The capture of Wewak

On the morning of 11 May 1945 three Australian warships – the sloop HMAS Swan and the corvettes HMAS Dubbo and HMAS Colac – hove to a few kilometres off the shore of Dove Bay, east of Wewak on the north coast of New Guinea. At 8.34 a.m. the first wave of landing craft touched down on the beach without meeting serious resistance. That same day soldiers of the 19th Brigade of the Australian 6th Division, advancing from the west along the coast, took Wewak airfield. The port, which since 1942 had been the largest Japanese air base on the north of the island and the last haven of the Japanese 18th Army, was in Australian hands.

Chronologies record under this date that “the war in New Guinea goes on, and the Australians attack Wewak”. The first part is accurate; the second needs qualifying: 11 May was not the start of the attack on Wewak but its culmination. Wewak Point itself had been taken on 10 May, and on 11 May the airfield and the town fell. Fighting nearby went on for several more days, however, and in the surrounding mountains until August.

The Aitape–Wewak campaign

The Japanese 18th Army of General Hatazō Adachi had been cut off in April 1944, when the Americans landed at Hollandia and at Aitape, far in its rear. Its last offensive, on the Driniumor in July 1944, ended in defeat. From then on the remnants of the army – by Australian estimates some 30,000–35,000 men from three decimated divisions (the 20th, 41st and 51st) – tried to survive in the Wewak area and the Torricelli Mountains, cultivating gardens and foraging for food. They had neither aircraft nor ships; supplies reached them only sporadically, by air or by submarine.

General Douglas MacArthur needed his American divisions in the Philippines. In the autumn of 1944 the defence of the bases on New Guinea, New Britain and Bougainville was handed over to Australian forces. From October Major General Jack Stevens’s 6th Division – a veteran of the fighting in North Africa, Greece and Crete – began arriving at Aitape. Until then the Americans had stayed close to the airfield, coming into contact with the Japanese only on patrols. The Australians took a different line: the Commander-in-Chief of the Australian Military Forces, General Thomas Blamey, with the approval of John Curtin’s government, decided on a limited offensive to drive the Japanese from the coast. Similar operations were conducted at the same time on Bougainville.

From November 1944 the 6th Division advanced eastwards along two routes. The infantry brigades – first the 19th and, from January 1945, the 16th – moved along the coast towards Wewak. The 2/6th Cavalry (Commando) Regiment, and later the 17th Brigade, pushed inland into the Torricelli Mountains towards Maprik, the source of much of the 18th Army’s food. It was a war of patrols and companies, fought in the rain, across swollen rivers and through mud; supplies came by barge or on the backs of carriers. On 16 March the Australians took the coastal airfields at But and Dagua. On 25 March Lieutenant Albert Chowne of the 2/2nd Battalion led an attack on a Japanese position blocking the road to Wewak and was killed; he was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. In this fighting the Australians used flamethrowers on a large scale for the first time in the war. On 23 April the 17th Brigade captured Maprik.

The fall of Wewak

At the beginning of May Brigadier James Martin’s 19th Brigade resumed the advance on Wewak. The Japanese fortifications were bombarded from the sea by the cruiser HMAS Hobart, the destroyers HMAS Arunta and HMAS Warramunga, the sloop Swan and the British cruiser HMS Newfoundland of the British Pacific Fleet, and from the air by Beaufort bombers of the Royal Australian Air Force.

On 10 May the 2/4th Battalion, supported by two troops of Matilda tanks and the fire of five artillery batteries, attacked Wewak Point. The point itself fell quickly, but the Japanese held out in bunkers, caves and tunnels, which had to be blown up or burned out with flamethrowers one by one. According to an Australian government account (from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs), the Japanese lost more than a hundred killed there, while Australian losses amounted to only two men.

On 11 May Farida Force landed on the beach at Dove Bay: 623 men of the 2/9th and 2/10th Commando Squadrons, a machine-gun company and a battery of mountain guns, under Lieutenant Colonel Eric Hennessy. Its task was to cut the road running east from Wewak and block the garrison’s line of retreat. That same day the 19th Brigade took the airfield and the town. Wewak, for three years the target of countless American and Australian air raids, ceased to be a Japanese base.

The fighting around the airfield did not stop at once. The Japanese held the hills above the runway, in the area of the Wirui mission. On 15 May the 2/4th Battalion attacked these positions. When one company’s advance was halted by fire from a concealed machine gun, Private Edward Kenna stood up in full view of the enemy, raked the bunker with a Bren light machine gun fired from the hip, and then killed two Japanese gunners with his rifle. According to the citation for his award, bullets were passing between his arms and his body. Kenna received the Victoria Cross; he died in 2009, the last surviving Australian to have been awarded it for the Second World War.

In the Prince Alexander Mountains

The loss of Wewak did not end the fighting. The remnants of the 18th Army withdrew southwards into the Prince Alexander Mountains. The 16th Brigade followed them from the coast, while the 17th Brigade advanced from the direction of Maprik to close the trap from the other side. On 14 May the Hayfield airstrip near Maprik was completed, allowing reinforcements and supplies to be flown in. Throughout June and July the 19th Brigade fought for the strongly defended heights south of Wewak – Mount Shiburangu, Mount Tazaki and Mount Kawakubo.

The offensive was halted on 11 August 1945, when news arrived that the Japanese government was considering terms of surrender. By then the 16th Brigade had reached Numoikum and the 17th Brigade Kairivu, in both cases some 23–24 kilometres from Wewak. On 13 September 1945, at the airstrip on Cape Wom near Wewak, General Adachi handed over his sword to the commander of the 6th Division, Major General Horace Robertson, and signed the surrender of the 18th Army. According to Australian figures, some 13,000 of his soldiers went into captivity at that point; in the Aitape–Wewak campaign alone some 14,000 others had died of hunger and disease. Adachi, sentenced to life imprisonment by an Australian military tribunal at Rabaul for crimes committed by troops under his command, took his own life on 10 September 1947.

The reckoning and the dispute over the “unnecessary campaigns”

According to the official Australian history of the war, the Aitape–Wewak campaign cost the 6th Division 442 killed and 1,141 wounded in action, while a further 145 men died of other causes. Losses to disease were much greater: more than 16,000 cases were recorded, many of them of malaria resistant to the Atebrin taken as a prophylactic. Japanese losses are estimated at 7,000–9,000 killed; only 269 soldiers were taken prisoner during the fighting.

Even during the war the question arose of what it was all for. The Japanese army around Wewak posed no threat either to Australia or to the Allies advancing on the Philippines and Okinawa; it could, as the saying went, have been left to “wither on the vine”. Critics accused Blamey of conducting the offensives in New Guinea, on Bougainville and on New Britain for his own glory. The officer and military historian Eustace Keogh later concluded that the offensives at Aitape–Wewak and on Bougainville had served “no useful purpose, either political or strategic”, and the journalist Peter Charlton called them “the unnecessary war” in the title of his 1983 book.

Defenders of the decision point out that in 1944 no one knew when the war would end. Eastern New Guinea was a mandated territory under Australian administration, and the government in Canberra, sidelined by MacArthur from the main operations, wanted to show that Australia was still fighting. Driving out the Japanese was also meant to allow garrisons to be reduced and men to be released for the economy. That does not alter the fact that the soldiers of the 6th Division paid a high price in a struggle whose outcome could no longer affect the course of the war.

Place in the war

The capture of Wewak closed the last chapter of the great battles in New Guinea, which had begun in 1942 with Japanese landings on the north coast of the island. After years in which it had been the Australians who bore the brunt of the fighting on the island, in 1945 their war was being fought on the fringes of the main front: at Wewak, on Bougainville, on New Britain and – from 1 May – on Borneo, where an Australian brigade landed on Tarakan. The Americans at this time were fighting on Okinawa and Luzon, and their bombers were burning Japanese cities. Adachi’s army, hungry and sick, survived in the mountains to the end, playing no further part in the war beyond tying down Australian forces.