Air raids on Java and Port Moresby

At around 3 a.m. on 3 February 1942 six Japanese flying boats appeared over Port Moresby, capital of the Australian Territory of Papua on the south coast of New Guinea. For half an hour they dropped bombs on Seven Mile airfield and the outskirts of the town. The damage was slight, but it was the first raid on Port Moresby and the first of more than a hundred that would fall on the town over the next eighteen months. Later that morning, more than 3,000 kilometres to the west, Japanese navy bombers and fighters appeared for the first time over eastern Java. They struck the naval base at Surabaya and the airfields near Malang and Madiun, from which Dutch and American aircraft were operating. That day the air war reached the heart of the Dutch East Indies and the threshold of Australia.

Airfields on Borneo and Celebes

The Japanese offensive to the south advanced from airfield to airfield. Every island captured was above all a new base for the air forces preparing the next leap. Three weeks had passed since the landings at Tarakan and near Manado on 11 January. On 24 January the Japanese landed near Balikpapan on Borneo and at Kendari in south-eastern Celebes. The airfield at Kendari, one of the best in the whole archipelago, fell into their hands almost undamaged. Within a few days Mitsubishi G3M and Mitsubishi G4M bombers of Vice Admiral Nishizō Tsukahara’s 11th Air Fleet had moved there, while Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighters of the 3rd Air Group (3rd Kōkūtai) and the Tainan Air Group occupied Kendari and Balikpapan in turn. Eastern Java was now within their range.

The plan for the conquest of Java provided that, before the 16th Army went ashore, naval and army aviation would destroy the Allied air forces on the island and the fleet would sweep the ships of the ABDA command from the surrounding seas. The air campaign over Java was thus the first stage of the invasion. On that same 3 February the defenders of Ambon, Dutch soldiers and the Australian Gull Force, surrendered. Another link had fallen from the “Malay Barrier” between Singapore and Australia that the ABDA command was meant to defend.

The forces meant to defend Java

General Archibald Wavell, Supreme Commander ABDA, had had his headquarters since mid-January at Lembang near Bandung. His air forces, commanded by the British Air Marshal Richard Peirse, were made up of units from four countries. The largest was the air arm of the Dutch colonial army, the KNIL: Curtiss Hawk 75, Curtiss-Wright CW-21 and Brewster Buffalo fighters and obsolete Martin B-10 bombers, which had been bled white in January in attacks on Japanese convoys off Tarakan and Balikpapan. Dutch naval aviation had a base for Dornier Do 24 and Catalina flying boats at Morokrembangan near Surabaya, from which it flew long-range reconnaissance. The American air force on Java, commanded by Major General Lewis Brereton, consisted of the remnants of the forces driven out of the Philippines and of reinforcements brought in via Australia: B-17 heavy bombers of the 19th and 7th Bombardment Groups, stationed mainly at Singosari airfield near Malang, and the first P-40 fighters, which were only just reaching the island. British and Australian squadrons were still fighting over Singapore and Sumatra.

The forces were few, the equipment came from different countries, and in practice there was no common communications or warning network. In eastern Java a few observation posts telephoned reports of aircraft approaching from the Java Sea, but often only ten or fifteen minutes passed between the report and the raid. The Japanese had long had good reconnaissance: on 1 and 2 February their scout planes circled over Surabaya.

Surabaya, Malang and Madiun

Late on the morning of 3 February several formations of Japanese bombers, escorted by Zero fighters, struck several targets in eastern Java simultaneously. According to Japanese and Western studies the raid comprised anything from several dozen to more than seventy bombers and several dozen fighters; some aircraft were also assigned targets on Bali. The main target was Surabaya: the principal base of the Dutch fleet in the east of the archipelago, with a naval harbour, a dockyard, Perak airfield and the seaplane base at Morokrembangan.

The Dutch fighters were scrambled in time, and fierce combat developed over the city. It proved very costly for the defenders. The Zero pilots, mostly veterans of the fighting in China and over the Philippines, had the advantage in numbers, experience and height. According to some studies the Dutch lost five Hawks and four CW-21s in the air that day, and many of the surviving machines came back damaged, with wounded pilots. At Morokrembangan bombs and strafing destroyed, according to Dutch tallies, twelve naval aircraft: three Dornier Do 24s, two Catalinas, three older Dornier Wal flying boats, two Fokker T.IV seaplanes and two trainers. West of Surabaya two Zeros shot down an American Douglas B-18 bomber carrying Major Austin Straubel, commander of the 7th Bombardment Group. Straubel died of his injuries; the airport at Green Bay, Wisconsin, bears his name today.

Near Malang Japanese fighters strafed Singosari airfield at low level, and the bombers followed. According to the diary of the American 19th Bombardment Group, two or three Flying Fortresses burned on the ground, one of them loaded with bombs, and another B-17 was shot down with its crew some ten or fifteen kilometres south of Malang. Maospati airfield near Madiun, a Dutch bomber base, was also attacked. According to various tallies the Allies lost several dozen aircraft in all that day, in the air and on the ground; the Japanese reports were even more optimistic, with the 3rd Air Group alone claiming 39 kills. Japanese losses were small.

Two days later, on 5 February, the Japanese struck Surabaya and Morokrembangan again, this time with an escort of more than thirty Zeros, and destroyed more Dutch naval aircraft. From then on the raids came almost daily. On 4 February bombers from Kendari spotted the squadron of the Dutch Rear Admiral Karel Doorman in the Flores Sea and badly damaged the cruisers Houston and Marblehead: the ABDA fleet could no longer operate safely in waters over which its own air forces had no control.

The first bombs on Port Moresby

The raid on Port Moresby was modest compared with the strike on Java, but for Australians it carried a particular significance. Only eleven days earlier the Japanese had taken Rabaul on New Britain, some 800 kilometres north-east of Port Moresby, and had immediately begun preparing an air and naval base there. The first aircraft able to reach Papua from it were four-engined Kawanishi H6K flying boats, very long-range reconnaissance machines capable of carrying several hundred kilograms of bombs. On 3 February, between 3 and 3.30 a.m., six of them bombed Seven Mile airfield and the outskirts of the town. On 5 February, again at night, seven came, and their bombs hit an explosives store. By the end of the month G4M bombers with fighter escort were appearing over Port Moresby: on 24 February they destroyed a Hudson reconnaissance aircraft on the airfield, and on 28 February they sank two Australian Catalinas in the harbour.

Port Moresby was then a small colonial town with a harbour, two airfields and a garrison that was only beginning to take shape. The 49th Battalion of the Australian militia had been stationed there since March 1941, and on 3 January 1942 the liner Aquitania brought the headquarters of the newly formed 30th Brigade with the 39th and 53rd Battalions and artillery. They were mostly young, poorly trained conscripts. The militia could not be sent overseas, but Papua and the mandated Territory of New Guinea, as territories under Australian administration, fell outside that ban, and so it was the militiamen who were to defend Port Moresby. European women and children had been evacuated from Papua back in December. There was not a single Allied fighter over the town. The only defence consisted of anti-aircraft guns and machine guns. The first fighters, Kittyhawks of No. 75 Squadron of the Royal Australian Air Force, did not arrive until the second half of March.

Australia senses the threat

The bombs on Port Moresby fell on a territory for which Australia was responsible, and at a moment when its government was living with a sense of mounting danger. The best Australian divisions were fighting in the Middle East and North Africa, the 8th Division was defending Singapore, and the British fleet, on which the defence of the continent had rested for two decades, had not a single capital ship left in the Far East after the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse. British and Australian troops had already withdrawn to Singapore Island, and every week brought the Japanese closer to Australia.

The Prime Minister, John Curtin, the Labor leader who had taken office in October 1941, drew his conclusions back in December. On 27 December 1941, in a New Year article in the Melbourne Herald, he wrote: “Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.” He knew that Britain could survive without Australia, but he had no intention of letting Australia go under. In London, not least with Winston Churchill, the article caused outrage. The course had nonetheless been set. At the Arcadia Conference the Australians, absent from the table, pressed for a voice in the direction of the war in the Pacific. At the end of January the ANZAC Area was created, a naval zone covering the waters around eastern Australia, New Zealand and New Guinea, under an American admiral.

In February General Iven Mackay, commanding the home defence forces, presented the government with an appreciation in which, given the scarcity of forces, he proposed concentrating the defence on the most important part of the continent, between Brisbane and Melbourne. The first raids on Port Moresby and Java showed how real that threat was: Japanese air power already stood on New Britain and Celebes, and with every new airfield its reach moved closer to the Australian coast.

Place in the war

The raids of 3 February opened the Japanese air campaign that within four weeks shattered ABDA’s air forces. Throughout February the Japanese bombed the airfields and ports of Java almost daily, and the losses suffered on the ground and in the air outstripped the replacements sent from Australia a few aircraft at a time. On 19 February aircraft from the carriers of Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo and bombers from Kendari attacked Darwin, through which reinforcements for Java were passing, and on 27 February bombers sank the aircraft transport Langley, which was carrying P-40 fighters to the island. By the time the decisive battle was fought in the Java Sea on 27 February, and Japanese divisions landed on Java on the night of 28 February – 1 March, Allied air power on the island had practically ceased to exist. The Dutch East Indies campaign ended with the surrender of 8–9 March.

Port Moresby held out. After the capture of Lae and Salamaua on 8 March, Japanese fighters could dominate the skies over Papua, and raids became an everyday occurrence. The town became the objective of a major operation that was halted in May by the Battle of the Coral Sea, and in the summer infantry advanced on it across the Owen Stanley Range, to be stopped in the Kokoda Track campaign a few dozen kilometres from the town. The air war over Port Moresby, begun that night by six flying boats, lasted until August 1943. After the fall of Singapore Curtin announced on the radio that the battle for Australia had begun; the term, now questioned by some historians, became fixed in Australia’s memory of the war. In March Douglas MacArthur arrived in Australia, and in April he took command of the Allied forces in the South West Pacific. Port Moresby, bombed for the first time on 3 February 1942, became the main forward base of his forces in the struggle for New Guinea.