The end of the Battle of Milne Bay

On the evening of 5 September 1942 Japanese warships closed the shore near Waga Waga, on the northern side of Milne Bay. They had not brought the reinforcements that Commander Minoru Yano’s men had been awaiting for a week; they had come to take them away. That day the staff in Rabaul had concluded that the Battle of Milne Bay, which had begun with a landing on the night of 25–26 August, was lost, and ordered a withdrawal. The Japanese naval infantry who were to have captured the Allied airfields at the eastern tip of New Guinea had not come near them again since their failed night attack of 31 August.

War chronologies place the victory under 5 September and call it the first decisive defeat of Japanese land forces in the Pacific War. The date corresponds to the day on which the decision to evacuate was taken and the main body of the evacuation sailed. Australian accounts, however, state that the survivors were taken off intermittently from 4 to 7 September, and the end of the battle is usually dated to 7 September, when the fighting with the last groups left on shore ceased.

The last days of fighting

From 31 August the initiative lay with the Australians. The veterans of Brigadier George Wootten’s 18th Brigade, who had earlier defended Tobruk, advanced eastwards along the only coastal track, from KB Mission towards the Japanese landing site. The terrain favoured the defenders: the coconut plantations were cut by streams and swamps, rain turned the track to mud, and Japanese machine-gun posts lay hidden in the thick undergrowth above the fords. On 3 September the 2/9th Battalion lost 34 killed and wounded in a single action for a stream crossing west of Elevada Creek.

On 4 September the same battalion ran into another Japanese position near Goroni. In the afternoon, when one of its sections was pinned down by fire from three machine-gun posts, Corporal John French ordered his comrades to take cover, destroyed two of the posts with grenades and went for the third with a Thompson submachine gun. When the firing stopped, the Australians found the dead Japanese gunners in front of him and French mortally wounded. For this action he was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross, the only one awarded for the Battle of Milne Bay; the citation stated that his “cool courage” had saved his section from heavy casualties.

By the evening of 4 September the Japanese force, according to later findings, numbered only about fifty fully fit men. All the company commanders had been killed, three or four platoon commanders were still alive, and the rest were wounded, sick or exhausted. On 6 September the Australians reached the main camp of the landing force, where they fought only minor skirmishes with small groups left behind during the evacuation.

The decision to evacuate

After the defeat of 31 August the Japanese command in Rabaul did not give up at once. It planned to ship the Army’s Aoba Detachment – the 4th Infantry Regiment with an artillery company – to Rabi to complete the capture of the airfields. The detachment could not arrive before 11 September, however, and until then Yano’s men were to be reinforced by about 130 men of the 5th Yokosuka Special Naval Landing Force. Two attempts to land them, on 2 and 4 September, failed. On 2 September Yano reported that his force was in “the worst possible situation” and would defend itself to the death. Subsequent reports left no doubt that the survivors would not last until the Aoba Detachment arrived, and so on 5 September the Japanese command – the operation was directed by the staff of Vice Admiral Gun’ichi Mikawa’s 8th Fleet – ordered the withdrawal. That same evening the ships of the 18th Cruiser Division took most of the survivors off the beach.

According to tallies based on the records of both sides, of the roughly 1,940 men the Japanese had landed in the bay, the ships evacuated 1,318, including 311 wounded. The Australians, who lost about 370 men in the battle, including more than 160 killed and missing, estimated the Japanese dead at 700–750; a Japanese source gives 625.

The Japanese navy was still able to show that the sea belonged to it at night. At about 10 p.m. on 6 September the light cruiser Tenryū and the destroyer Arashi entered the bay and shelled the freighter Anshun, which was unloading under floodlights at the wharf at Gili Gili; after some ten hits she rolled over onto her side. The ships also shelled positions ashore and swept their searchlights over the Australian hospital ship Manunda, but did not open fire on her, as she was clearly marked. By 7 September only isolated stragglers remained ashore, trying to make their way through the jungle to Buna; Australian patrols went on rounding them up for several weeks.

A different fate befell some 350 Japanese who had been stranded on Goodenough Island on 25 August after their barges were destroyed. An attempt to evacuate them on 11 September ended with American aircraft sinking the destroyer Yayoi, further attempts failed, and the survivors were taken off only at the end of October, after fighting the Australian 2/12th Battalion.

What the victors found

As they advanced eastwards, the Australians came upon the bodies of their own soldiers who had been taken prisoner and murdered, and the corpses of local Papuans. Testimony gathered afterwards speaks of at least 59 civilians killed, among them women raped before they died, and states that none of the 36 Australian prisoners survived. These discoveries confirmed the soldiers in the belief that the Japanese were to be fought without mercy, and this affected the later fighting in New Guinea. No one was ever tried for the crimes committed at Milne Bay.

“The first defeat on land”

The phrase found in the chronologies – the first decisive defeat of Japanese land forces – derives largely from General William Slim, who in 1942 commanded a corps in the retreat from Burma and later the Fourteenth Army. In his memoir Defeat into Victory he wrote that at Milne Bay the Australians had inflicted on the Japanese their “first undoubted defeat on land”, and that they, first among the Allies, had broken the myth of the Japanese army’s invincibility. Historians accept this verdict with a reservation: the Japanese had already lost individual engagements – at Changsha in China, in the first attempt to land on Wake, at the Tenaru on Guadalcanal – but never before had they been forced to abandon an entire operation and evacuate its participants. Strictly speaking, moreover, it was not the army that was beaten at Milne Bay but the navy’s landing forces.

The news reached the troops at the moment they needed it most. On the Kokoda Track the 21st Brigade was just falling back towards Efogi after the battle of Isurava, and in Burma the British were licking their wounds after the retreat to India. The Australian press wrote of a “tonic surprise” and a “turning point”, while warning that the hardest fighting in New Guinea was yet to come. Among the soldiers the victory made it possible to explain earlier Japanese successes by numerical superiority and surprise, rather than by some innate superiority of the enemy in the jungle.

General Douglas MacArthur took a cooler view of the battle. He reported to Washington that the success had been owed to intelligence, which had made it possible to concentrate superior forces in the bay, and that it might not be repeated. His headquarters in Brisbane also remained concerned that the commander of Milne Force, Major General Cyril Clowes, had acted too slowly and allowed the enemy to escape.

Place in the war

The evacuation from Milne Bay wrecked the Japanese plan to take Port Moresby from two directions at once. Major General Tomitarō Horii, whose South Seas Detachment was pushing along the Kokoda Track across the Owen Stanley Range, could no longer count on a seaborne landing drawing off the Australian reserves and opening the way for him along the coast. Together with the fighting for Guadalcanal, which was absorbing the strength of the 17th Army, this decided, over the following weeks, that Horii would be halted and turned back within sight of Port Moresby. At the same time the victory removed the threat that the Japanese would build an airfield from which their bombers could reach further towards northern Australia and the Coral Sea.

The bay itself became one of the main Allied bases in New Guinea. As early as September and October 1942 American engineers built a new wharf there, and in November its airfields supported the advance on the Japanese beachheads at Buna and Gona. In 1943 the landings at Lae and on New Britain set out from Milne Bay. For Australians the battle took its place alongside Kokoda as a symbol of 1942, the year in which the Japanese advance southwards was halted for the first time.