The landing at Cape Gloucester

On Boxing Day 1943, just after dawn, American and Australian cruisers opened fire on the western end of New Britain. Some tens of minutes later, at about 7.45 a.m., the first landing craft grounded on the beaches of Borgen Bay, a few kilometres south-east of Cape Gloucester. Ashore went the men of the 1st Marine Division – veterans of Guadalcanal going into battle again for the first time in a year. The operation was code-named Backhander and formed the western arm of the Allied pincers closing around Rabaul, the main Japanese stronghold in the South-West Pacific.

Why the Allies went to New Britain

The plan for Operation Cartwheel, adopted in the spring of 1943, provided for the forces of General Douglas MacArthur to advance along the coast of New Guinea and those of Admiral William Halsey through the Solomon Islands until the two groupings had ringed Rabaul. By the autumn the western arm had made a great stride forward: in September the Australians captured Lae and a few days later landed at Finschhafen on the Huon Peninsula. Facing that peninsula, across the Vitiaz and Dampier Straits, lay the western end of New Britain. As long as the Japanese held it, every Allied convoy sailing further west, towards Madang and Wewak, had to pass under their flank.

On 22 September 1943 MacArthur ordered the seizure of the western part of the island (Operation Dexterity). The task went to the Alamo Force of General Walter Krueger – in practice the headquarters of the US Sixth Army. The main objective was the two Japanese airfields at Cape Gloucester, built in 1942 on the site of a pre-war landing ground. Not everyone thought the operation necessary. General George Kenney, MacArthur’s air commander, argued that by the time the airfields had been developed the front would have moved on anyway. The army and navy commanders, however, concluded that without control of the straits further operations in New Guinea could not be supplied safely. At the same time an air offensive was under way against Rabaul itself: from October the base was bombed by Kenney’s aircraft, and in November carriers struck it to cover the landing on Bougainville.

The first step on New Britain was taken on 15 December, when the reinforced 112th Cavalry Regiment, fighting dismounted, landed at Arawe on the island’s south coast. It was to block the route by which the Japanese could move reinforcements from east to west and to draw their attention away from Cape Gloucester. One of the groups approaching in rubber boats was shot to pieces from the shore, but the main landing succeeded and the beachhead survived the Japanese air raids that followed.

The Marines against Matsuda’s detachment

The 1st Marine Division was commanded by General William Rupertus, who in 1942 had been deputy to General Alexander Vandegrift on Guadalcanal. After that campaign the division had rested and been brought back up to strength in Australia, and in the summer and autumn of 1943 it moved to New Guinea. It practised landings around Milne Bay, Cape Sudest and Goodenough Island, although almost all the amphibious equipment was then committed on the Huon Peninsula. A drop by the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment near the airfields was originally planned as well, but it was abandoned for fear of congestion on the departure airfields and bad weather; the seaborne echelon was strengthened instead. The 7th Marines were assigned to the first assault, followed by the 1st Marines, while the 5th Marines were to remain aboard ship as a reserve that Krueger kept at his own disposal.

On the other side stood the detachment of General Iwao Matsuda – a group made up chiefly of the 65th Brigade and the 53rd and 141st Infantry Regiments, subordinate to the 17th Division, which had arrived on New Britain from China in the autumn of 1943. According to the American official histories there were about 3,900 Japanese soldiers in the area of the cape just before the landing. The airfields were defended by a battalion of the 53rd Regiment with artillery support, while the 141st Regiment was far to the south. The Japanese had fortified above all the airfields themselves and their immediate approaches; they left the swampy beaches of Borgen Bay almost undefended, counting on holding a few hills and the tracks along which they would move their reserves. Matsuda’s men were weakened by disease and malnutrition, because Allied aircraft and PT boats were sinking the barges that supplied them from Rabaul. All Japanese forces in the Bismarck Archipelago were commanded from Rabaul by General Hitoshi Imamura, commander of the Eighth Area Army.

For several weeks before the landing American and Australian aircraft bombed the area around the cape; from November neither airfield was usable. According to American studies more than 1,800 sorties were flown here and nearly 4,000 tons of bombs dropped. Reconnaissance patrols of Marines, Alamo Scouts and Australian coastwatchers were also put ashore from small craft.

The landing of 26 December

The troops embarked on Christmas Day at Oro Bay and at Cape Cretin near Finschhafen. The convoy of Task Force 76 under Rear Admiral Daniel Barbey – fast transports converted from destroyers, several dozen tank landing ships (LSTs) and smaller vessels – passed through the Vitiaz Strait by night under the cover of American and Australian cruisers and destroyers commanded by the British Rear Admiral Victor Crutchley. A Japanese reconnaissance aircraft spotted it on the way, but the commander of the South-East Area Fleet at Rabaul, Vice Admiral Jin’ichi Kusaka, concluded that it was carrying reinforcements to Arawe and sent his aircraft there in the morning.

At 6 a.m. the cruisers began shelling the airfields, the beaches and a hill the Americans called Target Hill. Then came B-24 and B-25 bombers, and finally landing craft converted into rocket launchers raked the edge of the jungle. The main landing went in on two beaches designated Yellow 1 and Yellow 2 on Borgen Bay, about 8 kilometres from the airfields. Smoke from the bombardment shrouded the shore and some of the boats came in at the wrong place, but nobody defended the beaches themselves. At the same time a battalion of the 1st Marines landed on the other side of the peninsula, at Green Beach near Tauali, to cut the coastal track; there, too, the Japanese had abandoned their positions before the landing.

The real enemy turned out to be the terrain. Immediately behind the narrow beach began mangrove swamp and dense rainforest. Columns of Marines, Sherman tanks and lorries had to crowd onto a single coastal track, which the downpour quickly turned to mud. The beaches became jammed. Even so, according to American studies, by evening about 13,000 men and more than 7,000 tons of equipment had been landed; some of the supplies came ashore loaded on lorries, which drove off the landing ships and went back aboard empty.

In the afternoon, at about 2.30 p.m., Japanese aircraft that had searched in vain for a target at Arawe that morning arrived over the beaches. Bombs struck the Fletcher-class destroyer USS Brownson; she sank within about a quarter of an hour, and 108 of her crew were killed. The destroyers Shaw and Mugford were also damaged. The Japanese lost many aircraft in these attacks, shot down by fighters and by the ships’ anti-aircraft guns, although the sources differ on the number. On land, a battalion of the 53rd Regiment that had hurried up from the direction of Nakarop attacked the positions of the 7th Marines on the edge of the beachhead through the evening and night. The attack was repulsed, and the artillery of the 11th Marines had managed to get ashore that same day.

The “green inferno” and the capture of the airfield

The next day the 1st Marines set off north-west along the coast and after a few kilometres ran into a well-concealed Japanese position with anti-tank and field guns, which the Marines named Hell’s Point. It was broken on 28 December with tank support; according to the Marine Corps monograph more than 260 Japanese and 9 Marines were killed there, and 36 Marines were wounded. The same day a new supply beach, Blue Beach, was opened closer to the front, because transport from the Yellow beaches was bogging down in the mud. The roads were repaired by the navy’s construction battalions, the Seabees.

The weather was equally merciless to both sides. December and January are the height of the north-west monsoon on this coast: the downpour after the landing went on without a break for several days, and storms kept returning for weeks afterwards. One officer remembered rain that was “like a waterfall pouring down on you without end”. Foxholes flooded, clothing and boots rotted, and trees undermined by the rain sometimes fell onto positions and killed sleeping men. The official Marine Corps monograph on the fighting is entitled Cape Gloucester: The Green Inferno, and “the green inferno” later became a common name for the whole campaign. By the end of January more than a thousand Marines had been evacuated because of disease and non-battle injuries.

On 29 December the reserve 5th Marines came ashore. Together with the 1st Marines they outflanked the Japanese positions from the south-west and broke through the defences that same day. On 30 December the Marines took both airfields, and the next day, New Year’s Eve, General Rupertus had the American flag raised beside the wreck of a Japanese bomber on the larger of the strips. He sent Krueger a message presenting him with the entire Cape Gloucester airfield “as an early New Year’s present”. Japanese air raids on the beachhead had already ceased on 29 December, when the weather worsened and American air power shifted the weight of its attacks to Rabaul.

On the west coast, near Tauali, the battalion from Green Beach was meanwhile beating off smaller attacks. The strongest came before dawn on 30 December, in darkness and torrential rain: two companies of the 53rd Regiment assaulted the Marine positions for five hours. According to American figures 89 Japanese and 6 Americans were killed.

Place in the war

The capture of the airfields did not end the fighting. In the first half of January 1944 the Marines widened the beachhead southwards, towards Borgen Bay, to push back the Japanese artillery; they fought hard battles at a stream they named Suicide Creek, for Aogiri Ridge and finally for Hill 660, taken on 16 January. Matsuda then withdrew the remnants of his forces eastwards. According to American figures the operation cost the Americans about 310 killed and more than 1,000 wounded, and the Japanese more than 2,000 killed. On 2 January 1944 Krueger’s forces also landed at Saidor in New Guinea, and in February patrols from Cape Gloucester and Arawe met in the interior of the island. The western part of New Britain and both straits were in Allied hands.

The value of the whole operation is still questioned. The airfield at the cape never became an important base, and the American naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison called the operation “a waste of time and effort”. Others point out that the runway proved useful during the landings in the Admiralty Islands in February 1944 and as an emergency field for aircraft damaged over Rabaul and Kavieng. Above all, though, the landing at Cape Gloucester completed the western arm of Operation Cartwheel. As early as the summer of 1943 the American Chiefs of Staff had decided that Rabaul need not be stormed: it was enough to surround it and leave it cut off. The Japanese garrison of the fortress, estimated at anywhere from about 70,000 to more than 100,000 men, survived in this way until the end of the war without playing any further part, while MacArthur was free to send his forces further west, along the coast of New Guinea, towards the Philippines.