The landing at Lae and the drop on Nadzab

At dawn on 4 September 1943, twenty minutes after sunrise, the first landing craft grounded on two beaches on the shore of the Huon Gulf, between about fifteen and thirty kilometres east of Lae. Out of them came the soldiers of Major General George Wootten’s Australian 9th Division – veterans of the siege of Tobruk and the battles of El Alamein. The next day, 5 September, hundreds of parachutes blossomed over the valley of the Markham river: the American 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment seized, without a fight, the old landing ground at Nadzab, to which transport aircraft flew in the Australian 7th Division over the following days. The two operations, under the common code name Postern, had a single aim: to catch the main Japanese base on the north-east coast of New Guinea in a pincer.

Popular war chronologies sum up the whole month in a single sentence: the 503rd Regiment “under the command of General Douglas MacArthur” lands at Nadzab, Lae passes into Australian hands, and the Australians take Salamaua. These events need to be separated. The Australian 9th Division landed on the coast on 4 September; the paratroopers jumped on Nadzab a day later, on 5 September; Salamaua fell on 11 September, and Lae only on 16 September. Nor was the regiment directly under MacArthur’s command – the Allied Commander-in-Chief in the South West Pacific watched the jump from a bomber, while the 503rd was commanded by Colonel Kenneth Kinsler.

Background: Lae, Salamaua and the Postern plan

The Japanese had taken Lae and Salamaua in March 1942. Lae, formerly a port serving the goldfields inland, became a forward air base and, after the defeats at Port Moresby and Buna, the mainstay of the Japanese defence on the shores of the Huon Gulf. In January 1943 the Japanese brought in reinforcements and tried to use it as a springboard to take the Australian base at Wau, but the Battle of Wau ended in their retreat. The next convoy, carrying the 51st Division, was destroyed from the air in March in the Battle of the Bismarck Sea. From then on the Japanese command no longer risked convoys to Lae; reinforcements were landed further west, at Wewak and Hansa Bay, and moved forward by barge or submarine.

The strategic framework was set by Operation Cartwheel – the twin offensive by MacArthur in New Guinea and Admiral Halsey in the Solomon Islands against the great Japanese base at Rabaul. A directive from MacArthur’s headquarters of 6 May 1943 envisaged three steps: the seizure of Woodlark and Kiriwina islands (which took place at the end of June), the capture of the Lae–Salamaua–Finschhafen–Madang area, and the occupation of western New Britain. The second task went to General Thomas Blamey’s New Guinea Force – overwhelmingly Australian. The land offensive in New Guinea in 1943 thus rested once again on the shoulders of the Australian Army.

Blamey’s plan was bold. Instead of fighting through the jungle from the Salamaua side, he wanted to strike Lae from two directions at once: the 9th Division would come by sea and land east of the town, while Major General George Vasey’s 7th Division would reach the Markham valley west of it by air. The original idea had been to move a single brigade along the coast in small boats; Blamey considered this too risky under the noses of the Japanese airfields, and in May he obtained approval to use the whole division and the large landing ships of Rear Admiral Daniel Barbey’s VII Amphibious Force. The whole operation was overseen on the spot by the commander of I Corps, Lieutenant General Edmund Herring.

Deception was the key. Since the spring the Australians of the 3rd Division and the Americans who had landed at Nassau Bay on 30 June had kept up constant pressure on the Japanese positions around Salamaua. The commander of the Japanese Eighteenth Army, Lieutenant General Hatazō Adachi, and the commander of the 51st Division, Lieutenant General Hidemitsu Nakano, judged Salamaua to be under direct threat and kept moving more battalions there – at the expense of the Lae garrison. Allied intelligence estimated that some 7,250 soldiers remained in Lae itself, just over 5,000 of them in combat units.

The landing of 4 September

For the Australian Army this was the first major amphibious landing since Gallipoli in 1915, and it had been six months in the preparing. The division had trained in jungle warfare on the Atherton Tableland in Queensland and practised landings near Cairns, together with the US 2nd Engineer Special Brigade, which crewed the small landing craft. In July and August the units were moved to Milne Bay. Wootten deliberately chose beaches beyond the range of the Japanese artillery at Lae: Red Beach, east of the mouth of the Buso river, about 15 kilometres from the town, and Yellow Beach two kilometres further on. He wanted to land at night, but the night of 3–4 September was moonless and Barbey feared he would miss the right beaches. H-hour was therefore set for 6.30 a.m.

Brigadier Victor Windeyer’s 20th Brigade sailed from Milne Bay on 2 September. The first waves travelled in fast transports converted from old destroyers, the rest in infantry and tank landing ships (LCIs and LSTs). The landing was preceded by a short bombardment from five American destroyers. No one opposed them on the shore – the few Japanese outposts abandoned their positions. The air threat, however, proved dangerous. As the fifth wave was approaching Red Beach, several fighters and bombers attacked the landing craft; a bomb hit LCI-339, which burned out on the beach, and a near miss tore open the side of LCI-341. Eight Australians were killed, among them the commanding officer of the 2/23rd Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel R. E. Wall, and 45 were wounded.

Even so, some 8,000 men came ashore within four hours. The 2/13th Battalion secured Yellow Beach and the eastern flank, the 2/15th and 2/17th Red Beach and the crossing of the Buso, and behind the 20th Brigade landed the 26th Brigade, which immediately set off westwards. Engineers laid steel mesh on the sand, felled trees and built roads. In the afternoon some seventy Japanese aircraft came over the gulf to attack more LSTs heading for Red Beach. Although several dozen P-38 fighters were sent to intercept, two ships were badly damaged; on LST-471, hit by an aerial torpedo, 43 Americans and Australians were killed, including 34 commandos of the 2/4th Independent Company. In the afternoon the Japanese also bombed the beach itself, blowing up an ammunition dump. In the evening and during the night of 5–6 September the division’s reserve, the 24th Brigade, came ashore.

The drop on Nadzab, 5 September

The second arm of the pincer was even more innovative. The 7th Division, concentrated at Port Moresby, could neither cross the mountains nor reach the Markham valley by sea – it had to be flown in. That required an airfield. The choice fell on Nadzab, a disused pre-war landing ground in a wide valley covered with tall kunai grass, several dozen kilometres west of Lae. It was to be seized by American paratroopers – the whole 503rd Regiment, which MacArthur had agreed to commit at Blamey’s request in August. The date was set by the commander of the Fifth Air Force, General George Kenney, on the basis of forecasts by two teams of meteorologists: the weather was to be good over New Guinea and bad over the Japanese airfields on New Britain.

On the morning of 5 September fog and rain shrouded the airfields around Port Moresby, but at about 7.30, as forecast, they began to clear. A formation of 302 aircraft from eight airfields assembled over Tsili Tsili and flew along the valley of the Watut and then the Markham. In the lead were B-25 bombers, which “cleaned up” the drop zones with fragmentation bombs and machine-gun fire; behind them seven A-20s laid smoke screens. At 10.22 a.m. paratroopers began jumping from 79 C-47s; each aircraft emptied in ten seconds, and the whole regiment was in the air within four and a half minutes. At the same time B-24 and B-17 bombers were bombing Japanese positions at Heath’s Plantation, halfway to Lae.

MacArthur, Kenney and Vasey watched the jump from three separate B-17s. Kenney recalled in his memoirs that when he announced he would fly up to watch “his kids”, MacArthur replied that he would come too, because they were his kids as well. The Commander-in-Chief was afterwards awarded the Air Medal for “personally leading” the paratroopers. There were no Japanese on the ground. Three paratroopers were killed during the jump (two when their parachutes failed to open, the third in a fall from a tree), and 33 suffered minor injuries. The same day a party of Australian gunners from the 2/4th Field Regiment also jumped with two dismantled 25-pounder guns; one was assembled and made ready to fire in two and a half hours, the other only after three days of searching for missing parts in the tall grass. From the direction of Tsili Tsili came Australian pioneers and engineers, who crossed the Markham and, together with the Americans and local carriers, cleared the grass for an airstrip.

The race for Lae

On 6 September the first aircraft landed on the new strip at Nadzab, but bad weather over the Owen Stanley Range delayed the airlift of the infantry. Early on the morning of 7 September the bloodiest accident of the whole operation occurred at Jackson’s airfield near Port Moresby: a B-24 taking off fully loaded with fuel and bombs clipped a tree at the end of the runway, crashed and exploded, showering burning fuel over trucks carrying men of the Australian 2/33rd Battalion. The entire eleven-man American crew and 59 Australians were killed and 92 injured – roughly half of all the Allied dead in the Nadzab operation. The battalion nevertheless flew out as planned. The remaining brigades of the 7th Division landed at Nadzab as the weather improved and set off east along the Markham valley towards Lae.

The 9th Division, meanwhile, was advancing along the coast with two brigades – the 24th by the sea, the 26th a little inland – while the 20th Brigade guarded the beachhead. Japanese resistance was generally weak, but nature proved an obstacle: jungle, swamps and several fast rivers that turned into torrents once the heavy rains began. On 6 September a Japanese company attacked the 2/23rd Battalion on the Buiem river and held up the advance for several days. Worst of all was the Busu, in places several hundred metres wide and swollen after three days of rain. On 9 September Lieutenant Colonel Colin Norman’s 2/28th Battalion forced it at the mouth, in extended order and under fire from the far bank, without boats or bridging equipment. Thirteen soldiers drowned, and dozens were swept away by the current. The 26th Brigade inland crossed the Busu only on 14 September, after building a bridge under fire.

The Japanese quickly realised that they were in danger of being surrounded. On 11 September Australians of Major General Edward Milford’s 5th Division occupied Salamaua, which had been abandoned – Adachi had already ordered Nakano to evacuate it and move the troops to Lae by barge and on foot. But Lae itself was also to be given up: even before the Busu was forced, Nakano had issued orders for a retreat northwards across the mountains of the Huon Peninsula. The Australians captured a copy on 13 September and tried to cut off the retreating columns, but managed only to harass them on the track in the Markham valley.

The race for the town, in which the 9th Division still seemed the favourite on 15 September, was won by the 7th Division. Brigadier Kenneth Eather’s 25th Brigade fought hard actions near Jensen’s and Heath’s plantations, and on the morning of 16 September its battalions entered Lae without meeting any further resistance – in the afternoon the 2/31st Battalion took the town’s airfield. The greater danger at that point came from their allies: American aircraft strafed the advancing Australians, and Vasey sent a message in clear that “only the bombers of the Fifth Air Force” were preventing him from entering Lae; the 9th Division’s artillery also shelled them until the news reached Wootten. The leading troops of the 9th Division, which had taken the airfield at Malahang the day before, arrived not long afterwards; some accounts date their entry to 17 September. The town was in ruins and almost empty.

The escape across the Saruwaged and the losses

Most of the Japanese garrison – some 9,000 men by Australian estimates – slipped out of the pincer. The columns of the 51st Division set off across the Saruwaged Range, which rises to more than 4,000 metres, towards the north coast of the peninsula. The march, without roads, in cold and rain and with food running out, lasted about a month; the soldiers abandoned their artillery, machine guns and equipment, and according to the Australian official history between 600 and 1,000 of them died on the way. Those who survived reached the sea in mid-October as the exhausted, largely sick remnants of a division.

Allied losses were moderate for an operation of this scale. According to the Australian official history, the 9th Division lost 77 killed, 397 wounded and 73 missing (other tallies give more than 500 casualties in all and up to 115 killed), and the 7th Division, between 5 and 19 September, 38 killed and 104 wounded, not counting the victims of the accident at Jackson’s airfield. Japanese losses in the fighting for Lae were estimated at about 2,200 men, and in the Salamaua–Lae campaign from April to September at more than 8,000 killed and wounded. These figures come from Allied documents and should be treated as approximate.

Significance

Operation Postern was one of the most successful combined operations in the Pacific in 1943. In twelve days the Australians and Americans, combining an amphibious landing, a parachute drop and the airlift of an entire division, took from the Japanese two bases that had been fought over for a year and a half. The drop on Nadzab – after the chaotic drops during the invasion of Sicily – was regarded as a textbook example of the use of airborne troops and influenced American thinking about this arm. For the Australian Army the landing at Lae was proof that after years of fighting in the desert and the jungle it could also carry out a major amphibious operation. Yet for all its success, the most important objective was not achieved: the destruction of the 51st Division. The Japanese escaped across the mountains, albeit at the cost of their equipment and their fighting capacity.

The capture of Lae opened the way further for the Allies. As early as 22 September the 9th Division’s 20th Brigade landed near Finschhafen, at the eastern tip of the Huon Peninsula, on the Vitiaz Strait separating New Guinea from New Britain. The 7th Division advanced inland along the Markham valley and the valley of the Ramu – on 19 September its commandos took Kaiapit – and then into the Finisterre Range, towards Madang. Lae and Nadzab became large bases: Nadzab grew into one of the main Allied airfields in New Guinea, from which the Fifth Air Force could reach Wewak and Rabaul.

The consequences on the Japanese side were even more important. The loss of Lae and Salamaua convinced Imperial General Headquarters that the South Pacific front was overextended. At the end of September 1943 Tokyo drew a new “absolute” defence zone, running through western New Guinea, the Carolines and the Marianas; everything in front of it – including Rabaul and eastern New Guinea – was henceforth merely to delay the Allies for as long as possible. The Japanese forces in New Guinea went over to a defensive from which they would never emerge. For MacArthur, Lae was the first big step on a road that led along the New Guinea coast towards the Philippines.