The landing on Los Negros

On the morning of 29 February 1944 – the extra day of a leap year – American landing craft, under low cloud and in sheets of tropical rain, ran through the narrow entrance to Hyane Harbour on Los Negros under fire from both shores. They put ashore just over a thousand men of the 1st Cavalry Division, a formation that had never been in combat. It was meant to be no more than a “reconnaissance in force”: the airmen claimed that the Japanese had abandoned the Admiralty Islands, while headquarters intelligence put their strength there at about four thousand. Intelligence was right. Even so, that afternoon General Douglas MacArthur came ashore, inspected the positions and ordered the force to stay. So began the Admiralty Islands campaign (Operation Brewer), which lasted until May 1944 and closed the last gap in the ring around the Japanese stronghold of Rabaul.

Rabaul and the “cork in the bottle”

From mid-1942 the whole of Allied strategy in the South-West Pacific revolved around Rabaul. The port at the northern tip of New Britain was the main base of the Japanese army and navy in that part of the ocean. The plan for Operation Cartwheel, drawn up in the spring of 1943, envisaged MacArthur’s forces advancing along the coast of New Guinea and those of Admiral William Halsey through the Solomon Islands until the two arms closed around Rabaul.

Originally Rabaul was to be captured. In the summer of 1943, however, the American chiefs of staff concluded that an assault on a fortress defended by nearly a hundred thousand men would cost too much, and on 6 August 1943 they adopted a plan to neutralise and bypass Rabaul. That, however, required the capture of bases from which it could be kept in check and which would give the fleet a forward anchorage. The Admiralty Islands, some 320 kilometres north-east of New Guinea and nearly 600 kilometres west of Rabaul, were ideally suited for this. The largest of them, Manus, together with horseshoe-shaped Los Negros and a chain of smaller islands, encloses the large, deep Seeadler Harbour, where an entire fleet could anchor. The Japanese had built an airfield on Los Negros, at the Momote plantation, and a second one near Lorengau on Manus.

The Admiralties were to be taken on 1 June 1944; the date was later brought forward to 1 April. From the autumn of 1943, however, the situation was changing fast. The aircraft of General George Kenney and the air forces in the Solomons bombed Rabaul systematically; in November carriers struck it, and in December the Americans landed at Cape Gloucester and began the New Britain campaign. On 15 February 1944 the New Zealanders took the Green Islands, only about 200 kilometres from Rabaul. On 17 and 18 February the carriers of Admiral Chester Nimitz wrecked Truk, the Japanese fleet’s main base in the Carolines. The Japanese navy then withdrew what was left of its air strength from Rabaul; on 19 February fighters from Rabaul fought their last major engagement with Allied aircraft.

A decision in five days

On top of this came a stroke of intelligence luck. In January 1944 the Australians, advancing along the coast of the Huon Peninsula, found Japanese army codebooks abandoned at Sio. From then on MacArthur’s cryptanalysts could read Japanese military traffic far more freely than before. On 13 February MacArthur ordered preparations for Operation Brewer – the seizure of the Admiralty Islands – with a target date of 1 April. Some 45,000 men were earmarked for it, with the 1st Cavalry Division in the lead.

On 23 February three B-25 bombers circled low over Los Negros and Manus for an hour and a half. No one fired at them; they saw no people and no movement, and grass was growing on Momote airfield. The crews reported that the islands had probably been evacuated. Kenney took the report to MacArthur and proposed not waiting until April but seizing the islands at once with a small force. According to his memoirs, MacArthur listened while pacing the room and then said: “That will put the cork in the bottle.”

On 24 February the orders went out. A reinforced squadron of the 1st Cavalry Division was to land on Los Negros within five days and carry out a reconnaissance in force. If the islands were empty, it was to occupy them; if resistance proved too strong, it was to withdraw. MacArthur announced that he would sail with the landing force himself and decide on the spot what to do next.

Not everyone shared the airmen’s optimism. MacArthur’s intelligence chief, Charles Willoughby, working from decrypted signals and interrogations of islanders, put the Japanese garrison at about 3,000 men on 15 February and raised the figure to 4,000 on 24 February. At the headquarters of Lieutenant General Walter Krueger’s Sixth Army, which was responsible for the land operation, reportedly no one believed the islands were empty. On 27 February Krueger sent a six-man patrol of Alamo Scouts, flown in by seaplane, to the southern coast of Los Negros. The scouts reported that the woods were swarming with Japanese. By then, however, it was too late to change the plan.

The Japanese garrison

The Admiralty Islands came under General Hitoshi Imamura’s Eighth Area Army at Rabaul. In September 1943 Imperial General Headquarters decided to shorten its defensive line in the South Pacific and drew a new “absolute” defence zone running through, among other places, the Carolines and western New Guinea. Rabaul and the Admiralties now lay in front of it and were to be held as long as possible to buy time to fortify the main line – all the more so because Allied bombers based in the Admiralties could reach Truk. Instead of a division, Imamura was given only two infantry battalions for them, shipped in at the end of January and the beginning of February 1944.

On the day of the landing the garrison was commanded by Colonel Yoshio Ezaki, commander of the 51st Transport Regiment. Under him were that regiment; the 2nd Battalion of the 1st Independent Mixed Regiment (mostly reservists with no combat experience); the 1st Battalion of the 229th Infantry Regiment from the 38th Division – veterans of several campaigns, including Guadalcanal, though poorly equipped; and naval units. According to later American calculations there were about 4,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors on the islands in all. Ezaki expected a landing from Seeadler Harbour, since only there could a large fleet enter, and he placed his main forces there. The airfields had been wrecked by bombing, and he had forbidden his men to move about or fire in daylight so as not to betray their positions. It was precisely this discipline that deceived the airmen on 23 February.

A thousand men in twelve ships

There were only a few days to prepare. The landing was led by Brigadier General William C. Chase, commander of the 1st Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division. Despite its name, the division had had no horses since 1943 and fought as infantry; it had arrived in Australia in mid-1943. The core of Chase’s force was the 2nd Squadron of the 5th Cavalry Regiment, reinforced by an artillery platoon with two 75 mm pack howitzers, an anti-aircraft machine-gun battery and 29 Australians from ANGAU – the Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit – who knew the terrain and were to maintain contact with the islands’ roughly 13,000 inhabitants.

To be ready within five days and keep surprise, the slow tank landing ships could not be used. The troops – 1,026 men in all – were embarked in three fast transports (converted old destroyers) and nine destroyers. The naval force as a whole was commanded by Rear Admiral William Fechteler. MacArthur and the commander of Allied naval forces in the South-West Pacific, Vice Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, sailed in the light cruiser USS Phoenix – the same ship that went to Argentina after the war and, as the General Belgrano, was sunk in 1982 during the Falklands War.

The landing site was chosen where no one expected it: not Seeadler Harbour but the small Hyane Harbour on the eastern shore of Los Negros, right next to Momote airfield. Its entrance was less than 700 metres wide, and the beach was short and fringed with mangroves. As the historian Samuel Eliot Morison observed, since the whole operation was a gamble, one might as well be consistent.

29 February: through the narrows

At 7.23 a.m. Fechteler deployed his ships for the attack, and at 7.40 the cruisers and destroyers opened fire. The air support failed: because of the low cloud ceiling only a few B-24 bombers reached the target before H-hour, followed later by nine B-25s, most of which could do nothing. The ships therefore bombarded the shore for longer than planned. As the first wave of unarmoured landing craft – each carrying 37 men – approached the harbour entrance, Japanese machine guns on both points opened fire on it, while heavier guns fired at Phoenix and the destroyers. The cruiser and the destroyer USS Mahan quickly silenced the gun on the south-eastern point.

At 8.17 a.m. the first wave – G Troop of the 2nd Squadron – touched down. Second Lieutenant Marvin Henshaw was the first ashore with his platoon and seized the edge of the coconut plantation. The first wave suffered no casualties. The return trip was worse: when the ships ceased fire, the Japanese went back to their positions at the harbour entrance and caught the boats in crossfire. The second wave had to turn back and got through only when the destroyers Flusser and Drayton drenched the northern point with shells. The third and fourth waves also went in under fire.

Of the twelve landing craft, four were damaged, and without them there would have been no way to evacuate the squadron; from then on they ran only when the destroyers had silenced the Japanese gunners, helped by a downpour. By 12.50 p.m. the whole force was ashore, including the heavy machine guns and the two howitzers, manhandled onto the beach. The navy lost two killed and three wounded; the cavalry ashore lost the same number.

On land things were initially quieter than on the water. Before 10 a.m. Lieutenant Colonel William Lobit’s squadron took Momote airfield – overgrown with weeds, pitted with water-filled bomb craters and littered with wrecked aircraft. In the afternoon the troops crossed its whole length, and patrols reached Porlaka and the skid road across which the islanders dragged their canoes between Hyane and Seeadler Harbours, without meeting the enemy. Freshly abandoned kitchens, a storehouse full of food and captured documents nonetheless showed that the Japanese had not left.

MacArthur on the beach

At around 4 p.m. MacArthur and Kinkaid came ashore. The 64-year-old general, in a raincoat and his famous cap, toured the positions and presented Second Lieutenant Henshaw with the Distinguished Service Cross on the spot. When an officer warned him that a Japanese sniper had been shot nearby only a few minutes earlier, he is said to have replied that this was the best thing to do with them. Then he made the decision he had come for: the reconnaissance was becoming an invasion. He ordered Chase to “remain here and hold the airstrip at any cost”, and on returning to Phoenix he sent signals to rush more troops, equipment and supplies to Los Negros as quickly as possible. At 5.29 p.m. the cruisers and most of the destroyers sailed for New Guinea; only Bush and Stockton stayed off the island, ready to provide fire support.

The first night

Chase and Lobit concluded that Willoughby’s men, rather than the airmen, had been right. A thousand men could not hold a line some three kilometres long around the whole airfield, so towards evening the general pulled the force back to the eastern end of the runway and closed it into a tight perimeter about one and a half kilometres long, its back to the sea. Digging foxholes in the coral rock was hard going, and the gunners, whose howitzers could not fire so close to their own lines, fought as riflemen. The heavy machine guns were placed in the front line. Chase urgently requested an airdrop of barbed wire and ammunition.

When Imamura learned of the landing, he ordered Ezaki to attack with all his forces. Ezaki, however, still suspecting that Hyane was merely a diversion ahead of the main landing in Seeadler Harbour, kept the reservist battalion in the north of the island. He sent Captain Baba’s 1st Battalion of the 229th Infantry Regiment into the attack with orders to “annihilate the enemy who has landed”, since “this is not a delaying action”; if threatened with capture, the soldiers were to take their own lives.

After dark small groups of Japanese began to creep up on the American perimeter. They attacked without coordination, mainly with grenades, and cut almost all the telephone wires. They struck hardest at the southern sector; some soldiers, wearing life jackets, swam along the shore and came ashore behind the American lines. In the darkness two Japanese got right up to Chase’s command post, where they were stopped by the intelligence officer, Major Julio Chiaramonte. At dawn on 1 March the attackers withdrew. Inside the perimeter lay the bodies of 66 Japanese soldiers; the Americans had lost 7 killed and 15 wounded. On the afternoon of 1 March a Japanese patrol infiltrated in broad daylight to within some thirty metres of the command post; surrounded, its men died fighting or killed themselves with grenades, and Captain Baba was found among the dead.

Ezaki attacks

On the morning of 2 March six landing ships entered Hyane Harbour with the second echelon – the rest of the 5th Cavalry Regiment, artillery and the navy’s 40th Construction Battalion – escorted by American destroyers and the Australian HMAS Warramunga. The cavalrymen widened the perimeter, and the naval construction men (the Seabees), instead of building an airfield, were given a sector of the defensive line. Krueger speeded up the move of the whole division: further echelons were to arrive on 6 and 9 March instead of 9 and 16 March.

Ezaki, meanwhile, gathered almost all his forces on Los Negros and on the night of 3–4 March attacked the beachhead. This time the Japanese came on openly, in places talking and singing, straight into the minefields and the fire of the machine guns. When his gun jammed, Sergeant Troy McGill fought on using it as a club until he was killed; he was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously. At dawn the attack petered out. More than 750 Japanese bodies were counted in and around the American perimeter; no prisoners were taken. The Americans lost 61 killed and 244 wounded. Ezaki had suffered a defeat from which his garrison never recovered.

The rest of the campaign

The subsequent fighting belongs to the history of the campaign as a whole, which lasted until May. On 5 March the commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, Major General Innis P. Swift, arrived on Los Negros and took command. By 9 March the cavalrymen had cleared the northern part of Los Negros, and Allied ships had silenced the Japanese guns on the islets at the entrance to Seeadler Harbour, which had been open to the Allies since 8 March. The Seabees brought Momote airfield into service, and Australian Kittyhawk fighters landed there on 9 March. On 15 March the division’s 2nd Brigade landed on Manus and on 17–18 March took the airfield and the settlement of Lorengau. Fighting against scattered remnants of the Japanese garrison in the mountains of Manus and on the smaller islands went on for weeks; the campaign officially ended on 18 May 1944. According to Krueger’s report, 3,280 Japanese dead were counted, 75 were taken prisoner and about 1,100 disappeared without trace. The Americans lost 326 killed, 1,189 wounded and 4 missing.

Rabaul encircled

It is often written that Rabaul was completely isolated on 29 February. In fact, on that day the closing of the ring was only beginning: its permanence was decided only by the defeat of Ezaki’s counter-attacks, the opening of Seeadler Harbour and the capture of the airfields. The last link was the landing of US Marines on 20 March 1944 on the islet of Emirau, north of New Ireland, which made it possible to drop a costly landing at Kavieng. From the spring of 1944 Rabaul and its garrison – according to most accounts nearly 100,000 soldiers and sailors – remained cut off from Japan, without aircraft and without a fleet. Imamura’s troops survived in underground shelters until the surrender in 1945, but they had ceased to matter to the course of the war. Operation Cartwheel had come to an end.

Its place in the war

The Los Negros landing was one of MacArthur’s riskiest decisions and one of his most successful. A thousand men without combat experience landed in the face of a garrison four times stronger and waited two days for reinforcements. They were saved by surprise, the fire of the destroyers, a tight perimeter and the mistake of Ezaki, who attacked piecemeal. Rear Admiral Fechteler later admitted that they had been “damned lucky” not to be thrown off the island, while his superior, Rear Admiral Daniel Barbey, believed that the original plan – landing the whole division in April – would have achieved the same result at lower cost. Many historians, however, think that an assault on the strongly defended beaches of Seeadler Harbour would have cost more, and that bringing forward both MacArthur’s and Nimitz’s campaigns by a month shortened the war.

The Admiralty Islands became one of the largest Allied bases in the Pacific. The Seabees built airfields, fuel depots, repair shops and floating docks there. In April 1944 the convoys for the landing at Hollandia in New Guinea assembled off Manus, and in October part of the fleet that carried MacArthur’s troops to Leyte and fought the Battle of Leyte Gulf sailed from there. In 1945 Manus was the main forward base of the British Pacific Fleet.

The rapid capture of the islands also made it possible to drop other operations. In March 1944 the American chiefs of staff cancelled the Kavieng landing, and MacArthur, instead of inching along the New Guinea coast, was able to leap hundreds of kilometres west to Hollandia. That leap opened the road to the Philippines, to which MacArthur had promised since March 1942 to return. The landing on Los Negros thus closes the phase of slowly prising the Solomons and New Guinea from the Japanese and opens the phase of great leaps.