The Battle of Milne Bay

Late on the evening of 25 August 1942, in rain and darkness, more than a thousand Japanese naval infantry with two light tanks came ashore on the northern shore of Milne Bay, at the very eastern tip of New Guinea. Their task was to capture the airfields the Allies had built there over the previous two months. At dawn on 26 August they struck the first Australian positions near KB Mission. So began the battle that the Japanese called Operation RE or the Battle of Rabi, and which ended twelve days later in their complete withdrawal. It was the first time in this war that a Japanese land operation had been so thoroughly defeated that its participants had to be evacuated and the objective abandoned.

On 26 August, however, no one foresaw such an outcome. The Australians did not know how many Japanese had landed or how many more were coming, and the Japanese did not know how many defenders were waiting for them. It all unfolded in a week in which both sides, in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, were sending reinforcements to several fronts at once.

Reinforcements for both sides (18 August)

War chronologies record under 18 August that Japanese and Australian reinforcements arrived in New Guinea. This is shorthand for several parallel movements spread over roughly a week. After the landings at Buna and Gona in July and the capture of Kokoda, Major General Tomitarō Horii was concentrating the main body of the South Seas Detachment on the north coast of Papua. On 18 August the bulk of the 144th Infantry Regiment came ashore near Basabua, and further convoys brought the 41st Regiment on 21 and 27 August. With these forces Horii was to cross the Owen Stanley Range and take Port Moresby from the landward side.

In the same days the Australians were reinforcing Papua with men of the Second Australian Imperial Force – the volunteer army raised for service overseas – who had experience from the Middle East. Brigadier Arnold Potts’s 21st Brigade, veterans of the Syrian campaign, arrived at Port Moresby; in mid-August its 2/14th and 2/16th Battalions set off along the Kokoda Track to relieve the exhausted militia at Isurava. At the same time – from 12 to 21 August – units of Brigadier George Wootten’s 18th Brigade were arriving at Milne Bay; its battalions (the 2/9th, 2/10th and 2/12th) had earlier fought in besieged Tobruk. This last movement proved decisive for the battle that was to break out a week later.

Fall River base

After the Battle of the Coral Sea, General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of Allied forces in the South West Pacific Area, decided to ring Port Moresby with forward airfields. A base at the eastern tip of the island had two advantages: aircraft flying from there towards Rabaul did not have to cross the mountains, with their banks of cloud and turbulence, and any Japanese convoy heading for Port Moresby from the east would have to pass it within bomber range. The first site chosen, on Mullins Harbour, proved unsuitable, so on 11 June MacArthur’s headquarters replaced it with Milne Bay – a sheltered, deep inlet some 35 km long, surrounded by mountains and swamps, with a narrow strip of flat coconut plantations at its head. The base was given the code name “Fall River”; the name proved unfortunate, as some supplies were sent by mistake to the real Fall River in Massachusetts.

From June, Papuan labourers and American engineers cleared palms and laid steel matting on the waterlogged ground. The first airfield (No. 1 Strip, at Gili Gili) received Curtiss P-40 Kittyhawk fighters of Nos. 75 and 76 Squadrons of the Royal Australian Air Force at the end of July; the third (No. 3 Strip, near Kilarbo) was still under construction in August. Landing aircraft threw up the water standing on the strip and often bogged down in the mud. The bay was garrisoned by Brigadier John Field’s militia 7th Brigade (the 9th, 25th and 61st Battalions from Queensland), and on 22 August command of the whole – the so-called Milne Force – was formally assumed by Major General Cyril Clowes, a veteran of Gallipoli. He then had under his command some 7,500 Australians and nearly 1,400 Americans (mainly engineers and anti-aircraft gunners), of whom about 4,500 were infantry. He placed the inexperienced 7th Brigade on the defensive and kept Wootten’s veterans in reserve for a counter-attack.

The Japanese plan and the Allied warning

Japanese aircraft discovered the new airfields on 4 August and bombed them from that day on. As early as the end of July the commander of the 17th Army, Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake, had asked Vice Admiral Gun’ichi Mikawa, commander of the 8th Fleet at Rabaul, to seize the base. The army did not want to risk its own barges under Allied air power, so the task fell to the navy and its landing forces. Japanese intelligence assumed that the airfields were defended by two, at most three companies – 300 to 600 men. Only about 1,250 troops were therefore assigned to the first echelon: 612 men of the Kure 5th Special Naval Landing Force under Commander Shōjirō Hayashi and 197 of the Sasebo 5th were to land from the east, while some 350 others, carried by barge from the Buna side, were to cross the mountains and attack the defenders from the rear. The landing was covered by Rear Admiral Mitsuharu Matsuyama’s 18th Cruiser Division with the light cruisers Tenryū and Tatsuta.

The Allies knew more about these plans than the Japanese knew about the Allies. Cryptanalysts reading Japanese naval communications had warned MacArthur as early as July that an attack on Milne Bay should be expected at the end of August, and his intelligence chief, Brigadier General Charles Willoughby, read the August air reconnaissance as a sign of an impending landing. Hence the hurried transfer of the 18th Brigade. The Allied air commander, Major General George Kenney, stepped up patrols and on 24–25 August had the airfields at Buna bombed; according to Australian studies, only six Japanese fighters were left there afterwards to cover the landing.

The landing

On the morning of 24 August an Australian Hudson and coastwatchers reported a convoy approaching from the direction of the Trobriand Islands. That same day Kittyhawks found the seven barges carrying the second group drawn up on the shore of Goodenough Island, where the troops had stopped to rest. In two hours of strafing the airmen destroyed all the barges. Some 350 Japanese were stranded on the island for two months, and the outflanking move through the mountains collapsed before it had begun.

The main convoy, attacked by fighters on 25 August to little effect, entered the bay after dark. At about 10.30 p.m. more than a thousand men with two Type 95 Ha-Go light tanks came ashore near the village of Waga Waga – owing to a navigational error some 3 km east of the intended spot, and thus further from the airfields. Immediately afterwards two of the three boats in which D Company of the 61st Battalion was withdrawing from a forward outpost ran into Japanese barges. One reached the shore and its occupants made their way through the jungle to their own lines; the other was shot to pieces, and eleven Australians were killed in the fighting or murdered after being taken prisoner.

War chronologies usually place the start of the battle on 26 August. Strictly speaking, the landing took place late on the evening of 25 August and the first land fighting during the night and at dawn on 26 August; both dates are used in the literature.

The advance on the airfields (26–28 August)

At dawn on 26 August the Japanese, advancing along the only coastal road with their tanks in the lead, reached the position of B Company of the 61st Battalion near KB Mission. The militiamen, who had no anti-tank weapons, beat off the first attack. That same morning Australian Kittyhawks and a Hudson, together with American B-17, B-25 and B-26 bombers, attacked the Japanese beachhead base: they burnt supplies and most of the barges with which the attackers could have outflanked the Australians from the sea. Japanese fighters from Buna were shot down shortly after take-off, and aircraft from Rabaul were turned back by the weather – from then on the landing force fought without air cover. In the afternoon the 61st Battalion, reinforced by two platoons of the 25th Battalion, counter-attacked, but in the evening, after it had been shelled by Japanese warships from the sea and then attacked by infantry during the night, it fell back behind the Gama River.

On 27 August Clowes sent the 2/10th Battalion – some 420 men – eastwards with a task that Australian historians describe as unclear: partly a reconnaissance in force, partly a blocking position near KB Mission. In the evening the battalion took up positions on a plantation, and at 8 p.m. both Japanese tanks drove onto it with their headlights on. Sticky bombs would not adhere to the damp armour. For two and a half hours the Australians, supported by the guns of the 2/5th Field Regiment, beat off four attacks, but around midnight the Japanese broke into their positions and the battalion withdrew in disorder, losing 43 killed and 26 wounded. That same day the commander of No. 76 Squadron, Squadron Leader Peter Turnbull, a fighter ace of the fighting in North Africa and Syria, was killed when he crashed while flying low in search of the Japanese tanks; command passed to Keith Truscott.

At dawn on 28 August the Japanese reached the unfinished No. 3 Strip. It proved an excellent defensive position: the wide, open strip gave the defenders a field of fire, and the mud at its end immobilised both tanks, which their crews abandoned (the Australians found them only on 29 August). Fire from the 25th and 61st Battalions and the American 709th Anti-Aircraft Battery, together with repeated attacks by the Kittyhawks, drove the attackers back two kilometres. The American engineers and anti-aircraft gunners thus became the first American soldiers to fight on land in New Guinea.

The decision (29 August – 7 September)

Mikawa decided to reinforce the landing force. On the night of 29 August warships landed some 770 more men (from the Kure 3rd and Yokosuka 5th Special Naval Landing Forces) at Waga Waga, with Commander Minoru Yano. Clowes, forewarned of the convoy and expecting a landing in his rear, called off a planned counter-attack by the 18th Brigade, and the Kittyhawks flew to Port Moresby for the night. This cautious delay later became the basis of criticism levelled against him.

At 3 a.m. on 31 August the Japanese attacked No. 3 Strip across open ground lit by Australian flares. Three successive banzai charges broke down under the machine-gun and mortar fire of the 25th and 61st Battalions and the American engineers, and under Australian artillery fire. Hayashi was killed; Yano took command, but an attempt to outflank the positions on Stephen’s Ridge also failed, and before dawn the remnants of the attackers withdrew eastwards.

That same morning the 2/12th Battalion went over to the counter-attack. It advanced slowly through the mud, harassed by snipers and ambushes; the Australians described Japanese soldiers feigning death in order to attack those approaching at close quarters, and from then on they systematically finished off bodies lying on the ground. In the evening they retook KB Mission with the bayonet, and during the night, on the Gama River, they shattered some three hundred Japanese trying to break through to the east. From 1 September the Japanese command was no longer thinking of the airfields but of evacuation. On 2 September Yano signalled 8th Fleet headquarters: “We have found ourselves in the worst possible situation. We will calmly defend our position to the death.” From 3 September the advance was led by the 2/9th Battalion, which lost men in the stream bends in fights for every ford. On 4 September, near Goroni, Corporal John French single-handedly destroyed two machine-gun posts with grenades and was killed at a third, which he managed to silence; he was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. That evening, according to later findings, only about fifty fully fit soldiers remained on the Japanese side.

A plan to send the army’s Aoba Detachment to Rabi fell through, as it could not arrive before 11 September. On 5 September the Japanese command ordered a withdrawal, and Matsuyama’s ships took the survivors off the beach; Australian studies state that the evacuation went on, with interruptions, from 4 to 7 September. On the night of 6–7 September Japanese warships sank the freighter Anshun while she was unloading in the bay, and on 7 September the battle came to an end. Australian patrols were still rounding up stragglers trying to reach Buna overland.

Crimes

The advancing Australians came across evidence of Japanese crimes. According to testimony later collected for Justice William Webb’s report, none of the 36 Australians taken prisoner at Milne Bay survived; some had been murdered, and some of the bodies bore signs of mutilation. At least 59 civilians, most of them Papuans, were also murdered, among them women raped before they died. In 1944 these materials were passed to the United Nations War Crimes Commission, and in 1947 they were presented to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, but no one was ever tried for Milne Bay. According to the historian Mark Johnston, these crimes hardened the attitude of Australian soldiers for a long time: the ruthlessness with which they killed Japanese from then on stemmed largely from a desire for revenge for the atrocities and for the rumoured fate of prisoners.

Losses

The figures vary from source to source. According to tallies based on Australian and Japanese documents, a total of about 1,940 Japanese troops landed at Milne Bay, of whom the ships evacuated 1,318, including 311 wounded; the Australians estimated the Japanese dead at 700–750, while a Japanese source gives 625. The Australian War Memorial writes of some 2,800 Japanese, of whom about 1,300 got away. The Australians lost 373 men, including 167 killed and missing (Australian War Memorial: 161), and the Americans 14 killed. For the men of Milne Force, malaria proved more dangerous than the Japanese: after the battle more than one in six of them fell ill, Clowes himself among them, and the epidemic was brought under control only at the turn of 1942 and 1943, when quinine was replaced by Atebrin.

Significance

Milne Bay was the first battle of this war in which a Japanese land operation ended in complete failure: the landing force did not take its objective, suffered heavy losses and had to be evacuated. The qualification is necessary because the Japanese had already suffered local defeats – in the First Battle of Changsha in China, in the first attempted landing on Wake, or a few days earlier on the Tenaru on Guadalcanal – but these had not ended in the abandonment of an entire operation. The Australian press called the victory a “tonic surprise”, and the soldiers on the Kokoda Track, where the Japanese attacked Isurava on that very day, 26 August, and the British in Burma learnt that the Japanese could be beaten. Lieutenant General Sydney Rowell, commander of New Guinea Force, judged the actions of Nos. 75 and 76 Squadrons RAAF on the first day to be “probably the deciding factor”; Clowes shared that view.

MacArthur was more restrained. He reported to Washington that the success had been owed to good intelligence, which had made it possible to concentrate superior forces, and that it might not be repeated. Throughout the battle he and General Thomas Blamey bombarded Clowes with demands for haste, and on 1 September Blamey wrote that through his slowness Clowes might have lost the chance to destroy the enemy completely. Australian historians consider these charges unjust, since headquarters in Brisbane did not know the conditions in the bay and showered Clowes with false warnings of fresh landings. Clowes never again received an important combat command, and in 1943 he returned to Australia to a post on the rear lines of communication.

The defeat at Milne Bay deprived the Japanese of the chance to outflank the Australian defence on the Kokoda Track from the sea. Since at the same time the 17th Army had to commit ever more forces to Guadalcanal, in September Horii, who had already come within a few tens of kilometres of Port Moresby, was ordered to withdraw. The Japanese stranded on Goodenough Island were evacuated only in October, after a fight with the Australian 2/12th Battalion. Milne Bay itself became a large Allied base, with a new wharf able to take Liberty ships straight from the United States, from which forces set out for Buna in November 1942 and for Lae and New Britain in 1943. In September No. 1 Strip was named Gurney Field, while No. 3 Strip, where the Japanese advance had reached its westernmost point, was named in Turnbull’s memory.