The landing at Segi Point

Before dawn on 21 June 1943 two American destroyers converted into fast transports, USS Dent and USS Waters, squeezed through the reef- and rock-strewn waters of Panga Bay at the south-eastern tip of New Georgia in the central Solomon Islands. Both ships scraped the bottom, but at 5.50 a.m. the first boats set off for the shore. On the beach at Segi Point (local name: Seghe) the men of two companies of the Marine Corps’ 4th Raider Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Michael S. Currin were greeted by bonfires lit by the man they had come for: the British coastwatcher Donald Kennedy. There were no Japanese. The landing, carried out nine days earlier than planned, was the first step in the American attack on New Georgia.

The Cartwheel plan and Operation Toenails

After the end of the fighting on Guadalcanal in February 1943, the Allies were looking for a way to defeat Rabaul, the main Japanese base in the South West Pacific. On 28 March the American Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded that it was still too early to capture this heavily defended stronghold and ordered that it first be encircled. From this directive grew the plan for Operation Cartwheel: General Douglas MacArthur’s forces were to advance along the coast of New Guinea, and Admiral William Halsey’s up the chain of the Solomon Islands. Japan could no longer easily reinforce its garrisons in New Guinea since its convoy carrying reinforcements had been destroyed in the Bismarck Sea in March. The two commanders agreed the details at a meeting in Brisbane in April 1943. In this operation Halsey was in command in an area that formally belonged to MacArthur, and in strategic matters he came under MacArthur’s direction.

Halsey’s first objective was New Georgia – more precisely, the Japanese airfield at Munda. The Japanese had built it in secret in the autumn of 1942, and it became operational in December. It lay about 300 kilometres from Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, so aircraft flying from Rabaul could refuel there on their way to Allied bases and back. From November 1942 the Americans bombed Munda from the air almost without pause and shelled it several times at night from cruisers, but each time the Japanese quickly repaired the runway. The airfield therefore had to be taken on land. In February 1943 Halsey’s forces occupied the Russell Islands without a fight, and these served as the springboard for the next leap.

The invasion of New Georgia was named Operation Toenails. The plan Halsey issued on 3 June provided for four simultaneous landings on 30 June: on Rendova island opposite Munda, at Viru Harbour, at Wickham Anchorage on neighbouring Vangunu island, and at Segi Point. The three smaller landings were to secure the supply route from Guadalcanal and the Russell Islands, and a fighter airfield was to be built at Segi Point. The amphibious force was commanded by Rear Admiral Richmond Turner, head of the South Pacific Amphibious Force, and the land forces by Major General John H. Hester, commander of the 43rd Infantry Division. The Eastern Landing Group, which was to take Segi, Viru and Wickham, was led by Rear Admiral George H. Fort.

On the Japanese side the defence was in the hands of Major General Noboru Sasaki’s South-Eastern Detachment, headquartered at Munda. According to American estimates, in June 1943 there were some 10,500 army and navy troops on New Georgia and about 9,000 on nearby Kolombangara. The Japanese army regarded the central Solomons as a lost position and preferred to make its stand further back, on Bougainville. The navy wanted to delay the Allied advance for as long as possible. The defence of the central Solomons was therefore entrusted to the navy, although army units formed the core of the New Georgia garrison, and the commanders of the two services cooperated with difficulty. Their air power was still dangerous, although it had suffered heavy losses in the spring, and in April Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto had been killed over Bougainville.

The coastwatcher at Segi

Donald Gilbert Kennedy, a New Zealander, had before the war been an official in the administration of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate. When the Japanese occupied the archipelago in 1942, he stayed behind as a captain in the local Defence Force and as one of the coastwatchers. This was a network of planters, officials, missionaries and islanders who, hidden on occupied islands, reported Japanese ships and aircraft by radio. In the summer of 1942 Kennedy moved his base to Segi, on the Marovo Lagoon. It lay beneath the route of Japanese aircraft flying from Rabaul to Guadalcanal, so his warnings gave the American fighters precious minutes. Kennedy also reported convoys passing through New Georgia Sound, which the Americans called “the Slot”, and rescued downed airmen. He let the islanders in every village know that the government was not leaving and that the Japanese would eventually be driven out.

Around his hideout Kennedy organised an armed band of local people. Its task was observation, not fighting, but Kennedy’s men several times wiped out Japanese patrols that came too close. On the night of 19 May 1943 they fought a skirmish with a Japanese boat on the Marovo Lagoon, and Kennedy was wounded in the thigh. From March Segi was also a base for American reconnaissance patrols: raiders flew in by Catalina flying boats and, with Kennedy’s scouts and carriers, explored the approaches to Munda, Viru and Kolombangara.

At the beginning of June 1943 the Japanese sent a detachment to south-eastern Vangunu to punish villages that were cooperating with the Allies. On 17 June about half a battalion of the 229th Infantry Regiment, commanded by a major whom American sources call Hara or Nagahara, set out from Viru Harbour towards Segi. On 20 June Kennedy reported that the Japanese were approaching and that he was withdrawing into the hills, and asked for help.

A change of plan

Losing Segi before the day of the landings would have deprived the Allies of the site for the planned airfield and of their best source of information on the island. Turner therefore changed the plan within a few hours. Originally the reinforced 1st Battalion, 103rd Infantry Regiment was to land at Segi on 30 June. Now the admiral sent the unit that was closest to hand: the 4th Raider Battalion, less N and Q Companies, stationed on Guadalcanal. At 8.30 p.m. that same day, 20 June, the loaded Dent and Waters put to sea.

The landing on 21 June was unopposed. The Japanese detachment was still near the village and plantation of Lambeti, on the route between Viru and Segi. The next day, 22 June, the fast transports Schley and Crosby brought in A and D Companies of the 103rd Infantry Regiment and a team that was to survey the site for the airfield. Despite several alarms, Japanese troops did not attack the beachhead. The calm ended only on 30 June, when Segi was hit by a series of air raids. That same day Seabees of the 20th Naval Construction Battalion began building the runway. They worked with bulldozers and excavators, at night by searchlight, and by 11 July the strip was ready for limited use as an emergency fighter field.

On 27 June Currin’s raiders set off in rubber boats towards Lambeti, intending to march from there through the jungle to Viru Harbour and take it from the landward side. Steep cliffs above the harbour ruled out a landing from the sea. The march through mud and swollen streams, interrupted by skirmishes, took longer than expected. The raiders reached the harbour only on the evening of 30 June and captured it the following day, supported by dive bombers (some accounts give the date as 30 June). On 4 July B Company of the 103rd Infantry Regiment took over the defence of Viru from them.

Did Operation Cartwheel begin at Segi?

Popular chronologies state that Operation Cartwheel began on 21 June with the landing of the 4th Raider Battalion at Segi Point. That is a simplification. The landing at Segi was an earlier, unplanned move, forced by the threat to Kennedy. Moreover, only two of the battalion’s companies landed at Segi, not the whole battalion. Operation Cartwheel began on 30 June 1943. On that day Halsey’s forces landed on Rendova, at Wickham Anchorage and at Viru Harbour, and MacArthur’s at Nassau Bay in New Guinea and on Woodlark and Kiriwina islands. Advance parties had already been put ashore on those islands a few days earlier. Segi Point was thus the first point on New Georgia taken by the Americans and the start of the campaign for the island. The chronologies’ observation that New Georgia was not secured until August is, on the other hand, accurate.

Significance

The operation at Segi was small and bloodless, but it saved Kennedy, his men and his network of informants, and gave the Allies a foothold at the eastern entrance to the Marovo Lagoon. The airfield at Segi later served fighters covering the fighting for Munda. The Japanese took the movements around Segi as a sign of a larger operation and brought their aircraft forward to the airfields around Buin on Bougainville. When, however, Allied activity seemed to slacken in the last days of June, Vice Admiral Jin’ichi Kusaka pulled the aircraft back to Rabaul. That is why the main landing on 30 June took the Japanese command by surprise.

The New Georgia campaign proved far harder than expected. In July the attack on Munda bogged down in the jungle, in the rain and under fire from well-concealed Japanese fortifications. The command had to commit further divisions and replace the commander of the land forces. The Munda airfield was taken only on 5 August, and the last Japanese units evacuated New Georgia at the end of August. Halsey did not repeat the mistake. In August his forces bypassed heavily garrisoned Kolombangara and landed further on, on Vella Lavella. Bypassing Japanese strongholds in this way soon became the Americans’ standard method in the Pacific. Kennedy ended the war as a major. Segi Point and the Marovo Lagoon went down in the history of the Pacific war as an example of how much depended on the men left behind enemy lines and on the islanders who worked with them.