The Japanese in the Solomon Islands

Many chronologies state that on 14 March 1942 the Japanese landed troops in the Solomon Islands. No landing took place in the archipelago on that day. Japanese aircraft and ships had been appearing over the northern islands since January, and according to some accounts Japanese vessels put into Buka Passage as early as about 9 March, but the first permanent garrisons were not established until the end of the month. On 30 March Japanese naval infantry landed in the Shortland Islands; at roughly the same time they occupied the islet of Sohano in Buka Passage, and at the beginning of April the port of Kieta on the east coast of Bougainville. The Japanese did not take Tulagi, the capital of the British protectorate, until 3 May, and they began building an airfield on Guadalcanal only at the beginning of July. March was nevertheless the month in which the war came to the Solomon Islands in earnest: after the capture of Rabaul and the landings at Lae and Salamaua, the archipelago became the next target of Japanese expansion.

An archipelago divided in two

The Solomon Islands stretch for almost 1,500 kilometres south-east of New Britain in two parallel chains of islands, separated by a broad channel that the Americans later called “the Slot”. Politically the archipelago was divided. The two largest northern islands, Buka and Bougainville, had been part of German New Guinea before 1914, and after the First World War they became part of the Australian mandated territory administered from Rabaul. The rest of the archipelago, from the Shortlands to Guadalcanal and Malaita, formed a British protectorate with its capital at tiny Tulagi, on an islet off the coast of Florida Island.

Neither the British nor the Australians had forces there capable of defending it. A platoon of the Australian 1st Independent Company of commandos was sent to Buka to guard the airstrip, and another detachment of the company was stationed at Tulagi, where a forward base for Royal Australian Air Force flying boats operated on the neighbouring islet of Gavutu. From 22 January Tulagi was bombed regularly. In February most European civilians were evacuated to Australia, and the Resident Commissioner, William Marchant, moved the seat of government to Malaita. On Bougainville and Buka most European planters and missionaries left; those who stayed were mainly Catholic missionaries who refused to abandon their parishes.

Japanese bases in the north

For the Japanese navy the Solomon Islands were an extension of the defences of Rabaul. Vice Admiral Shigeyoshi Inoue, commander of the 4th Fleet, wanted seaplane bases and airfields in the archipelago from which reconnaissance could reach far to the south, towards the routes linking Australia with the United States. There was nothing to conquer on the northern islands; it was enough to occupy them. On 30 March Japanese ships entered the harbour in the Shortland Islands and put ashore two platoons of naval infantry. One of them remained and began building a seaplane base. In Buka Passage the Japanese occupied Sohano, the seat of the district administration. The Australian platoon at the Buka airstrip did not fight; it was withdrawn inland and then evacuated. At the beginning of April the Japanese entered Kieta. In the following months they built airfields on Buka, on the Bonis Peninsula, near Kieta and in southern Bougainville, and the bay off Buin and the waters of the Shortland Islands became fleet anchorages.

The coastwatchers

Before the Japanese arrived, a network had been prepared in the archipelago that was to prove one of their most dangerous adversaries. Since the 1920s the Royal Australian Navy had maintained a network of coastwatchers on the islands of Melanesia and along the Australian coast: officials, planters, missionaries and radio operators who in the event of war were to report the movements of foreign ships. From 1939 it was run by Lieutenant Commander Eric Feldt, a former official of the New Guinea administration who knew most of his men personally. He equipped them with heavy radio sets, carried by a dozen or more porters, and gave the whole organisation the code name “Ferdinand”, after the bull in a popular children’s book who preferred smelling flowers to fighting. The coastwatchers were to hide and watch, not fight.

When the Japanese occupied the northern islands, two men stayed behind in the mountains of Bougainville who would earn a place in the history of this war. Jack Read, assistant district officer at Buka Passage, watched the Japanese landing at Sohano from the hills and then moved to a post at Porapora, from which he could see the whole of Buka and the sky over the route from Rabaul to the south. Paul Mason, a planter who had lived on Bougainville for over a decade, set up an observation post above Kieta and later above Buin. Both, like other coastwatchers, were given commissions or non-commissioned rank in the naval reserve, in the hope that if captured they would be treated by the Japanese as prisoners of war rather than as spies. Further south Donald Kennedy, a district officer, set up a base in April on Santa Isabel and later on New Georgia, while on Guadalcanal the district officer Martin Clemens remained. All of them relied on the help of the local people: Melanesians carried their equipment, brought them food, warned them of Japanese patrols and gathered information themselves, risking their own lives and those of their villages.

Australia feels surrounded

The news from the Solomon Islands arrived in weeks when Australia felt more threatened than ever before in its history. In less than two months Rabaul and Singapore had fallen, the Japanese had bombed Darwin and Broome, taken Java and set foot in New Guinea. Japanese bases in the Solomons threatened the eastern flank of New Guinea and, in the longer term, New Caledonia, Fiji and Samoa, through which ran the route for reinforcements from the United States. It was in March that the Americans began to secure that route: after Samoa, their troops landed in New Caledonia on 12 March. Prime Minister John Curtin demanded the return of the Australian divisions from the Middle East and faster American help. On 17 March General Douglas MacArthur arrived in Australia to take command of the Allied forces in the South-West Pacific.

The Japanese were indeed thinking of cutting Australia off. Their plans, agreed in March and April, provided for the capture of Port Moresby and Tulagi, and then of New Caledonia, Fiji and Samoa. The army refused to invade the continent itself, as some naval officers proposed, but the Australians could not have known that.

Place in the war

The Japanese bases in the northern Solomons were the first link in a chain that within a few months stretched as far as Guadalcanal. On 3 May a naval infantry detachment under Rear Admiral Kiyohide Shima occupied Tulagi, which the Australians had abandoned just before; this was part of the operation that culminated in the Battle of the Coral Sea. In June the Japanese surveyed the plain by the Lunga River on the north coast of Guadalcanal, and at the beginning of July they began building an airfield there. The coastwatchers and reconnaissance aircraft immediately reported it to the Allies. On 7 August 1942 the US Marines landed on Guadalcanal and Tulagi, and the captured, almost completed airfield, named Henderson Field, became the focus of the six-month Guadalcanal campaign, one of the turning points of the Pacific War.

In that fighting the coastwatchers on Bougainville played a part that nobody had foreseen in March. Read and Mason, hidden beneath the flight path of the Japanese bombers from Rabaul, warned the Americans on Guadalcanal of incoming raids almost daily, giving the fighters time to take off and gain height. Admiral William Halsey is credited with saying that the coastwatchers saved Guadalcanal and Guadalcanal saved the South Pacific. Bougainville remained in Japanese hands much longer. It was over this island, on 18 April 1943, that American fighters shot down the aircraft carrying Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. In November 1943 the Americans landed on the west coast of Bougainville as part of Operation Cartwheel, but the garrisons on Buka, at Buin and in the Shortland Islands did not surrender until after the end of the war, in September 1945. For the islanders, forced to work on building airfields and later bombed by the Allies and starving during the blockade, the occupation that began in the spring of 1942 lasted more than three years.