s second largest island. The Australian territory, primarily the Papuan Peninsula, is dominated by a range of jumbled, precipitous mountains that form the peninsula’s elongated spine.
Words can scarcely do justice to the Owen Stanley Mountains, which soar dramatically to more than thirteen thousand feet within a few dozen miles of Port Moresby. The lower slopes are heavily forested, with huge exotic hardwoods protruding from a jungle canopy so dense that daylight barely penetrates to the ground. The upper slopes are often invisible, shrouded by clouds of mist or drenching squalls that ride the updrafts and downdrafts like ghostly apparitions.
Beyond the mountains, aviators flying to Rabaul faced a long journey over the Solomon Sea, where the weather was frequently treacherous. The warm waters, seasonal wind patterns, and a host of other meteorological factors influenced a system known as an intertropical convergence zone (also called an intertropical front), a semipermanent disturbance capable of producing ultra-severe thunderstorms. The thunderheads frequently topped out at forty thousand feet or higher—well above the altitude limitations of most World War II aircraft—and planes that tried to penetrate the front could expect to encounter extremely violent turbulence and frequent lightning.
Because of the weather, the first attempt to hit Rabaul on the night of January 23 was unsuccessful. The next effort began the following afternoon when Thomas McBride Price, a twenty-seven-year-old squadron leader from Adelaide, South Australia, briefed five Catalina crews at the RAAF’s forward area headquarters in Port Moresby. After receiving their assignments, the airmen were transported down to the waterfront, where they boarded “an ugly old bomb scow” that took them out to the Catalinas moored in the harbor.
Soon, puffs of whitish smoke drifted across the water as ten radial engines were started. Presently the seaplanes moved from their moorings and taxied sluggishly to the downwind end of the harbor, their broad hulls riding low in the water. One by one they turned into the wind and went to full throttle, their engines screaming at maximum power. It took several nerve-wracking minutes for the overloaded planes to gradually build up enough speed to break contact with the water. Once airborne, the Catalinas climbed slowly and banked to the southeast. Far too heavy to climb above the Owen Stanley Mountains, they were forced to take a lengthy detour around the Papuan Peninsula before turning northward toward Rabaul.
As daylight faded, the crews ate a meal prepared in the in-flight galley. Later that evening, the Catalinas reached the intertropical convergence zone parked over the Solomon Sea. Flying at an altitude of only a few thousand feet, barely making ninety miles per hour because of their heavy bomb load, the seaplanes plowed through the fattest, most turbulent portion of the front. Inside the storm, the aircraft bucked violently. “It was an amazing thing,” recalled one pilot. “I just couldn’t believe how the Catalina held together under the stresses of the sudden drops and lifts. You virtually lost control of the airplane. It was very rough indeed.”
In addition to wrestling their planes through the turbulence, the pilots were periodically blinded by brilliant flashes of lightning. Often they were forced to turn the controls over to the copilot until their vision improved.
When the planes finally burst from the storm into clear skies, the contrast was almost startling: stars shimmered overhead, and the air felt as smooth as velvet. With the target still several hours away, some of the crewmen climbed into bunks to “snatch a nap like children in kindergarten.” They were lulled to sleep in minutes as the Catalinas droned slowly through the night.
When the seaplanes at last approached the northern tip of New Britain, the crews found Simpson Harbor obscured. A layer of scattered clouds was not unusual, but on this January night the volcano Tavurvur was active, spewing a thick cloud of vapor over the anchorage. As the Catalinas descended to six thousand feet, the “bomb-aimers” moved forward to the optical sights mounted in each bow. Down below, searchlight beams crisscrossed the night sky. Several antiaircraft batteries manned by the Maizaru 2nd Special Naval Landing Force, who specialized in the rapid deployment of “high-angle” 80mm guns, opened fire on the intruders. Ships in the harbor joined in, firing blindly through the clouds.
Private 1st Class Akiyoshi Hisaeda, a member of the 55th Division field hospital, was aboard the troop transport Venice Maru when the Catalinas attacked. “Battle exchanged for about one hour between several enemy machines and our navy and army,” he noted that night in his diary. “Our forces sustained at least one casualty.”
Whatever damage Hisaeda referred to was evidently the result of sheer luck. The Australian bombardiers, unable to locate targets in the night, simply aimed their bombs at the antiaircraft fire coming up from below. Frustrated by the poor visibility, the Catalina crews reported only “probable hits” when they returned to Port Moresby.
Due to all the blind shooting, the Japanese caused more harm to themselves than did the attackers. Friendly fire from shipboard antiaircraft guns swept across the plateau south of
Simpson Harbor, hitting elements of the South Seas Force. The 55th Transportation Company’s bivouac area suffered damage and casualties, according to Lt. Col. Toshiharu Sakigawa, who described his men as “quite disturbed” by the incident.
Two nights later the Catalinas were back over Simpson Harbor, but this time only three aircraft participated in the raid. The third flying boat, piloted by Flt. Lt. Terence L. Duigan, arrived over the target approximately an hour behind the first two. He observed one ship “blazing fiercely” near the northwestern shore of Simpson Harbor and another burning in the middle of the anchorage. When the crews returned to Port Moresby, one reported a possible hit on an “aircraft carrier,” but in reality the Catalinas had caused only minor damage.
Although neither of the first two attacks had caused much damage, the Australians believed they had done some harm to the Japanese. More importantly, all planes had returned safely, and the flyboys were hailed as heroes. “RAAF Shocks Japs,” proclaimed the Sydney Sun, which added in bold type: “In the two raids on Rabaul, it is now believed that four Jap troopships have been rendered useless and others damaged.”
The accompanying story consisted mostly of propaganda, but it served as a tonic for a nation already tired of gloomy war news. The resounding media coverage also spurred the RAAF, which continued to attack Rabaul every second night. The next raid was conducted by four Catalinas on the night of January 28, but due to poor visibility the results were unobserved. Two nights later, Squadron Leader Price led five Catalinas back to Simpson Harbor and claimed one hit on a ship. The Australians reported intense antiaircraft fire after the mission, an indication that heavy batteries manned by the South Seas Force were now in place.