The landing on Bougainville

At dawn on 1 November 1943 American transports hove to in Empress Augusta Bay, on the west coast of Bougainville Island – the largest island of the Solomon Islands archipelago. By about half past seven the first wave of the 3rd Marine Division was ashore on twelve stretches of beach on either side of Cape Torokina. There were few Japanese here, so by midday the beachhead was in American hands, and by evening most of the men and supplies had been unloaded from the transports. The landing opened a campaign that was to give the Allies airfields within range of the main Japanese base at Rabaul – and fighting that on the island itself went on until Japan’s surrender in August 1945.

Goodtime or Cherryblossom

War chronologies record under this date that US Marines landed on Bougainville “as part of Operation Goodtime”. The operation’s name there is a confusion. The code name Goodtime belonged to the landing on the nearby Treasury Islands, carried out on 27 October 1943 mainly by New Zealanders. In American plans the landing at Empress Augusta Bay was code-named Cherryblossom (also written Cherry Blossom). Both operations, however, together with the diversionary raid on Choiseul, were parts of a single plan: the Treasury Islands and Cape Torokina were taken by ships of Rear Admiral Theodore Wilkinson’s III Amphibious Force, and the Choiseul raid was prepared by the staff of I Marine Amphibious Corps. The confusion is therefore easy to understand.

The other statement in the same entry is accurate: the fighting on Bougainville did not end until the end of the war. The last Japanese soldiers on the island surrendered only on 21 August 1945, several days after the Emperor announced Japan’s surrender.

The road to Bougainville

Bougainville, an island some 200 kilometres long, covered in jungle and dominated by volcanic mountains, lies at the north-western end of the Solomons chain. Before the war it belonged administratively to the Australian Territory of New Guinea. The Japanese occupied it in the spring of 1942 and built several airfields there: at Kahili and Buin in the south, at Kieta in the east, and on Buka island and the Bonis peninsula in the north. It was over Bougainville that Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was killed in April 1943, shot down in an ambush by American fighters.

The island was the next step in Operation Cartwheel – the Allied plan to encircle and neutralise Rabaul on New Britain, where General Hitoshi Imamura’s 8th Area Army and naval air units were based. In the summer of 1943 the forces of Admiral William Halsey, commander of the South Pacific Area, had taken the central Solomons after heavy fighting in the New Georgia campaign. In the second half of September the Japanese abandoned Arundel, and on the night of 6–7 October, after the naval Battle of Vella Lavella, they evacuated their last troops from the central part of the archipelago. From 12 October General George Kenney’s air forces carried out massive raids on Rabaul, intended to cover the next landing.

Where to land

The original plan provided for the capture of the Shortland Islands off Bougainville’s south coast and the Japanese airfield at Kahili. The heavy fighting for the airfield at Munda, however, had convinced Halsey and his staff that frontal assaults on strongly held bases cost too much. On Vella Lavella the strong garrison of Kolombangara had already been successfully bypassed; now they decided to do the same on a larger scale. Intelligence estimates, based on intercepted signals, captured documents and the interrogation of prisoners, put the Japanese forces on Bougainville and the surrounding islands at between 35,000 and 44,000 soldiers of General Harukichi Hyakutake’s 17th Army and about 20,000 sailors of the 8th Fleet. The core of the ground forces was the experienced 6th Division of Lieutenant General Masatane Kanda, which had previously fought in China. Most of these troops were concentrated in the south of the island, around Buin and in the Shortlands, and in the north, near Buka.

The Americans therefore decided to land where there was hardly any enemy – at Empress Augusta Bay, halfway along the west coast. The site was not ideal: the ground around Cape Torokina was swampy and ill-suited to airfields, the bay was open to the sea and made a poor anchorage, and the pre-war charts proved so inaccurate that minesweepers ran onto uncharted shoals. In its favour, however, was its distance from the main Japanese concentrations. The planners estimated that it would take the Japanese about three months to organise a serious counter-attack through the jungle and mountains. By then the Americans were to have built a defensive perimeter based on two rivers and a range of hills and to have completed their airfields. The aim was not to capture the whole island, only a stretch of coast from which fighters could escort bombers over Rabaul.

The landing force

The landing was directed by Rear Admiral Wilkinson from his flagship, the transport George Clymer. Also aboard was Lieutenant General Alexander Vandegrift, the hero of Guadalcanal, who in October – after the sudden death of Major General Charles Barrett – had again taken command of I Marine Amphibious Corps, although he had already been named Commandant of the Marine Corps. Going ashore were Major General Allen Turnage’s reinforced 3rd Marine Division, for which this was its first battle of the war, as well as the 2nd and 3rd Raider Battalions and the 3rd Defense Battalion with its anti-aircraft guns. The troops were carried in eight transports and four cargo ships, screened by eleven destroyers. Air cover was provided by Major General Nathan Twining’s Aircraft, Solomons (AirSols) – a mixture of Army, Navy, Marine and New Zealand aircraft – and cover from the sea by Rear Admiral Aaron Merrill’s force of cruisers and destroyers. Kenney, meanwhile, was to bomb Rabaul so that the Japanese air forces could not concentrate on the bay.

In the month before the landing, AirSols aircraft flew more than 3,200 combat sorties against the airfields on Bougainville. The Japanese 11th Air Fleet withdrew its aircraft from the south of the island to Rabaul, and the airfields there ceased to count. At that very moment, however, carrier aircraft of Admiral Mineichi Koga, commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet, were arriving at Rabaul; under Operation RO he intended to cut the Allied supply lines in the Solomons.

The Treasury Islands and Choiseul

The landing was preceded by two smaller operations. On 27 October the 8th Brigade of the New Zealand 3rd Division, supported by Americans, landed on the Treasury Islands – on Mono and Stirling – some 120 kilometres south of Empress Augusta Bay. A radar station to give warning of air raids was to be set up on Mono, and Blanche Harbour between the islands was to serve as an anchorage for later echelons. It was the first opposed landing by New Zealand troops since Gallipoli in 1915. According to Allied records, the fighting up to 12 November cost the New Zealanders 40 killed and 145 wounded and the Americans 12 killed and 29 wounded, while the Japanese garrison lost 223 killed and 8 taken prisoner.

That same night, 27–28 October, some 650–725 Marine paratroopers of Lieutenant Colonel Victor Krulak’s 2nd Parachute Battalion landed on the island of Choiseul, south-east of Bougainville. The raid on Choiseul was meant to convince the Japanese that the main blow would fall there. For a week Krulak’s men, guided by local scouts and the Australian coastwatcher Carden Seton, attacked Japanese posts and barges along some 40 kilometres of coast. On 2 November some of the men, cornered at the mouth of the Warrior River, were evacuated by PT boats; one of them, PT-59, was commanded by Lieutenant John F. Kennedy. On the morning of 4 November, with the beachhead on Bougainville secure, the battalion sailed away to Vella Lavella. According to American figures, it had killed 143 Japanese for the loss of 11–13 dead. General Roy Geiger later likened these operations to a series of short straight punches, meant to throw the enemy off balance and conceal the real power of the left hook aimed at Empress Augusta Bay. The Japanese did indeed send reinforcements to Choiseul.

The landing of 1 November

Three transport divisions set out at the end of October from Espiritu Santo, Guadalcanal and Efate by different routes and met at sea on 31 October. Until dark the convoy pretended to be heading for the Shortlands. That day and night Merrill’s cruisers and destroyers bombarded the airfields on Buka and the Bonis peninsula, and then the Shortlands, while AirSols aircraft bombed Kahili and Kara.

At 7.10 a.m. on 1 November the transports stopped in the bay. The 9th Marines landed on beaches north-west of the cape, the 3rd Marines on the cape itself and south-east of it, and the 3rd Raider Battalion seized the islet of Puruata off the cape. The naval bombardment before the first wave proved of little effect, but 31 Marine aircraft from Munda attacked the beach positions. Some 7,500 men landed in the first echelon. A heavy surf tossed the landing craft about and many were wrecked on the shore; some of the beaches proved too steep and narrow to land on.

About 270 Japanese defended the cape – mainly a company of the 23rd Infantry Regiment – in a dozen or so bunkers with machine guns, mortars and a single 75 mm gun hidden in a log emplacement. That gun destroyed four landing craft and damaged ten more, until Sergeant Robert Owens of the 3rd Marines forced his way into the emplacement through the firing port and drove out the crew; he was killed and posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. The Raiders used dogs to find Japanese hidden in the dense undergrowth. By around 11 a.m. the cape area was in American hands, although isolated pockets of resistance fought on until dark.

Rabaul responds

The Japanese response came from the air. At 7.35 a.m., some tens of minutes after the first wave had gone ashore, 44 fighters and 9 dive-bombers from Rabaul appeared over the bay. They were intercepted by New Zealand and American fighters from Munda and Vella Lavella, and the screening destroyers put up dense anti-aircraft fire. The transports broke off unloading and manoeuvred for two hours, but suffered no serious damage. In the afternoon a second, larger raid arrived; only a dozen or so aircraft got through the fighters directed from the destroyer Conway, and the only hit – a near miss beside the destroyer Wadsworth – killed two sailors. The Americans speeded up the unloading, swinging crates in cargo nets straight from the ships onto the beach and putting men of the combat units to work on it as well. In the evening Wilkinson took the transports out of the bay, fearing a night attack by warships; the cargo of four of the supply ships was not yet all ashore.

His fears were justified. A force under Rear Admiral Sentarō Ōmori – two heavy cruisers, two light cruisers and six destroyers – had already left Rabaul with orders to destroy the ships in the bay. It was at first accompanied by destroyers carrying about a thousand troops for a counter-landing, but these were sent back to base. On the night of 1–2 November Ōmori’s force ran into Merrill’s cruisers and destroyers and, after a battle lasting several hours in which it lost the light cruiser Sendai and the destroyer Hatsukaze, turned back to Rabaul. The beachhead was safe from the sea.

The first days on the beachhead

By the end of the first day the Americans held a narrow strip of coast, and on 2 and 3 November they widened it with patrols, wiping out the remaining defenders. On 3 November the islet of Torokina, right off the cape, was occupied without a fight. According to American records, Marine losses in the landing were 78 killed and 104 wounded. Of the roughly 270 defenders of the cape, few survived: in three days the bodies of 192 Japanese were found.

Japanese aircraft attacked supply convoys again on 5, 8, 11 and 17 November, but lost many aircraft in doing so. Rabaul itself came under attack: on 5 November aircraft from the carriers Saratoga and Princeton of Rear Admiral Frederick Sherman damaged several heavy cruisers in the harbour that Admiral Koga had sent from Truk to destroy the forces covering the landing. The Japanese navy made no further serious attempt to strike at the beachhead from the sea.

The first days showed that the choice of site had been sound. General Imamura and the 17th Army command regarded the landing at Empress Augusta Bay as a feint and expected the main blow in the north, near Buka, so instead of immediately attacking the beachhead with the forces stationed in the south of the island, they reinforced other sectors. On the night of 7–8 November the Japanese landed several hundred troops at Koromokina Lagoon, on the northern edge of the beachhead, but this force was quickly destroyed. By the time Rabaul understood that the Americans meant to stay at the bay for good, the moment for an effective counter-attack had passed.

The perimeter and the airfields

In the following weeks further echelons arrived at the beachhead: the rest of the 3rd Marine Division and Major General Robert Beightler’s US 37th Infantry Division, brought in by fast transports and slower LST landing ships. Vandegrift flew back to the United States to take up the post of Commandant of the Marine Corps, and in mid-November command on the island passed to Major General Roy Geiger, a Marine aviator. The perimeter was gradually pushed inland, through swamp and jungle, along the trails leading over the mountains to the other side of the island. The fighting for these trails – on the Piva river and in the coconut grove at a junction of tracks – was brief but fierce. Far more dangerous to the soldiers than Japanese bullets were the rain, the mud and tropical diseases, above all malaria.

The most important work was done by the Seabees, the men of the Navy’s construction battalions, and by a brigade of New Zealand engineers. The first construction units went ashore with the infantry on 1 November, and on 3 November, under sniper fire, work began on a fighter strip right by the cape. The swampy ground first had to be drained. Torokina airfield received its first Corsair fighters on 10 December; further inland two Piva airfields were later built – one for bombers and one for fighters – as well as a PT-boat base on the islet of Puruata.

Place in the war

The landing on Bougainville was the last great step of the Solomon Islands campaign. A year and three months after landing on Guadalcanal, the Americans stood on the last large island of the archipelago, some 400 kilometres from Rabaul. From the airfields at Cape Torokina, fighters could now escort bombers over the Japanese stronghold itself. By early 1944 more than 400 Allied aircraft were based on Bougainville, and by the end of February Rabaul’s air defences had been broken. Instead of storming a base defended by nearly a hundred thousand troops, the Allies surrounded it and left it to wither.

At the same time, the landing was a model example of the strategy applied earlier on Vella Lavella: land where the enemy is weak, build airfields and force the Japanese to attack strongly fortified positions themselves. And so it turned out. In March 1944 General Hyakutake threw about 15,000 troops against the beachhead; the offensive was repulsed, and the Japanese lost an estimated 5,000 killed and 7,000 wounded. At the end of 1944 the Americans handed the beachhead over to Lieutenant General Stanley Savige’s Australian II Corps, which in 1945 went over to the offensive towards the north and south of the island. Whether those hard battles against an enemy already cut off and starving were worthwhile remains a matter of dispute among Australian historians to this day. The fighting on Bougainville was ended only by the surrender of the Japanese forces on the island on 21 August 1945. Of the tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers who had been there in November 1943, some 23,500 soldiers and labourers then went into captivity; most of the rest had been killed in the fighting or had died of hunger and disease.