The landing at Finschhafen

Before dawn on 22 September 1943, less than a week after the fall of Lae, ships of the US VII Amphibious Force lay off the eastern coast of the Huon Peninsula in New Guinea. After a short bombardment by destroyers lasting just eleven minutes, in darkness and in smoke pressed down to the ground by low cloud, boats carrying men of Brigadier Victor Windeyer’s Australian 20th Brigade headed for the shore. Their objective was Finschhafen – a small port and airstrip some ten kilometres south of the landing beach. This time, unlike at Lae, the Japanese were waiting on the beach. It was the first opposed landing by Australian troops since the landing at Anzac Cove at Gallipoli in 1915.

The line found in popular chronologies – the Australians land at Finschhafen, and the Japanese fight on well into October – is true but modest. Finschhafen itself fell on 2 October; then came a major Japanese counter-offensive in mid-October, and the fighting for the Sattelberg massif, which dominates the area, and for the Wareo plateau dragged on until December.

Why Finschhafen

The Huon Peninsula juts out from north-eastern New Guinea towards New Britain. Whoever held it controlled the Vitiaz Strait and the Dampier Strait – the narrow passages between the Solomon Sea and the Bismarck Sea. For the Allies, within Operation Cartwheel, it was the key to further leaps: to the western coast of New Britain and along the northern coast of New Guinea. Finschhafen, a former centre of the German colony, with Langemak Bay and several anchorages, could become a base for landing craft and aircraft.

A plan to take Finschhafen had existed since August, but it had been assumed that its time would come a few weeks after the capture of Lae. The landing at Lae and the leap to Nadzab, however, went faster than expected – the capture of Lae was complete by 16 September. That same day General Douglas MacArthur ordered Finschhafen to be taken as quickly as possible, and the following day, at a conference in Port Moresby, he and General Thomas Blamey chose a seaborne landing by one brigade of the 9th Division. Rear Admiral Daniel Barbey, commander of the VII Amphibious Force, had originally counted on a four-week pause; under pressure from MacArthur he agreed to a few days. The 20th Brigade was chosen – relatively rested and experienced in amphibious landings since 4 September. The date, first set for 21 September, was put back by a day at Windeyer’s request.

The plan’s most serious weakness was intelligence. The head of intelligence at MacArthur’s headquarters, Brigadier General Charles Willoughby, regarded Finschhafen as a mere staging point and, after the fall of Lae, lowered his estimate of its garrison to around 350 men. Blamey’s intelligence spoke of 3,000, the staff of I Corps of 1,800. In reality there were about 5,000 Japanese in the area. The commander of the Japanese Eighteenth Army, Lieutenant General Hatazō Adachi, understood the importance of the peninsula: as early as August he had sent the 80th Infantry Regiment of the 20th Division there and entrusted its defence to Major General Eizō Yamada, and after the landing at Lae the main body of Lieutenant General Shigeru Katagiri’s 20th Division set out from Madang towards Finschhafen. Until it arrived, Yamada was to hold the hills around Sattelberg and prepare a counter-attack.

The landing on Scarlet Beach

The landing site was chosen north of Finschhafen, at the mouth of the Song River, because Japanese defences were expected to face south, towards the Australians advancing from Lae; it also avoided having to cross the Mape River. The beach was named Scarlet so that it would not be confused with Red Beach at Lae. The whole force numbered about 5,300 men with supplies for 15 days. The first wave – two companies each from the 2/13th and 2/17th Battalions – was carried in plywood boats lowered from four fast transports; the following waves came in LCI, LST and LCT landing ships and in boats of the US 532nd Engineer Regiment.

Darkness and smoke took their toll. Almost all the boats of the first wave veered to the left and landed in Siki Cove and near Arndt Point rather than on the designated beach – only three of the sixteen reached Scarlet. The beach and the cove turned out to be covered by log-and-earth bunkers linked by shallow trenches and manned by about 300 Japanese soldiers. Paradoxically, the mistake saved many lives, because the flimsy boats did not run into the heaviest fire, but it mixed up the companies and delayed the capture of the shore. The second wave, in rampless LCIs from which the infantry descended by gangways, therefore came in under fire from bunkers that should already have been taken. Among those killed that morning was the American officer directing traffic on the beach, Lieutenant Commander John Band.

The Australians, however, quickly regrouped. Platoons cleared the bunkers with grenades, companies pushed inland, and in the afternoon the 2/15th Battalion attacked Katika, a hill crossed by the track to Sattelberg, where the Japanese put up their strongest resistance. By evening the day’s objectives had been reached. Around 12.40 p.m. Japanese aircraft caught the landing ships and destroyers already returning towards Buna, but they were intercepted by American fighters and no ship was hit; air raids on the beachhead, on the other hand, were repeated almost daily from then on and killed many. On the first day the Australians lost 20 killed and 65 wounded, and nine missing who, as it later turned out, had also been killed or wounded.

On to Finschhafen

On 23 September the 2/15th Battalion moved south and reached the Bumi River. Its southern bank was held by Japanese naval infantry, with wire entanglements and positions on a commanding rise. The 2/13th Battalion outflanked them from the west across steep, jungle-covered slopes and crossed the river waist-deep under fire, while the 2/15th took the hill above the crossing with the bayonet, in places climbing on all fours. Japanese bombers repeatedly attacked the rear areas; one raid in these days, on the jetty and airstrip area at Finschhafen, killed 14 men of the 2/3rd Field Company of engineers alone.

Windeyer grew increasingly worried. He had at the same time to advance on Finschhafen and to guard the beachhead against the Japanese gathering around Sattelberg – an old Lutheran mission on a summit rising to nearly a thousand metres. On 27 September he asked for another battalion and tanks. Willoughby still insisted on his 350 Japanese, but MacArthur agreed to send the 2/43rd Battalion, which reached Scarlet Beach on 29–30 September. This allowed the whole 20th Brigade to be thrown against the town. After hard fighting for the Kakakog ridge and the crossing of Ilebbe Creek, supported on 1 October by an air strike and artillery fire, the Japanese began to withdraw. On 2 October the 2/17th Battalion crossed the Bumi unopposed, and by evening Finschhafen was in Australian hands. Meanwhile the 22nd Militia Battalion had been marching from Lae over the mountains and along the coast; it covered about 80 kilometres in ten days and joined up with the 20th Brigade.

In the fighting between 22 September and 2 October the brigade lost 73 killed and 276 wounded (285 wounded according to another tally), and the US 532nd Engineer Regiment eight killed and about 42 wounded. Australian documents described Japanese losses as heavy, without a reliable figure.

The Japanese counter-attack and Sattelberg

The capture of the town did not end the fighting – the hardest battles still lay ahead of the Australians. The intelligence error and the delay in sending reinforcements had given the Japanese time to bring up the 20th Division and regain the initiative. During the night of 16–17 October they struck the beachhead from three directions: from the north; from the sea, with a party of landing barges that was broken up by American PT boats and machine guns on the beach; and in the centre, where two infantry regiments broke through as far as Siki Cove and cut off some of the Australian positions, which from then on had to be supplied by air drops. The attack, however, was poorly coordinated and petered out by 24 October. Major General George Wootten, the 9th Division’s commander, who had arrived at Finschhafen with the 24th Brigade on 10–11 October, soon had the whole division under him, together with Matilda tanks.

In November the Australians advanced on Sattelberg. The 26th Brigade took the massif on 25 November, and Sergeant Tom Derrick of the 2/48th Battalion was awarded the Victoria Cross for the assault on the last Japanese positions. At the beginning of December the Wareo plateau fell, and in January 1944 the Australians reached Sio along the coast, while the Americans landed at Saidor, behind the retreating 20th Division.

Significance

The landing at Finschhafen opened the Huon Peninsula campaign – one of the longest and hardest struggles fought by the Australian Army in the war. MacArthur’s swift decision after the fall of Lae made it possible to seize the port before the Japanese could reinforce it, but the intelligence error at headquarters, which for a week counted the enemy in hundreds rather than thousands, meant that a single brigade had to fight an equal force for several weeks. The disputes over reinforcements also exposed tensions between the Australian commanders and MacArthur’s staff that would recur until the end of the war in New Guinea.

Finschhafen became one of the main Allied bases in New Guinea – with airfields, a port and depots from which further landings were launched. Possession of the Huon Peninsula gave the Allies control of the Vitiaz and Dampier Straits and made possible the landing on the western tip of New Britain in December 1943. Together with the 7th Division’s advance through the Markham and Ramu valleys towards the Finisterre Range, it closed the chapter of the fighting for eastern New Guinea and opened the way west for MacArthur, along the coast of the island towards the Philippines. Adachi’s Japanese Eighteenth Army, driven from one position after another, fell back towards Madang and Wewak, increasingly cut off from its supplies.