The Japanese at Lae and Salamaua

On the night of 7–8 March 1942 Japanese transports, escorted by cruisers and destroyers, entered the Huon Gulf on the north-east coast of New Guinea. During the night and early morning an army infantry battalion went ashore near Salamaua, and a naval infantry detachment a few dozen kilometres further north, near Lae. Nobody put up serious resistance. A handful of Australian volunteers blew up bridges, set fire to stores and withdrew into the mountains. The Japanese, who six weeks earlier had taken Rabaul, now had a foothold on New Guinea itself for the first time: two airfields little more than 300 kilometres in a straight line from Port Moresby. Two days later more than a hundred American carrier aircraft appeared over the gulf, having flown across the mountains that span the whole island, and attacked the ships lying offshore. It was one of the most successful American blows of the first months of the Pacific War.

The gold towns of the Huon Gulf

Lae and Salamaua lay in the Territory of New Guinea, a former German colony that Australia had administered since 1920 under a League of Nations mandate. Both places owed their importance to gold. In the 1920s and 1930s rich mines had been opened in the Bulolo and Wau valleys inland, which no road reached. Everything, from food to parts for heavy dredges, was brought in by the aircraft of Guinea Airways, flying from the airfields at Lae and Salamaua. According to frequently cited figures, in the early 1930s aircraft in New Guinea carried more freight than air transport in any other country. It was from the airfield at Lae that Amelia Earhart took off on her last flight on 2 July 1937. At the beginning of 1941, when volcanic eruptions were making life difficult in Rabaul, the administration of the whole territory was also moved to Lae.

The war with Japan quickly destroyed this world. On 21 January 1942, two days before the landing at Rabaul, several dozen Japanese aircraft simultaneously bombed Lae, Salamaua and Bulolo, destroying most of the civil transport aircraft on the airfields. The Administrator of the territory declared a state of emergency and handed power to the military, and within a few days the civilians had left the coast; some escaped on foot across the mountains, others flew out on the last aircraft. The civil administration of New Guinea had in effect ceased to exist.

The defence of the area rested with the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles, a volunteer battalion made up of white settlers, miners, planters and officials, mostly middle-aged men armed with rifles dating from the First World War. It had been mobilised only on 21 January. One company held the area around Lae and another the Salamaua district, where it was joined by men of the Australian 2/22nd Battalion who had made their way across from New Britain after the destruction of Lark Force. They had no chance whatever of stopping a landing. Their task was to destroy infrastructure and keep watch on the enemy.

Operation SR

After taking Rabaul, the Japanese navy concluded that the new base would be secure only if the airfields in front of it were occupied. Vice Admiral Shigeyoshi Inoue, commander of the Fourth Fleet, responsible for the South Seas Mandate, named Lae, Salamaua, Port Moresby and Tulagi in the Solomon Islands as the objectives of the next operations. The Naval General Staff backed the plan. The army, which did not want to commit large forces in so remote an area, agreed to limited operations involving Major General Tomitarō Horii’s South Seas Detachment, the same force that had taken Rabaul.

The landing at Lae and Salamaua was called Operation SR. Salamaua, with its airfield and settlement, was to be taken by Major Masao Hori’s II Battalion of the 144th Infantry Regiment, and Lae with its airfield by a naval infantry battalion from Kure. Cover was provided by Rear Admiral Sadamichi Kajioka’s force with the light cruiser Yūbari and destroyers, and distant cover by four heavy cruisers. Aircraft of the 24th Air Flotilla at Rabaul, which had been bombing Port Moresby since February, also attacked Lae and Bulolo in those days. The convoy of transports and an auxiliary minelayer left Rabaul on 5 March.

The landing on 8 March went almost unhindered. At Lae the Japanese met no enemy at all. At Salamaua, observers of the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles and men of the 2/22nd Battalion, after a brief exchange of fire in which one Japanese was killed, tried to wreck the airfield, blew up the bridge over the Francisco River and withdrew towards Mubo. Individual Australian Lockheed Hudson bombers of No. 32 Squadron from Port Moresby attacked the ships and hit the transport Yokohama Maru, killing three soldiers. On the same day that, at the other end of the archipelago, the Dutch command was agreeing to the capitulation of Java, the Japanese took two more points on the road to Australia without a fight. On 10 March another of their detachments landed at Finschhafen on the Huon Peninsula.

A change of plan

It was just then that American carriers were in the vicinity. Since February Vice Admiral Wilson Brown’s task force, with the carrier Lexington, had been operating in the waters between New Caledonia and the Solomon Islands. On 20 February it had tried to attack Rabaul, but it was spotted by Japanese flying boats and fought off an attack by bombers from Rabaul in which Lieutenant Edward O’Hare shot down several aircraft and became one of the first American naval aviation heroes of the war. Brown concluded that another strike on so strongly defended a base required a second carrier. Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet, sent him Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher’s task force with Yorktown. The two forces met north of New Caledonia on 6 March and set course for New Britain.

On 8 March, when they were already on their way, Brown received word from Australian air reconnaissance that the harbour at Rabaul had emptied and that Japanese ships were lying at anchor off Lae and Salamaua. He changed his target. Instead of approaching Rabaul from the Solomon Sea, where flying boats could easily have spotted him, he took the carriers into the Gulf of Papua off the south coast of New Guinea. From there the aircraft had to fly over the Owen Stanley Range, a ridge rising to more than four thousand metres and usually shrouded in cloud. The heavily laden dive bombers and torpedo bombers could not climb over it; they had to go through a pass at about 7,500 feet, or just under 2,300 metres. Reconnaissance of the terrain was scanty and the maps inaccurate. The risk was such that a single sudden change in the weather could smash the whole strike against the mountainsides. On the other hand, an attack from the south, from behind the mountains, guaranteed complete surprise, and the carriers, hidden in the gulf on the far side of the island, remained out of reach of Japanese reconnaissance.

The strike from behind the mountains

On the morning of 10 March, from a position in the Gulf of Papua about 45 nautical miles offshore, 104 aircraft took off: 53 from Lexington and 51 from Yorktown. They were Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers, Douglas TBD Devastator torpedo bombers and Grumman F4F Wildcat fighters. Earlier, alone in a single dive bomber, Commander William Ault, commander of Lexington’s air group, had taken off. He circled over the highest point of the pass, reporting on the weather, and it was he who was to decide whether the strike would cross the mountains or turn back. The weather held. The strike went through the pass without loss.

At 9.22 a.m. Lexington’s first dive bombers attacked the ships off Lae, and a quarter of an hour later the torpedo bombers and another squadron of dive bombers struck the ships off Salamaua. The fighters strafed the shore and the wharves. About half an hour later Yorktown‘s aircraft arrived and attacked the targets that were still afloat. The Japanese were taken completely by surprise: they had no fighters at Lae or Salamaua, and the ships’ anti-aircraft guns could not fend off so large a strike. After the carrier aircraft came eight B-17 bombers from the airfield at Townsville, which added their bombs.

According to post-war tallies, three transports were sunk: Kongō Maru, Yokohama Maru and Tenyō Maru. Damaged were Yūbari, two destroyers, another transport, the minelayer Tsugaru, the seaplane tender Kiyokawa Maru and an auxiliary minesweeper, which went to the bottom a few days later. According to the same studies, the Japanese lost about 130 killed and 250 wounded. American losses were limited to one dive bomber, shot down by anti-aircraft fire together with its two-man crew; eleven other aircraft returned damaged. The American airmen, like almost all airmen in this war, rated their achievements much higher: they reported sinking five transports, two heavy cruisers, a light cruiser and a destroyer. By then there were no heavy cruisers left in the gulf. But the real result was also very good. Some two-thirds of the ships used in the landing were sunk or damaged. Heavier losses among the troops were avoided only because the soldiers were already ashore, and the damaged ships were lying close inshore, so that some of them could be beached.

Echoes in Washington and Tokyo

Some American historians regard the raid of 10 March as the greatest success of the US Navy in the period between the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Battle of the Coral Sea. After the raids on the Marshall and Gilbert Islands, which had produced modest results, and the failed attempt to strike Rabaul, it was the first action in which the carriers inflicted real losses on the enemy in his own amphibious operation. In a letter to Winston Churchill, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called it “the best day’s work we have had”. For Americans, who for three months had heard mostly of defeats, from the fall of Wake to the surrender of Singapore, the news mattered a great deal. According to a contemporary study by US naval intelligence, it was also the first operation in which two American carriers had acted together in a single coordinated attack.

It did not, however, change the situation on land. The Japanese held on to Lae and Salamaua and at once began adapting the airfields there for naval fighters. In April Zeros of the Tainan Air Group moved in, and together with bombers from Rabaul they kept Port Moresby under incessant attack from then on. The psychological effect proved more important. The Japanese command learned that the Americans were ready to risk their carriers to disrupt its operations in the South Pacific. When a seaborne landing at Port Moresby was being planned in April, it was judged too dangerous without the cover of Japanese carriers. Two large carriers from the force that had struck Pearl Harbor were assigned to the operation, and it was they that met Lexington and Yorktown in the Coral Sea in May.

The Australians in the mountains

The volunteers of the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles, withdrawn inland, would have had no chance of stopping the Japanese had they pushed into the mountains towards the mines at Wau and Bulolo. In the first days after the landing the Australian command in Port Moresby ordered them to destroy the airfield at Wau and the power stations and bridges in the Bulolo valley. The Japanese, however, did not advance inland. They confined themselves to fortifying their coastal bases and to patrol raids; on 18 March one of these destroyed an Australian supply dump at Komiatum. The Australians set up observation posts on the hills above Salamaua and in the Markham valley near Lae, from which they reported shipping and aircraft movements by radio. They also helped thousands of local indentured labourers who, after their white employers had fled, were left without means of subsistence and with no way of returning to their villages. Many of them later became carriers and labourers in the service of the Allies. In May the first Australian commando units flew into Wau, and on 29 June, together with the volunteers, they carried out a successful raid on the garrison at Salamaua.

Japan and Australia

It is often written that the landing at Lae and Salamaua began the Japanese march on Port Moresby “and then on Australia”. The first part of that claim is true; the second needs qualifying. At the turn of February and March 1942 some officers of the Naval General Staff did propose an invasion of northern Australia. The Army General Staff refused outright: occupying even part of the continent would have required at least a dozen or so divisions and enormous shipping tonnage, which Japan did not have. The compromise adopted at the beginning of March at a joint liaison conference of the government and the high command provided instead for extending operations so as to cut Australia off from the United States. Over the following weeks this was turned into concrete plans: the capture of Port Moresby and Tulagi, and then of New Caledonia, Fiji and Samoa. To the Australians the distinction was invisible. After the bombing of Darwin, the strafing of Broome and the fall of Java, every new Japanese landing in the north looked like a stage in a march on their continent.

Its place in the war

For a year and a half Lae and Salamaua became the main Japanese bases on New Guinea. In May the seaborne operation against Port Moresby collapsed in the Battle of the Coral Sea, the first carrier battle in history. In the summer the Japanese tried to take the town overland and set off across the Owen Stanley Range, and they were stopped only in the Kokoda Track campaign. The base at Lae and Salamaua supplied these operations and was the starting point for the failed attack on Wau in January 1943. In the end the Australians, supported by the Americans, retook both towns in September 1943, in an operation that combined a seaborne landing with an Allied parachute drop in the Markham valley. Salamaua, destroyed in the fighting, never recovered. Lae is today the second-largest city in Papua New Guinea.

The raid of 10 March, on the other hand, foreshadowed what the war in the Pacific would look like. It was decided by air power and carriers, and every airfield on New Guinea and in the Solomon Islands was fought over, because whoever held it controlled the sea for several hundred kilometres around. Lexington, which led the attack across the mountains on 10 March, was sunk two months later in the Coral Sea, and Yorktown in June at Midway. By then, however, the United States had come through the hardest months of the war, and its carriers had proved that they could strike back.