The Japanese take Rabaul

Before dawn on 23 January 1942 Japanese transports entered Blanche Bay and Simpson Harbour at the north-eastern tip of New Britain. More than five thousand soldiers of Major General Tomitarō Horii’s South Seas Detachment went ashore. Defending the area was the Australian Lark Force, fewer than fifteen hundred strong. Its resistance collapsed within a few hours, and before midday its commander, Lieutenant Colonel John Scanlan, told his men to save themselves as best they could. That same night another Japanese force landed at Kavieng on neighbouring New Ireland. Rabaul, the capital of the Australian mandated Territory of New Guinea, soon became the largest Japanese base in the South Pacific.

A harbour in a crater

Rabaul lies on one of the finest natural harbours in the Pacific: Blanche Bay and its inner part, Simpson Harbour, fill a flooded volcanic caldera ringed by volcanic cones. The town was founded by the Germans as the capital of German New Guinea. In September 1914 it was occupied by the Australians, and the Treaty of Versailles and the decisions of the victors handed the former colony to Australia as a Class C League of Nations mandate. This was the achievement of Prime Minister Billy Hughes, who wanted to keep Japan as far as possible from Australia’s shores. Japan’s own mandated islands in Micronesia, meanwhile, began a few hundred kilometres to the north. In 1937 Rabaul was devastated by an eruption of the Vulcan and Tavurvur volcanoes; it was then decided to move the territory’s capital to Lae on New Guinea, but the town remained the main centre of the Bismarck Archipelago.

For the Japanese, Rabaul mattered in two ways. Some 1,300 kilometres to the north lay Truk in the Carolines, the main forward base of the Combined Fleet. Australian aircraft from Rabaul could reconnoitre and bomb it, while Japanese forces at Rabaul could shield it. The harbour and airfields of New Britain also opened the way to New Guinea, towards Port Moresby, to the Solomon Islands and to the sea lanes linking the United States with Australia. The capture of Rabaul and Kavieng, designated Operation R, was thus the next step after the capture of Guam, and it was entrusted to the same forces: the South Seas Detachment, built around the 144th Infantry Regiment, and the 4th Fleet of Vice Admiral Shigeyoshi Inoue.

Lark Force

The Australians sent a garrison to New Britain in March and April 1941. Its core was the volunteer 2/22nd Battalion of the Second Australian Imperial Force, some 700 strong. To this were added the local militia of the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles, a coastal battery with two old six-inch guns at Praed Point, two anti-aircraft guns, an anti-tank detachment, engineers, signallers and a field hospital with six army nurses. According to various tallies, Lark Force as a whole numbered some 1,300 to 1,400 men. At the Lakunai and Vunakanau airfields was No. 24 Squadron of the Royal Australian Air Force, with ten Wirraways – armed training aircraft – and four Lockheed Hudson bombers. On New Ireland, at Kavieng, was the 1st Independent Company of commandos, about 130 strong, whose small sections were also scattered across other islands, among them Buka and Tulagi.

This force could not defend Rabaul, and no one in Melbourne expected it to. The Chiefs of Staff regarded it as a forward observation post, meant to protect the airfield and the flying-boat anchorage and, in the event of invasion, to delay the enemy for as long as possible. Its first commander, Lieutenant Colonel Howard Carr, reported that his forces were inadequate. His successor, Scanlan, a First World War veteran, calculated as late as December 1941 that a genuine defence would require four thousand infantrymen. After the attack on Pearl Harbor the government of John Curtin decided neither to reinforce the garrison nor to evacuate it. No plan of withdrawal was prepared either, nor any supplies for guerrilla warfare. In December European women and children were evacuated from Rabaul; civilian men, as well as the local Tolai people and the Chinese community of several hundred, remained.

The air raids

The first Japanese air raid on Rabaul took place on 4 January 1942; according to some sources it was carried out by flying boats from Truk. The raids were repeated over the following days. On 20 January more than a hundred aircraft from four carriers of Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo’s Kidō Butai – Akagi, Kaga, Shōkaku and Zuikaku – appeared over New Britain. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto had assigned the force that six weeks earlier had attacked Hawaii, and in December had supported the capture of Wake with two carriers, to cover an operation against a handful of Australians; the Japanese command did not know exactly what forces it would be facing. Eight Wirraways took off against Mitsubishi A6M fighters. Three were shot down and two crashed on landing; six airmen were killed and five wounded. After this encounter No. 24 Squadron practically ceased to exist. Its commander, Wing Commander John Lerew, signalled RAAF headquarters in Melbourne with the gladiators’ Latin salute: “Nos morituri te salutamus” (“We who are about to die salute you”). The last aircraft flew off to Lae, and the ground staff were evacuated by flying boat and Hudson.

On 21 January carrier aircraft attacked Kavieng as well as Lae, Salamaua and Bulolo on New Guinea, destroying the civilian aircraft used to supply the goldfields there. That day an Australian Catalina flying boat sighted the invasion force and managed to send a report before it was shot down. On 22 January dive-bombers destroyed the battery at Praed Point, killing or wounding some twenty gunners. Scanlan withdrew the infantry from the town to positions overlooking the bay. In the afternoon engineers blew up the dumps, including some two thousand aircraft bombs; the explosion flattened buildings within a radius of several hundred metres and killed many local labourers.

The night of 23 January

The Japanese convoy entered Blanche Bay during the night, and a few hours before dawn men of Colonel Masao Kusunose’s 144th Regiment began landing at several points simultaneously. On the beach below the Vulcan volcano and near Raluana Point a mixed Australian company, supported by mortars and machine guns, held up the 3rd Battalion for several hours; elsewhere, on unoccupied stretches, the Japanese came ashore almost without loss and pushed inland, outflanking the Australian positions. Early in the morning they took Lakunai airfield, and then Vunakanau.

Scanlan had no reserves, communications were breaking down, and the outflanking threatened to cut off every company. He judged the situation hopeless and issued the order remembered as “every man for himself”: the men were to withdraw in small groups into the jungle along the northern and southern coasts of the Gazelle Peninsula. Australian sources state that 28 men of Lark Force were killed on 23 January. According to their own figures, the Japanese lost 16 killed and 49 wounded.

On New Ireland the landing began at the same time, at around 2.30 a.m. Japanese naval infantry landed at three points around Kavieng. The commandos fought a brief action for the airfield, demolished what they could and withdrew inland to the Sook River. Some of them later tried to escape in a small vessel but were captured at the beginning of February.

The jungle and Tol

Lark Force was not prepared for a retreat. The men who fled into the jungle had no food, maps or medicines, and malaria soon began to decimate them. The Japanese dropped leaflets telling them that they would find neither food nor a way of escape on the island and would starve to death if they did not surrender. On 9 February they landed at Gasmata on the south coast, cutting off the route to the west. Over the following weeks more than a thousand Australians were taken prisoner; Scanlan too surrendered in February.

Around 4 February, at the Tol and Waitavalo plantations on Wide Bay, soldiers of the 144th Regiment murdered some 160 prisoners. According to the findings of an Australian court of inquiry, they were led in small groups into the jungle and bayoneted or shot; a few survived by feigning death, and their accounts formed the basis of the investigation. Responsibility was attributed to Colonel Kusunose, who starved himself to death at the end of 1946 before he could be brought to trial.

Few were saved. The Papuan administration and officers from New Guinea organised rescue operations on their own initiative: in March and April the vessel Lakatoi picked up stragglers from the south coast and the Witu Islands, and the yacht Laurabada from Palmalmal. According to the Australian War Memorial, some 400 men got away from New Britain; according to other tallies, about 450 soldiers and civilians.

The Solomon Islands

Some chronologies state under 25 January that the Japanese entered the Solomon Islands. That did not happen in January 1942. On 22 January Japanese aircraft bombed Tulagi for the first time; it was the seat of the British Resident Commissioner of the Solomon Islands Protectorate, and the neighbouring islet of Gavutu was a base for Australian flying boats. The raids then became more and more frequent. European civilians were evacuated to Australia in February, and the Resident Commissioner, William Marchant, moved to Malaita, from where he kept the coastwatchers’ network in contact. The first Japanese landings in the archipelago came only later: the Japanese occupied Buka and Bougainville, which politically belonged to the Australian mandate of New Guinea, between 9 March and early April, and took Tulagi on 3 May 1942, in the operation that led to the Battle of the Coral Sea.

Significance

Rabaul was one of Japan’s cheapest victories of the war. In the weeks in which Japanese forces were invading the Dutch East Indies and, in Malaya, closing in on Singapore, they also pushed the reach of their air power more than a thousand kilometres south, over New Guinea and the Coral Sea. The Japanese quickly rebuilt the airfields, in time built more, and turned Rabaul into a fortress with tens of thousands of troops, the headquarters of the 8th Fleet and the 8th Area Army. From here in 1942 came the landings at Lae and Salamaua, the expedition against Port Moresby that ended in the Battle of the Coral Sea, the march across the mountains towards Kokoda, and the supplies for the troops fighting on Guadalcanal. It was from Rabaul, in April 1943, that Yamamoto directed his last air offensive.

The Allies eventually concluded that an assault on the fortress would cost too much. In Operation Cartwheel the forces of Douglas MacArthur and the US Navy encircled Rabaul with a ring of bases on New Guinea, in the Solomon Islands and in the Admiralty Islands, and air power destroyed its value as a fleet base. The garrison, still tens of thousands strong, survived in isolation until Japan’s surrender in 1945.

The heaviest price was paid by the prisoners. In June 1942 the Japanese separated the officers and the nurses, who were shipped to Japan and survived the war. The remaining men of Lark Force and the civilians from Rabaul were loaded aboard the Montevideo Maru, bound for Hainan. On 1 July 1942, off Luzon, she was sunk by an American submarine whose crew did not know she was carrying prisoners. According to the Australian War Memorial, 1,053 Australians, military and civilian, were killed; it was the greatest single maritime disaster in Australia’s history. The wreck was found only in 2023, at a depth of more than four kilometres.