The Japanese on the north coast of New Guinea

On 2 April 1942 a Japanese landing party went ashore at Babo, a small settlement with an airfield on Bintuni Bay, on the southern edge of the Bird’s Head peninsula in the western part of New Guinea. The day before, the Japanese had taken nearby Fakfak in the same way. No one opposed them. So began an operation lasting several weeks in which the Japanese navy, moving from port to port, took possession of the entire northern and western coast of Dutch New Guinea, the last corner of the Dutch East Indies not captured during the conquest of the archipelago. A few days later, on the other side of the island, another Japanese force put troops ashore on Manus in the Australian mandated territory. By the end of April the whole northern edge of New Guinea, from the Bird’s Head to Lae and Salamaua, was in Japanese hands or within their immediate reach.

Under 2 April it is sometimes recorded that the Japanese landed in New Guinea, “most importantly at Hollandia”. That statement needs correcting. At the beginning of April the landings took place at Fakfak, Babo and Sorong, at the western end of the island. Hollandia, today’s Jayapura, lying near the border with the Australian part of the island, was occupied only at the very end of the operation – on 20 April according to the post-war Japanese monograph (some studies give 19 April). It is true, however, that Hollandia later became the most important Japanese base in this part of New Guinea.

A forgotten colony

Dutch New Guinea was the least developed part of the Dutch colonial empire. In an area larger than the whole of Poland lived a few hundred thousand Papuans, most of them in the interior, with which the colonial administration had little contact, and few Europeans. The Dutch maintained a dozen or so administrative posts, missions and trading stations on the coast. The largest of them, such as Fakfak, Manokwari, Sorong and Hollandia, were small towns with a landing stage, a few government offices, the shops of Chinese traders and the houses of missionaries – Protestant in the north and Catholic in the south.

In the 1930s, however, the colony began to gain in importance. The Dutch company Nederlandsch Nieuw Guinee Petroleum Maatschappij discovered oil around Sorong and began to extract it. An airfield was built at Babo, the terminus of the KLM line in New Guinea. Groups of settlers, mostly Indo-Europeans from Java to whom the colonial government promised land and a new life, settled around Manokwari. Even so, the colony’s defences were token. The garrisons of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL) in the various towns numbered from a few dozen to about two hundred men, armed only with small arms.

After the outbreak of the Pacific War Babo gained importance as a staging post on the air route from Australia to the north. Australian air force engineers, together with the Dutch, adapted the airfield for military use. On 30 December 1941 it was bombed by Japanese flying boats; three people were killed and a dozen or so, including children, were wounded. For several weeks in early 1942 Australian Lockheed Hudson bombers were stationed there to drive off the Japanese flying boats. But as one island of the archipelago after another fell, and finally, in March, Java capitulated, the garrisons in New Guinea were completely cut off. There were no orders from Bandung, no supplies and no hope of reinforcements. Some of the Dutch managed to get away to Australia; others waited to see what would happen.

An order from Tokyo

The Japanese did not plan a major operation in Dutch New Guinea. According to the post-war Japanese monograph on naval operations in the south-west Pacific, on 5 March 1942 Imperial General Headquarters ordered the commander of the Combined Fleet, once the operations on Java were over, to destroy the remaining enemy forces in the area and occupy the colony’s key points. The aim was above all reconnaissance: to survey the ground for future airfields, anchorages and oil deposits and to secure a line of communication with the Australian part of the island. The plan provided for landings at Fakfak, Babo, Sorong, Manokwari, Momi, Serui, Nabire, Sarmi and Hollandia, with permanent garrisons at Fakfak and Manokwari.

The task was given to the 2nd Southern Expeditionary Fleet, formed on 10 March from the former 3rd Fleet, which had carried out the invasion of the Dutch East Indies. On 15 March, on Ambon, captured at the end of January, the Dutch New Guinea Invasion Force was organised under Rear Admiral Ruitarō Fujita. It consisted of a small group of warships, transports and naval infantry units. Its first stop was Bula on the island of Seram, where on 31 March the Japanese inspected the oilfield. The Dutch had destroyed it so thoroughly that rebuilding it was out of the question. That same day, far to the west, another Japanese force was occupying Australia’s Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean.

From Fakfak to Hollandia

On 1 April Fujita’s force landed at Fakfak, the seat of one of the Dutch administrative divisions. The small Dutch garrison surrendered without a fight; the Japanese monograph even records that no enemy forces were encountered at all. The Japanese left a naval garrison of a few dozen men there and set up a seaplane base. On 2 April it was Babo’s turn. According to Western accounts, most of the Dutch garrison had already flown or sailed to Australia. The Japanese occupied the settlement and the airfield, which in the following years they developed into an important air base for the army and navy. On 4 April they landed at Sorong, the centre of the Dutch oil industry in the colony.

The only serious resistance the Japanese expected to meet was at Manokwari, where by their reckoning there were some 150 soldiers. When Fujita’s force entered the bay on 12 April, the garrison was gone. The commander of the Dutch detachment, Captain Johannes Willemsz Geeroms, had ordered the only ship to be set on fire to keep it out of enemy hands and withdrew with some of his men into the Arfak Mountains. The Europeans who remained in the town were taken by the Japanese to internment camps on Ambon; according to Dutch accounts, some of them were executed. Sixty-two Dutchmen, soldiers and settlers, together with a dozen or so Papuans, remained in the jungle and, with the help of local tribes, began a guerrilla war. Geeroms was captured in April 1944 and beheaded. According to Dutch sources, of the 62 men who went into the mountains only fourteen survived the war. The Japanese left a detachment of nearly two hundred men at Manokwari, and the town itself later became their main headquarters on the Bird’s Head.

From then on the operation proceeded almost as a matter of routine: a landing at Momi on 15 April, at Serui on the island of Yapen on 16 April, at Nabire on Cenderawasih Bay, then called Geelvink Bay, on 17 April, and finally at Hollandia and Sarmi on 20 April. Nowhere were enemy troops encountered. Concluding that there was no longer any enemy in the colony worth fearing, the Japanese dissolved the invasion force at Manokwari on 21 April, and its ships returned to Ambon.

Manus Island

At almost the same time another Japanese force, sent from Rabaul, occupied the Admiralty Islands north of New Guinea, part of the Australian mandated territory. Some chronologies give 6 April, others 8 April; the latter date is the one most often accepted, while some studies give 7 April. On that day the light cruiser Tatsuta, the destroyer Mutsuki and the transport Mishima Maru entered the harbour at Lorengau, the chief town of Manus, and several hundred men of the naval forces stationed at Rabaul went ashore.

The island was not defended. The only troops there were a section of the Australian 1st Independent Company, commandos who before the war had been dispersed across the islands of the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomons as observers and who also gave medical care to the inhabitants. Lorengau had already been bombed on 25 January, during the preparations for the attack on Rabaul; the main target then had been the radio mast. Faced with overwhelming Japanese superiority, the Australians withdrew into the jungle, from where for some time, working with the coastwatchers, they reported enemy movements. In April and May, like the company’s other scattered sections, they were evacuated or made their own way to New Guinea. The Japanese set up an administrative post and an airstrip at Lorengau, and later began building a second airfield at Momote on the neighbouring island of Los Negros. According to some sources, the labour included prisoners taken at Singapore, among them soldiers of Indian Sikh regiments.

The capture of Manus was of no great strategic significance in the spring of 1942. The Admiralty Islands covered Rabaul from the north-west and lay on the route of aircraft flying from Rabaul to the north coast of New Guinea. The Japanese nonetheless knew what they had: the large, deep Seeadler Harbour, sheltered by an arc of islands, was one of the finest natural anchorages in the south-west Pacific.

People left to fend for themselves

For the civilians who remained in the occupied places, Japanese rule meant internment, forced labour and uncertainty about their fate. Missionaries were especially vulnerable. They were numerous both in Dutch New Guinea and in the Australian mandated territory, and were often citizens of neutral countries or of countries allied with Japan, Germans among them, which for a time could shield them from internment. That protection proved illusory. In March 1943 the Japanese destroyer Akikaze took several dozen missionaries and civilians from the Catholic mission on Kairiru Island near Wewak and from Wewak itself, and then some twenty more people from Manus, among them Lutheran and Catholic missionaries. According to the findings of Australian investigators after the war, all of them, including three infants, were murdered on board on the way to Rabaul, on orders from the headquarters of the 8th Fleet.

Not the whole colony came under Japanese rule. The Japanese took no interest in Merauke on the south coast, which remained in Dutch hands throughout the war and in time became an Allied foothold, garrisoned also by Australian troops. In the mountains of the interior, by the Wissel Lakes, the Dutch colonial official Jean Victor de Bruijn, with a group of Papuan soldiers and police, held for more than two years a patch of territory free of the Japanese, from which he passed intelligence to Australia. Contact with him was kept up by seaplanes landing on Lake Paniai. He withdrew only in July 1944.

Place in the war

In April 1942 Japanese expansion in the south-west Pacific was close to its peak. The occupation of the north coast of New Guinea completed the conquest of the Dutch East Indies and gave the Japanese a chain of strongpoints from the Moluccas to Rabaul. The next step was to be Port Moresby, but the seaborne expedition against it collapsed at the beginning of May in the Battle of the Coral Sea. From then on New Guinea was transformed from a remote backwater into one of the main battlefields of the Pacific War.

The Japanese began to develop the bases seized in April 1942 in earnest only when the Allies went over to the offensive. Hollandia, in 1942 merely one of several small towns on the coast, became in 1943–1944 the main Japanese supply centre in this part of the Pacific, with three airfields and fortifications on the surrounding hills. Manokwari was the headquarters of the army and of the divisions defending the Bird’s Head, while Babo, Sorong and Fakfak served as airfields and ports.

All of this was smashed in 1944. On 29 February 1944 the Americans landed on Los Negros in the Admiralty Islands, and on 18 March they took Lorengau. Seeadler Harbour became one of the largest Allied naval bases in the Pacific, and the invasion of the Philippines was later launched from the Admiralties. On 22 April 1944, almost exactly two years after the Japanese landing, the troops of General Douglas MacArthur landed at Hollandia and Aitape, cutting off tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers in the Wewak area. Hollandia was turned into a huge base through which hundreds of thousands of American soldiers passed, and MacArthur set up his headquarters there for a time before his return to the Philippines. The Japanese garrisons at Babo, Fakfak and Manokwari, bypassed by the Allied offensive, held out, cut off from supplies, until the end of the war.